I stood in the middle of the battlefield. Around me, after an empty three-meter ring, the ground was a mosaic of torn flesh and broken bone—ghouls, zombies and snapped skeletons tangled with shattered gear and rusted weapons half-buried for nearly a hundred meters. Dust-laden winds ripped across the plain, blurring the world into a gray smear.
The scorched earth smelled of iron and rot; black blood pooled and dried in shallow hollows. My head throbbed as I stared at the monstrosity I'd created.
'This is manageable now.' I thought, scanning the clearing.
'That's a lot of damage. Maybe it was worth it.' I thought, though the tide of bodies seemed endless.
Sudden vibrations shivered the ground. My attention snapped outward; I began scanning with my eyes instead of relying on the wind. Left, right, back, front—visibility was limited by the dust, but the tremor was unmistakable. Corpses shuddered; weapons sunk into the earth clattered and toppled.
Something resolved in the wind: shadows. Not just more undead, but larger shapes moving with the tide.
'Is that a golem? Can undead control golems too? Maybe the process is same…' I thought, curiosity flaring as the marching shadows drew nearer.
I waited, watching the shapes grow.
When they came clear of the dust, the difference was obvious. More ghouls, zombies, and skeleton soldiers—yet they moved with better coordination. Their walking looked...normal. No flayed jaws, no exposed brains, no snapped limbs. They walked as if muscles and joints worked for them again.
I glanced at the greatsword at my side.
'Hmmm... Time to change my fighting style.' I thought, and slid the sword back into my inventory.
'I could use Reversal Field but the reflection would only affect the nearby ones. It'll take too long with that.' I thought, selecting from my arsenal.
The horde closed another distance. Now they were about sixty meters away. Up close, their difference became clearer: their flesh looked intact, their movement measured and deliberate.
'They look… stronger….' I thought as I scanned them.
'Damn. I can even see muscles on a lot of them. Did they hit the gym while I was hit by depression?' I thought, an uneasy fascination crawling through me.
'Let's take a look at their Status.' I thought and probed the front row.
'I don't know what the stat of previous ones were but these seems alright I suppose.' I thought, eyes flicking over numbers.
'Hmm…? This one got passive skills? Is this Zombie a variant?' I thought as I examined the passive skills of an undead in the front rank.
[ Passive Skills ]
[ Death's Embrace: A Corpse Commander has announced Undead Parade in its area. All undead of lower rank than the Corpse Commander will follow its command. While within the area of this skill, regeneration is increased by 300%. ]
[ Bone Fortress: A Corpse Commander has announced Undead Parade in its area. All undead of lower rank than the Corpse Commander will follow its command. While within the area of this skill, defense is increased by 300%. ]
'WHAT? 300%? This is crazy!! And the buff is for an AoE skill that means—' I thought, panic flaring, and I began checking statuses across the formation.
'F**K! All of them are under the effect of it. The difference is the Skeleton has 300% attack increase instead of Regeneration.' I thought, dropping into guard stance.
'This is going to be a pain.' I thought, and a blue screen blinked into being before me.
[ All stat points from your recent level-up have been allotted, Master. ]
The message stunned me for a second, then realization hit.
'I forgot I can level up.' I thought, the weight in my chest shifting.
'I haven't been levelling up so I kind of forgot…' I thought as danger eased a fraction.
'Now that I think about it the pain in my head is mostly gone.' I thought, relief spreading.
[ As you ordered, I have allocated your stat points. By increasing your INT stat, the amount of mental strain you can withstand has been increased. ]
'I guess I can use bigger attacks again. I'm not doing that one again, but I can at least try things within my limit.' I thought, making preparations.
[ Master, please remember to eat before entering large-scale combat. An empty stomach exacerbates depression and impairs judgment. ]
'Ugh… That is true… I can't think straight on an empty stomach.' I thought, agreeing with Sebas.
'Fight against the world? … Now thinking about it feels really awkward. I was thinking too much—A vampire, being hunted, had to hide her identity from everyone.—Maybe… It might happen.' I thought, recalling the darker edges of my mind.
'Let's access the situation calmly then.' I thought, and raised my right hand, shaping a single finger like a gun.
I created a bullet of wind to the tip of my finger and fired. The small wind bullet flew forward in a straight line, punching through several heads; bodies collapsed in spraying gore.
I fired again, angling to the right. When the projectile struck, a violent wind explosion erupted—skulls burst, limbs shredded, and several ghouls were cleaved to pieces. Yet some of the zombies whose heads had been pierced tried to push themselves up.
'Hmm….. So I need to destroy their head completely to finish them off.' I thought, watching a broken body twitch.
'There's infinite training dummies and level-up material here I can use to test my limits. If I want to catch up with the heroes who have been preparing and training for years I need to push my limits.' I thought, resolve settling.
I gathered wind beneath my feet and launched myself straight up—one hundred meters into the air. The sky was a sheet of cloud; no sun broke through. Below, the undead stretched to the horizon, a moving black sea that did not end even when the dust swallowed their forms.
'Let's use the environment a little.' I thought, and swept my hand horizontally across the air.
Wind crawled across the battlefield, slow and searching, like a beast sniffing for a trail. Metal screamed—a high, thin shriek—then a sword lashed from the churned earth and spun behind me. Another followed, then one more, then five more; they rose and gathered, floating in a terrible, ordered symmetry, points angled toward the ground.
