Part 21: The Miner Completely and Utterly Defeats the Necromancer

Part 21:
The Miner Completely and Utterly
Defeats the Necromancer

THE TATTERED RUINS of the black tower lay strewn about the field of snow. But Raystol the necromancer still stood, surrounded by his skeleton guardians. Their armor and weapons were clad in a thick, black aura, a sure sign of magically enhanced equipment.

Raystol looked furious. “What have you done to my tower?! Did you plant explosives or something?!”

“Nope! We just shoveled it!” Lithisia answered confidently.

“Shoveled it?!”

“Yup! Sir Alan’s shovel is truly the one and only shovel, told of in the Tales of Shovel meant to…” Lithisia was interrupted as Alan grabbed her shoulder.

“Hold your horses, Lithisia. The prime minister is still listening in. I want to keep intelligence about me close to the chest.”

“Close to the chest?”

“This is an information war,” Alan explained. “It’d be bad news for us if the big boss baddy got his hands on any more of our data.”

“Are you really saying this, now of all times?” Catria mumbled.

Alan had gone wild with his shovel for the entirety of their little journey. He’d built the World Tree Castle, destroyed Riften Castle, turned the Sandopolis checkpoint into rubble, annihilated a legendary dragon with the Wave Motion Shovel Blast, and even started a religion based on the shovel (well, Lithisia had). How could he possibly be worried about leaking info to the enemy?

If anything, it was far stranger that the prime minister and his goons didn’t yet know about Alan.

“That’s because I’ve been making cover stories with my shovel,” Alan told her.

“Do I even want to know?”

“In other words, I’ve been ‘burying’ the truth of the tale with my shovel.”

“Don’t you dare ‘in other words’ me. Explain. Now.”

To some degree, Alan’s shovel was capable of “digging up” and “burying” abstract concepts. During the war with the demon empire beneath the surface, he encountered demons that were capable of coming back from the dead no matter how many times they were killed. In order to lay them to rest for all eternity, he had to use his shovel to bury the very concept of “immortality” in the ground. The exact process involved writing “immortality” on a stone and burying it with his shovel. After he’d done that, the demons never again came back to life. He had used a similar process when he solved the riddle of the pyramid.

“This is an ability designed for information warfare.” In order to hide information about the party, he buried the “truth of the tale.” Shovels were good for hiding things, after all. “But it’s not perfect. If the prime minister overheard information about us, it’s possible he could dig up the truth… Hm? What’s wrong, Catria?”

“I have the worst headache in the history of all mankind right now,” she replied. Alan wasn’t human. He was something else in the shape of a human. Probably a shovel.

“Catria, sagely knowledge! You mustn’t forget!”

The problem was that at the moment, it was impossible for her to forget.

“I discovered something after what happened in the tower! Something huge!” Riezfeld went on.

“Huh?”

“Hee hee hee. You see…” Riezfeld puffed out her chest proudly. “I’ve discovered that I don’t even remotely understand shovels!”

“Is that so?” Didn’t she already know that?

“Ah! I’m being serious, Catria. Even the Ice Sage’s observational skills weren’t good enough to understand how it all worked. It doesn’t fit into any existing magical framework. We’ve taken a step into the unknown, Catria! A profound step, even!”

“I’m getting the feeling that one big step is in the direction of a steep cliff.”

But Riezfeld was extremely excited by her discovery, so Catria felt it best to just leave her to her frenzy.

Instead, Catria said, “Alan, let’s hurry up and end this already. I’m sure your Wave Motion Shovel Blast can incinerate all of them.”

“Catria, think back on the rules of shoveling.”

“Er, what?”

Alan held his shovel up and pointed it at Raystol, who was glaring at them. “Safety first.”

Catria immediately felt bad for Raystol, who was no doubt about to be obliterated by the miner’s fixation on safety measures.

“So this time around, I plan on beating them the normal way.”

“Normal? What does that involve?”

