Noble Lady Reformation Guide

“Haa… huff…”

Kalimford staggered into the tent located at the center of the camp, letting out a ragged breath.

There, his old friend Melverot lay stretched out, on the brink of death.

At the sight of his body completely wrapped in bandages, the memory of the fiercest battle of Kalimford’s life inevitably surfaced in his mind—the subjugation of Noir.

Was this not the first time since then that Melverot had pushed his body to such an extreme limit?

As he thought about it, Kalimford managed to support his emaciated body and leaned down on the opposite side of the tent.

Ever since Fina had fallen into a critical state, he had begun to clearly feel that his own physical condition was far from encouraging as well.

Most likely, at the moment her life was extinguished, Kalimford’s would also come to an end.

‘I believed I had already lived long enough… and even so, death is still frightening.’

Leaning against the cot, Kalimford was drenched in cold sweat.

Perhaps it had already been excessive to step onto the battlefield so many times with a body in such a condition.

Perhaps it would have been better to remain at Ravenclaw Academy and witness the final stage of Siern’s life.

However, curiously enough, Kalimford did not feel deep regret.

Perhaps, deep down, he had already sensed—consciously or unconsciously—that he would end up acting this way.

“Our era is reaching its twilight, Melverot.”

The troops had run off to deploy, and in the camp only the wounded and a few medics remained.

In that lonely and gloomy space, the Archmage, with a gaunt appearance, embraced his staff and let out a bitter laugh.

“Then… a new era will come.”

Clutching tightly at his body, which was gradually losing strength, Kalimford stood up once more. There were still things to be done.

***

— Thud, click.

Dereck pulled out with one hand the staff fastened to his back and, with the other, gripped his sword in reverse hold.

— Thud thud thud, clack.

Shaking the hem of his dark crimson robe, he focused on the sound he had been hearing for a while.

Thud, thud.

Something was falling again and again.

It was the sound of the horde of corpses throwing themselves from the top of the wall.

The enemies, with no intention whatsoever of opening the gates, were jumping directly outside the wall to subdue the adversary who had appeared before them.

Those troops that had transcended even death did not need ladders or secondary gates.

They simply hurled themselves from above, crashed against the ground with a wet sound of flesh and blood, and immediately rose again.

Dozens, hundreds of corpses falling one after another and standing back up was such a horrifying sight that merely seeing it was enough to shatter morale.

The grotesque sounds escaping from their mouths resembled those of beasts more than humans.

“Fuuu… huu…”

Dereck drew in a deep breath and channeled all his magic, unleashing the 4-star combat spell.

‘Large-Scale Spatial Freeze.’

For Dereck, who had already reached mature mastery even within the 4-star rank, subduing a horde of this size was perfectly possible.

Bababam!

Fwoooosh!

Crack crack crack!

A colossal amount of magical power, visible even from the camp, enveloped the entire area.

All the corpses within the radius around Dereck were turned into blocks of ice.

When he clenched his fist tightly, all of them shattered and disappeared.

Craaaashhhh!

And silence returned.

The horde of corpses had been wiped out with insulting ease.

However, what was truly terrifying about those creatures did not lie in the individual strength of each one.

Thud thud thud, clack.

Bodies continued to fall endlessly from the top of the wall.

That endless tide seemed to surge forth without limit, impossible even to quantify.

No matter how talented a mage might be, faced with an overwhelming mass of numbers, sooner or later he would exhaust his strength.

— Kyaaaaaaaah!

And if the problem had been only the quantity, perhaps it would not have been so desperate.

One of Fina’s most refined creations, the Archlich, floated in the sky, commanding the spirits and letting out a piercing shriek.

The humanoid figure of bones, wrapped in rags, suspended in the air—a scene so infernal that it made anyone who beheld it tremble in fear.

That Archlich, despite being nothing more than the creation of a necromancer, was a monster capable of wielding magic close to the 4-star level.

A horde pushing forward with absurd numbers, and above it, a high-rank mage governing them.

Knights and mages. Vanguard and rearguard.

Those monsters with no ego of their own pressured the enemy with formations and postures as organized as humanity itself.

And standing against them was only a young frontier noble.

A being who could very well have been swept away and erased in an instant.

— Fwaaak!

Of course, from the beginning Dereck’s objective was not to break through that absurd horde alone, but to draw their attention.

To pull them all out and buy the time necessary for Princess Roselin to open the castle gate.

Once the access was cleared, they could charge directly toward the place where the queen slept.

If in the process he managed to reduce as much as possible the number of corpses protecting her, all the better. Including that Archlich dominating the front.

Whiiiiing!

Kyaaaaaaaah!

A gigantic concentration of magical power gathered around the mouth of the floating Archlich and, shortly after, a tearing scream, as if the air were being sliced with a blade, spread across the battlefield.

