Chapter 181: Wretched Stroke of Luck
Just as the creature stepped forward, raging currents erupted from the shattered ground surrounding it, surging upward from every direction before spiraling around its body as though forming a gigantic whirlpool, trapping it within an inescapable prison.
At first, it remained relatively small, but it continued to expand without stopping, growing larger and larger until it slammed into the ceiling itself. Its enormous maw spread so wide that it looked capable of swallowing an entire house in a single gulp.
Countless torrents of water spun around it with terrifying speed, circling endlessly as they tore through everything trapped within their grasp. The ground trembled beneath the pressure, broken stones and scattered debris were thrown backward, while loose clothing fluttered under the storm's furious pull.
As though that was not already enough, jolts of lightning descended one after another into the heart of the whirlpool.
Instead of resisting each other, the two elements merged perfectly, each amplifying the other's destructive power.
The water guided every bolt toward its target with unbelievable speed, leaving the creature unable to defend itself while being dragged deeper into the swarming currents, while the lightning infused the torrent with a deadly sharpness that ripped apart everything it touched.
With both powers perfectly intertwined, the gigantic whirlpool appeared almost impossible to overcome. It looked as though a ravaging storm had descended upon the hall itself, threatening to reduce everything around it to ruin.
No one could see what had become of the creature inside, but there seemed to be no possible escape from such a destructive spell.
Then something strange happened, something no one had been prepared for...
A radiant, ethereal light flashed from inside the water... as it did so, a straight line appeared in the middle of the whirlpool. It stretched from bottom to top before the whole vortex was cleanly split in half from head to toe, its halves parting to two sides.
With no force left to contain them, the enormous volume of water collapsed onto the ground and rushed through the gaps, holes, and craters, flooding parts of the floor before gradually dissipating into nothingness.
In the middle of it all, the creature stood still while holding the jian against its arm, crimson flames danced within its empty sockets with malicious fury.
Kael's jaw dropped.
'W-what the... fuck?'
A wave of water rushed toward him at first, but it kept shrinking until it became little more than a stream by the time it reached his legs.
Valentina, however, found herself perplexed.
'What did it do? How did it even do that? Even though the same thing has happened, what... six or maybe seven times by now... I still can't figure it out.'
Although slicing apart a spell wasn't something unheard of, plenty of swordsmen were capable of doing so, but the way the creature accomplished it was fundamentally different.
Every time her spells tried to harm it, there seemed to be a strange, unfamiliar, yet quite unmistakable feeling that swept across her mind, making her feel uneasy. It was as though her spells weren't simply ineffective against it, not only because the creature's defense was extraordinary, but also because she somehow lost her connection to them.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her spells simply dissipated the instant they touched it. Or could it be possible that her spells were being devoured by something? Did the creature possess an ability akin to that?
She didn't know how it worked, but one thing was certain, she wasn't simply imagining it, there was indeed something influencing her spells. Which also meant that using magic against this creature would still prove completely useless, much like it had against the Star-eyed Digger King.
'If I may say so myself... encountering two creatures possessing the same type of ability one after another... what an exquisitely wretched stroke of luck.'
Before she could dive any deeper into her thoughts, however, her head suddenly felt heavy, her vision became blurred, but she still tried her best to remain conscious.
'Ah... I'm exhausted.'
...
Although the whirlpool hadn't managed to hold the creature back for very long either, it had still bought enough time for the last adventurer to step into the circle.
Just as they were about to travel through the floor, however, the creature lunged toward them with astonishing speed, appearing right in front of them in less than a second before swinging its jian at them.
Kael narrowed his eyes.
'Why is it attacking them all of a sudden? Did it realise their plan to escape? If so, it's over... it's over for them, it's over for all of us. All of the leaders are already down, unable to fight or even lift a finger, so none of them can help anymore. They had fought with everything they had and given their all. Despite knowing how this battle would most likely end, they still laid down their lives so that their fellow companions could escape from this cursed hell... but even that wasn't enough. They still failed to achieve their objective. Are all of their efforts about to go to waste just like this? Is this how everything's going to end?'
A strange expression crossed his face.
'Man, they're so close. If only... if only someone could buy them a single second... perhaps they'd make it. Damn it... is there really nothing I can do to help them? Think... think... think... what could possibly distract that creature at a moment like this?'
