The mud in the Howling Woods didn't just stick to your boots. It swallowed them.
Thick, black, and smelling of ancient rot. The dead pine needles mixed with the soil to create a spongy trap. For a man walking on foot, it was exhausting. For a thousand-pound warhorse carrying a knight in full silver plate armor, it was a nightmare.
The heavy *schlick-thud* of the hooves echoed far too loudly between the massive, moss-covered tree trunks.
Renn walked point. He didn't struggle. His boots found the exposed roots. He stepped on the solid patches of gray stone breaking through the earth. He moved in complete silence. The heavy Obsidian-Weave coat absorbed the damp cold.
Behind him, the Holy Purge Vanguard was falling apart.
They had been marching for six hours. The canopy overhead was so thick that the gray morning light had never really penetrated the woods. It looked like permanent twilight. The fog clung to the ground, swirling around the horses' knees.
"Keep the formation tight!" Commander Vane shouted. His voice was hoarse. He wiped condensation off his silver breastplate. "Don't let the supply carts fall behind!"
A loud snap echoed to their left.
One of the draft horses pulling the rear supply cart screamed. It was a high, terrified sound. The cart tilted violently. The wooden wheel had dropped into a hidden sinkhole covered by dead ferns. The horse's front left leg bent at a sickening, unnatural angle. White bone poked through the brown hide.
The convoy stopped.
Paladins drew their broadswords, looking wildly into the dense, dark trees. They expected an ambush. They expected wolves.
There was nothing. Just the dripping of condensation from the pine needles.
Renn stopped and turned around. He looked at the screaming horse. He didn't say a word.
Vane spurred his own mount forward, pushing past two of his knights. He looked at the ruined cart wheel and the thrashing draft horse. His jaw tightened.
"Put it down," Vane ordered the nearest squire.
The young boy, trembling in his chainmail, stepped forward with a heavy iron dagger. He drove it into the base of the horse's skull. The screaming stopped. The massive animal went limp in the mud.
"We leave the cart," Vane said. He glared at the heavy wooden crates filled with rations and holy water. "Load what you can onto the spare mounts. Burn the rest. We don't leave supplies for the heretics."
Renn watched the squires scramble. They were wasting time. They were making noise. They were bleeding an animal in the middle of a predator's territory.
Illia stepped up next to Renn. She leaned her weight on her wooden staff. The hem of her brown robe was caked in black mud.
"You're taking them in circles," she whispered.
"No. I'm taking them exactly where they asked to go," Renn replied. His voice was completely flattened by the iron mask. "The dens are north. We are heading north."
"You guided us straight through a briar patch two miles back. You ignored the high ridge to walk us through this bog." She didn't look at him. She kept her blue eyes on the squires pouring lamp oil over the broken cart. "You are tiring them out."
"Heavy armor is a coffin in the woods. They just don't know it yet."
Renn crouched down. He pressed his black leather glove into the mud near a cluster of pale, sickly-looking mushrooms. *Corpse-Bells*. They only grew where a large amount of blood had seeped deep into the soil.
He dug his metal-clad fingers into the dirt and pulled up three of the white, fleshy caps. He crushed them in his fist. A pungent, sickly-sweet odor leaked through his fingers.
He reached into the small leather pouch on his belt. He had scraped a few drops of the corrupted boar's black blood into a glass vial before they left the town.
"System," Renn thought.
The familiar blue grid flickered across his retinas. It projected a small, invisible cube over his closed fist.
[Target 1: Corpse-Bell Fungi (Toxic/Scent)]
[Target 2: Corrupted Boar Blood (Abyssal/Frenzy)]
[Command: Synthesize.]
The blue light flared warmly inside his palm. No one noticed. The squires tossed a torch onto the oil-soaked cart. Bright orange flames roared upward, completely ruining whatever night vision the paladins had left.
[Synthesis complete.]
[Result: Frenzy-Spore Powder (Common Consumable). Emits a low-frequency scent undetectable to humans. Highly aggravating to territorial predators.]
Renn opened his hand. The crushed mushrooms and black blood were gone. In their place was a small pinch of dark red powder. It looked like dried rust.
He stood up. He casually brushed his gloved hand against the coarse fabric of his pants. He let the red powder fall. It mixed instantly with the wet mud directly in the center of the marching path.
"Move out!" Vane yelled. The fire crackled loudly behind them. "Mercenary! Find us a solid trail! I won't lose another horse to a rabbit hole."
Renn turned around and started walking.
The paladins fell into a single-file line to navigate the tight trees. The first warhorse stepped squarely onto the patch of mud where Renn had dropped the powder. The heavy iron horseshoe pressed the Frenzy-Spore deep into the damp earth, picking up a thick coating of the rust-colored dirt. The next horse did the same. And the next.
