Episode-923
Chapter : 1845
The guard’s eyes widened. He reached out with one of his four hands and snatched a stone. He popped it into his chest-mouth. Crunch. He chewed the rock. A look of bliss washed over his ugly face. His shoulders slumped, and the frantic twitching of his limbs stopped.
"Mmm," the guard groaned. "Quiet. It tastes like... stopping. Good. Very good."
He waved his spear lazily. "Go in. Sell your rocks. But don't let the vines get you."
Ben’s eyes snapped to the guard. "Vines?" he asked, his voice sharp. He didn't like unknown variables.
The guard didn't answer. He was too busy enjoying the numbness of the stone.
Lloyd grabbed Ben’s arm and pulled him through the gate before Ben could interrogate the guard. "Focus, Ben. We’re in."
Inside, the city was a nightmare of activity. The streets were narrow and winding, crowded with thousands of demons. The buildings leaned over the streets, casting long, dark shadows that seemed to move on their own.
There were no houses, only "feeding stalls." Everywhere Lloyd looked, demons were fighting over food. He saw bowls of glowing green soup that bubbled. He saw skewers of meat that twitched. The noise was deafening—a constant roar of demand and consumption.
"Target rich environment," Ben whispered, leaning close to Lloyd. "But the noise discipline is atrocious. How does anyone command an army in this racket?"
"They don't," Lloyd said. His head was throbbing. The "noise" Lloyd had detected outside was ten times stronger inside the walls. It was a constant, low-frequency hum that vibrated in his bones. "They just point them at the food and let them run. The city is breathing, Ben. It’s alive."
They moved through the crowd, heading toward the upper district where the palace of Beelzebub sat like a crown on the hill. Lloyd kept his eyes moving, scanning for traps. He noticed something disturbing about the cobblestones under their feet. They were warm. They were soft. It felt less like walking on stone and more like walking on hardened skin.
"Rubel didn't just find a hiding spot," Lloyd noted grimly. "He helped build a fortress. This entire city is designed to funnel power to the top. Every demon here is just a battery cell, and the city is draining them slowly."
"It’s parasitic," Ben said, his disgust evident. "A ruler who eats his own people isn't a king. He's a cancer."
"And we're the surgery," Lloyd said.
They reached the central town square. It was a large, open space paved with red tiles. In the center stood a fountain, but instead of water, it sprayed a thick, red liquid that smelled like copper.
Suddenly, the crowd around them stopped moving.
The noise of eating, shouting, and fighting vanished instantly.
Lloyd stopped. Ben bumped into him, his body going rigid.
"Where did everyone go?" Ben asked, his voice low. He didn't look around with fear; he looked around like he was selecting targets.
The demons in the square were retreating. They were running into the alleys, slamming doors, diving into shadows. Within ten seconds, the bustling square was completely empty.
Lloyd and Ben stood alone in the center of the vast, red square.
Behind them, the massive iron gates of the district slammed shut with a sound like a giant jaw snapping closed. Boom.
The silence that followed was heavy and threatening.
"Well," Lloyd muttered, his voice echoing in the empty space. "I think the merchants just left because the main event is starting."
"Ambush," Ben stated calmly. He reached under his cloak and gripped his weapons. "They knew we were coming. The Stagnant Stones got us in, but they were the bait."
"Of course they knew," Lloyd said, dropping the slouched posture. He stood up straight, his presence shifting from a bored merchant to a dangerous warrior. "Rubel has been watching us since we walked through the gate. He wanted us here. In the kill box."
Lloyd looked up at the palace balcony high above them. He couldn't see Rubel, but he could feel him. He could feel the smug satisfaction radiating from the tower.
"Sarcasm time is over, Ben," Lloyd said quietly. He centered his mana, preparing his body for the impact. "The vibration in the ground is changing. It’s not humming anymore. It’s screaming."
The ground beneath their feet began to tremble. The red tiles cracked. Something massive was moving under the city skin.
"Finally," Ben said, a savage grin spreading beneath his mask. "I was getting tired of walking. Let them come."
