The esteemed Miss Amber, master of stealth arts, professional wielder of shadow powers, and recreational grave enthusiast, lived by a maxim.
The path is always there. A door is merely an ethereal decoration. Once you set aside the psychological barriers, even the gates of a royal treasury require nothing more than a stick of celery.
All right, this world probably didn't have celery, but for Amber, opening a door in an ancient tomb didn't require celery either.
With a bit of minor shadow trickery, some knowledge of ancient wards, and a smidgen of negligible luck, the half-elf thief effortlessly dismantled the seals within the Seawright ancestral crypt. A passage that even Hestia and Rebecca hadn't known about appeared before the group.
Then everyone followed Amber into the passage.
The crypt corridor, built from rock and soul-anchoring bricks, was far more spacious than expected. Even Wayne and Byron, both nearly two meters tall in heavy armor, didn't feel cramped. The enchanted lamp brackets set into the walls on either side had long since gone dark, but after Hestia cast a few basic spells, these ancient fixtures, seven hundred years old, flickered to life one by one, lighting the way forward.
"I'm really just a small-time thief, honestly. I just scrape by," Amber said modestly as she walked at the head of the group. "I'm a descendant of Wood Elves, very respectful of ancestral spirits. How could I possibly do something like rob graves?"
Wayne was unimpressed. "You're this skilled at it and you still have the nerve to make excuses?"
Perhaps reassured that her life was no longer in immediate danger, this half-elf, who had absolutely zero racial dignity to speak of, had skin as thick as the tomb door she'd just pried open. "Lock-picking and ward-breaking are standard skills in my line of work. Is it my fault my fundamentals are solid?"
At that point, Rebecca, walking in the middle of the group, suddenly asked. "Are you a subject of Seawright territory?"
Amber scrunched up her brow in thought. "I've lived here for a few years, but I never applied for formal residency. Then again, under Seawright territory's rules, anyone who's lived here for more than three years and paid their taxes on time counts as a subject... so what do you think, do I count or not?"
Rebecca shook her head. "Without the application, no."
"Oh," Amber drawled. "Then why'd you ask?"
"I'm the lord of Seawright territory," Rebecca said with great seriousness. "So if you were one of my subjects, I'd be obligated to protect you."
Amber. "...Why didn't you say so earlier?! Is it too late for me to change my answer?"
Rebecca, perfectly straight-faced. "Too late."
Wayne glanced at Rebecca's deadpan expression, then at the utterly shameless Amber, and shook his head with an amused smile.
Though he'd woken up right in the middle of a mess, being human again still felt incomparably better than that godforsaken state from before.
He looked at Hestia, walking behind him. This however-many-greats-granddaughter of his had been sneaking glances at him more than once. He'd been waiting for her to speak up on her own, but since she still showed no sign of breaking the silence, he took the initiative. "Whatever you want to ask, just say it."
Hestia startled slightly, but quickly took a deep breath and composed herself. Looking at Wayne's face, identical to the one in the family portraits, she chose her words carefully. "Great Ancestor... I still find it hard to believe that you really are..."
"That's right, I really am that Gwayne Seawright, the pioneer from seven hundred years ago. I can recite my thirty-odd years of life experience for you, or would you like me to tell you about the era of the Second Expansion? Though honestly, none of that would prove much. A good historian could probably tell the story more convincingly than I could, my eloquence isn't great," Wayne shrugged. "You just want to verify whether I'm genuine, right?"
"Please forgive my doubts," Hestia said hastily, "but this is truly a bit... While tales of heroic spirits returning from the dead have existed since time immemorial, seeing it with your own eyes is another matter entirely. I've heard that some Holy Paladins and Silver Moon Elves can enter a state of suspended animation for years or even decades, preserving their souls and vitality through the power of holy light and elven mystic arts. But I've never heard of a human knight doing the same, and what's more... you've been dead for seven hundred years."
"To be honest, I don't know how it happened either," Wayne said, shaking his head. He would have loved to spin a tight, well-reasoned, convincing theory on the spot to awe his great-great-great-...-granddaughter, but neither his own knowledge nor Gwayne Seawright's memories offered anything usable.
So he simply admitted he couldn't explain it.
"Perhaps it's related to something I experienced in life. You know I received an elemental blessing while leading the pioneers through the wilderness. That probably altered my constitution."
"I see..." Hestia said noncommittally, then suddenly raised her head, looking toward the path ahead.
