Chapter 0089 Breaking Through the Perimeter

In the crooked darkness, jagged stone spires, ridges, and bulges filled most of the field of view. In the vast, silent cavern, even the faintest sound could travel a very long way through the winding tunnels.

Grimm sat high on the back of the swamp alligator hunter, blue sharp light flickering unceasingly in his eyes.

Though all was still around him and not a breath stirred, his instinct for danger was already clamoring without pause. A great number of enemies had clearly arrived.

With a soft chime, a dazzling scarlet shield of flame appeared and began to spiral around Grimm’s body. In his mind, the chip was working furiously, matching and comparing countless live images in rapid succession. Minute differences impossible for the naked eye were picked out one by one by the chip’s keen perception, then marked in sequence upon Grimm’s retina.

Grimm turned his head and fixed his gaze on a drooping stalactite to the left of his path. A shadow there looked a little denser than before. With a light stamp from Grimm, the earth hunter in front of him raised one hand, and a sharp ocher earth spear condensed instantly in its grasp.

Twisting its waist and throwing with force, the earth hunter sent the spear blazing away like a yellow bolt of lightning, pinning straight into that patch of shadow in an instant.

Within Grimm’s visual perception, that place had been empty a moment before, showing neither elemental response nor trace of life. Yet as the spear struck, there came first a dull, flesh-piercing thud, followed by a shrill and bloodcurdling scream that rang through the silent space.

The darkness roiled. A humanoid creature, its whole body covered in fine blue-black scales, abruptly took shape; the earth spear had gone clean through its chest and nailed it to a stone pillar.

Warm blood dripped steadily down the spear shaft. The humanoid creature began to struggle madly, but the more violently it thrashed, the wider the spear tore the wound, and the more fiercely the blood gushed out.

Then another earth spear whistled in from afar and bored straight through its skull.

The creature stopped moving at once, hanging motionless on the pillar. Within the cavern, only the clear and pleasant sound of blood striking the ground remained.

The next moment, Grimm looked up toward the dark, heavy ceiling.

Twelve or thirteen meters above the ground, it was too high for his sight to make out clearly in the weak light. But as the earth hunter hurled out two more spears, another lean, agile humanoid creature tumbled down from above.

The two spears had pierced its right chest and left leg, but had not taken its life. Yet while it lay writhing in agony on the cold floor, struggling desperately, the huge claws of the swamp alligator suddenly loomed before it.

With a dull boom, the cavern rang with the same muffled sound as a melon or tomato being smashed underfoot.

The swamp alligator continued to plod forward at its unhurried pace. When its claw lifted again, all that remained where the humanoid creature had been was a shapeless mass of mangled flesh and mud, impossible to tell form, race, or gender.

From the darkness, a sharp whistle suddenly sounded.

As the whistle echoed through the cavern, countless shadowy figures began to rush swiftly toward Grimm from the distant gloom. By the look of it, there must have been more than a hundred.

In the dark, the snapping of bowstrings came one after another. Piercing whistles that split the air surged in from all sides, aimed straight at Grimm, who was blazing with fire.

"Ah, so you want to gang up on me?"

Grimm did not dare be careless. In an instant he dispersed the flames shielding his body, then let himself sink as if into a swamp, melting into the great, thick body of the swamp alligator.

The moment Grimm vanished, the alligator’s back where he had stood was densely packed with arrows like a field of grain. Every arrowhead gleamed with a sickly green light, clearly dipped in some unknown poison.

The earth hunter that had suffered alongside him was also bristling with arrows, yet it paid them no mind at all. With both hands raised above its head, it kept grasping at empty air, each time automatically condensing a spear of earth elemental power a meter and a half long. Working with both arms, it hurled them nonstop at the lizardmen hunters who were showing themselves in the distance.

Some were dodged by the lizardmen hunters and assassins, some shattered against the troublesome stone ridges and stalagmites, and some struck home directly, instantly destroying an enemy in the shadows.

It had to be said that the lizardmen’s bodies were simply too frail and slender. In order not to hinder their agility and speed, they had not evolved the thick, hard scales seen in large magical beasts. Instead, they bore layers of fine, thin blue-black scales, whose only purpose was to keep body heat from leaking away.

This direction of evolution gave them incomparable ability to move unseen through dark subterranean caverns, but it also left their defenses pitifully fragile. An earth spear as thick as a cup could strike through any part of their bodies and inflict a deadly wound. Their delicate frames could not possibly withstand such attacks.