Chapter : 1846
They stood back to back, two tiny figures in the belly of a hostile city, waiting for the first strike.
The silence that fell over the central square of Gator City was heavier than any noise Lloyd Ferrum had ever heard. It was a pressurized silence, the kind that exists deep underwater right before a submarine hull begins to crack.
Lloyd and Ben stood back-to-back in the middle of the vast, red-paved plaza. The massive iron gates had slammed shut moments ago, sealing them inside. The crowds were gone. The noise was gone. The only thing left was the vibration beneath their boots.
"Seismic activity detected," Ben announced, his voice devoid of panic but tight with anticipation. He gripped his heavy lance with both hands, his knuckles turning white beneath his armored gauntlets. "The ground... it is humming. Frequency is rising."
Lloyd didn't just feel it; he could read it. The vibration wasn't random. It was a rhythmic, pulsing thrum that traveled up through the soles of his boots and rattled his teeth. It felt like standing on the chest of a giant beast that was slowly waking up from a long sleep.
"It isn't just humming, Ben," Lloyd said, his voice amplified by his helmet speakers. "It is charging up. It's a localized activation sequence."
Lloyd activated the [All-Seeing Eye]. The world around him shifted from the dull red of the Underworld stone to a wireframe grid of blue and white data. He looked down, peering through the layers of rock and dirt.
What he saw made his engineer’s heart skip a beat.
The city square wasn't just a gathering place. It was a lid. Beneath the cobblestones lay a massive, intricate network of magical conduits. They glowed with a sickly, crimson light. It looked like the motherboard of a supercomputer, but instead of copper and gold, the circuits were carved from bone and filled with flowing, pressurized blood.
"It is a circuit board," Lloyd analyzed, his eyes scanning the flow of energy. "A city-wide motherboard designed to funnel mana. And someone just flipped the 'On' switch."
As he spoke, the red cobblestones beneath them began to weep. A thick, glowing red liquid started to seep up through the cracks in the stone. It hissed as it touched the air, releasing a pungent smell of copper and ozone. The light from the ground grew brighter, bathing the entire square in the color of a fresh wound.
Then, the pavement exploded.
CRACK-BOOM.
It happened everywhere at once. The stone floor shattered, sending jagged shards of rock flying through the air like shrapnel. A cloud of red dust billowed up, momentarily blinding them.
Through the dust, the garden emerged.
These were not plants in any natural sense of the word. They were monstrous, biological weapons. Massive vines, thick as ancient tree trunks, erupted from the earth. They were a deep, bruised purple color, glistening with a wet, sticky slime. They didn't grow slowly; they shot upward with the speed of a striking cobra, reaching heights of twenty feet in seconds.
The sound was nauseating—a wet, tearing noise, like muscles ripping apart.
"Hostiles at three o'clock!" Ben shouted, his lance already moving.
A massive tendril swept toward them, slamming into a stone pillar nearby and pulverizing it instantly. Lloyd got a good look at the thing. It didn't have leaves. Instead, it was covered in thousands of curved, black thorns. Each thorn was the size of a dagger, dripping with a clear, viscous liquid.
"They are hunting us," Lloyd observed, dodging a strike.
Ben didn't dodge. He struck. His weapon, forged from high-grade spirit steel, bit deep into the plant’s flesh. Purple sap sprayed out, sizzling where it hit Ben’s armor. But the vine didn't recoil. It didn't retreat.
Instead, the wound Ben had inflicted began to bubble. Within a second, the purple flesh knitted itself back together. The vine seemed to get angry. It twisted in the air, revealing a "mouth" at its tip—a flower-like opening filled with rows of spinning teeth.
"Regeneration," Ben noted with a sneer. "High-speed cellular repair. Typical biological weapon. Annoying."
"Physical attacks are useless," Lloyd warned. "You are trying to chop down a forest that grows back faster than you can swing."
Lloyd scanned the environment again. He noticed something horrifying happening near the edges of the square. A few unfortunate demons, scavengers who had been hiding under the food stalls, had been caught in the eruption.