Chapter 16

Hey Jude (2)

The governor’s second army was overwhelmingly powerful.

From Lee Shin’s perspective, they were ordinary people, but to the dwarves they were giants—disasters in human form. There were more than a hundred of them, and every single one was thoroughly armed.

Blindly fired iron stakes would probably do nothing to them.

As despair drew closer, Lee Shin turned his attention toward an ability he had yet to use.

The final entry listed in his status.

「Skill: Apocalypse」
「Description: Brings about the end. Leaving nothing behind.」

Even just reading the words felt ominous.

For some reason, merely imagining himself selecting the skill caused a sense of foreboding to creep over him.

Even the status window tried to dissuade him.

「TIP: You must not. If you choose that, you will walk down a path from which there is no return.」
「TIP: (09)」

But did Lee Shin have any cards left besides this skill?

After thinking for a moment, another possibility occurred to him.

If the “strange abilities” he could use in his original world also worked here, then perhaps he could resolve this crisis another way.

‘My God. My God.’

At that moment, a familiar voice echoed in Lee Shin’s ears.

It was a desperate prayer.

After hearing Jude’s request, Lee Shin gave a faint smile.

The next moment, a pillar of light descended.

And an eerie being who had trembled in loneliness for countless years finally descended among other living beings.

“Uh…”

Skeleton Jude appeared under the attention of both allies and enemies alike.

Before anyone could understand what was happening, a crisp sound rang out.

Snap.

Jude flicked his fingers.

Then the friends who had kept the last creepy skeleton in that lonely world company began crawling out one after another to see the light of another world.

“What are you all doing?!”

Santiago shouted at the stunned dwarves until the veins bulged in his neck.

The old man, who had already regained the light of hope in his eyes, raised his flag and continued.

“A brother has come to help us! Supply weapons to our brother, who came running barefoot without even having time to put anything on!”

Only then did the dwarves understand what was happening.

Tears welled in their eyes.

“Waaaaaah!”

They erupted into cheers.

Surrounded by cheers directed at him, Jude looked awkward—

yet somehow, he did not seem to dislike it.

『My Jude, you have many friends now.』

At Lee Shin’s words, Jude clattered his teeth and nodded.

Looking up at the sky, Jude spoke with determination.

“Jude doesn’t want to be alone anymore. Jude won’t lose anything again. And Jude has enough power to make sure of that.”

The governor’s army appeared startled by the unexpected development.

They seemed uncertain whether they should continue advancing or retreat in response to this unforeseen situation.

Then the enemy commander unleashed a booming voice like thunder.

“Th-They’re—still—just—dwarves!”

Apparently, retreat had never crossed his mind.

By then, the distance between the two armies had narrowed considerably.

Jude’s undead legion had also finished preparing.

Weapons made personally by the dwarves.

Weapons they had manufactured in great quantities for the possibility that a necromancer from another world might someday come to aid them.

They gleamed beneath the sunlight.

“…My God, I don’t know how you arranged this, but if they can be properly controlled, there may be no combination more terrifyingly powerful than dwarves and undead.”

“Dwarves who can endlessly manufacture powerful weapons, and undead who cannot be killed without divine power. Their basic combat ability may be poor, but their sheer numbers are insane. Put the two together, and you get that monstrosity. Puhuhu.”

The cloud of dust slowly cleared.

The enemy finally saw the metal objects being held by countless skeletons.

They were not swords.

Not spears.

Not bows.

They were weapons that had announced the end of the age of cold steel.

Guns.

The enemy soldiers’ faces instantly went pale.

“Undead with almost no intelligence cannot perform complicated combat maneuvers. No matter how great the necromancer, the most they can usually do is make them repeat simple actions.”

Bang!

Hundreds of gun barrels held by hundreds of undead began spitting fire.

Because Jude had raised the corpses of creatures from the small world, the average height of his skeletons did not even exceed thirty centimeters.

The bullets fired from their weapons were correspondingly tiny.

But it did not matter.

“That is more than enough.”

Ratatatatata—!

The curtain of gunfire created by Jude’s undead legion halted the enemy’s advance.

Clang!

Because the giants were so heavily armored, stray bullets were not enough to kill them.

Even so, charging forward recklessly had become far more dangerous.

“Stop!”

At the commander’s shout, the enemies raised their shields and formed an improvised barricade.

The moment thick iron plates appeared, Jude snapped his fingers.

Snap.

The undead immediately stopped firing.

The instant he saw cover, Jude conserved ammunition.

Following his orders, undead whose magazines had emptied began reloading.

Those that still had ammunition remained aimed at the barricades, never lowering their guard.

