"Arghh!"
"No!"
Screams echoed through the forest as Sebas carefully neutralized a group of scouts they had found close to the village.
He had ordered Sebas to assess the level of these knights without killing them.
Initially, they still fought back, but after seeing how ineffective their attacks were, they quickly changed tactics and began to run away.
How boring.
Seeing Sebas effortlessly catch them was like watching someone stepping on a bunch of ants; there was no suspense over the result.
Suddenly, one of the knights looked at him, and after a quick mental calculation, began to run towards him with his sword in hand.
Does he think I'm an easier target? Does he want to use me as a hostage?
"Let him do it." Ainz stopped the Eight-Edge assassins who were ready to kill the knight and Sebas, who was glaring at the man's back. This could be interesting.
The knight, who was called Ian, got close to him and brandished his sword, swinging it in a beautiful arc towards his hand holding the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown.
A good call. Disarming an opponent is the best opening move for him in this situation.
Ian had come close enough for him to see the joy on his face for successfully reaching his target.
The sword hit his arm with all of Ian's strength, making no sound in the process.
And then, he saw the joy in Ian's face disappear, giving place to confusion.
He tightened his grip on the sword and once again swung it at Ainz, who remained in place, unharmed.
"Ahhh!" Ian yelled as he began to swing his sword frantically at Ainz, not aiming at anything in particular.
One hit his head, another on his arm, two more on his chest, and many, many more hits that he didn't even register.
Ainz let the man try as much as he wanted, only observing him through the process.
After a good minute, Ian stopped, breathing with difficulty as he looked at the man in front of him who had remained unharmed by his blows.
His face, now a mask of fear, was full of sweat that fell heavily through the gaps in his armor.
"Why?" He finally asked, like a child who couldn't understand a difficult subject and needed help from an adult.
"Are you wondering why your attacks don't affect me?" Ainz's voice was calm, if not a bit cold.
Ian nodded.
"Well, I guess there's no harm in telling you." Ainz shrugged.
"I have in me a skill called [High-tier Physical Immunity III]. It makes me immune to physical attacks below level 60, which is to say that you either have to be that strong or wield a weapon of that level in order to be able to harm me." He explained patiently, but seeing the look of confusion on Ian's face, he realized he might not understand the concept of skills or levels.
"Hum… You can think of it as a form of invisible armor that I'm constantly wearing. To harm me, you need to be strong enough to pierce through it first, and your attacks were not up to this standard." This time, Ian looked like he understood.
"Now, try again." Ainz deactivated his physical immunity.
Ian hesitated, but in the end swung his sword yet again, and this time the sword connected with Ainz's arm, making him feel like a mosquito had bitten him.
Ian got encouraged by this and continued to swing his sword at Ainz.
"See? I just deactivated the skill for a moment, or, if you prefer, I removed the invisible armor for a second." He pointed out while reactivating the skill, and with it, the sword no longer made him feel anything.
"I normally keep this skill activated at all times, since it doesn't consume any resources and doesn't harm any of my allies, but since I already showed you this one, let me show you a few more." Something about Ian's expressive face made him want to show off a bit.
Ainz rested his hand on a tree and muttered: "[Negative Energy Touch]".
Crack!
Black smoke appeared in his hand, and in an instant, the tree began to wither at a visible pace.
First, its leaves turned brown, falling to the ground. Then the branches broke, and finally the trunk withered, as if it had aged hundreds of years in just a few seconds.
Satisfied, Ainz took his hand out of the tree. The whole process only took him 5 seconds.
"[Negative Energy Touch] is a simple skill that deals a small amount of negative damage to creatures or objects I touch." He then looked at the withered tree beside him and added, "Well, small amount by my standards."
"As you might know, negative energy is what's used to raise undeads, which is to say that it works as a type of life force for undead creatures. If I were to touch an undead while having this skill active, it wouldn't damage it, but provide healing." He then opened his palm, and as he concentrated, the black smoke turned into whisps of light.
"Positive energy works in the opposite way. It is present in healing spells and potions, and represents the life force of living beings. For them, coming into contact with it is harmless, and they will even be healed, while the undead will burn when they touch it." He then touched the withered tree and waited.
Suddenly, from its cracked trunk, a small green stem rose, full of life.
"I'm still getting the hangs on this one, so I can't tell you everything it does."
[Blessing of Life] was one of the things he got from his Beginner Pack, and its effects were quite wondrous.
After acquiring this skill, he obtained something even better than immunity to positive energy.
He could now be healed by both positive and negative energy, obtaining the best of both worlds.
If this were all the skill could do, it would already be an incredible skill, but it had one other effect.
It allowed him to convert negative energy into positive energy and vice versa.
In a way, he could create a temporary [Positive Energy Touch] using these two skills simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the conversion wasn't automatic. He needed to manually alter the skill or spell to bring forth this effect.
In the days after obtaining this skill, he had tested it with many of his skills and spells, discovering that the stronger the ability, the harder it was to alter.
While he could instinctively use anything his game avatar knew, it seemed that he would need to study all his skills and spells in depth in order to apply [Blessing of Life] to them.
[Negative Energy Touch], as one of his weakest and simplest skills, was the one he could most easily alter at the moment.
"Ok. Now let me show you some other skills of the same type that I usually leave deactivated."
