The mont Theo said that, Mantis didn’t seem to hold back anymore.
It turned into a blinding white streak of light and shot forward. Theo finally saw the full extent of the new body’s tallic strike up close. One mont it was beside them, and the next it was already halfway across the field. When the apes noticed it, they instinctively started backing away from the terrifying presence.
Yet all creatures, be they intelligent or not, knew one thing:
Numbers were stronger than a single beast.
One of the apes roared, and the others imdiately understood. They surged forward together, like an army fueled by adrenaline.
Theo and the others watched as a single beast, barely a quarter the size of an ape, charged straight toward twenty or thirty apes.
When the distance closed and its cooldown ended, the mantis blurred again. In the next instant, an ape’s head flew into the air while its body staggered forward for a few steps before collapsing with a spurt of blood.
Before the group of apes could even understand what had happened, the mantis sprayed its spores in a wide arc. The cloud of spores spread everywhere, and in their panic, the apes inhaled it all.
One by one, the apes began collapsing.
The mantis calmly moved from one to the next.
Each ti, the mantis made a single, precise strike at an ape’s neck before moving forward again.
When the apes at the back saw the scene, every ape in the front lying lifeless on the ground without a speck of movent, their feet froze.
Suddenly, the adrenaline that had pushed them forward vanished, replaced by the fear that they had been suppressing it while the adrenaline coursed in them.
The mantis, however, didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t a creature of that forest, nor did it need ti to process anything. For it, the prey stood ahead, and all it needed to do was complete the hunt, no matter how long it had gone.
"Benevolent Artifact..." Clara gasped as she stared at the clean bloodbath.
Theo looked back at her with a small smile, though there was a hint of confusion in his eyes.
"Haven’t you seen the mantis fight the crawlers before? It had always been like this," Theo muttered.
The others barely reacted to his words. They just didn’t care anymore and were too absorbed in the spectacle, their eyes wide as they watched.
Only Rhys remained alert despite his initial surprise. He suddenly drew his sword and slashed it forward with explosive strength.
Hearing the sharp sound of air being cut, Theo turned around, just in ti to see an ape that had been sneaking toward them, its body already split clean in half.
The remaining apes saw this too and decided not to engage them anymore. All, if not every, ape had only one thought running in their minds.
RUN!
Still, the mantis managed to kill three more during their retreat.
At that point, Theo could already see around ten apes lying lifeless on the ground. He rembered the first ti he and his party had entered the ape’s territory, when they had struggled to kill just three.
But now, as he watched the battlefield, all Theo could see were apes vanishing into the distance as they fled the area.
The mantis tried to chase after them, but Theo commanded through the bond that it was enough, and the hunt was over.
"How do we take all these ape corpses with us? There’s no way these bags are big enough even if we cut them," Theo asked the group.
But all Lucien, Cassian and Clara could do was look at the situation; they were still too shocked to listen to anything, much less respond.
At last, Theo clapped his hands once, finally snapping them out of their daze.
Clara looked at him and imdiately moved toward Theo to protect him, only to slow down midway as she thought about it.
They had already been in the deeper parts of the forest, and now they were in the ape’s territory.
Not even once had Theo needed protection before, so why would he need it now?
With conflicted emotions, Clara walked over and stood beside Theo along with her beasts.
"I can help with that," Rhys spoke up, drawing Theo’s attention.
"We can use the wyvern to transport all of them back to the castle," Rhys added in his usually sleepy tone.
"You... will use the Wyvern... as transport?" Theo asked, completely dumbfounded.
"Hm? Isn’t that normal, young master? Oh, you probably haven’t seen that in your Barony," Rhys said, as if he had figured out the reason behind Theo’s confusion.
But Theo was still lost.
"Wyverns are commonly used for air transport. They are fast, can carry over 500 kilos, and can even fly three shifts without resting. rchants use them once they grow large enough."
Rhys said all that, but Theo noticed the shift in his expression when he finally realized why he was even trying to explain all this.
"Alright then, would you like to head back too, elder brother?" Theo asked politely.
Lucien only looked at him for a mont before nodding, making Theo nod back. This had beco their new minimum-energy-consumption conservation thod.
They began gathering the ape corpses, and the more they brought together, the more annoyed the wyvern beca, who was already staring at the sleepy Rhys with judging eyes.
Everyone could see the clean cuts that ran directly through the heads, no rough wounds, no blood loss from anywhere, only the neck and head. It made carrying them a lot easier as well since the bodies weren’t ssy with the soil and dirt sticking to them.
Once they were done, they all hopped onto the wyvern’s back, and soon it took off into the air.
Theo’s mantis was the only one that wasn’t sitting normally. It was latched around the wyvern’s arm, gripping on its scales just not to fall off.
Theo feared it might co out of the beast space at the wrong ti and just fall from the sky randomly.
Yet when the wyvern saw the mantis again after a few days, it had moved closer to it at first, only for the mantis to scratch its scales again.
That made Theo realize sothing.
The mantis might now be overwhelmingly strong within the forest, but in the real world, where dragons and far more abominable beasts existed, it was still weak.
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