They were stamping a perfect, continuous scent trail right into their own tracks.
Illia fell in step a few paces behind Renn. She wrinkled her nose slightly. She couldn't smell the powder, but she felt the subtle shift in the ambient mana. Her Light affinity made her highly sensitive to corruption.
She looked at Renn's back. She looked at the heavy black hilt of the Storm-Rot Cleaver over his shoulder. She tightened her grip on her staff.
The terrain shifted thirty minutes later.
The trees thinned out, replaced by massive, jagged spires of gray rock jutting out of the earth like broken teeth. The ground turned to hard shale and loose gravel. A deep, narrow ravine opened up ahead of them.
The walls of the ravine were almost eighty feet high, covered in thick, dripping green moss. The pathway at the bottom was barely ten feet wide.
"The Valley of Dead Echoes," Renn said loudly. He stopped at the entrance of the ravine.
Vane rode up next to him. The Commander looked up at the steep, claustrophobic rock walls. He rested his hand on the hilt of his glowing broadsword.
"It's a bottleneck," Vane stated. His tactical training kicking in. "A perfect place for an ambush. We can't maneuver the horses in there."
"It cuts a day off the march," Renn said flatly. "The alternative is going around the jagged peaks. That takes three days. And we just burned a quarter of your rations."
Vane ground his teeth. He looked back at his exhausted men. The silver armor was splattered with mud. The horses were breathing heavy, white steam rising from their flanks in the cold air.
"Are the wolf dens past this valley?" Vane asked.
"Directly past it," Renn lied. The dens were fifty miles east. This ravine led to the nesting grounds of something entirely different.
Vane stared into the fog filling the narrow gap. He drew his broadsword. The silver blade flared with a brilliant, blinding golden light. The Holy mana pushed the gray fog back a few feet.
"Shields up! Weapons drawn!" Vane commanded. "We push through fast. Do not break the line."
Renn walked into the ravine. His boots crunched on the loose gravel.
The sound was terrible. Every hoofbeat, every clank of armor, every heavy breath echoed off the stone walls and amplified. It sounded like an army of iron golems marching through a canyon.
The fog grew thicker the deeper they went. The daylight vanished completely, replaced by the harsh, artificial golden glare of the paladins' weapons.
Renn kept his eyes on the mossy rock walls high above them.
He saw the first shadow move.
It was fast. A blur of dark, segmented armor sliding silently down the vertical cliff face. It completely ignored gravity.
Renn stopped. He reached over his shoulder and gripped the hilt of the Storm-Rot Cleaver.
"Stop," Renn said.
Vane pulled his horse up short. "What is it?"
A small pebble fell from the cliff. It hit Vane's silver pauldron with a sharp *clink*.
The Commander looked up.
A massive, multi-legged horror dropped from the fog.
It was an Iron-Jaw Centipede. It was forty feet long. Its segmented exoskeleton was the color of rusted iron. Hundreds of sharp, scythe-like legs clicked frantically against the stone wall. Its head was just a massive pair of serrated, black mandibles dripping with a foul-smelling, yellow acid.
It didn't go for the men. It went for the horses. The scent of the Frenzy-Spore powder on their hooves drove the beast into a blind, starving rage.
The centipede landed squarely on the back of a paladin near the middle of the column.
The impact crushed the warhorse to the ground instantly. The horse's spine snapped with a sound like a falling tree. The paladin screamed as he was pinned beneath the heavy, thrashing metal-like body of the monster.
The massive black mandibles snapped shut around the paladin's waist. The silver plate armor crumpled like tin foil. Blood erupted in a massive spray, painting the gray gravel bright red.
"Abomination!" Vane roared. "Slay it!"
The ravine devolved into absolute chaos.
The horses panicked. They reared up, kicking wildly in the narrow space, slamming into each other. Paladins were thrown from their saddles.
Three more centipedes dropped from the cliffs.
They were drawn by the scent, and now they were frenzied by the smell of fresh blood.
One of them hit a supply horse. Its scythe-legs wrapped around the animal, thousands of tiny hooks digging into the flesh. The yellow acid dripped from its mouth onto the horse's flank, instantly melting the skin and muscle. White smoke hissed into the air, carrying the smell of cooking meat.
A paladin swung his glowing broadsword. The Holy light cut a deep gash into the side of the centipede.
The beast shrieked—a high, metallic grinding noise that vibrated in the teeth. It whipped its heavy, armored tail. The spiked end slammed into the paladin's chest, launching him backward. He hit the stone wall of the ravine so hard his helmet caved in. He slumped to the gravel, dead.
Renn didn't step forward. He stepped back. He pulled Illia with him, pressing her against the cold, damp rock face near the entrance of the bottleneck.
"Keep your light off," Renn ordered.
