Crolo-Ivarians.
They wore pasty, black, and furling flesh as their knave-blue eyes wiped themselves with a strange black flame.
They wore the faded armor of forgotten warriors as their blades were strapped to their hands, a band of flesh holding tightly.
I essentially sat behind Red Dragon taking notes as he slayed them easily.
It was because they were boring.
They moved so slowly that they seemed to be under a constant time curse and were essentially mindless.
Their legs clunked from side to side, covering a distance of around 10 meters in 20 seconds.
And those were the speedsters.
The blades in their hands might as well have been cupcakes, for they could not wield them skillfully. The blades seem to get in the way of the Crolo-Ivarians fighting style of walking up to something, swinging a darkened, blackened hand, and then repeating before their path was clear.
According to the grey-white-haired girl who I had learned to be of the name Frila these Crolo-Ivarians were used overwhelmingly by the Crow Kingdom in the past.
Their numbers were insane and since they weren't bony-like skeletons but rather fleshy-like humans, they had the strength and muscular power to storm through citadels with a large enough force.
The sight of a landslide of Crolo-Ivarians filled my mind.
It... could work?
I just couldn't picture the things before me, that were being so effortlessly silenced by Red Dragon to be anything more than worms.
I had even ended a few myself, my right hand drove itself clunkily, driving apart the neck and head as the body of the Crolo-Ivarians became lifeless before my underwhelmed expression.
Alas, I didn't have the stamina to fight them for hours on end.
It had been half an hour since we had gone down and Red Dragon had been impaling, slicing, and blasting Crolo-Ivarians to the sides of the clearing left and right.
According to Frila, they were a trump card in the fabled battle of Amirelles where the Crow Kingdom and the Kingdom of knights battled it out for a territory somewhere in the west.
In other words, a territory that shouldn't have been in the business or interests of either kingdom.
After 12 days and 13 nights of corpse-staunched fields and mountains of cold bodies of Crolo-Ivarians, the tired heavily-armored knights were finally at ease with the last blade thoroughly dismantling the last of hundreds of thousands of Crolo-Ivarians.
As they kneeled at the brink of dawn, witnessing the destruction that the battle of Amirelles had wrought they were just relieved that it was over.
Clunking around heavily in imperial suits of armor infest with holy embroideries and scriptures the brave knights scattered across the battlefield who had reached slayed thousands of Crolo-Ivarians in their regions all sat still with their swords in the ground.
They hadn't slept a wink since the beginning of the battle and now their will was wavering.
1 Knight, namely Pegarus of Pertador was coated in a platinum suit of steel that enhanced his masculine features.
He stood in a sea of bloodied corpses, the only thing that stood out here was his attire and the state that seemed to crack the world around him
All one could see was a long dark-black split from the top of his pointed helmet.
His great sword swung by his side, primordial in its ocean-blue state as he met eyes with the man who was the sole reason for the hundreds of thousands of Crolo-Ivarians that had spawned.
Tendes Toterson.
Bandaged in black-wraith robes he had long tied black hair that drooped to his chest. His face was that of a 45-year-old man's, besmirched with an unappetizing wrinkle here and there and still invigorated despite being well past his prime.
The lack of a well-groomed beard caused his jovial expressions to seem childish and insane.
"Huh-HAHA. HA.HAHAHA.HA.HAHAHA. AAH. HA-HA-HA-HA."
Pegarus stood in discomfort as the quote on the quote -Black Meister of Mandel- rumored to be one of the best sorcerers the kingdom of Crows had ever seen laughed frenzy despite his wrecked state.
One swift blow from Pegarus would send him into the next life.
"Haa."
The only sound in the derogatory and foul field vanished in a short fade.
A calm and slithered voice murmured through the wind as the atmosphere began to crack dangerously.
"Goodbye, Black Meister of Mandel."
Pegarus swung his sword behind his back, ready to finish off the massacristic terrorizer before him and maybe even blow half the corpses behind him into a bloody mess.
As his muscles were merely an inch from propelling forwards and ending the battle, a hoarse and croaky voice whispered in the wind deafeningly.
"The feathered hills never fall."
Pegasus's blood-strained eyes creased as everything around him became a rapidly changing landscape.
The world tremored as heaps of fields of Crono-Ivarians across the entire battlefield formed together to create colossal skeleton titans.
With ferocious flaming blue eyes, white bony creatures of draughting stature rose before the tired knights all across the battlefield.
Pegarus charged his blade before sending a fierce strike directly at the titan.
A silence ensued as the world caught up to the sheer power that had just been released.
Boom.
Asphalt exploded in a spiky insunanted cloud in the center of the skeleton as its sides slid down each other, crumbling to the ground with one hit.
There was a reason the Kingdom of Knights only sent around 20 Knights to each battle.
Pegarus continued slashing and cleaving skeletonal titans before his eyes set on the caster.
Kneeling with his hands behind his back, Tendes sat there weakly yet smugly.
His works revolving battalions of bone needles creating maelstroms and thick blizzards of bone artillery that formed the deathly picture of Pegarus slowly walking through the field of bones, Bone spikes crashed and pounced upon his suit of armor yet a thin shower of sparks emerged from every corner as he kept going.
Feeling the pressure increasing to concerning levels, Pegarus' deadly walk soon became a desperate run.
Swinging his bloody arms back for one last slash, his eyes gleamed with a crazy blue.
His voice was void and null as it seemed to ignore the rules of reality and jump straight before the Black Meister.
"Die."
A fluorescent blue crack formed from the lining of his sword.
Laughing horrendously, the Black Meister revealed a set of rotting teeth as his hands rose and the freakishly alive hill of bones rose from the ground and took him away.
"FOR ANOTHER DAY PEGARUS."