By then, he had already stopped the bleeding from his wife's wound, though it could easily reopen if she forced herself to move again. So, after pressing his healing against it one last time, he desperately looked around in search of anything that could be of use to him.
Luckily, he found something.
It was his own severed hand, which lay beside him. It had most likely been washed here by the water that had nearly flooded the floor.
'Tsk... what could this useless hand possibly be good for?'
To his surprise, however, a ridiculous idea suddenly crossed his mind... though he had no idea whether it would work or not.
'It's better than doing nothing at least.'
Halting the healing on his wife, he picked up the torn hand and stood up before bringing it to the side of his mangled shoulder.
As the two severed parts met, a vibrant green glow blossomed from his palm, this one far brighter than before, making the shredded muscles ripple and twitch.
He was planning to reattach his arm!
Previously, he had noticed that the creature had no intention of letting him heal so easily when it tried to kill Aerisyl, so, he wanted to see whether it would interfere once again if he tried to heal himself instead, especially since he was accelerating the process at a much faster pace.
Keeping the healing active, he lifted his gaze and glared at the creature.
At that moment, it was about to slice through a woman's back, but to his surprise, there was no reaction from it.
The blade flashed through the air at a terrifying speed, but then, it suddenly halted in midair.
The creature turned its head toward him, crimson flames dancing inside its empty sockets as dark malice poured from its gaze.
Kael's lips curled into a dark grin.
'Fooled you.'
Without another thought, he tossed the severed arm back onto the ground.
'How stupid are you? Did you really think this arm could actually be reattached? If it could... I would've done it a long time ago. Well, a certain elf just had to ruin the structure of my shoulder, so now it's nothing more than a useless pit to me. If only you had a few brain cells inside that muscle-less skull of yours.'
Realising it had been tricked, the creature instantly resumed its attack, its blade descending with even greater speed than before, only to be intercepted by a katana that appeared in its path and knocked it aside.
'Good thing... I knew how fast she was.'
In the next moment, the teleportation circle beneath the adventurers shone with an incandescent light as every figure standing upon it dissolved into countless fragments of light before vanishing completely.
The adventurers had escaped successfully.
"Phew!"
Kael collapsed onto the ground and let out a long sigh of relief. Even though he had hardly done anything as of yet, he still felt completely exhausted.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
The deafening sound of steel colliding with steel reverberated throughout the hall as Mistwalker and the creature exchanged an endless barrage of attacks in less than a second. Some strikes were deflected, others blocked, and the rest were avoided with effortless precision. Still, neither of them had managed to land even a single scratch yet.
The two of them moved through the hall so quickly that Kael could barely follow their movements at all, only catching a few flashes of light along with clouds of dust and shattered debris bursting beneath their feet every now and then.
By the time he managed to notice one of those traces, they had crossed half the hall and were clashing somewhere else.
He was, of course, not particularly surprised that Mistwalker could keep pace with the creature when none of the other leaders could. It was because he had suspected from the beginning that she had been holding herself back.
With nothing he could do about that battle, he turned his attention back to healing his wife once again.
By then, Aerisyl was rushing toward Valentina after realising she was no longer needed there, while Valric still lay motionless against the distant wall.
For some reason, Kael could not shake the feeling that he had forgotten something important, but what exactly had he missed?
As he turned his head toward Seraphina, he expected her to either leap back into the battle or at least struggle to sit upright, but what greeted his eyes instead made his skin crawl.
A massive maw was looming right in front of him, its two rows of razor-sharp teeth beginning with long, curved fangs stretching endlessly inward, each one at least as large as a kitchen knife.
Three grotesque tongues, slick with thick saliva and intertwined with one another, lashed out at him, each one thicker than his thighs and writhing like living serpents.
The maw was so enormous that he could not see its face or any part of its body. All he could see was its jaw closing around him.
It was going to swallow him whole!
'Shit! Shit! Shit!'
He tried to form a wind blade... but he was slow, too slow to finish the spell in time.
As the maw snapped shut and everything went dark, something struck violently into his chest, sending him flying away.
His body rolled across the floor several times before finally coming to a halt.
'Ah... that hurts!'
Rubbing his aching chest, he raised his head and looked toward where he had been standing, trying to see what had happened, and more importantly, what exactly had thrown him out of the creature's mouth.
