The Paladin in the Abyss

Apart from the murder of crows, there were other creatures in the sky, and they were engaged in combat with one another. A flock of enormous vultures guarded the airspace of the Witches’ Forest, fiercely battling the skeletal remains of their deceased ancestors, with black feathers, white bones, and red blood sporadically falling to the ground.

The battle on the ground was equally intense. Lancelot could not find Peyton Derrick’s true form, but it seemed the Lich had resurrected all the corpses that had once fallen on this land. Countless skeletal soldiers swarmed the forest like ants, making it seem like the Lich was the true master of the dead; meanwhile, the witches had animated those decayed and withered trees. These terrifying tree-men swung their thorn-covered arms, smashing the tide of the Undead to pieces like reefs against crashing waves.

The witches themselves also joined the battle. Their appearance was even more hideous than rumored, resembling old crones who had lived for two centuries, but with the agility of baboons. Each witch stood atop a peculiar war machine, hurling lightning, hail, and venomous curses in all directions. It took Lancelot a while to realize that these war machines were actually treehouses with legs—some resembling the tentacle-like vines of an octopus, others like chicken feet. Before seeing it with their own eyes, no sane person could believe such things existed, let alone that they could charge across the battlefield like mammoths.

At first glance, it seemed like the forest’s guardians had the upper hand. The withered tree-men could knock down multiple enemies with one punch, and each spell from the witches could clear a large area among the enemy ranks. But the sheer number of the Undead army was overwhelming. Some of the fallen even seemed capable of standing back up unless the witches had some hidden trump card. Otherwise, if this continued, it wouldn’t be long before they were completely overrun.

Lancelot certainly had no interest in intervening in the battle, but he also couldn’t fly openly in the sky—it was too conspicuous. He tucked his wings tightly, rapidly descending and gliding silently under the cover of the shadows between the treetops, while his companions followed closely behind him. In this extremely chaotic battlefield, Lancelot’s Spirit Perception could hardly distinguish any details, but he could still roughly sense the direction where powerful presences lay and thus avoid them in advance.

Crossing the battle lines took almost no time, and after only a few heartbeats, they had left the fierce fighting far behind them. The surroundings quickly became quiet, with the air seemingly filled with some substance that absorbed sound. The distant sounds of battle were muted, as if heard through thick curtains, while the flapping of their own wings against the air sounded unusually sharp.

The dense forest remained all around them, but the trees here appeared extremely diseased—trunks twisted and gnarled as if writhing in pain, with not even a single dry leaf left on the branches. It seemed as if a terrible plague had recently swept through this part of the forest.

The problem was, from the sky earlier, this part of the forest had appeared completely normal—nothing at all like this ghostly scene. Illusion Technique was naturally the most reasonable explanation, but Lancelot couldn’t be sure whether what he was seeing now was real.

As they ventured deeper, the woods finally began to thin out, and faint flickers of light reflecting off a surface could be seen ahead. After flying a bit further, the scene suddenly opened up, revealing a small lake with a radius of nearly a hundred feet in their view. Something about that lake made Lancelot hesitant to approach further. He landed on a sufficiently sturdy tree branch, transforming back into his Human Knight form, and his companions followed, landing alongside him with looks of shock as they gazed at the eerie waters.

"Is that... the Stygian River’s water in the lake?" Bruto asked hesitantly. "I’ve never seen that black liquid anywhere else..."