Blacksmithing Is Child’s Play for a Dark Mage - Chapter 99

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 99
An Artifact imbued with Mental Magic was a rarity that demanded enormous effort and expense merely to create.
Yet to fire such things off indiscriminately like catapult rounds was the act of a mind utterly untethered from reason.
“Surely—surely there must be some way to stop them!”
“We could deploy Mental Protection Magic to shield against it, but…!”
Pesart shook his head with an expression of despair.
“There simply isn’t enough mana to cast the spell on every soldier individually!”
All the while, soldiers continued to crumble where they stood.
With neither strength to lift a blade nor will to nock an arrow, they simply sank to the ground and wept.
“Damn it all! Find a way—any way at all!”
“S-sire! The temple—if we petition the temple for aid…!”
It was then that it happened.
A knight’s voice rang out sharp with panic, his face drained of all color.
“My lord! The enemy approaches!”
Count Gehenna peered over the castle walls, his eyes blazing with fury.
“Blast this wretched Black Mage—!!”
Far below, the enemy’s vast undead horde had begun to move, slow and methodical.
And they came bearing siege ladders—countless of them—bearing down on Gehenna’s Castle Walls without mercy.
* * *
“Breach the walls!”
The moment the command fell, ten thousand Skeleton Soldiers surged forward toward Gehenna’s Castle Walls in perfect unison.
Each bore a ladder—long and imposing—held firm in their bony grip.
These ladders, too, were far from ordinary things.
Fashioned entirely from bone and imbued with Dark Magic, they possessed a durability that would not yield to any ordinary impact.
In short—bone for materials, bone for labor, even bone for the ladders themselves. A truly immortal army forged entirely from cost-efficiency and calcified remains!
Hundreds, thousands of Bone Ladders hooked against the Castle Walls simultaneously. The sight resembled nothing so much as a vast, bleached spider’s web ensnaring the fortress entire.
“Aye! Commence the wall breach!”
Tay bellowed with delight. There was something about siege warfare that had a way of stirring the spirit in peculiar fashion.
With the command, the Skeleton Soldiers began to scale the ladders in perfect synchronization.
They moved like nothing so much as a tide of ants.
Countless white bone digits swarming up the ladders, ceaselessly ascending without pause or rest.
A handful would have been merely grotesque; but ten thousand Undead or more transformed the sight into something closer to a force of nature itself.
Of course, the defenders upon the walls did not yield without struggle.
The handful of soldiers who had escaped the Melancholy Statue’s mental assault, along with the mages, unleashed magic and arrows in desperate profusion.
With each detonation of Flame Burst, dozens of Skeleton Soldiers shattered into scattered bone fragments. With each volley of Mana Arrows pouring down like rain, the climbers plummeting from the ladders in cascading waves.
But it was labor as futile as pouring water into a bottomless vessel!
For every one that fell, two more surged to fill the gap. For every ten that broke apart, twenty more clawed their way upward.
A tide of ants without end, surging forward in endless waves!
The sheer number of Skeleton Soldiers vastly exceeded the total mana reserves of all the mages combined!
In mere moments, the Castle Walls lay packed thick with Skeleton Soldiers from end to end.
And then, something peculiar unfolded.
The Skeleton Soldiers who had seized the walls paid no heed whatsoever to the soldiers cowering on the ground in despair.
Those whose minds had been shattered by the Melancholy Statue, left helpless and paralyzed—they weren’t even deemed a threat. The Skeleton Soldiers simply swept past them without a second glance.
Instead, they singled out with lethal precision those few still wielding their blades with vigor, converging upon them with focused intent.
Ignoring the defenseless, striking only at those who posed true threat—the textbook definition of ruthless efficiency.
A masterpiece of ruthless pragmatism!
And finally.
Screeeeak—
Some of the Skeleton Soldiers who had seized the walls descended to the interior and wrenched open the massive Castle Gate from within.
When the gates open in siege warfare, does that not mark the end of the game?
In other words, the match was decided—there was no way forward but surrender.
Through the gaping open gates, the remaining Skeleton Soldiers outside flooded inward in a torrent.
And behind them came Tay, borne in his Skeletal Palanquin, and Partan astride his Skeletal Horse, both advancing with an air of utter leisure.
The interior of the fortress had already become a chaos beyond redemption.
In the midst of that hellscape, a single knight fought his way through the press of Skeleton Soldiers and hurled himself toward Tay.
“Wicked villain! Feel the bite of my blade!”
True to the knight’s reputation, he carved through several Skeleton Soldiers with impressive ferocity as he drove forward.
But that was where it ended.
“You face me instead.”
Partan moved to block his path directly, meeting the knight’s charge head-on with sword and will. And in that instant when the knight found his feet locked in combat with Partan’s steel.
