Chapter 155: The Marsh
He dropped back through the leaves, through the shifting patches of light, and landed once more on that branch.
Ryan began to climb down.
From thirty or forty ters up, descending was faster than climbing. He pulled the short blade free one thrust at a ti, drove it back in, steadied himself, and slid downward. By the ti his feet touched the ground, his legs were still a little weak, but they were much better than before.
Ryan chose a direction and started walking.
That feeling of being watched was gone.
After that thing died, the forest seed to co back to life—or rather, that suffocating stillness of impending death had finally lifted.
As he walked, he asked inwardly, “Syl, you said the elves love nature. Then what kind of nature do they love?”
Syl was silent for a while.
“Clean nature,” he said at last. “Clear. Alive. Not this—”
He did not finish.
Ryan nodded and kept walking.
“Do elves like water?”
“Yes. But not stagnant water. Flowing water. Clean water.”
“Do they like mountains?”
“Yes. But not bare mountains. Mountains with trees and grass.”
“Do they like...?”
And so he walked and asked, and Syl walked with him in spirit and answered. None of the questions really mattered. They simply made the long journey feel a little less oppressive.
After walking for who knew how long, the trees around him finally began to thin.
An open stretch of land appeared ahead.
Not the kind of clearing smashed open by a monster, but a true open expanse—grassland, pools of water, reed beds, and patch after patch of mud bog.
Wetlands.
Ryan stood at the edge of the forest and looked out over them.
The grass was tall, in so places reaching above his waist. The pools reflected the light of the sky in glittering patches. Whenever the wind brushed through the reeds, they whispered with a dry rustling sound. In the distance stood a few solitary trees, growing by the water, twisted and crooked.
That lifeless stillness was gone.
He could hear insects chirping, birds calling, and sothing splashing in the water.
Ryan drew in a deep breath and stepped into the wetland.
At the sa ti, deep within the marsh—
Vera stood on a stretch of shallow ground, surrounded by seventeen monster corpses.
Those monsters—eight snakes, five crocodiles, and four grotesque things she could not even na—were all dead.
They had died cleanly. So had been cut into pieces. So had been shattered into heaps. So were covered in countless wounds, as though carved apart a thousand tis over.
Not a single drop of blood had touched her.
The wind still flowed around her, faint, almost invisible. It was like an extension of her own body, obeying every passing thought.
Vera lowered her gaze and looked at her hands.
They were pale and slender, the sort of hands a noble lady might use to play the piano.
Yet those very hands had just killed seventeen monsters.
There was no ripple in her gray-green eyes.
She lifted her head and looked deeper into the wetland. From that direction, faint sounds of battle could still be heard—soone else was still fighting.
Vera did not go over.
She turned and headed in a different direction. Her pale green figure quickly vanished into the reeds, leaving behind only the soft rustle of the wind.
At the northeastern corner of the wetland, near that wall of dark green forest, Eleanor drove her sword through the skull of the last monster.
It was a reptilian creature larger than a crocodile, five or six ters long, pitch-black, with three rows of fangs in its mouth.
When it collapsed, it sent up a huge spray of muddy water that splashed all over Eleanor.
Her wine-red combat outfit was already spattered with black blood. So of it had dried and ford hard crusted patches. Her red hair had been soaked with mud as well, strands of it sticking to her face. She stood among the heap of corpses, the hand gripping her sword still trembling faintly.
Not from exhaustion.
From exhilaration.
Or perhaps from release.
In front of her lay more than twenty monster corpses, strewn about in every direction.
There were snakes, crocodiles, those unnaable things, and so even stranger creatures—stitched together from the forms of several monsters, twisted, ugly, revolting.
All of them were dead.
All of them had been killed by her sword, one after another.
Eleanor drew a slow breath and flicked the blood from her blade. The sword itself was dark red, and now, stained with blood, it looked even redder.
She thought back to the battle just now.
When the first snake had shot at her, there had still been a trace of panic in her heart.
When the second lunged, she had already cald down.
By the ti the fifth crocodile burst out of the mud, there had been only one thought left in her mind—
Kill.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
Her sword had beco faster and faster, crueler and crueler. When the monsters pounced, she pierced them through. When they sward her, she spun and swept them away. When they tried to flee, she chased them down and cut them apart.
For one fleeting instant, she had even felt as though she were not fighting at all, but dancing.
A dance of slaughter.
Eleanor lowered her eyes to her hand. It was still trembling, but not from fear. She simply had not yet co down from that state.
Then she raised her head and looked deeper into the marsh.
That was the direction she needed to go.
And it was also the direction that person was most likely heading.
Eleanor tightened her grip on her sword and began to walk forward.
The muddy water rose past her ankles, each step making a wet sucking noise. The corpses behind her grew farther and farther away, but the sll of blood still clung to her nose and refused to fade.
She was not afraid.
She had already figured it out.
In a place like this, there were no noble ladies, no duke’s daughters, no rules and restraints.
There was only life.
Or death.
She chose life.
And then, with this sword, she would shatter that heart demon—
into pieces.
Farther away still, near a reed bed close to the center of the marsh, Vincent stood in a crooked tree, looking down from above.
Gray was fighting below him.
Twelve black monsters had him surrounded—six Deeppool Giant Pythons, four Ironclad Crocodiles, and two Rotmarsh Giant Lizards.
Each of those pythons was as thick as a water barrel, its body covered in dense black scales that gave off a cold sheen in the dim light. Their jaws hung open, revealing two inward-curving rows of venom fangs. A drop of transparent sli fell from one fang onto a reed leaf, and the leaf instantly yellowed, curled, and shriveled.
The Ironclad Crocodiles were half-subrged in the mud, with only their dark yellow eyes and black ridged backs exposed above the surface. Along those backs ran rows of sharp bony spikes from neck to tail, glinting faintly like poisoned blades.
The Rotmarsh Giant Lizards were the most disgusting of all. Their entire bodies were covered in lumps and nodules that constantly oozed black-brown fluid. When that fluid dripped into the mud, the water around it imdiately frothed with white bubbles. Their tongues were forked like snakes’, flickering endlessly in the air as they tracked Gray’s scent.
Gray stood among them with a short sword in each hand.
He was not especially tall, and even seed sowhat lean. His short gray hair clung damply to his forehead with sweat. His face was expressionless, his eyes fixed on those monsters as though they were nothing but dead things already.
The first Deeppool Giant Python moved.
It shot out of the mud with the speed of a black bolt of lightning, its gaping mouth wide enough to swallow a grown man whole. Its two rows of venom fangs lunged straight for Gray’s head, venom whipping from the tips in thin arcs.
Gray did not dodge.
He stepped forward half a pace.
That half-step was enough to make the python’s strike miss.
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