Chapter 99: The City Is Sealed
Walfred set aside the pointless thoughts and focused on moving forward again.
After that, as they cut across a ruined park and an apartment complex empty of any sign of life, the blizzard raged even more fiercely. It had to mean the place where the Spirit King waited was drawing closer.
And then.
"Ugh, the spirits..."
"...There’s honestly an unsettling number of them."
The closer they got to their destination, the more the number of spirits grew exponentially. Enough that you could say they’d gone past the thousands and were closing in on the tens of thousands.
So densely packed there was no room to set foot.
At the sight of them filling the ground and sky without a single gap, Julie muttered as if fed up.
"I’ve never in my life seen this many spirits gathered in one place."
"That’s normal. You don’t usually get many chances to run into spirits at all."
Margaret answered calmly.
By the time they had completely cleared the apartment complex. The spirits filling the sky abruptly began to let out bizarre cries.
"Skreeee!"
"Skree! Skree-skree-skree!"
The meaning was impossible to tell.
It might have been praise for the birth of their king, or it might have been a warning against Walfred’s group heading toward that king.
As the bizarre cries echoed and rang through the surrounding area, everyone’s faces hardened.
"Ugh, so loud..."
Elsa furrowed her brow.
Elsa, who had been on the verge of dozing off in Walfred’s arms, glared up at the spirits in the sky with a face full of clear irritation.
And in that moment.
Elsa’s pupils split vertically.
[Everyone, quiet...]
But Dragon Tongue didn’t activate.
Before Elsa could finish her words, Walfred hurriedly clamped a hand over her mouth.
’...That was a close call.’
He’d nearly thrown out a wide-area taunt.
On top of that, activating Dragon Tongue on all those spirits would burn through an enormous amount of mana. In the worst case, there was a chance every bit of his mana would run dry.
Whether she knew this or not, Elsa stared at Walfred with eyes full of complaint.
"Mmf, ahh. Ehh?"
At her look, as if asking why he was getting in her way, Walfred opened his mouth to explain.
But in that instant.
Whoooom! KRAKABOOM!
A tremendous gust of wind suddenly tore in.
Not a simple blizzard, but something you could only call a wind pressure that ripped at the skin.
"Guh!"
"Wh-what is this wind...!"
The wind was strong enough to lift them off their feet, so the group hurriedly took cover in a nearby ruined building.
A moment later, when the wind died down, the snow falling from the sky stopped along with it. Then, beyond their now-clear field of view, something strange came into sight.
West Philadelphia Station. In front of the liberated gate.
There was something with a form unlike the other spirits, something otherworldly. A round orb scattering a faint blue light around it.
The moment they took it in.
The whole group’s eyes went wide.
"...!"
A cold edge sharp enough to slice skin.
It felt like a massive natural disaster compressed into a single being. Crushed beneath a pressure on an entirely different level, they all realized at once.
That this was the Spirit King.
Gulp!
The sound of someone in the group swallowing hard was clearly audible. In that suffocating tension where no one dared open their mouth...
"It’s cute."
Elsa’s voice suddenly rang out.
Snapped back to his senses by those words, Walfred turned to look at her. And he soon realized what Elsa had been looking at when she called it cute.
"Cute? That thing...?"
"Yeah! It’s like a big piece of candy."
Elsa beamed.
She wasn’t wrong, but as a mere human, the dragonkin’s sense of aesthetics was beyond him.
So as he smiled awkwardly.
"Daddy."
"Yeah?"
"I want to keep that one."
The words jolted him wide awake.
She wanted to keep it? The Spirit King?
"Uh, that’s a little..."
Wouldn’t that be tough?
He wasn’t even sure Margaret and the Hunters could exterminate that thing on their own to begin with. Walfred shot a glance at the three Hunters, frozen stiff like statues.
In that moment, Margaret came to her senses.
"...Everyone, get ready."
Biting her lip, she stoked her fighting spirit.
At that, Damon and Julie, snapping out of it belatedly, immediately hardened their expressions.
"Major, are you really going to do this?"
"I-I don’t think we can win..."
"Even if the odds are slim, we have to fight. Otherwise, we’ll all die."
Her expression said she’d already steeled her resolve.
The first of the two to act was Damon. Letting out a heavy sigh, he abruptly reached his hand toward Margaret’s shadow.
And a moment later.
Damon, who had been muttering some unintelligible words, then spoke the skill’s command.
"...Shadow Man."
The instant the skill activated.
Margaret’s shadow vanished without a trace.
In its place, something abruptly shot up.