His deceitful figure drifted away on his throne of bones. His words came from maniacal eyes as he smiled and grinned so much that his bones showed through his clearly unhealthy skin.
A sea of paling and deformed bones fell upon Pegarus.
The sound alone would burst eardrums as the earth around them shivered.
It sounded like an uncomfortably close rumbling and crushing sound as hundreds of thousands of small white pines formed a natural calamity.
From each side, constructs and titans joined this sea.
As Pegarus' blows ensued, half the sea was split and collapsed upon itself, but although every attack that came from Pegarus split the sea, the only sight he had of the Black-Meister constantly diminished as waves of whfilledleld his view with every passing second.
Splits and asphalt blasts crashed into the air yet Pegarus was far outmatched.
These constructs were no longer living, and they seemed to possess the hysterical ability to reattach themselves to another bone construct.
Therefore, a never-ending cycle.
Sending his close end as rumbles and seafalls of bones slid into the small space that remained in the now inescapable dome of harrowing bones, Pegarus' will widened as he rose his sword.
"For Ganero."
Chrt.
Coldly, a spurt of blood popped out from the Knight's unbreakable armor.
Nothing happened for a few seconds.
The sea of bones topped and the Black-Meister's eyes gleamed from his throne of bones.
He was joyous.
The area seemed to tremble, even the Black Meister who was now miles away felt the cries of nature.
He urged his bone fortress to move away faster as he watched through a bone-titan what was going on.
Black.
It had gone.
Checking his bone titans all across the battlefield, the Black Meister could only hear murmured words and the last screams of rebellion as his skeleton titans were wiped out across the board one by one.
"For Taled."
"For Raitu."
"For Bentar."
Confused about how the knights had gained an unprecedented boost in power, the Black Meister sent out a small part of his bone fortress to scout.
For miles on, he found cratered ground and the avoidance of bones everywhere.
As his bones spread further and further, he released no knights were remaining.
Just sodden craters that had besmirched the field.
"Damnit."
The Black Meister cursed at the insolent Knights.
20 unavoidable tainted craters had been formed.
The only one who had lost in this battle was the black meister.
The Crow Kingdom had gained land, and the Land of Knights had lost some valiant and honorable knights but they had plenty more.
The Black-Meister had hoped to gain some stronger undead, with his new bone-magic revolution he would've been an unstoppable force yet they had all used some sort of self-destruction method.
The bones beneath his throne pierced the flabby skin of his arm as he bit down on his tongue ragefully.
4 Months later, the Black Meister died due to issues concerning health.
But he was always remembered from that moment on, as the victor of the battle of Amarilles and the death of 20 Knights whose names had been spread like heroic tales before their demise.
He was the Black Meister.
And he was the man who managed to use a creature that all undermined, the Crolo-Ivarians, to make an unstoppable army that crushed its enemies once, fell, and then crushed them once again.
Unfortunately, he had died without offspring and his secrets were sent with him to the grave.
Merely a month after his death, the land in the west had been renamed and was now known as Toternay. (Named after him obviously.)
And another chunk of land was credited to the Crow Kingdom.
In centuries of long-fabled history, the Crow Kingdom had never lost a piece of land after keeping it for 1 season.
This was because they set up corpse farms and fields all around their kingdoms that would strangle even the liveliest of visitors to sleep.
My eyes blinked wildly as I realized that Red Dragon was now casually facing the last 3 of the Crolo-Ivarians.
The Kingdom of Knights, eh?
It didn't sound too bad.
In fact, it sounded pretty admirable.
A kingdom that didn't send out hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers and commissioned peasants into war but only 20 godly and righteous knights.
It was clearly working since after talking to Frila for a while to clear my boredom in this dark setting I had learned the order of Kingdoms in terms of size and power.
Size
Kingdom of Crows-1
Kingdom of Iron-2
Kingdom of Knights-3
Kingdom of White-4
Kingdom of Holy Light-5
Kingdom of Gale-6
Kingdom of Flames-7
Kingdom of Mautire-8
Kingdom of the Sun-9
There were 9 kingdoms in the 'continent' where the humans resided in.
I had heard there were other mystical races in continents far from ours, but my brain was already pretty dreary from all this knowledge. To my surprise, it didn't seem as though kingdom size was a dead-set correlation to kingdom power.
Power
Kingdom of Crows-1
Kingdom of White-2
Kingdom of Holy Light-3
Kingdom of Knights-4
Kingdom of Mautire-5
Kingdom of Iron-6
Kingdom of Flames-7
Kingdom of Gale-8
Kingdom of the Sun-9
It seemed as though the Crow Kingdom was the powerhouse, the kingdom of White and the kingdom of Knights seemed to be right after it followed by the Kingdom of Mautire and the Kingdom of Iron. The Gale Kingdom was weaker than I thought, I had assumed an all-rounder would be around 4th but it looked like it had fallen far.
Fortunately the Kingdom of Holy Light seemed to keep the Crow Kingdom under tight binds using the advantage of its natural counter.
At least before the esteemed pope passed, I was told by Frila.
"It's strange. It's like you've never once learned the current powers of the world. I would've thought a boy your age would've known such basic things."
I wasn't being insulted, just worried after.
The frail voice of Frila seemed almost worried as her eyebrows furrowed and her now-ponytailed drifting grey-white hair burrowed itself around her neck.
I merely shook it off and looked at Red Dragon with savoring eyes.
This man was a true hero.
It felt like I hadn't done anything.
Ahem.
Correction.
I HADN'T done anything.
Thankfully there were -S- Rank Adventurers in seemingly every bar corner.
"So do we get 200 Judes now?"
I sighed at the thought of almost an entire day of strain for just 200 Judes.
"Hmm?"
Red Dragon's eyes peeked just barely through his black-stained blood hood. His voice seemed chilled and flat.
"That was wave one."