Chapter 43

□【Holy Knight】Ray Sterling

In the world of ＜Infinite Dendrogram＞, a job system exists.

Just as I am a 【Holy Knight】, ＜Master＞ and Tian hold some kind of job.

The exception is ＜Master＞ who have just started ＜Infinite Dendrogram＞ and Tian's children.

Since it is so widespread in the world, there are many types of jobs.

Even among the front-line jobs, there are a large number of types, including my 【Holy Knight】 and the knight, swordsman, warrior, fighter, boxer, and samurai systems, etc.

Each of these has multiple advanced job development paths.

Moreover, these are just the front-line combat jobs; there are also rear-line and support jobs. Additionally, there are many jobs, such as the merchant system, which (basically) do not excel in combat.

It is impossible to grasp them all.

In fact, the 【Catalog】 I received from my brother, which lists all the job transfer conditions up to the advanced jobs, had nearly ten thousand jobs, and I still haven't memorized them all.

Even if there are hundreds of thousands of active ＜Master＞ in ＜Infinite Dendrogram＞, if divided equally, there would be fewer than 100 people per job, right?

Of course, the actual distribution is likely to be skewed. For example, Luke's 【Pimp】 is not favored by ＜Master＞.

However, the number of jobs relative to the number of people is far greater than in typical MMORPGs.

Among the countless jobs that are impossible to grasp... there is one job that I have memorized.

It is the 【Necromancer】.

Its characteristics include a wide variety of status ailment magic skills and dark attribute attack magic skills.

And there is 《Necromancy》... a skill that uses MP to tame corpses into tamed monsters.

The target of 《Necromancy》 can be either a person or a monster.

Naturally, the more powerful the creature, the more difficult it is to tame.

Conversely, a powerless child can be turned into a monster with little effort.

One of the conditions for transferring to an advanced necromancer job, as listed in the catalog, is the "number of successful 《Necromancy》 attempts."

According to the wiki, some necromancers in Tian's criminal world use children and the sick to increase their number of successful 《Necromancy》 attempts for job transfers.

Additionally, it was commented in the discussion that the conditions for transferring to a super-class necromancer job might be similar.

When I read that description, I felt extremely ill and the existence of the necromancer system was etched into my memory.

And now, I am recalling the existence of that system.

While forming a hypothesis about why the Gooz Maze bandits were kidnapping children... I was advancing through the underground passage toward the endpoint.

◇

The underground passage is a straight path, and there are no bandits along the way.

Instead, adult undead clad in armor were guarding the area, not children.

They were likely resurrected from those who died when this place was a military fortress.

Or perhaps they were turned into undead from the bodies of adventurers or others that the bandits had defeated.

I defeated these undead as well.

Even if they were once human, I couldn't afford to stop.

If I stopped, more people would die.

Eventually, I reached a door at the end of the passage.

The wooden door was secured with a steel padlock, and a presence that was not of the dead could be felt from inside.

“Huh!”

I swung down my greatsword, Nemesis, and destroyed the wooden door instead of the padlock.

As the wooden fragments scattered, I leaped into the room, surveyed the surroundings, and remained on guard to immediately defeat any bandits present.

However, there were only sleeping children in cages.

There were seven children, all with their eyes closed, asleep.

One of them is likely the target of the rescue mission, Rody.

Of course, I intend to save all of them, regardless of the quest.

However, strangely, there was no one else in the room besides the children.

“Are the bandits not in this room?”

‘The padlock was on, so perhaps they left the children to be guarded by the undead?’

“Maybe.”

I cautiously checked the condition of the children.

I reached into the cage and gently shook one, but there was no sign of them waking up.

‘It’s probably a drug or a status ailment magic.’

“Likely.”

My guess is that it’s probably magic.

The same person who turned the children into undead probably did this.

These children are waiting for a ransom, and if it doesn’t come, they will be killed and their bodies used by the 【Necromancer】.

It’s a terrible thought.

‘Master, to the right.’

I looked in the direction Nemesis indicated.

There was another door there, made of iron, with an iron doorknob.

I approached and turned the doorknob slightly.