From a hundred meters out, the weapons of the undead I'd just annihilated lifted into the air and drifted behind me. As the blades threaded upward, several found necks and skulls—clean, mechanical punctures that sent bone and brain matter slapping the dust.
'I wonder how much toll will this take on me? - I won't learn from my mistakes. – But, I need to push myself too – No, I just want to try new things – Or maybe both, excitement to try new things while pushing myself.'
I lifted my hand. The swords rearranged into a ring, points all radiating outward. When I lowered my palm, they launched—silver needles blasting in every direction with brutal speed. Instead of pinning corpses, the blades danced: driving through ghoul skulls, severing zombie arms, cracking skeleton helmets into powder. Limbs sheared; torsos were halved; heads tumbled and skidded across the dry earth.
One by one the undead fell. Several swords struck skeleton skulls and shattered under the strain, springing into jagged fragments.
After a breath, all the remaining floating swords snapped like brittle bones.
I drifted down and picked up the last intact blade. The hilt had once been gold; time had bled the color away, and a black, crusted blood clung to the edge.
'Only this is left huh? Quite sturdy'
Around me the dead lay scattered, many still twitching or crawling. Some with split skulls were already knitting flesh back together; torn torsos drew threadlike membrane across ruptured guts. The reformation was ugly and immediate.
'Now….. It's time to raise hell.' I smiled as the wind surged.
Dust peeled up in rings from twenty to fifty meters out, pulled into a growing swirl. Corpses and broken equipment skittered, tugged but not yet dragged free. The vortex tightened—faster, angrier—until the tornado became a hungry column eating flesh and gear.
Bits of rock and iron from over a hundred meters away were drawn in. The torn and the torn-apart were spun into its throat: thousands of undead riding ragged winds, sliced by the razor-currents again and again. Cuts opened, clotted flesh peeled, and flesh regrew as bone kept splitting—the cycle repeating in a grotesque machine.
'I guess that's all it could swallow.' I snapped my fingers. The wind ignited.
The fire licked through the tornado: first singeing flesh, then liquefying muscle and organ into blistering, steaming stew. Heat climbed until the innards of the undead softened and flowed. The dust-and-dead funnel became a smithy of ruin—a furnace of corpse disposal. Within minutes flesh was gone; bones glazed and crumbled into glassy sludge. Even rusted blades sagged and dripped as slag; the ground itself steamed and bled molten stone.
'Ugh… back of my head feels tight. Keeping the temperature high while keeping temperature around me under control and not letting it burn all the oxygen have put quite the burden on me.' I pressed the heel of my hand to the base of my skull and the inferno winked out as if erased.
The battlefield reeked of metal and burning flesh. Scorched, glassy crust pooled where the tornado had roasted everything. Visibility improved—the dust torn away—and a new tremor shuddered through the plain. From behind the remaining veil of whirlwind, a shadow detached itself.
I could see roughly two hundred and fifty meters now. Standing alone in the cleared battlefield, all the lesser undead were gone—melted, broken, incinerated. The thing that stepped into view made my chest press tight.
A monstrous silhouette, roughly two stories high, lumbered forward. Its body was orc-like but burned raw, skin gone to blackened muscle; its head was bald and stitched over where eyes should be. No armor, no clothing—just bulked-up body knotted with muscle. Two of its arms were thick and powerful; the other pair were pale bone, dragged like discarded scaffolding at its sides.
'I thought it was a golem. WTF is that? Status' I called, probing.
[ Corpse Commander ]
[ A Fusion Evolution of Blight Maw (Zombie evolution) and Feral Fiend (Ghoul evolution) ]
The name and the stats hit like cold water. My curiosity curdled into apprehension.
'Fusion…? Evolution…. There's fusion available ?' I muttered, a thousand theories firing through my head.
'I…. can-' I began, but the thing tore a sound from its chest—a roar that rolled like thunder. The ground answered. More undead buckled up and marched out of the dust like tidewater pulling back for a reef.
'I had enough.' I hefted the battered golden-hilted sword and slashed from left to right. A wind-blade peeled off the edge and launched toward the Corpse Commander.
'If I kill the commander the lower one should be easy to ignore. I've already done some big damage now I should only need to take down some big ones and the Lich should appear to see why it's army is dying so quickly. I know this will work as the undead coming became stronger as I killed more.' I thought, calculating strategy as my blade collided with the Corpse Commander and dust billowed around it.
'A blast? I didn't cut through? But it had the same cutting power as the one I used with the great sword.' I thought, confused, as a sharp tightness spread across the upper left side of my head.
As the dust settled, the creature emerged with both massive arms raised in front of its body. The muscled limbs bulged grotesquely, and over them clung jagged layers of bone. Its skeletal arms had fused atop the flesh like a grotesque shield, forming a natural armor that turned its own body into a fortress.
'I-it's unscathed?' I thought, stunned.
[ Master, that amount of power can only cleave low-level enemies.]
'But I had such pain by just doing it before?' I asked aloud, more to myself than to Sebas.
[ That is because you attempted to concentrate an extreme amount of wind into a very small volume. And you were low-level for such a maneuver; the backlash was inevitable.]
'Sigh I guess it makes sense. There wasn't any strain on me this time. I thought it was an overpowered move.' I felt a wave of disappointment wash over me—then suddenly, something happened.
[ All stat allocation following your level-up is now complete. ]
A smile spread across my face despite the blood and ash.
'I guess it's time to change the fighting style.'
to be continued…