We spent the next several minutes in silence. We lurked right next to the corridor that branched into three separate corridors, awaiting any potential escapees from the scavenger band. This was close enough that we could watch over the exit to the subsection of the school dedicated to the Universal Tree, while still being able to run if a powerful group of enemies erged.
Fortunately, the enemy didn’t follow us out of the ball room. Perhaps they were afraid of us - or perhaps they lacked the ability to track exactly which direction we had gone. Either way, I started to feel relief as the minutes passed by without any visible movent from the scavengers.
After nearly ten minutes had passed, our group started to lose so of our sense of tension. After all, if the scavengers hadn’t followed us after this much ti had already passed, their potential threat level would drop considerably. Every single minute that passed, the laws of reality in the Market would corrode their flesh and bones. Every second, they grew weaker, while we remained the sa.
asked Felix, after my attention started to drift.
I said.
said Felix.
I paused. I hadn’t actually thought of my actions as being related to extinguish at all, but now that Felix had pointed out the parallels between extinguish and my hope-destroying spell, it was hard not to see the similarities. Even if I hadn’t consciously used extinguish as a model for my hope-destroying spell, I had probably pulled on my experience developing extinguish, at the very least.
I said. New ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄhapters are published on novel※fire
said Anise. Her eyes shone like little stars as she grinned at . Then, so of the excitent in Anise’s face faded.
said Felix. His voice also carried a tinge of excitent.
We spent the next several minutes watching over the exit to the universal tree part of the school, as we discussed potential tools Felix could make out of the tree bark. Finally, I got a System notification.
Slaughter: Assist in Killing a Humanoid (Stage 2 Mage).
Achievent 100
I said.
said Felix.
I felt a bit troubled by that. The System’s notifications were an easy and efficient way to track whether an enemy had died or not. If we could get perfectly accurate minute to minute information, it might have been worth charging back into the Universal Tree area once a few more scavengers died. Mopping up the survivors with a few distant extinguishes could have reduced the odds of the scavengers sohow making a coback. Sadly, we had no way to change when we got Achievent notifications.
said Felix.
The four of us waited another fifteen minutes, before I started to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. We hadn’t gotten another kill notification, or any kind of System notification. I had originally thought that half an hour would be enough ti for the other scavengers to perish, and that should have brought us to the next Achievent threshold. However, there was nothing.
I said.
asked Sallia.
The four of us looked at each other for several seconds, before I ultimately sighed.
I said.
We crept back into the Universal Tree section of the school, and after several minutes of walking, we returned to the ball room. After scanning the area, I confird that there weren’t any nearby souls, and I couldn’t find any traps either. I had originally thought that the scavengers might leave so kind of ‘gift’ for us to try to take us with them, but if they had left a trap behind, I couldn’t find it.
Felix and I carefully combed over every step we took as we started making our way back towards the last spot we had seen the scavengers, but we didn’t find any signs of traps or sabotage. Instead, we found several marks of desperate, hurried attempts to survive.
In one area, I found an incredibly ssy attempt at subverting the laws of reality. It looked like soone had tried to forcibly establish a bubble of friendly laws of reality - but they had utterly failed, either because they lacked the raw power needed to create a separate bubble of space. All that remained of their failed attempt was a rapidly fading spatial bubble and a few fragnted laws of a different physics system.
In another area, we found a corpse - or at least, the very ssy remains of a corpse. It looked as if the corpse in question had been run through a blender. Their body was bubbling and roiling as chunks of flesh, bone, and blood geysered out of the body in random, irregular intervals. The entire hallway was sared with red, and as we moved through the hallway, I had a strong urge to hose down the entire area with the best cleaning solution I could find. The sight and sll were both nauseating.
It didn’t take us long to find the second and third corpse, which looked much like the first one.
Seeing that our trap had at least dealt with three enemies should have put my mind at ease - but instead, it amplified my feelings of concern.
Where were the other corpses?
Soon afterwards, with my soul sight, I saw sothing else in the distance. It validated my fears.
In the distance, I could see twenty-eight souls. Four of the souls were withered and weakened, almost as if they were plants that hadn’t been watered in weeks. They were so close to death that even a light extinguish could probably finish them off - dealing with all four of them would probably only take ten percent of my alteration essence reserves, perhaps even less.
Unfortunately, the other twenty-four souls were in great condition. Most of them were at least on par with the scavengers we had seen so far. In the center of the group, I could see a scavenger with a much stronger soul. It didn’t quite compare to the strongest monsters we had seen in our previous life, but even though their raw life force was lower, sothing about the way their soul looked sent prickles of danger down my spine.
Life force wasn’t a true asure of power and threat. It was just a rough estimate of soone’s physical abilities.
I said, before I sent my friends a copy of everything I had seen.
We had found the main expedition force of the scavengers. And since four of the first group of scavengers we had found had survived… the main force of scavengers also knew about us.
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