Santiago stared in astonishment.

“…What in the world? Undead should just repeat the same actions over and over, shouldn’t they? Those aren’t walking corpses. They look like soldiers following a commander’s orders…”

Apparently, the other skeleton friends raised by their peculiar skeleton friend Jude were just as unusual as their master.

In any case, if their allies were more capable than expected, there was nothing better than that.

“Do you want to play hide-and-seek?”

Looking at the enemies hiding behind their shields, Jude clapped his hands.

Clap!

The skeletons standing neatly in ordered ranks suddenly tore off one of their own arms.

Then they hurled the bones high over the distant shields.

Pure-white bones spun through the air—

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

The situation had gone far beyond anything the giants had expected.

They stomped the skeleton soldiers apart or swept them away with enormous wooden clubs they had brought to counter the dwarf priestess.

But attacks without divine power could not kill undead.

“Ah…”

Jude tilted his skull.

“You’ll regret that. Jude is very good at hide-and-seek.”

At the same time, the skeletons holding guns were suddenly pulled toward the flying bones and launched into the air.

It was a tactic exploiting the undead trait that caused separated pieces of their bodies to attract one another.

“Wh-What?!”

The enemy soldiers panicked as skeletons suddenly appeared over their defensive wall.

Ratatatatata!

The skeletons opened fire without hesitation.

One giant took a bullet through the gap in his helmet and straight into the eye.

He screamed and collapsed.

“Crush—them!”

No matter how many times the giants smashed the skeleton soldiers apart, they simply came back to life and attacked again.

When some of the undead ran out of ammunition, they grabbed grenades supplied by the dwarves in both hands and crawled straight into the giants’ mouths.

A moment later—

Boom!

One of the giants met a horrific end.

「All living beings killed within [Land of Death], cast by the Low-Rank Believer Jude, will automatically be incorporated into Jude’s legion.」

The headless giant twitched grotesquely.

Then it rose again as a new undead.

Its flesh, skin, and muscles slowly melted away until nothing remained but pure-white bone.

The sight of their former comrade transformed before their eyes finally sent the enemy into panic.

“U-Uaaagh!”

“Th-The—dwarves—have—joined—hands—with—demons!!”

“Run—away!”

As more people died, Jude’s forces continued to swell.

With tireless skeletons surging forward like waves, the once-confident enemies began fleeing while begging for their lives.

But Santiago had no intention of letting them escape.

“Miss Eve, join in!”

“Yes!”

With Eve on his back, Santiago kicked off the ground and sprinted forward, reaching the enemy in an instant.

Transparent fishing lines wrapped around the giants, and a one-sided slaughter began.

“How dare you stand before dwarves wearing things made by dwarves!”

The halo behind Eve’s head flashed brightly as she clung to Santiago’s shoulders.

At the same time, the powerful authority she possessed as the sole saintess of the Church of Lee Shin activated.

「Intermediate Believer Eve activates [Iron Punishment]!」
「The weight of all iron equipment worn by those who do not belong to the ‘Church of Lee Shin’ increases drastically.」

At once, the fleeing giants began collapsing one after another.

They screamed as though enormous boulders were crushing them.

“U-Urrgh!”

Watching the dramatic effect, Lee Shin thought that Eve had finally grown into a proper saintess.

But even Eve herself seemed surprised by what she had done.

“H-Huh… My God, my God! Has this lowly Eve’s authority already become powerful enough to punish those giants all at once?!”

Unfortunately, no.

「Synergy: Light and Shadow [Tier 2]」
「Category: Combat」
「Condition: A clergy member and an undead belong to the same party.」
「Effect: Greatly increases the effectiveness of all divine-type abilities and all necromantic-type abilities.」
「Overall Assessment: Contradictions are beautiful.」

It was a new synergy that had appeared with Jude’s arrival.

That synergy had noticeably amplified Eve’s authority.

“Y-You damned dwarves!”

The giants pinned to the ground gritted their teeth and trembled.

From their perspective, perhaps they had every right to feel wronged.

The force they had brought this time consisted of more than a hundred giants.

If Jude had not been there, the dwarves would have been helpless against their raw violence as they pushed forward, smashed through the barricades and city, and trampled the dwarves underfoot.

It was already excessive force for conquering the Red City, Gepetto.

Clearly, the governor had intended to crush them completely this time.

And yet, despite investing this much, they had still lost.

Of course they would feel aggrieved.

There was no way they could have predicted that an absurdly powerful necromancer from another world would suddenly show up to help the dwarves.

But Lee Shin had no intention of sympathizing with them.

