Chapter 331: 174. Encounters and Farewells (Part One)

Translated by A Passing Wanderer

Edited by RED

**

It had happened around two thousand years ago.

{Advance! Attack!}

Back then, the whole continent was mired in the Age of Chaos.

Flames of war continued to rage on, and corpses were liberally discarded all over the various battlefields.

The dead followed the natural laws of the world and soon became the undead. The job of bringing those zombies down belonged to the Theocratic Empire.

{What are you all doing?! You’re bait, so do your job properly, slave!}

The empire back then was quite literally an organisation of tyrants, filled to the core with thugs tainted deeply by corruption and madness.

Such people were shouting out angrily, {Go and lure the zombies in!}

Avaldi was deeply terrified. He tried to run, but his unsteady footing caused him to tumble down. He looked back and discovered hundreds of staggering, shuffling zombies closing in on him. [1]

There was not a whole lot that an old man like him could do in a situation like that, especially so when he had spent all of his life as a blacksmith in some forgotten rural village, and most of his vigour was gone at his advanced age.

Even then, he was forcibly conscripted into the military, and became bait to lure zombies in. The reason he was thrust into this role was because of ‘debt’.

His most ardent wish was to craft battlegear, right up until his dying day. But in order to achieve that dream, he needed lots of capital, and that eventually led to his forced conscription.

{Elder Avaldi!}

Avaldi shifted his gaze at that call. A young man in his early twenties rushed up to the old man and helped him back to his feet.

{Vland?!}

Just as Avaldi called out the young man’s nickname, a zombie chomped down on the old man’s ankle. Blood splattered all over the place.

{Aaaahk!}

{Dammit, you abominable bastards!}

Vlandmir thrust his spear and shoved the zombie back. But just before he could help Avaldi escape quickly from there, both of them froze in place.

That was because a group of Paladins was standing before their eyes. These so-called holy knights grinned in a sinister manner, and shattered large pots. Oil gushed out from there and soaked the grass below. One of the Paladins even tossed a pouch of oil in Vlandmir’s direction, as well.

{This is an order. Be a good bait and get purified alongside the undead.}

{W-what are you even…!}

{Someone bitten by a zombie will spread plague around. We have no more use for slaves like you lot.}

{N-no, wait! We have families to look out for! M-my younger sister, she’s…!}

{Don’t you worry, fella. We will take a very good care of your younger sister for you.} The Paladins tossed several lit torches forward as insidious sneers formed on their faces.

Vlandmir hurriedly shoved Avaldi out of the way.

Flames rapidly spread out and enveloped the young man in an instant. His arms flailed about, trying to put the fire out, but it spread too quickly over his body, instead. Even in the midst of his struggles, zombies still pounced on the duo.

{Y-you sons of b*tches!!!}

Avaldi panted laboriously as the zombies bit into his flesh. Even as he suffered from the excruciating pain, his eyes shifted around to look around himself. He could see Vlandmir’s burning figure being devoured by the zombies.

The young man wielding a spear cried out at the sneering Paladins in the distance, {I curse you all. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill all of you…!!!}

{Curse away, slave. Too bad for you, we are all blessed with Gaia’s grace, anyway. Ahahaha!}

The Paladins then retreated from there.

Soon, screams could be heard coming from a village nearby, the village that both Vlandmir and Avaldi hailed from.

Not too long afterwards, eerie silence was the only thing coming from the village.

The torrential rain continued to fall from the heavens.

Vlandmir was dead, now merely a burnt-black corpse. Avaldi had also lost his life from excessive loss of blood.

Some time later, they became undead themselves and were ‘revived’.

They shuffled around without any functioning ego and eventually arrived at their burnt-down village. Every villager who used to live there was now dead.

The Paladins had gone on a killing and looting spree, using zombie hunting as their pretext. The village’s men were turned into playthings and killed, while women suffered indescribable humiliation before being discarded as corpses themselves.

The zombified Vlandmir tilted his head this way and that. He had finally reached his family home, which had also been burnt down to the ground. His younger sister’s burnt corpse could be seen within the wreckage.

But the Vlandmir of now couldn’t feel any emotion even after discovering her. He simply walked right past the gruesome sight.

As for Avaldi, he was roaming around in his former workshop. He also tilted his head, because even before he could understand how it happened, a hammer and a pair of tongs used during the manipulation of heated metal were gripped firmly in his zombified hands.

{…}

The two men, now merely another pair of walking dead, aimlessly drifted around the continent. They instinctively headed to where demonic energy was at its densest, and if they encountered any living humans, they attacked and consumed fresh flesh.