That was when he first saw the monster.
At first glance, it looked like a massive wolf-like creature at least three metres tall, but not quite. It had two pairs of yellow eyes on either side of its head while a long vertical eye rested in the middle of its forehead. Unlike a normal wolf, however, those eyes seemed to be merged into its skin, or rather they looked as though they had formed directly on its flesh instead of within its skull. Not to mention, they were far too long compared to the size of its head while their unnatural shape only made them even more disturbing to look at.
Two long and thick dark horns protruded from its head before curling upward toward its neck like sprouting branches. Around its shoulders and neck grew masses of flower or petal-like growths that looked as though they were woven together from countless writhing tentacles. It had no ears either, or at least none that Kael could see.
Its fur was unlike anything Kael had ever seen before. It had no individual strands at all, only shifting patches of blackness that flowed constantly like drifting smoke.
'Where did this creature even come from? I hadn't noticed anything entering the hall yet, nor did I sense its presence... so how long has it been here? Perhaps not that long... otherwise something this large could never have gone unnoticed.'
Seraphina stood a metre or two away from the creature with her sword in hand, facing it without the slightest sign of hesitation.
'So, it was her who saved me. But still... was it really necessary for her to kick me in the chest just to do that?'
Was he really in any position to complain, though?
'Ack, it still hurt!'
He shook his head, steadied himself, then pushed himself back onto his feet.
At that moment, Mistwalker was fighting against the skull creature all alone while Valric still needed time to recover and Valentina remained unconscious, leaving Seraphina as the only one capable of fighting. However, her mana reserves were nearly depleted and the wounds she had suffered earlier had yet to heal completely, so standing against a monster like this in her condition was practically suicidal. Though she no longer had the luxury of choosing otherwise.
As the creature's five eyes shifted from her to him, Kael clenched his fist tightly before walking forward and asking politely, "Captain, would you mind some assistance?"
Whether she accepted his help or not did not matter to him since he had decided to fight beside her even if she refused.
To his surprise, Seraphina glanced over her shoulder before answering in her usual cold tone, "By all means. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated."
As soon as those words left her lips, the creature lowered its jaw and lunged straight toward her, but instead of attacking with its claws, it simply opened its mouth wider and wider until it seemed intent on swallowing her whole.
Seraphina instinctively tightened her grip around the hilt of her sword and blinked a couple of times.
'How am I supposed to block that?'
Compared to the monstrous size of its maw, her sword was pitifully small, and by the time its blade could intercept anything, she would be inside the creature's stomach.
Without wasting another moment, she dashed sideways and slipped past its jaws by nothing more than a hair's breadth.
Kael, who had been rushing toward its flank, stared at the scene with a blank expression.
'Yeah, no kidding. The bastard doesn't even want a proper fight... it just wants to eat us. Well, what else was I expecting from a damned cannibal anyway?'
Using the opening she had just created, Seraphina leaped into the air and raised her sword high above her shoulder. The blade cleanly cut through the air as she aimed a precise strike beneath the creature's neck.
Just then, all five of its eyes turned toward her suspended figure.
It had seen through her plan!
In the next moment, the creature violently whipped its head toward her, causing one of its thick horns to crash into her body.
Seraphina shifted her sword to intercept the blow, but the force behind the impact far exceeded her expectations, sending her crashing into the ground below.
Before she could even gather herself and rise again, the creature lifted one of its paws and slammed it down upon her abdomen, crushing her body into the floor with such overwhelming force that the ground beneath her shattered as cracks rapidly spread outward, leaving her completely pinned beneath its weight.
Fortunately, the creature had restrained its strength in order to subdue her rather than kill her outright, otherwise that single blow would have ended her life on the spot.
'Ah!'
A mouthful of blood escaped her lips.
Then the creature lowered its head until its enormous maw hung above her. Three long intertwined tongues, drenched in foul-smelling saliva, slithered out from between its teeth before descending toward her face as though they intended to lick her.
A look of pure disgust appeared on her face.
Before those revolting tongues could touch her, however, something sliced cleanly through all three at once, sending the severed pieces flying away from her face.
'Wind magic?'
The creature stood motionless for a moment and narrowed its eyes as though unable to believe its tongues had been severed.
