Crest of the Strongest Knight

Chapter 139 - Auspicious Slumber

"...So that's how you all managed to hold out for so long."

"Gotta admit, it scared the shit out of us when it first happened, ma'am." A soldier said as he approached Medrauta. The silver-haired knight stood on a bloodless battlefield, the only pools of crimson long consumed by earth itself. All around her were living corpses, silent and slumbering as her sword plunged again and again into the defenseless creatures.

"Why? I would've been relieved." Medrauta replied as she continued slaying beast after beast relentlessly despite their inability to fight back. There was no honor to spare for such accursed creatures, after all. The sound of squelching echoed around the knight, informing her that Viviane was taking the opportunity to thin out the herd as well.

The sudden onset of dormancy that the witchspawn suffered had come as a surprise to Medrauta, but it was certainly a welcome reprieve from the pitched battles she had thrust herself into mere hours ago. As far as Medrauta knew, such beasts should have been active throughout all hours, but the unexpected development certainly helped explain some things.

While she wasn't entirely sure what purpose the spire in the capital actually served, Medrauta was fairly certain that Amelia was using it to amplify her abilities significantly. However, she was still a budding witch and by no means powerful enough to maintain an infinite army of constantly regenerating witchspawn, especially considering she had to pay attention to all the other plots she had apparently fueled throughout the rest of the empire.

But why would she choose nighttime for the creatures to go dormant? That's when witchspawn are most powerful. Unless... Medrauta frowned, her gaze inadvertently shooting upward as it was drawn toward the tip of the spire. Perhaps Medrauta's desire to confirm her own speculations warped her perception, but it almost seemed as though the light of the full moon was being drawn into the spire. If that was true, then there was no doubt that Amelia required the moon's power to maintain her army, forcing her to charge up a reservoir before the monsters could become active once more.

"Well... I guess we just weren't expecting it," the soldier finally answered, turning his head to the side in an attempt to hide his embarrassment. He wished he could've given a better answer, but he didn't want to lie to the knight either. "Didn't really make much of a difference, though. Asleep or not, they still kept regenerating."

Medrauta nodded. "Let's see if we can fix that, then. I'm pretty sure there's a way to kill these things even with mundane means, but I don't exactly remember how."

"...Is that why you're covered in black goop?" Viviane asked as she approached her knight, stepping carefully around the pools of black liquid that Medrauta left behind. The knight had been so engrossed in dissecting the slumbering witchspawn that she'd failed to hear Viviane approach.

"Oh, uh..." Medrauta looked down at her black-stained sword and gauntlets. Though the liquid normally evaporated rapidly and returned to its natural state as mana, Medrauta had been slaying and dissecting the slumbering beasts so quickly that she was actually accumulating goop faster than it could essentialize. "...Yeah."

Viviane stopped next to her knight, inspecting the rapidly dissolving corpse of the freshly dissected beast. From a cursory inspection, there wasn't really anything special about it. The creature took on the form of a misshapen four-legged canine with various spines sticking out of its eerily undulating body. Despite it being cut apart, there was nothing outstanding about its insides either. As a creature birthed from pure mana, there was no need for it to have internal organs or anything of the sort, leaving it as just one giant mass of black-red matter.

As the creature finished dissolving into a pool of shivering fluid that quickly began evaporating back into the air as mana, Medrauta sighed and shook her head before moving on to the next dormant witchspawn. The black goop on her gauntlets and sword had already begun essentializing, but her blade was soon stained yet again.