They gradually evolved and eventually became Progenitors. When Vlandmir finally became a vampire, all of his old memories came flooding back to him.

He roared out in despair and raged in madness. He then swore upon his life in front of Avaldi, {I swear to destroy the Imperial Family! I shall create a home that belongs only to us!}

That was Vlandmir’s most ardent wish.

However, Avaldi was different. He wished to continue on as a blacksmith, and wanted to find out just how far his new-found strength could take him.

Vlandmir proved to be a good partner in bringing Avaldi’s wish to reality.

Vlandmir the vampire secretly strengthened himself and his followers without the Imperial Family finding out, and then began waging various wars against the Theocratic Empire.

Vampires invaded the empire’s borders, burned the villages and territories down, and freely killed and looted.

But whenever that happened, the vampires were hunted down. They were impaled in the stakes, got beheaded, and met gruesome deaths.

The members of the Imperial Family proved to be simply too strong.

{There is a man named Amon. Create armaments for him.}

Avaldi, who had been exclusively focused on crafting a spear for a very long time, received an order from Vlandmir. The latter had chosen to utilise the strengths of Aslan’s Necromancers in order to get his revenge. His plan was to manipulate the one referred to as the strongest Necromancer in history to oppose the Imperial Family.

That was the moment of the Necromancer King’s entrance to the world’s stage.

Amon proved to be ridiculously powerful. No one could stop him. Not even Vlandmir, who was already being called the Vampire King by then, was able to deal with him.

Avaldi was truly satisfied by this development. This was basically the same as his armaments being proven as the greatest of all time, after all.

But then… Amon lost.

Kelt Olfolse, the leader of the Imperial Family, was responsible for tearing off the Necromancer King’s skull and shattering the latter’s body to pieces, all the while using a treasured tool of the Imperial Family, no less!

What a humiliating thing that was.

Avaldi was overcome by a sense of defeat. For the past thousand-plus years, he had believed no one could better his creations, yet someone did exactly that.

That was why he began wanting Vlandmir to soundly defeat Kelt Olfolse. With the spear of blood Avaldi had created, it should only be a matter of course to kill the Holy Emperor for good.

Doing so would be the ultimate proof of his weapons being the greatest of all time!

But… Vlandmir was defeated, too. And then, the foolish Vampire King didn’t want to use the spear of blood anymore.

{Oh King of Vampires, what are you planning to do now?}

The Vampire King was now staying in the frozen mountain range.

{I shall awaken the Jötnar. I shall use them to attack the Imperial Family.}

The Vampire King should have been focused on rebuilding the Army of Blood and reinforcing their combat strength, yet he had no thoughts of doing such things. He had already tasted a resounding defeat in the last war, so it only made sense to make preparations to quickly shore up his weakened side, yet Vlandmir was thinking of relying on an external power that he couldn’t even handle.

{By making the giants submit to us, we shall finally get our hands on the necessary power to defeat the Imperial Family!}

But, that was wrong.

Did the Vampire King no longer wish to test out Avaldi’s greatest work?

Why had Avaldi chosen to follow Vlandmir all this time? To get his revenge on the Imperial Family? Of course not. The Vampire Blacksmith’s lifelong wish was just this one thing: creating the greatest weapon, and being acknowledged as the greatest craftsman in the world in the process.

That would serve as proof that there would never be anyone else who could exceed his skills in the continent’s history. That was the only reason why Avaldi continued to exist.

“…Master? Master Blacksmith?”

Avaldi, who had been sitting in the corner of the hut and reminiscing his past, finally opened his eyes and frowned rather deeply.

“Alright! Cheers!”

The interior of this small, cramped hut was filled with a group of dwarves who were raucously knocking back their favourite brew.

“Hahaha!” Their laughter was rough and manly.

These uninvited guests had intruded upon Avaldi’s once-quiet hut to gleefully munch on the meat of an animal that the vampire had hunted earlier.

The dwarves. Their meat was way too tough, while their blood tasted as bad as drinking rotten sewer water. They were basically the lowest-ranked and worst possible livestock one could imagine.

Such beings had been staying in the hut for the past few days, not even bothering to leave Avaldi alone.

‘…Should I just kill them all?’

(TL: Avaldi in [1] is actually Grand Duke Ivaldi, but the author inexplicably changed his name. I assumed they made a mistake since the Korean alphabets for “I” and “A” are right next to each other on the Korean keyboard, and thus ignored it in the previous chapter, but from this chapter onwards, the author keeps using ‘Avaldi’. Hence we’ll stick with the changed name, as well.)