From the feel of it, it seemed that no lock was in place.

‘Are you going in?’

Of course.

I turned the doorknob and kicked open the door.

I had already broken one door.

If someone was inside, there was no point in sneaking around.

“Is this...”

Sure enough, there was a person inside the room.

It was a boy, and like the children in the previous room, he appeared to be asleep.

The boy was lying on a precise magic circle drawn on the floor in the center of the room.

‘...The owner of this room has some rather questionable tastes.’

Nemesis said this with a tone of anger.

It wasn’t just the magic circle on the floor.

Rather, the entire room, apart from the magic circle, was problematic.

Bloodstains that wouldn’t wash away on the walls and ceiling.

Tanned hides of “something” hanging on the walls.

A barrel filled with bones.

On a table placed along the wall, there were countless tools and materials, but I averted my gaze when I saw a taxidermy of a right hand with fingers increased to twenty.

“...”

This must be the laboratory of the 【Necromancer】 who created those undead.

However, the 【Necromancer】 himself is not here. He seems to be out intercepting Hugo.

This child was saved just before becoming an experiment for the 【Necromancer】.

‘What do you do? Ensure the safety of the children? Or go upstairs and fight the bandits with Hugo?’

It’s a tough decision.

Ensuring the safety of the children is the top priority, but it’s difficult to transport seven unconscious children to safety by myself.

On the other hand, leaving the children to fight upstairs is risky, as they could be taken hostage.

Waiting here to protect the children while Hugo defeats the bandits is also a bad option if Hugo loses.

What should I do?

‘Perhaps we should move the child to the other room first. I don’t know what this magic circle is for, but it’s unlikely to have a positive effect on the child.’

“Right.”

I stepped into the room to move the child from the magic circle.

After taking a few steps, my foot stepped on something and I felt a sense of discomfort.

I knew what I had stepped on; it was a thick piece of cloth.

At first, I thought it was a felt blanket, but upon closer inspection, I saw that it had sleeves sewn on, and it was a robe.

However, what made me uncomfortable was not that it was a robe, but that there was something hard underneath it.

I kicked up the robe on the floor to check what was underneath.

“This is...”

The hard sensation I felt through my shoe was a bone.

I wasn’t surprised to see human bones. After all, there were barrels full of them.

But this bone was half human and half something else.

The bone was thicker than human bones and resembled horse bones I had seen in a museum.

“Why are human and horse bones mixed together?”

‘They might be the bones of a centaur. According to my knowledge, the bones of such a race would look like this if they remained.’

Centaur... I remember that Gideon had many sub-humans, and there were races similar to the centaurs of Greek mythology.

Indeed, the human bones lacked a lower half, and the horse bones lacked a head and neck.

It must be a centaur.

However, these bones are large.

I don’t know the average size of centaurs, but these are not from a child.

Why are the remains of an adult centaur here?

‘Perhaps they obtained a corpse and used it for an experiment.’

“Even so, they should have cleaned up. It seems they were preparing for the next experiment.”

Looking at the child lying on the magic circle, it’s clear that the next experiment could start immediately.

There’s no way they would leave the bones from the previous experiment on the floor.

At the very least, they were meticulous enough to put other bones in the barrel.

‘I think it’s futile to try to understand the mind of a madman.’

That’s true, but...

“...There’s no point in thinking about it.”

The priority now is to move that child.

I stepped into the magic circle—making sure to break part of it with Nemesis to prevent any strange magic from activating—and picked up the child.

The child’s body was cold from lying on the cold floor.

But they were still breathing.

Their chest was rising and falling.

Relieved, I carried the child on my back and was about to leave the room... when I felt something.

The child was breathing, and their chest was rising and falling.

But an indescribable chill ran down my back—

‘Die.’

—A voice came from somewhere.

At the same time, I felt the sound of a blade grazing my neck.

I realized that the child I was carrying had a short sword in their hand.

Blood spurted from the severed carotid artery... and I fell to the stone floor.

To be continued

The next update will be at 22:00 today.

(￣(エ)￣)＜Two chapters updated today.