The Skeleton Soldiers around him swarmed forward all at once, crushing the knight beneath their overwhelming weight.
It was a textbook case of the strong overwhelming the weak.
One against many—and at such a crushing numerical disadvantage—even the proudest knight couldn’t manage much resistance.
In the end, the knight’s limbs were pinned down completely, reduced to a state where he couldn’t so much as twitch.
Of course, they didn’t kill him.
The reason was simple enough: ransom.
Warfare in this age operated on surprisingly practical principles.
The proper method was to capture important figures like nobles and knights alive, then release them in exchange for a substantial ransom.
In other words, an enemy commander was nothing but a cold corpse if you killed him—but a walking ATM if you kept him breathing. That’s why Tay had stopped his hand and let him live.
Having secured the knight properly, Tay turned and walked slowly deeper into the castle.
In the distance, atop the Castle Walls, Count Gehenna was still struggling alone.
Even as his entire Domain crumbled around him, he refused to relinquish his sword, fighting on to the bitter end.
Tay watched that sight for a moment, then climbed slowly up onto the Castle Walls.
“Surrender,” Tay said.
His voice was utterly calm.
But Count Gehenna fixed him with eyes bloodshot with rage, his teeth grinding audibly.
“You filthy Black Mage! I’ll take you with me even if it costs my life!”
With that, he raised his sword high as if in one final act of defiance, and charged straight at Tay.
Perhaps it was the last vestige of a fallen nobleman’s pride.
But—
Crack!
Tay’s Ghoul suddenly burst from nowhere, intercepting the charge perfectly from the side.
A sudden flanking attack—a textbook-perfect counter.
The Count’s limbs were caught entirely in the Ghoul’s iron grip, and before he could even scream, he was slammed to the ground.
And again, they didn’t kill him. A figure of the Count’s stature commanded a ransom on an entirely different scale from some mere knight.
Tay stood over the captured Count and bellowed loud enough to make the entire castle ring.
“The enemy commander is taken! All of you—surrender!”
The cry that the enemy commander had been captured echoed through every corner of the castle, and even those few defenders still putting up resistance began lowering their weapons one by one.
And so.
The Gehenna Barony fell completely into Tay’s hands.
That bit of wisdom about a year-long siege being standard in siege warfare? Nonsense.
Tay had swallowed that supposedly impregnable fortress whole in a single day.
Tay smiled with satisfaction and slowly surveyed his newly acquired Domain.
For a first conquest, he was very pleased indeed.
* * *
The heart of the Gehenna Barony: Gehenna Castle.
Tay had finally succeeded in seizing this formidable fortress completely.
The defeated soldiers had been disarmed without exception, and Skeleton Soldiers moved busily throughout the castle, securing order.
Among them, none moved more frantically than Partan.
He was personally leading the cleanup operations in the immediate aftermath of the occupation, shepherding all his subordinates along with him.
Had Partan not moved so efficiently, the chaos within the castle would have been far worse.
The old saying that one competent person is worth ten was proving itself true.
Beyond that, the fact that Undead themselves were maintaining order helped considerably as well.
The reason was simple.
Fear.
For ordinary commoners, Undead were creatures that made your knees weak and your legs tremble just to look at them.
A sensible person who encountered even a single skeleton in a dark alley would faint on the spot.
And when swarms of those gleaming white bone creatures prowled the streets?
The castle’s residents naturally huddled inside their homes, not even daring to breathe audibly.
No curfew order had been issued, yet a self-imposed curfew was being enforced with perfect precision. It was fear marketing at its finest.
Meanwhile, Tay was seated at the head of the conference table—the lord’s seat—lost in thought.
‘The thing is… I’m short on manpower.’
Swallowing an entire castle was one thing, but actually running it was another matter entirely.
Land without hands to work it was just an expensive burden.
‘I’ll have to request they send administrators.’
In fact, Tay had already ordered Kael to secure administrators.
But that order hadn’t been fully satisfied yet. They were still in the process of scraping together people from various places.
Still, he’d need to requisition a few from that pool and dispatch them here. He couldn’t afford to leave his newly conquered castle idle.
A Black Mage Makes a Blacksmith Far Too Easy
Author|
Automaton G
Publisher |
(주) Samyang C&C
Editor-in-Chief |
Editorial Department
Published by |
(주) Samyang C&C – Dream Books
Address |
7th Floor, Gwangseong Building, 28 Bongeunsa-ro 114-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea
UCI |
G720:N+A063-20260511100
Blog |
blog.naver.com/dreambookss
Twitter (X) |
@dreambookss
Submissions |
[email protected]
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of (주) Samyang C&C – Dream Books.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————