“Well, if I copy the enemy’s magic with my shovel and shoot it back at them, boom. Done.”

“I see, I see. That is normal (as far as shovels go).” Catria was being completely sarcastic here.

At the same time, behind Catria, Lithisia was as enthusiastic as usual. “Sir Miner! Good luck! We’ll be cheering you on!”

“Hey, so, uh, what’s with the sketchbook and pencil?” asked Alice.

“It’s for drawing out sketches for the Holy Shovel Text! Here, be my guest, Sage Riez!”

“It’d be my pleasure! As a sage, drawing and writing things is right up my alley!”

It felt like they were on a school field trip taking photos or something. There was zero tension.

The prime minister’s voice echoed throughout the room. “Raystol, they’re toying with you! Hurry up and capture Princess Lithisia!”

“Yes, Your Majesty!” Raystol clearly also felt that he was being played with, and truth be told, he was. Nonetheless, Raystol responded to Prime Minister Zeleburg’s order and immediately took an attack stance. As he raised his rod up high, a black aura flared around him. “See how you like my special magecraft!”

With a terrible boom, Raystol and his guards immediately disappeared from above the snow.

Catria whipped around, dread washing over her. Raystol and his guards appeared behind Lithisia and the others. High speed movement—no, teleportation. Only master-level mages could use the technique. He probably thought that he had caught them by surprise.

But that wasn’t the origin of Catria’s bad feeling. Right next to Raystol stood Alan.

“What the?!” Raystol let out a scream the moment he realized the miner was next to him. He scrambled back, quickly putting distance between them. “How did you do that, you bastard?!”

“With my Shovel Teleportation skill, of course.” By shoveling dirt, Alan could make it look as though he was teleporting. He could go anywhere that dirt was connected.

“Raystol, hurry and finish them! I’m growing irritated.”

“Urgh! Oh, mana! Twist and contort! Forge a blast of fire and defeat mine enemies!” Raystol waved his rod about. Five giant balls of flame appeared in the air.

“I can do that, too.” Alan stabbed his shovel into a stone on the ground, generating 555 orbs of fire that each looked like the sun itself. By rapidly scraping his shovel against the stone, he was able to create Fire Shovel Balls. They were capable of melting all kinds of rock. The fireballs streaked toward Raystol.

“GAAAAAAAAAH!!!” Panicked, Raystol once more used instant teleportation and fled into the sky.

Alan tapped his shovel on the ground a few times and tilted his head. “Damn, I missed. Controlling those things is tough as nails. Shovels really aren’t meant for long-range attacks other than beams.”

Well, shovels really weren’t long-range weapons to begin with. Nor were they beam weapons.

“No! No, no, no! This is stupid! This is absurd!”

“Raystol! Raystol! Answer me at once! What is going on?!”

“It’s his shovel! He’s using magic with his shovel!”

“Hold yourself together! I’m getting more noise on your end!”

“I’m telling the truth, Prime Minister Zeleburg!”

Raystol and Zeleburg were frazzled. Catria could sympathize. She let out a deep sigh. “I still feel bad for them.”

Raystol once more attempted to attack the party with magic, only to have Alan and his shovel mimic his power with one hundred times greater intensity. Trying to study and learn from this was pointless, or so Catria thought.

Next to Catria, Riez was similarly studying the battle at hand. “It might be the opposite, actually…”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I initially assumed that the shovel fell under the umbrella of magic. But…” Riez began to explain. Heating ice—elements. Creating a lodge from an avalanche—creation. Instant movement—dimensional manipulation. The shovel was capable of tapping various magical properties even better than spells. All of which meant the shovel didn’t fall under the umbrella of magic, but rather… “Quite possibly, magic falls under the umbrella of the shovel.”

A cold sweat ran down Catria’s back. Alan’s skills proved to be far beyond the bounds of magic on a fairly constant basis.

