The Vampire’s Templar

As Camilla waited for her injuries to heal, the Trista hunter began to target the titan’s leg, trying to immobilize it. However, the titan didn’t make it easy. The hunters on the ground were much slower and less nimble than Camilla had been in the air.

As the hunters advanced, the titan simply slammed its shield down on the ground in front of them, forcing them to either back off or be crushed into paste. If they backed off, they now had a moving wall in front of them.

The neck of the headless titan loomed over them, somehow looking even more menacing than before. But when the hunters saw the beaten-up head still lying on the ground, remaining motionless, their courage flared up.

“It’s really not regenerating!” Cadaelia said, gasping. “You can block off the regeneration with foreign mana?”

However, she quickly regained focus and pointed her staff at the titan’s shoulder. “If it’s protecting its legs, then its upper body is open. Fire!”

“Yes, vice-captain!”

After causing the titan to slip and break apart, the magus corps of Regalius Litha that accompanied the First Division were in high spirits and they did not question Cadaelia’s orders. They opened fire, sending jets of water at the giant statue. However, it didn’t do much.

“Wind mages first. Make cracks in its armor if you can.”

Unfortunately, only one of the mages remaining possessed the wind affinity. All he managed to do was send a mass of wind blades at the giant, nearly invisible to the naked eye. It carved a few grooves into the giant, barely worthy of attention, but the mage soon sent another wave of blades, deepening the scars in the stone.

“Now, water mage, and then ice, and then fire! Let’s bust that rock open!”

This time, the water seeped into the grooves, some of them deeper than others. A frigid ray soon sealed the gaps, and then an inferno engulfed the giant’s shoulder. When the flames disappeared, nothing remained of the mages’ efforts, but none of the mages were stupid. They simply continued what they had done before.

The titan paid them no mind, focusing whole-heartedly on the hunters swarming about its feet. Even if the shield could block the advance in one direction, it couldn’t block advances from all the other directions.

The front liners surrounded the giants. They taunted it, dashing in and out. No matter how much the titan tried, the hunters refused to be bit, even abandoning their shields to reduce their weight. After all, it’s already been demonstrated that an un-enchanted shield was useless against something of that power.

The titan was slow and unwieldy. It slowly turned, trying to keep the annoying swarm of hunters in its sights, but the hunters just dodged away, chipping away at its legs with all kinds of weapons ranging from swords to axes to hammers. Of those, the hammers, when combined with a mana-empowered strike, hit the hardest, shattering the stone on the surface while the mana further damaged the inside.

While the front liners kept the titan busy, the mages continued to pepper it with spells, freezing and thawing the stone over and over to no apparent effect, until the titan turned once more to face the biggest threat. As the titan raised its shield, there was a loud crack and its entire left arm separated from its shoulders, breaking off.

The front liners below scrambled to get out of the way of the huge slab of falling stone, and the shield kicked up a huge cloud of dust, though not as big as before. This time, the hunters didn’t stay still and waited for it to reform itself like before.

“Now!” Cadaelia shouted.

The wind mage raised his hand and a small vortex formed over the fallen arm, sucking up the cloud into the sky and scattering it all over the room.

Everyone except the front liners who were still embroiled in battle watched the arm with bated breath. The arm remained motionless while the titan continued to swing its sword.

Cadaelia shook her head sadly. “It’s not in that arm either. Seal it and move on to its sword arm. It’s moving a lot, so it’ll be harder this time…”

Several blasts of pure mana streaked toward the arm, splashing against the broken joint while two front liners dropped by to further exacerbate the damage. Although the arm had begun trembling, seeking to defy gravity and reunite with the titan, the magic and hammer strikes doomed the arm to stillness.

Now without a shield, the titan was defenseless except for its sword.

“It can’t be that easy, right?” Camilla asked. “There’s just no way…”

“Shh, don’t foredoom us by saying something like that!” Kagriss said.

Camilla winced. “Okay, okay. I think I’m recovered. I’m going to dismantle that sword arm now, okay?”

Kagriss hesitated. “They look like they have it under control. Are you sure you want to go back there?”

“If they die, I’ll feel bad. Besides, I’ll be careful, okay?”

“…Right.”

With Kagriss’s permission, Camilla spread her wings and arm, feeling the stiffness in her newly repaired muscles. After a brief stretch, she took flight again. Behind her, there was a burst of mana as Kagriss took flight again, hovering in the air.

It won’t be their first time working together, and it certainly won’t be their last. Even without words, they knew what to do to help each other most.

Although Camilla’s sword wasn’t fully repaired, she wasn’t about to let that stop her. Ever since she became an undead and vampire, she’d gone weaponless far too often to let her hand-to-hand combat skills rust, and now she was almost as good in barehanded fighting as she was with weapons.

Besides, this way she could latch onto the titan and it wouldn’t be able to shake her off. What could it do? Drop and roll? Hit her with a sword? Drop its sword and hit her with its hand? No matter what the titan chose this time, she’d be able to dodge it as easily as breathing.

Two threats became three, with the front liners on the ground, the mages firing spells from the back, and Camilla and Kagriss from the sky.

Casting aside her armor for even more speed, Camilla streaked toward the giant’s shoulder and landed, wincing as she neared the destruction her spell wrought. There were black and white speckles all over the stone and it looked like the rock had been blasted apart.

She developed the spell, and even now, she still didn’t have a counter for it if she ever met someone who could use the same thing.

