Chapter 114: March on
Far across the shifting expanse of the dungeonland, where the terrain was dry and cracked and the mana saturation too thick for casual breathers, Chief Varros and his troops from the Black Vale Territory marched in a tide of fury.
Their black and red banners fluttered behind them, soaked in the blood of recent conquests.
The iron plates of their armor shimmered beneath a cursed sun that hovered low over the jagged horizon, their boots crunching down the brittle bones of long-forgotten beast corpses that littered the cursed valley floor.
Varros, towering and musclebound with jagged tattoos burned across his chest and face, walked with the swagger of a man who had never once tasted defeat.
In his right hand, he dragged a serrated war-axe that still dripped with the greenish-black fluids of the squid-headed monstrosities they had just wiped out.
Behind him, the soldiers laughed.
They tossed the heads of the fallen back and forth like grotesque toys, hooting and jeering at the tentacled remains.
"Ha! Did you see this one’s eye pop when I cleaved it?" one soldier crowed, kicking the crushed remains of an octopus-headed demon. "Like squeezing a melon!"
"Ugliest thing I’ve seen since that tavern girl in Marrowtown!" another cackled.
As they celebrated, one of the surviving scouts—skin pale, one eye bloodshot, face trembling with sweat—stepped forward. His voice was a whisper trying to shout. "Chief Varros... please. We shouldn’t be here. This place... this is the place."
Varros stopped. Turned. His glare fell on the man like a curse.