Chapter 251 : Chapter 251
Chapter 251. Reinforcements
The expected sound of his shield being worn down never came.
The moment Logaris stepped into the mist, something bizarre happened.
The violet-black fog, which had been madly eroding all life around it, parted docilely the instant it touched his body, as if it possessed a will of its own. It even displayed an affinity that was almost fawning.
Logaris stopped in his tracks and looked at the scene in surprise.
He had not activated any defensive spellwork, yet not only did the toxic purple fog fail to harm him, it seeped into his body through his pores instead, making the dormant Mana within him burst into joyous life, like a traveler finally returning home.
“Could this be... Hell’s infiltration?”
Logaris recalled Maggie’s earlier warning: behind the beast tide from the Great Howling Rift, one of Hell’s Grand Dukes had been fanning the flames from the shadows.
“I wonder which one it is...”
Logaris muttered under his breath, pushing up the glasses on the bridge of his nose as his leather boots squelched across the rotting soil.
Not far ahead, violent energy fluctuations were churning the mist.
When Logaris passed through the last veil of smoke, the first thing that entered his sight was not Karlsas alone, but the badly mauled Sunscorch Heavy Cavalry.
Corrected version:
Though the five thousand elite knights had formed a circular formation, their condition was utterly horrific. The violet-black toxic mist, corrosive enough to eat through steel, seeped in through every opening. Quite a few knights had already had their armor eaten through, their exposed flesh ulcerating and oozing pus, while muffled groans of pain rose and fell without ceasing. Had their will not been iron-hard, they would likely have collapsed long ago.
“Tsk. Their quality is decent enough. Dying here would be a waste.”
Logaris delivered the assessment expressionlessly.
He came to a halt. His long fingers moved swiftly through the air, sketching out a complex rune that took shape in an instant.
“Isolation Array.”
Bzzzz—
A pale blue, translucent curtain of light spread outward from him in an instant, using him as its center, and in the blink of an eye it enveloped the entire order of knights. The purple mist that had been ravenously corroding flesh hissed the moment it touched the light screen, then was forcibly repelled.
The knights, who had been on the verge of suffocation, drew in a sharp breath of long-lost clean air and turned in shock toward the black-robed figure who had suddenly appeared.
Logaris paid no attention to their grateful or astonished gazes. His eyes passed over the crowd and landed on the very center of the battlefield.
That was the true hellscape.
Even Logaris, who was always exacting in his standards, had a rare glimmer of approval flash through the lenses over his eyes when he saw what lay before him.
“This old man is even fiercer than I imagined.”
Across the center of the battlefield, more than a dozen enormous corpses lay strewn in all directions.
Those fifth-tier magical beasts that could have destroyed an entire city out in the wider world had all been slaughtered by Karlsas!
At the center of that mountain of corpses and sea of blood, the old general Karlsas was kneeling on one knee. The two-handed greatsword that had followed him for many years had been chipped open with a jagged notch, and he was using it like a crutch, barely keeping himself from collapsing.
The old man’s armor was in tatters, as if something had splashed it with potent acid. It hissed with white smoke, while the skin exposed beneath it had turned an eerie ashen gray. He had clearly been poisoned deeply.
And yet he still stared fixedly ahead. The crimson Battle Aura in his eyes had dimmed, but it had not gone out.
Opposite him, the only surviving sixth-tier monster—and by far the most horrifying one—was in the height of its feeding frenzy.
There was nothing about it that resembled the proper shape of any sane living thing.
Its upper body was vaguely humanoid, yet it had four arms, and behind it stretched a pair of ruined black wings leaking pus. Its lower body, meanwhile, was nothing but a writhing mass of flesh, from which several thick tentacles currently extended.
Most horrifying of all was its face. It had no features at all—only a dense mass of hundreds upon thousands of compound eyes, all flashing with greed and malice as they locked onto the exhausted Karlsas.
At that moment, one of those tentacles was wrapped around the corpse of the Netherfire Steel-Armored Rhino Karlsas had slain.
That beast’s several-ton carcass looked like a toy made of cheese before it. The spine on the Devourer’s back split open, and a barbed feeding proboscis drilled out from within, plunging into the rhino’s body with a wet pop.
Gulp. Gulp.
A sickening swallowing sound rang out.
Visible to the naked eye, the rhino rapidly withered, while the several bone-deep sword wounds Karlsas had carved into the Devourer began healing at an absurd speed. Fresh, newborn flesh writhed madly over the wounds, a sight so revolting it turned the stomach.
“Damn it... this monster’s regenerative power...” Karlsas gritted his teeth, the hand gripping his sword trembling faintly. He had already done everything he could. He had slaughtered all its minions, but this leader was simply too bizarre.
“ROOOAR—!!!”
The Devourer let out a satisfied bellow. It seemed to have sensed the weakness of the old human before it.
Those hundreds upon thousands of compound eyes rotated at once, and in the end every last one focused on Karlsas.
In the next second, the tentacles behind it snapped upward, shrieking as they tore through the air and shot straight for the old general’s head!
They were so fast that not even an afterimage could be seen.
And then—
Hum.
A tremor so slight it was nearly inaudible.
The tentacle that was about to smash Karlsas’s head apart suddenly froze for an instant in midair.
Then a black line, fine as a strand of hair, appeared at its base.
Thud.
The entire tentacle was severed cleanly at the root. The cut was so smooth it looked like a mirror. Blood did not even have time to spurt out before the severed limb had already hit the ground, still twitching in a nervous spasm.
“Who?!” Karlsas’s eyes flew open.
A tall, slender figure in black stood before him at some unknown point, one hand tucked in his pocket while the other casually flicked away a speck of dust that did not exist.
“Lo... Logaris?”
“It’s urgent, so I’ll skip the talk. Kill it!”
Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, the Devourer had already reacted.
Its prey, already within its grasp, had been interrupted, and the purer, more enticing aura of Mana within Logaris drove the creature completely mad.
It let out a piercing screech. The remaining three tentacles struck at the same time from three vicious angles, sealing off every possible route of retreat for Logaris.
“Cut off its retreat.”
Logaris’s icy voice suddenly came from behind him.
Karlsas, already at the end of his strength, froze for a moment, but his body reacted faster than his mind. Faced with the shrieking tentacles rushing toward him, the old general clenched his teeth and wrung out the very last trace of lava-hot Battle Aura from within himself.
“Haaah—!!”
Not only did he refuse to retreat a single step, he gripped his sword in both hands and, at the very instant the sixth-tier monster lunged in for the kill, drove that crimson greatsword brutally into the frozen earth beneath his feet.
【Groundfire Eruption】
BOOM—!
A pillar of flame erupted skyward with Karlsas at its center, the tremendous impact trying to hurl the Devourer’s massive body up into the air.