Avoiding the destroyed neck, she crawled toward the other shoulder, the shoulder that contained the sword arm. Her nails dug into the stone. If the titan had been a bit bigger, the task might’ve been easier, but as it turned out, a person ten meters tall wasn’t all that big.

“Stop its movements and I’ll take care of the destruction!” she shouted down at Cadaelia, amplifying her voice to get over the continuous roaring of the titan, who nodded and changed her orders, stopping the mages from firing at the titan’s shoulders.

“She’s our ally right now, so if anyone hits her, you’ll have to answer to me!” Cadaelia growled. “Water and ice… go for its elbow. If you don’t have the confidence of hitting it, go for its legs.”

Like the good trained and experienced hunters they were, the mages adapted instantly to the orders and changed their focus. Although their first few spells missed, they stood became more accurate as they got used to predicting the movements of the titan’s sword and where it would swing next.

As long as they could predict where it’s sword will go, they’ll naturally be able to guess what the titan will have to do to move its sword in that direction, and then it was a matter of aiming in advance.

The task was made even easier when Kagriss flew over behind the titan and pressed her hand on its back. Black chains rose from the spot she touched and wrapped around the titan’s torso before reaching out and shackling its arm and pulling it in.

Although it was pulled taut, the chain held. A second later, several spells hit the titan’s elbow and freeze it solid. Immediately, more chains wrapped around the frozen joint, constricting it, and then the chains froze. The cycle repeated over and over until the titan’s elbow was wrapped in one tight ball of frozen magic that even it could not break through easily.

Camilla began to dig into the shoulder of the titan, tearing the stone apart with her claws before scooping out the broken pieces and tossing it aside. Once she made a hole big enough, she reached in and left a red orb like she did for its neck, and then just off.

Halfway through her fall, her wings spread out and pulled her into a glide. Her eyes focused on the orb she left in the titan’s shoulder and she brought her hands together. “Burst!”

Again, the malevolent mixture of mana burst out from the titan’s shoulder in an explosion, cracking the arm of the construct. However, it didn’t break off completely, since she hadn’t almost completely severed the arm like she did the neck beforehand.

But Cadaelia was on top of things as usual.

“Mages, fire!”

With such a huge crack, there was no way that she wouldn’t take advantage of it. Although weaker mages tended to be useless against such solid and durable constructs, she still managed to destroy a shoulder by exploiting a combination of elemental magic, and now she repeated the feat once more.

With stronger mages, or more mages, she might’ve tried the more violent fashion of heating the rock up and then pouring water on it, to make bigger cracks, but this way was easier.

Under her direction, the water expanded as they froze, all the while being sealed into the cracks by ice, forcing the rocks apart. Then, the fire melted the ice. The repeated melting and freezing wore the stone down until the titan snapped off its own arm trying to swing its sword.

Headless and armless, without a weapon or any means to protect itself, the titan was no longer a danger. A cheer went up among the front liners as they cheerfully avoided the stomping feet and began smashing at the ankles of the titan. With no other obstructions to their work, they quickly got through one and the titan, losing its balance, tilted precariously before finally falling.

Systematic dismantling.

Against larger opponents, that was how hunters operated. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that so much of the group escaped, or else there would doubtlessly have been casualties.

However, Camilla didn’t let down her guard. For a moment, she felt the holy mana in the air grow denser, although she wasn’t sure if she imagined it. Cadaelia echoed her apprehension.

“Not yet, it’s not over yet!” Cadaelia warned, glaring at the celebrating hunters. While it was understandable that it was exciting to topple a giant, the danger wasn’t over yet.  “We haven’t found the core yet.”

At her warning, the hunters quickly piped down and eyed the titan’s body with suspicion as if it’ll suddenly rise up and attack them. Yet, the titan was still, not moving at all.

Camilla flew back to Kagriss’s side. “What do you think is going on?”

“Who knows? But that makes it much harder to find out where the core is. We’ll have to shatter the body until we find it.”

Camilla groaned at the thought of something so tedious. With luck, she’ll be able to just sit back. “Maybe it’s in the foot they just broke off,” she suggested.

She watched with anticipation as the hunters got to work smashing the titan’s foot, but when the entire foot had been smashed into fist sized chunks of rock, the hunters found nothing out of place. Just rocks, rocks, and more rocks.

“How big is the core and what does it look like anyway?” she asked, dropping down with Kagriss next to Cadaelia.

Cadaelia didn’t look at her. She was too busy peering at the rubble. She did answer, however.

“The size of the core corresponds to the size of the construct, although the more skilled the craftsman that created the core, the smaller the core can be. But something that big should have a core at least the size of a head.”

“I see.”

Fortunately, no one asked her to go help, so Camilla stayed where she was watching as the hunters reduced more and more of the titan to fist-sized chunks of rocks or smaller. They started from the legs and worked their way up before getting to the huge torso.

The sound of reinforced metal smashing into reinforced rock, edged weapons being used as pickaxes, drove like a nail into Camilla’s mind and she couldn’t help but cover her eyes, unwilling to see perfectly weapons being treated in such a way.

“Those things might need replacing,” she lamented.

Doing such a monotonous task, the hunters couldn’t resist chatting and joking amongst themselves. But as the hunters neared the titan’s heart, a symbolic location that was perfect for a core to be stored in, everyone tossed away their stray thoughts and focused on the task at hand.