"Huh?"
The moment he saw it.
Walfred was startled. Because something like a double, identical to Margaret, had popped out.
"This is... like a clone?"
"Similar, but a little different."
Damon shook his head.
"An illusion-attribute clone can’t deal damage to enemies, but [Shadow Man] is different. It can copy the target’s physical abilities and skills."
"It copies physical abilities?"
"Yes. Up to fifty percent."
That startled Walfred.
It meant that a Margaret pulling half a person’s weight had just joined the party.
And then.
A good idea suddenly came to him.
"Wait, then if we use it on the Spirit King..."
"That’s impossible."
Before Walfred could even finish.
Damon flatly shut it down.
"To use [Shadow Man], you need the target’s permission."
"Ah..."
That’s a shame.
If it could’ve been used on the Spirit King too, it would’ve made for a pretty interesting matchup.
Beyond that, [Shadow Man] had several other drawbacks. The fact that it drained mana in real time. And the fact that only one shadow could exist in reality at any given moment.
’Still, it looks pretty useful.’
What he liked in particular was that it copied not just physical abilities but skills too.
As Walfred was thinking that.
"Thank you, Walfred."
Margaret came closer.
Then she bowed her head toward him.
"With this, your role is finished. This place is going to get dangerous very soon, so I hope you’ll get out of here as fast as you can."
"..."
Right, that had been the plan from the start.
Recalling the promise he’d made with Margaret, Walfred quietly nodded. Then, lifting Elsa into his arms, he spoke to the grim-faced Margaret.
"I’ll be waiting at Frankford Station."
"...Yes. We’ll exterminate it and be there soon."
Margaret smiled faintly.
With that parting word promising a reunion.
Walfred immediately turned and dashed off toward Philadelphia Station. Using [Snow Walker], he tore through the apartment complex in an instant.
KABOOOOOM!
Along with a tremendous explosion.
Crimson flames swept over West Philadelphia Station.
---
Leaving the burning West Philadelphia Station behind.
Walfred ran with his eyes fixed only on what lay ahead.
Thanks to [Snow Walker] and [Instant Burst], he reached the doorstep of Philadelphia Station in no time.
’I wanted to help, if I could...’
But he couldn’t.
The matchup between frost-attribute and fire-attribute was the worst there was. With neither of them nearby, they were actually doing each other a favor.
What’s more, the opponent was the king of the Frost Spirits.
Margaret stood a far better chance than Walfred, whose attacks wouldn’t land properly because he shared the same attribute.
’All I can do is pray she exterminates it safely.’
Walfred quickened his pace again.
Passing Philadelphia Station, he raced toward Frankford Station, the terminus of Philadelphia Line 1.
A short while after that.
He arrived at the entrance to the stairs leading down into the Frankford Station underground. Then, just as he stepped forward to descend into the pitch-black underground.
Ding!
Along with a familiar notification chime.
His vision flashed red.
[Warning! The temperature is plummeting.]
[Current temperature: -121°F]
"...What?"
Walfred’s steps came to a dead stop.
-121°F? Out of nowhere?
As he frowned in confusion, his face suddenly hardened like stone.
’Wait, this notification...’
The notification message that had just appeared.
He’d seen something similar before.
Where had he seen it? Walfred dug through his memories, and before long, it surfaced.
’When the Bone Drake grabbed me and carried me off.’
Then, the moment he’d entered the White Dome.
Along with the maddening cold, the exact same warning message had appeared.
And then.
[Warning! You have entered a danger zone.]
[Zone: Permafrost]
[Rank: S]
The warning message appeared once again.
Spotting the familiar name within it, Walfred narrowed his eyes.
"Permafrost, that’s..."
It was the name of the gate liberated at West Philadelphia Station.
But why had a warning message like this appeared at Frankford Station, several miles away from West Philadelphia Station, and not at the gate entrance itself?
Just as the question surged up.
"Daddy, Daddy. Look over there."
Elsa pointed ahead.
Walfred reflexively looked in front of him, and then felt his breath catch in his throat.
The ridgeline beyond Frankford Station.
Behind it, a colossal white wall was rapidly surging upward.
"...!?"
That was no simple wall.
It rose up in the shape of a circular dome, wrapping all the way around the outer rim of downtown Philadelphia.
The ends of the wall, towering high into the sky, all stretched out toward West Philadelphia Station. As if to seal away everything in downtown Philadelphia.
Walfred knew what that was.
"White Dome...!"
Right after running into the unexpected phenomenon.
His face hardened fast.