“Grrr, I will hold back no longer!” Raystol said as black magical energies began to gather around him. He was absorbing all of the magical power in the area. “My ultimate technique! Judgment from the heavens above! Taste this!”

“Oh?” Alan peered upward.

Raystol’s magical aura had grown so large that it reached up into the atmosphere, high enough to black out the sun. The air itself trembled around the burning mass overhead. As it dried the very sky, it careened toward Alan and the others at a ferocious speed—a meteor.

“METEOR SWARM!”

The titanic burning mass broke into hundreds of smaller pieces, all of them plunging toward Alan and his friends.

“Meteors are basically just rocks, right?” Alan said aloud. “Well, I specialize in rocks.”

A swing of his shovel left behind a characteristic trail of light.

KA-CHOOOOOM!

The top of Snow Mountain was sliced in half by Alan’s shovel, then hoisted toward the heavens. With his wide-range Shotgun Wave Motion Shovel Blast, he sent the giant ball of snow flying toward his enemy.

KA-CHOOOOOOOM!

“I call this the Shovel Meteor.”

“This is impossible!” Countless clusters hurtled toward Raystol, who once more attempted to flee via teleportation. However, it was too late. He would not escape.

“GAAAAAAAAAH!”

It was a direct hit. Raystol was caught in the overwhelming blast impact of the meteors. The only thing left in the field of snow was a burning crater.

However, the fight wasn’t quite over.

“Bastards! The lot of you!” A strange shuffling sound mingled with Raystol’s voice. A massive skeleton army rose to life around his semi-translucent astral body. His seething black aura was even thicker than when he was alive. “A necromancer is only truly at his best once he’s dead! Princess Lithisia is mine!”

A hundred skeleton men rushed at the princess, at which point Catria was legitimately concerned. If Alan fired his Shotgun Wave Motion Shovel Blast from where he stood, Lithisia would get caught in the crossfire.

“You made a fatal mistake in leaving behind only women and a useless witch!”

“Urgh!” Catria dashed forward. She had to save the princess.

“Foolish.”

Alice’s cold, childish voice echoed through the battlefield. She snapped her fingers. A black wave, darker and deeper by far than Raystol’s aura, launched from the tips of her nails like spiderwebs. The pitch-black threads completely bound Raystol and his skeleton army.

“Full Control, Undead.”

The skeletons ceased moving on the spot, almost as if they’d been paralyzed. Raystol was no different, and his expression was that of agony.

“Nngh?!”

“Hmph. Did you really think someone freshly undead could ever stand against me? You’re a hundred years too young to even try.” Alice tossed her sketchbook to the side and slowly rose to her feet. She turned to Alan, who had drawn near, and said, exasperated, “Alan, you shouldn’t hold back. If you had properly laid him to rest, the necromancer wouldn’t have come back to life.”

“I figured since you’re one of the undead, you’d be able to get some information out of them.”

“Oh, so you planned on leaving the matter to me from the beginning?”

“Can you do it?”

“You’re asking me to make this bald mage one of my brood?”

“The more info we have, the safer we are. Please.”

“Fine, if it pleases you.”

“I swear. There’s something seriously wrong with you people…” Catria finally caught up with them. Both Riez and Lithisia were fine back where she left them, doodling away as always. At this point, Catria felt like an idiot for being concerned, so she just looked up into the sky.

“Raystol! The line was cut! What were you saying about a shovel and…” The prime minister’s voice slowly grew quieter and quieter, until it could be heard no longer. Just as Alan planned, Zeleburg never managed to catch on to what was transpiring.

“Perfect. My information blockage worked.”

“Ugh. What in the hell is a shovel?” Catria whispered to herself for the hundredth or so time, dejected.

“Hrm, well, the shovel is…” Alan stopped. Using his shovel, he wrote “The truth of the battle with Raystol” into the snow and buried it. The remnants of Raystol’s black tower vanished into thin air as if they were melting. This was what happened when he covered up the truth with his shovel. “The strongest weapon when it comes to information manipulation.”