『Did you not know that I existed?』

The abandoned little ones now had a god of their own.

And giving hope in the face of impossible trials and despair was always the role of a god.

What these people had done was undeniably a grave sin.

『You knew of me, and still you committed this act.』

At Lee Shin’s words, the tightly bound enemies trembled in fear.

Though they were not dwarves, even they could clearly feel the presence of the god who truly existed above the sky.

Now, as unbelievers who had dared to harm the dwarves even after the god of the little ones had returned, they would face the most terrible judgment.

“P-Please… mercy…”

Before a fear so immense that it made their souls tremble, all they could do was beg for even the slightest mercy.

But Lee Shin showed none.

『Send the sinners where they belong.』

The instant Lee Shin spoke, Santiago ended the lives of the giants who had shut their eyes and begun sobbing.

With that, every last soldier who had participated in the governor’s second assault on the Red City, Gepetto, was wiped out.

But Lee Shin’s punishment did not end there.

『My Jude, help these sinners devote themselves to your little friends from now on, so that they may atone for their crimes.』

Jude immediately understood what Lee Shin meant.

Snap.

He flicked his fingers.

The next moment, the roughly one hundred giants who had died in this battle all rose again as undead, stripped down to bone and standing neatly in ordered ranks.

In an instant, they had gained more laborers than the entire population of the Red City, Gepetto.

And that was not all.

There were also hundreds of tiny workers who never tired and diligently did whatever they were told.

This city would now develop at a speed incomparable to anything before.

As they celebrated their glorious victory, cheers began echoing from far away.

Every dwarf who had witnessed today’s triumph was shouting a single name.

“Jude!”

“Jude!!”

Jude.

Jude.

Our hero, Jude…

Amid the waves of cheering, Jude stood blankly, his teeth clattering.

Then his whole body trembled.

Soon, he spread both arms wide and warmly welcomed his new friends.

“Hold me!”

In Jude’s own way.

「The party has achieved victory.」
「MVP: Jude」

「The governor of [The Small but Deadly World] will now understand the severity of the situation.

His belief that ten humans were enough to crush a thousand dwarves will have been shattered today, and he will require a considerable amount of time to deal with the loss of one hundred soldiers.

Either a new governor will arrive, or the current governor will stake everything he has on destroying this city.

For now, sufficient time will be granted.

Dwarves are a race with limitless potential, enough to rank among the greatest in the world of the stars.

Restore the technology and civilization the dwarves have lost, and support their development.

Help them become small but deadly beings whom no one will ever dare trample upon.」

“Waaaaaaah!”

“Jude! Jude!”

The residents of the small world rushed forward all at once to welcome their creepy yet terribly lonely new friend.

The dwarves crowded around the pure-white skeleton and sincerely expressed their gratitude.

Jude had no idea what to do and merely clattered his teeth.

Then his friend slowly walked toward him.

With the wind blowing through her hair, Eve approached with a broad smile.

“Hey, Jude. You’re the best!”

Hey, Jude.

The voice Jude had endlessly longed for and replayed in his mind in the distant past now crossed the years once more, spoken by another precious person.

Jude did not ramble on to his beloved friend about how those were his favorite words in the whole world, or how they had been the most wonderful words that had sustained him through his loneliness all this time.

Instead, he simply opened his mouth wide, stretched out his arms, and said,

“I’m happy!”

Lee Shin watched the boy, surrounded by tiny lives, who had only now begun to grow.

And somehow, those three heartfelt words made him just as happy as the glorious victory they had achieved today.

Truly.

After reading the status window, it seemed they could stop worrying about war for a while.

Now, in the Red City, Gepetto, skeletons could be seen working twenty-four hours a day without rest.

And dwarves could be seen cooperating with them as naturally as if they had always done so.

To develop faster and more reliably, they would ultimately need divine power.

Unfortunately, there was no way to obtain divine power in Jude’s world, where events like those in the small world did not occur.

After all, divine power could not be harvested from undead.

Once a week.

One hundred divine power.

That situation remained unchanged.

Even so, while watching the Red City, Gepetto, transform more with each passing day, Lee Shin thought that as long as he was with these people, they could overcome any trial.

As the city steadily stabilized and developed at astonishing speed, an event occurred not in the small world, but in the reality where Lee Shin himself lived.

“I sincerely apologize for failing to recognize its true value and offering such a pitifully low price!”

A neatly dressed man in a suit was bowing at a perfect ninety-degree angle as though he had committed a terrible crime.

Around him, people stared at Lee Shin with shocked expressions.

“How does two million dollars sound?”

So…

How exactly had things ended up like this?