In that brief second of its distraction, Seraphina gripped her sword tightly and thrust it into its wide-open mouth.
The blade pierced through the remaining parts of its tongues and sank deep inside.
She was about to channel her lightning through the sword and tear apart its insides if possible, but then the monster snapped its jaws shut, causing the blade to shatter beneath the crushing pressure of its teeth.
A chill ran down her spine.
Unexpectedly, the creature withdrew its paw from her abdomen and raised its head before letting out a deafening growl, as though the wound inside its mouth was causing it unbearable pain.
The moment its grip disappeared, Seraphina rolled across the ground several times until she had created enough distance between herself and the enemy.
The creature, however, turned its head toward the direction where that invisible attack had come from, perhaps trying to locate the enemy or preparing itself to attack once again, but no matter where it looked, the one responsible never entered its line of sight. It was as though they had vanished into thin air.
"Are you searching for me, buddy?"
Kael, who was suspended near the ceiling, shifted his body until both of his feet touched the stone above him.
The swirling gusts of wind that had been keeping him afloat flowed down toward his legs before crashing against the ceiling, launching him outward like a shooting javelin.
He pulled his only arm back and shifted into the posture of throwing a punch, while powerful gusts of wind spiraled around his fist, compressing into a force that promised to strike with overwhelming impact.
Since the creature was several times faster than him in every regard, attacking it from the front or behind without a weapon would only allow it to block, deflect, or simply endure the blow with its monstrous body, which was why he had chosen to strike from the one direction it would least expect.
As the wind whistled past his ears, he chuckled, "I am right here. Look up."
As though responding to his words, the creature lifted its head, only to find Kael's devastating fist crashing against it a moment later, causing a powerful shockwave to ripple through the air.
Kael had hoped to destroy at least one of those bizarre eyes, but to his disbelief, instead of injuring the creature, the force of his own momentum hurled him backward.
It happened not because his attack had been deflected, but because the creature itself was simply too powerful to be budged by such a measly blow.
'Damn it!'
He landed hard on his backside and cursed.
"Ouch!"
Groaning, he ran a hand through his hair.
'Ah... why do these mindless abominations possess so much strength compared to us, to the point that even our strongest attacks cannot affect them at all? It's so unfair.'
Even so, what was he supposed to do?
What else could he possibly do at this point, aside from waiting to be killed or eaten?
'Still, I have no intention of dying anytime soon either. I have yet to live a long life, after all, so giving up was never an option.'
Pressing one hand against the ground, he began to push himself back onto his feet, only to find the creature's wide-open maw descending toward him.
He froze for a moment.
'Not again!'
Unlike before, he did not even attempt to form another spell. Instead, he desperately shoved himself backward with both legs, yet even that was nowhere near fast enough.
He was not going to survive this!
Just as he braced himself for it, Seraphina appeared before him, faint sparks of lightning still dancing around parts of her body. Then she seized his collar and threw him out of the maw's path, replacing his position with her own.
The moment he was out of danger, she spun on her heel and tried to leap sideways, but that was also the exact moment the lightning surrounding her body vanished.
Her heart skipped violently and painfully.
Soon enough, her vision blurred.
Every wound, every ache, and every trace of exhaustion she had suppressed throughout the battle surged back all at once, making her body feel unbearably heavy. Only then did she realize that both her mana core and her body had reached their absolute limit.
No matter how desperately she tried, her muscles refused to obey her commands, so she no longer tried to force them either.
There was no point in doing so anyway.
'Ah... what a terrible time to suffer from mana exhaustion.'
Noticing that its prey had stopped moving, the creature tilted its head slightly before closing the remaining distance and catching her body between its jaws in a swift motion.
Her head, one arm, and both feet were hanging outside its jaws like a broken doll while its dagger-like teeth clamped tightly around her torso, not letting her go.
Kael, who had fallen to the ground not too far away, stared at the scene in horror. He raised his only hand toward the monster before shouting with all his might.
"No... don't do it! Don't! Don't you dare!"
The creature's five eyes studied him for a moment before sinking its teeth deep into her flesh with a sickening snap, ripping through her torso as though the durability of her armor didn't even resist it.
Seraphina spat out a mouthful of blood, while crimson streams poured from the corners of its mouth like a miniature waterfall, splashing onto the ground below.
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(Chapter Ended)
To be continued...