4-star necromantic spell.

‘Convergence of Spirits.’

The countless souls that covered the night sky like a curtain gathered at a single point and began to take shape through the Archlich’s power.

It was a spell that granted physical force to spirits, devastating everything in its path.

Each spirit was imbued with multiple transformation spells, destroying everything they touched in different ways.

Some exploded, others cut with sharp edges, others pierced through, and others simply pulverized bones with pure destructive force.

The unique properties of each soul differed from one another, generating attack patterns so varied that responding to them was practically impossible.

‘I never thought I would see this out in the open.’

An Archlich like that usually appeared only in the deepest part of the White Labyrinth.

Aside from Happy, Dereck had only seen something like this once in his life.

They said that starting from 4-star magic, spells began to reach a level worthy of war.

It went without saying that spell unleashed by the Archlich was designed to annihilate entire armies.

And magic of such scale was being used solely to crush Dereck.

Fwaaak!

Fwaaah!

Dereck made a huge leap forward, kicked several corpses out of his path, and threw himself directly into the storm of spirits.

Boom boom boom!

KABOOM!

Clang clang clang!

Swish!

Crack!

Scrrch!

The ground tore apart, exploded, collapsed, burned, and was pierced through.

Dodging with agile movements attacks equivalent to lethal blows one after another, Dereck searched for the opportunity to bring down the Archlich ruling the sky.

From 4-star magic onward, the strain on the body was considerable.

Even if it was a creation of a 6-star necromancer, after manifesting a spell of such magnitude, an opening would inevitably appear.

To find that instant of vulnerability and strike a decisive blow.

With that single determination, Dereck continued carving his way through the tide of spirits.

‘Is that… an Archlich…!’

Whiiik! Tap!

Princess Roselin, gasping for breath, finally managed to land atop the wall and widened her eyes as she beheld the battle unfolding in the Eastern Gate area.

Truly, Dereck had challenged that horde alone solely to open the way for her.

Compared to the main force, the scale was smaller, yet even so, the Archlich—the elite among the enemy forces—had personally taken the field.

Roselin, who until now had known of its existence only through soldiers’ reports, had no choice but to swallow hard at the sight of the gigantic reaper figure floating in the night sky.

‘All this time… he was fighting against something like that…?’

She understood in her own flesh how terrifying mages of the necromantic branch were.

Meanwhile, Dereck’s fireballs that dyed the night sky grew brighter and brighter, and the explosions resounded with an intensity capable of sweeping everything away.

‘This is no time to be distracted.’

Roselin clenched her teeth, lowered her center of gravity, and surveyed the surroundings of the wall. The place was truly silent.

To confront Dereck, it seemed that all nearby corpses had been drawn toward the Eastern Gate.

Thus, she advanced crouched along the empty wall and was just about to reach the opening mechanism above the gate when—

— Grrrk… ughh…

“…!”

From the shadows, a corpse rose with a grotesque sound and tightly seized Roselin’s ankle.

Startled, Roselin fell rolling to the ground, but thanks to superhuman mental strength she managed to suppress her scream.

Dereck was risking his life to draw attention; to make a mistake here and be discovered was unthinkable. It was an almost instinctive reaction.

— Crunch! Kraaak!

Gritting her teeth, Roselin kicked with all her strength at the corpse’s arm gripping her ankle, managed to free herself, and rolled across the ground.

Gasping, she got to her feet and looked with trembling eyes—it was a corpse missing one leg.

Without a doubt it had been injured during the battle and, because of that, its slowness had prevented it from reaching the Eastern Gate, where Dereck was drawing all the attention.

Her legs began to tremble violently, and her jaw also started chattering uncontrollably.

Right in front of her, a creature with nothing left but the instinct to kill was approaching to end her life.

Death was frightening.

However—could it be more terrifying than what that frontier noble was facing, surrounded by innumerable corpses in the middle of the plain?

Roselin ground her teeth and, with all her strength, swung the weapon strapped to her back.

Gripping it with both hands and struggling to move it, rather than wielding it, it seemed as though the weight of the weapon was dragging her instead.

Even so, the corpse, already nearly in a critical state, was sent flying and rolled across the top of the wall.

Bang!

“Haah… haah… haaah…”

Roselin let the mace fall to the ground and wiped the blood staining her cheek with the sleeve of her elegant dress.

Her heart pounded like a runaway drum and cold sweat streamed down her.

At the camp she had behaved like an absolute sovereign, untouched by fear, but in the midst of a blood-soaked battlefield she understood that even a member of royalty was nothing more than a simple human being.

She had already made her decision.

Clenching her trembling hands tightly, Roselin began running like mad along the wall.