Illia held her staff tight against her chest. She watched the massacre. She watched the paladins fighting desperately in the narrow space, their longswords clanging uselessly against the thick, rusted exoskeletons of the beasts.
"You planned this," Illia said. Her breathing was fast, but her voice was steady. "You knew this was a nest."
"I knew they were hungry," Renn corrected.
He watched Commander Vane. The blond knight was a legitimate threat. He hadn't panicked.
Vane stood over the crushed body of a squire. He held his broadsword with both hands. The golden runes etched into his silver armor flared to life. The Holy light condensed, forming a solid halo around his blade.
He didn't swing wildly. He waited.
A centipede lunged at him, its mandibles wide open to snap him in half.
Vane stepped inside the guard. He thrust the broadsword directly up, straight into the soft, unarmored underside of the beast's throat.
The Holy light exploded outward. It detonated inside the centipede's skull. The creature's head literally burst apart in a shower of yellow acid and gray fluid. The massive forty-foot body thrashed violently, tearing chunks out of the rock wall before finally collapsing in a twitching heap.
"Form a wall!" Vane screamed, wiping acid off his faceplate. The metal was hissing, slightly pitted by the corrosive fluid. "Shields front! Push them back!"
Six paladins managed to lock their kite shields together. The golden light linked, forming a solid barrier across the narrow path. The remaining two centipedes slammed into the barrier, their mandibles scraping horribly against the magical shield.
They were holding the line. Barely.
Renn narrowed his silver eyes behind the iron mask.
Vane was a Rank 4 Holy Knight. Stronger than Renn had calculated. If they survived this, Vane would execute him the moment the adrenaline faded. The Commander already suspected him.
Renn drew the Storm-Rot Cleaver. The heavy black blade slid out with a low hiss. The toxic green veins along the metal pulsed hungrily in the dark.
"What are you doing?" Illia asked. She saw his grip shift. He wasn't aiming at the monsters.
"Earning my pay," Renn said.
He stepped away from the wall. He activated the *Abyssal Step*.
The gravel beneath his boots cratered. He launched forward like a black cannonball, moving far faster than a human should be able to. He bypassed the thrashing rear legs of a centipede and appeared directly behind the paladins' shield wall.
He didn't attack Vane. He attacked the environment.
Renn swung the heavy cleaver horizontally, aiming at the steep rock wall directly above the shield formation. He pumped his dense, mutated mana into the hilt.
The *Corrupted Gale* effect activated.
A massive, crescent-shaped blade of toxic green wind tore out of the black steel. It shrieked through the damp air and slammed into the cliff face thirty feet above the knights.
The Abyssal rot instantly ate into the solid stone. The wind pressure detonated the weakened rock.
A loud, structural crack echoed through the ravine. 一声响亮的结构性裂缝在峡谷中回响.
"Look out!" Vane yelled, looking up. "当心!"维恩抬头喊道.
It was too late. 太晚了.
Three tons of solid gray shale detached from the cliff. The massive boulder plummeted downward. 三吨坚固的灰色页岩从悬崖上脱落.巨石轰然落下.
It hit the right side of the shield wall. The golden barrier shattered like glass under the sheer kinetic weight. Two paladins were instantly crushed beneath the stone, their armor folding flat into the gravel. 它击中了盾墙的右侧.金色的屏障在巨大的动能重量下如同玻璃般破碎.两名圣骑士立即被压在了石头下面,他们的盔甲平折进了砾石中.
The line broke. 线断了.
The waiting centipedes poured through the gap. 等待的蜈蚣从缝隙中涌了进来.
One grabbed a knight by the helmet, tearing his head clean off his shoulders. The other lunged at Vane, forcing the Commander to dive backward into the mud to avoid the snapping black mandibles. 其中一个抓住了一名骑士的头盔,把他的头从肩膀上扯了下来.另一个猛扑向维恩,迫使指挥官向后潜入泥浆中,以避免折断的黑色下颌.
Chaos reigned again. 混乱再度袭来.
Renn landed smoothly on top of the fallen boulder. He stood above the slaughter. He rested the flat of the heavy black blade on his shoulder. 雷恩平稳地落在了倒下的巨石之上.他站在屠杀之上.他把沉重的黑色刀刃靠在肩上.
Vane scrambled to his feet. His silver armor was dented and covered in mud and yellow blood. He looked at the fallen rock. He looked up at the mercenary standing on top of it.
Vane's eyes widened in sudden realization. He saw the faint green glow fading from the jagged black sword.
"You..." Vane spat blood from a bitten lip. He pointed his glowing broadsword at Renn. "You traitor!"
Renn didn't answer. He just looked down at the Commander.
A massive centipede reared up behind Vane, casting a terrifying, multi-legged shadow over the Holy Knight.
Renn turned around and jumped off the boulder, walking back toward Illia in the dark. He left the paladins to the dark.