Otome Game no Heroine de Saikyou Survival [WN] - Chapter 130.1

Forest of the Dead Part 2

The presence of a Vampire was confirmed. Moreover, a small village in the mountains was attacked.

It was generally accepted that the threat of a Vampire was not so much its strength but its ability to increase in number, which was both correct and incorrect.

An Undead was someone who had a Magic Stone before their death. Even if all the villagers were sucked of blood, only about 1% of the population would become Vampires, assuming that they would be Magic Stone holders.

That woman I saved and who attacked me also had a Magic Stone…I assumed that she was able to escape that far because she was capable of using Sorcery. If she was just a villager with no fighting skills, she would not have been able to escape when she was attacked by the demon.

But…even if they did not become Vampires, an even harsher fate awaited their victims.

I was running through the dark forest, illuminated by the hazy moonlight, when I stopped at the faint smell of blood in the air.

I turned my eyes toward the partially cleared forest and saw several figures lying on the ground, probably villagers who had run out of strength. I could already sense nothing but dark magical elements from their bodies.

The magic element that living creatures carry was mostly attribute-free, but as long as they were alive, they contained a small amount of magic element of all attributes. The Fire Element regulates body temperature, Water for blood flow, Wind for breath, Earth for bones and flesh, Light element for vitality, and Dark element for spirit.

They were already dead. The reason why dark magic elements tend to remain in corpses was because emotions tend to remain with the dead the longest and easily blend in with the dead.

“…Uuuu…aaaah…”

One of them grunted, exhaled, and began to wriggle. The man, who seems to have just come of age or still in his late teens, reached out as if to ask for help as he collapsed on his face.

“…”

I stared at him silently. My “eyes” could sense a little bit of magical element other than darkness, so I guessed he was on the verge of death.

The knife I pulled out of his thigh plunged between his eyes.

“Gaaaah!”

The man jumps up to his feet. As his beastly eyes turned to me, I pulled out another knife, which pierced the man’s eyeballs, and the blade of my slash-type pendulum slashed horizontally through his throat, then the man slowly collapsed as he finally understood his own death.

“You have no mercy for ‘failures’, Aria.”

Carla’s voice, which sounded as if she was making fun of me, came from behind me, and I looked at her for a moment. I wonder how it caught up with me.

The “failure” Carla mentioned was literally someone who failed to turn into a Vampire.

There were those with great magical power without having mastered Sorcery and also had a Magic Stone inside their bodies. For example, there were those who mastered multiple life magic and warriors who mastered non-attribute magic.

They do not become undead when they die, but they may become a “zombie” that could hardly be called a demon possessed by a lesser spirit. In the same way, victims of vampire attacks who possessed great magical power may not become vampires, but their souls could be defiled, and they could become servants of a vampire while still looking like humans.

The victims that failed to become a Vampire will never become a Vampire, even if its blood was sucked again.

The failures could move in the sunlight, but they were not as invulnerable as a Vampire.

They were no longer human. They may have body heat and breathe like living humans, but they no longer have the reason or intelligence they had before they were born, and they were nothing more than slave puppets obeying the higher species, the Vampires.

“They could still be alive, you know?”

“Do you call something a living being if it did not struggle to live?”

Could you call an object that didn’t live of its own volition, but was driven only by hatred of the living and a thirst for blood, a living thing? 

The victim was not evil. But once their blood was sucked, there was no way to save them. Unless a person possessed a very high physical strength, the only way to save the soul of a victim who lost half of their blood in such a remote location was death.

“Aria’s way of life is ‘harsh’. But I like your cold eyes… If it’s too hard for you, I’d be happy to kill them instead, would you let me?”

Carla’s white fingertips gently caressed my cheek as I looked at the victims with a grim look on my face, then I grabbed her slender wrist tightly.

“Carla, what do you know about this situation?”

When I asked Carla why she wanted to accompany me on this journey, she replied evasively that small villages were disappearing.

Carla knows “something” that even the dark side did not know. When I asked her about it, she smiled faintly and turned her gaze in the direction where she thought the village might be.

“We should head for the village, then. I think it will be easier for you to understand if you actually see it rather than talk about it here.”

“…Okay.”

Carla and I walk side by side through the dark forest. Carla’s body, perhaps her own Sorcery, made her seem to float slightly off the ground and followed my speed.

After a few minutes…I noticed something that looked like a fence surrounding the village and jumped over it to continue onward…I smelled a strong scent of blood and out of the corner of my eye, Carla was smiling.

As we continue on, our eyes were dotted with human corpses. We didn’t hear any loud noises, so maybe it was already over, but there didn’t seem to be that many corpses.

Even in a mountain village not shown on the map, there would be a few hundred people. A few families would be fine if they just lived here on their own, but without numbers, they would not be able to counter the threats of the monsters. However, the number of corpses we have found so far was less than a hundred, so whether they were alive or dead, the rest of the villagers must be somewhere around here.

“I can see a light over there.”

“Un.”

Hi, everyone. We have launched patreon for this novel. It will help us pay the translator-sama and hopefully hire an editor this novel.

Thanks for your time. See you in the next chapter.