"There's airflow," she said quietly. "And a different mana signature. The edge of the crypt area should be just ahead."
Wayne nodded, tightening his grip on the Pioneer's Sword, an inexplicable sense of unease told him that what lay ahead might not be safe.
"Stay alert," said Ser Byron, walking at the front alongside Amber, apparently sensing something too. He drew his steel broadsword, and with a casual pass of his other hand along the flat of the blade, a faint silver glow rose from its edge. "You three, watch our rear."
A clatter of metal sounded as the three soldiers readied for battle. Though they held only the most basic combat classes, they were elite warriors who had survived the fight against the monsters to the very end, carefully trained by House Seawright.
The fearlessness and composure on their faces quickly put the nervous Amber and little Betty, sheltered in the center of the group, at ease.
The crypt corridor was deep and long, but it had to end eventually. Soul-anchoring stone bricks embedded in the walls every ten meters marked the boundary of the crypt zone, and as these bricks disappeared, a slightly wider area appeared ahead, resembling a crossroads.
This was the junction between the crypt zone and the castle's underground level, the hub connecting to the ancient hidden passages.
Amber pointed at one of the branching paths from the "crossroads".
"That's where I came in. It leads to a dry well outside the castle, but that way is definitely crawling with monsters by now."
Wayne turned to Hestia. "Which way is west?"
Hestia traced a simple magic sigil in the air. The sigil transformed into a glowing ribbon that swayed and pointed in a particular direction.
"That way," Wayne said. But the instant the words left his mouth, a surge of danger slammed into his senses.
There was no time to think. This battle-hardened body reacted before his mind could, and Wayne raised the Pioneer's Sword almost instinctively to block. A sledgehammer-like impact immediately shuddered through the blade.
His body rocked slightly, then steadied. The attackers finally revealed themselves, accompanied by a slurred, murmuring drone, three tall, swaying figures lurched out of one of the dark corridors leading into the crossroads.
They bore no resemblance to any creature found in nature. They looked more like something cobbled together through the combined evil ingenuity of necromancers and demon warlocks. Nearly three meters tall, they resembled desiccated, deformed giants, but their bodies were formed of amorphous, mud-like matter that flowed and shifted constantly. The sludge surged and rippled across their surfaces, occasionally revealing gaping voids, and within those voids, blood-red bones could be seen.
"Ah!" Rebecca let out a sharp yelp the instant she saw the three monsters. Betty quickly bit down on her lip, looking as though she might burst into tears at any second. Hestia slammed her staff against the ground, triggering a minor clarity spell that countered the fear effect the monsters were projecting onto everyone, and spoke rapidly to Wayne.
"Great Ancestor, these are the monsters!"
By now Wayne had recovered from the shock of seeing inhuman creatures for the first time, and a corresponding memory surfaced in his mind.
"These things?!"
The three monsters had already launched their second attack. They continued to emit that dreamlike murmur as two of them charged in long strides toward Wayne's group. The third raised an arm, and a mass of dark energy coalesced before it, firing as a shadow bolt that streaked straight toward Amber at the front of the group.
"Whoa!" Amber yelped, instantly shrinking into the shadow behind Ser Byron and reappearing a moment later in another patch of shadow ten meters away. Ser Byron raised his silver-gleaming broadsword and, with a roar, charged to meet one of the onrushing monsters head-on.
"Hestia, Rebecca, take out the one firing shadow bolts! Try to avoid arcane magic, it's almost useless against these things! Amber, you and the soldiers protect the casters!" Wayne shouted, then swung his longsword and charged forward, steeling himself as he went.
He had never swung a blade in combat.
He had never seen an inhuman monster.
Despite having transmigrated and been reborn, it was only today, only now, that he stood on the soil of this other world on his own two legs for the first time.
So he had absolutely no idea what he could accomplish right now, armed with nothing but a trace of combat instinct lingering in this body, a head full of battle knowledge that didn't belong to him, and an ancient longsword drained of all its magic.
But more often than not, fate doesn't give you a choice.
Here you stand. There stands the monster. No way up, no way down, no way out. In your hand is a seven-hundred-year-old antique sword. You were supposed to have a shield too, but some wastrel of a descendant went and lost it a century ago. Under these circumstances, what else can you do?
Charge. Charge the hell in!
They're just Others, right?
Seven hundred years ago, Gwayne Seawright could have taken on a thousand of them single-handedly!
Today there are only three. You're telling me that's a problem?