"[Despair Aura I]"
***
"How are things on your side, Aura?"
"The Death Knight that Ainz-sama created is easily dealing with the knights in the village." At some point, a little dark elf girl had appeared beside Ainz. Her bright blonde hair shone under the sun, making her look like a precious gem.
If they can't even deal with a level 35 undead, then I guess Harold was quite accurate in his assessment.
Ainz ruffled Aura's hair, suddenly thinking about how good it would be to have kids.
"And the surroundings?"
"We identified a group of around 100 humans hiding a few hundred meters outside of the village. They don't bear any identifiable symbol, but they are all wearing low-level magic items." She reported that while trying to sway Fenrir, her highest-levelled tamed beast, who was trying to lick her face.
Aura had a mixed build, being both a ranger and a beast tamer. When fighting alone, she was the second weakest out of the floor guardians, only stronger than the level 35 Victim, but when she fought with all her beasts, not even Shalltear could defeat her.
Ainz had entrusted her with the mission of scouting his surroundings to ensure there was no one hiding in the shadows and to prevent any enemy from escaping with information.
To help her, he had Nigredo, Albedo's older sister, and the best diviner in Nazarick, looking through the region and masking their activities from any possible observer.
"Good. Keep an eye on them, but don't make any moves for now. I want to see what they're plotting first."
She accepted the command and was just ready to go when he stopped her.
"Wait, take this with you. [Create High-tier undead- Eyeball Corpse x1]." He used Ian's body to create an undead.
It looked like a big pink ball of flesh covered in multiple eyes. It floated in the air, blinking its eyes in what he thought was respect.
Eyeball Corpses were undead specialized in detection, and in some ways, they were even better than Aura at this.
"Thank you, Ainz-sama!" Aura gave him an excited bow before mounting Fenrir and moving with a bunch of other beasts somewhere.
Laughing a bit, Ainz turned to the taciturn Butler who was waiting for him together with the defeated scouts.
"What is your assessment, Sebas? How strong are these people?" He looked at the men with broken legs and arms sprawled on the ground. They looked desperate, like they had given up on life.
Sebas didn't respond immediately. He held his chin, making some calculations in his head before answering.
"It's difficult to accurately measure people who are weak to such a degree, but I believe that they should fall in the range of level 5-10, Ainz-sama," Sebas answered apologetically.
"There's no need to be sorry, Sebas. It's not your fault that they are so weak, after all."
He then looked at the scouts.
"As for you… I'll let Demiurge deal with you." Ainz used [Gate] and had people take the men away.
"Sorry about asking you not to kill them during the assessment. It shouldn't have been easy." After they were left alone, with only the Eight-Edge Assassin around, Ainz apologized to Sebas.
Sebas, of course, began to tell him that he didn't need to apologize, but Ainz continued.
"The thing is, Sebas, I still don't know who I'll side with in this conflict." He began to walk, and Sebas followed.
"I want to minimize the number of deaths on both sides in order to have some cards to play if I want to side with any of them. The knights can be returned if I decide to side with the Slane Theocracy, or the villagers can keep their lives if I choose the Re-Estize Kingdom." He explained his thought process to him, and then asked:
"Who do you think I should side with?"
"The villagers, Ainz-sama," Sebas answered without hesitation.
"Oh. And why is that?" He was intrigued.
Sebas hesitated a bit.
"Because they will be grateful to you, Ainz-sama. They will more easily accept your rule and work for you after being saved."
"That's not a bad idea." It was a feasible plan, a bit simple, but that wasn't a bad thing.
"But it's still uncertain if the villagers as a whole would be grateful to me, especially if they see me commanding a Death Knight." He couldn't assume that all of them would be like the Enmot sisters.
"If my intention is to get territories, waiting for the knights to finish slaughtering the villagers before taking over would be easier." If he ordered the Death Knight to leave, the knights would be free to finish what they started. As for if they would still be in the mood for that, he didn't know.
"I could let a few people who submit to me live in the then-empty village, and it should count as my territory all the same. Not to mention that the Slaine theocracy seems to be in a better position than the Re-Estize kingdom, seeing as how they have the free resources to frame another country for the massacre of a few villages, while there's no response from this kingdom even after so many villages were destroyed."
"Maybe, if I ally with them, the Slaine Theocracy will cede a few territories to me without resistance." As he continued, he noticed that Sebas was silent, so he turned to him.
Why is he like that?
Sebas wasn't making a sound, but he could tell that he was bothered.
Then it dawned upon him. Sebas was someone with a good alignment, and he was created by Touch-me, the biggest goody two-shoes of Nazarick.
This talk must have made him uncomfortable. He unconsciously began to think like his former Demon Lord self, and Sebas was caught between his loyalty and his own desires. Sebas, like the other NPCs, valued his wishes more than anything, including their own lives, so to contradict him would be unthinkable.
I need to develop a way for them to express their opinions more freely, it seems.
As for what Sebas wanted, it was easy to guess.
"Do you want to save the villagers?" He asked.
"I'll do whatever Ainz-sama wishes," Sebas answered seriously.
"Sigh," if you want to save them, just say so.
"Let's go save those people." It may not be the most optimal move, but compared with the happiness of one of his companions, all the benefits and difficulties seemed meaningless.