“Haah… t-that’s…”

“It’s an Archlich… Captain of the Ravens squadron… and my comrade Luke… fell because of that thing…”

“If it’s the Eastern Gate… then that Archlich came out personally to stop Baron Ravenclaw…”

At the point where Captain Lutein had gathered the troops following orders.

If they managed to open the entrance, Dereck would immediately activate the signal magic, and as soon as they saw it, the assault group would bravely charge into combat.

The calm before the storm.

The soldiers, with tense expressions in the darkness of the night, trembled like leaves shaken by the wind.

They had already attempted the assault several times, and all had ended in failure.

It was natural for a fear close to that of the defeated to be reflected in their eyes.

And one of the sources of that fear…

The sovereign of the spirits that stained the county’s night sky, the Archlich.

Upon seeing it appear, the faces of comrades who had fallen at the hands of that monster seemed to flash briefly through their minds.

The exact situation of the battlefield could not be seen clearly.

From the camp, it was nothing more than a small point in the distance.

They could only infer what was happening from the shockwaves of Dereck’s magic spreading from afar, and from the horde of spirits expanding with even greater force.

Death.

Those two heavy and viscous syllables began to spread among the soldiers.

Captain Lutein carefully observed the situation and frowned uneasily.

‘Morale is already breaking even before they march out. It seems the repeated previous defeats have eaten away at their very spirit.’

From the position of commander, he had to control his expression.

However, the unease continued to spread within him.

‘With this mental state… even if we manage to open the gate… I do not know if we will be able to advance… and even if we enter, I do not know if we will be able to dominate the battlefield.’

“Nngh… ugh…!”

When he glanced at the soldier sitting in the saddle beside him, he saw that the hand gripping the spear was also trembling violently.

The fear of death gnawed even at the heart.

Just as that Archlich, already turned into the very symbol of death, kept the battlefield gripped by anxiety.

Boom! Kraaash! Slash!

Once again, Dereck’s fireballs traced blazing arcs across the night sky.

He had managed to land a direct hit with his magic on the reaper of death who was unleashing countless spirits.

Crackle! Whooosh! Craack!

“I’m glad to see you from solid ground.”

After cutting down corpses and running between them, Dereck lunged at Happy, who was plummeting after being struck head-on by the fireball.

The old robe burned amid the smoke and, within its folds, the skull blackened by the flames.

At last, he had brought down that floating skeletal mage from the sky.

Determined not to let the opportunity slip away, Dereck grabbed its chest and, twisting his body, slammed it into the ground once more.

— Kyaaaaak!

He stomped on its ribs with the intention of crushing them, but the creature repelled him with a shockwave and rose again.

Boom! Thud!

Dereck rolled across the ground and, barely managing to steady himself and stand up, the monster attempted to flee.

He had let it escape once at the ducal mansion of Beltus.

As an experienced mercenary, Dereck had never allowed prey to escape twice in that manner.

The Archlich Happy.

The creation into which Fina had poured the greatest effort.

As befitted a monster of that caliber, it had repeatedly blocked the advance of the imperial army during the siege of the County of Elvester, had dominated the area with confusion magic, and had mercilessly slaughtered allies.

He had to end it here and now.

Otherwise, the soldiers who still remembered the face of that reaper would hesitate to spur their mounts and charge.

— Kkadeuk!

Blood poured from Dereck’s shoulder, which had already taken several blows.

Even so, he abruptly lifted his gaze toward the Archlich in the sky and said.

“Are you going to run?”

— Kyaaaaaaaak!

“No.”

Whoosh!

Booom!

Residual mana phenomenon.

The technique Kalimford had personally taught him brought the Archlich down once more, just as it attempted to return to the same position.

Dereck was already several moves ahead.

In particular, he had the habit of completely memorizing an enemy’s patterns when facing it a second time.

It was a creature that, when the distance was shortened, always tried to rise again to regain space.

Splattering blood, Dereck leapt and once again grabbed the Archlich by the rib area.

With a dry crack, he tilted his head and fixed his gaze on the skull’s face.

Bluish flames burned in its eye sockets.

Aside from that, no trace of life remained.

However, anyone who saw it could understand.

Its creator, Fina, the disciple and master she cherished most.

Baron Dereck Lydorf Ravenclaw.

Without the slightest mercy, he was going to pulverize each and every one of its bones.

The moment that intuition pierced through it.

Crackle! Craack!

Screeech!

With a mana-charged blow, the ribs shattered into pieces.

Whooosh!

Crack-crack-crack!

On the wind-swept plain, a mage trampled with his right foot the Archlich that had fallen to the ground, observing it with an icy gaze from above.

A blood-red glint in his eyes.

White hair that made one’s skin crawl.

He shook his shoulder, as if the fluttering of his clothing annoyed him, and looked once more at the monster that still retained a faint remnant of life.

Death comes to all equally.

Even for an Archlich in the form of a reaper, that law did not change.