The poisoned arrows they customarily used were utterly useless against the elemental puppet body of a mud-crafted native. Forced by circumstances, these lizardmen hunters had no choice but to draw their short daggers and leap like flying sparks among the walls and stone spires, rushing toward the massive swamp alligator still advancing ahead.

At that moment, the weakness of having no enchanted weapons became glaringly obvious.

Weapons forged from special underground metals were indeed extraordinarily sharp, but most were too thin, too light, too short. Such weapons were not enough to break through the alligator’s earth armor, which gleamed with a yellow radiance. The many lizardmen surrounded the swamp alligator and attacked without cease, their blades hacking and scraping away clods of hardened earth from the armor until the fragments fell in a steady shower. But after a short while, with a sweep of ocher light, the earth armor restored itself as though new.

They could not hurt the swamp alligator, but the swamp alligator could hurt them.

Though its attack frequency was somewhat slower, each sweeping thrust of earth spears could still claim three to five lizardmen lives. The swamp alligator was like a giant tank rumbling forward and crushing everything in its path, while the lizardmen were merely a pack of ignorant tribesmen with bamboo spears and arrows on their backs. The gap in strength between the two sides was far from slight, and the heavy casualties that followed were only to be expected.

At last, after the lizardmen had suffered losses exceeding half their number, a shrill whistle sounded again from the darkness in the distance.

With low hissing cries, the lizardmen began to withdraw.

When the area around the swamp alligator fell silent once more, Grimm’s body, hidden beneath his thick cloak, slowly emerged again. He hesitated, and did not order the swamp alligator to pursue the fleeing enemies.

It was clear that the subterranean tribes here had a strong sense of territorial ownership. Grimm had probably strayed too close to their nesting grounds and thus drawn their savage assault. Now that they had suffered such a heavy setback, it seemed they would retreat to their lairs and defend them instead.

Yet just as Grimm drove the swamp alligator onward, his keen hearing picked up the successive cries of agony from the lizardmen in the distance, as though a new war had broken out in the darkness.

Grimm had no interest in that, however, so he merely stood on the alligator and cast a few glances into the distance before continuing on his way.

In the pitch-black shadows, the old leader of the hyena men hid behind a stone pillar, watching Grimm swagger past from afar. His gray, narrow snout was filled with an expression of surprise he could scarcely conceal.

Behind him, one agile hyena man after another, leaping swiftly through the rough darkness of the caves, was lunging with fierce speed at the lizardmen force that had returned in defeat. The two sides chased and slaughtered one another in the black shadows among the towering ridges and stone spires, the muffled sounds of sharp daggers cutting throats rising endlessly.

If this ambush succeeded, perhaps the cursed lizardman tribe would be driven out of this region, and then all the profit in the ruins would belong to the hyena men alone.

Still, the gray-eared one remained wary of that surface apprentice who had suddenly entered the inner ruins.

With a wave, it summoned one of its subordinates from the shadows behind it.

"Go. Tell Splintertooth in Shining City to inform Lord Fallen Sorcerer that another group wants to enter that relic site. Say that our Gray-Ear tribe was unable to hold them back and suffered heavy losses, while the Dark Scale lizardman tribe was exterminated by the enemy."

In the darkness, the old hyena man’s crimson eyes gleamed with cold light, and his white fangs were chilling to behold.

"Yes, I will go at once."

After a slight bow, the shadow turned and melted into the boundless dark.

...

The farther Grimm went, the heavier his unease became.

Ahead and behind, to his left and right, above and below, the metallic content of the rock strata grew richer and richer, while exposed soil became scarcer and scarcer. This also meant that if he encountered a terrible enemy here, even he would find it hard to flee underground as he had before.

For him, that was truly the worst sort of bad news.

Still, Grimm had to admit that this was indeed an excellent place for building a city.

In the underground world, if one wished to construct a city in a single stroke and for the long term, the first things to consider, beyond surrounding life resources, mineral resources, and sources of fresh water, were the stability and strength of the geological structure. Regions like this one, rich in metal deposits and framed by continuous, sturdy strata, were rare indeed.

Ore meant an endless flow of resources to attract wandering caravans. Water meant the ability to sustain more life. But neither could compare to the value of having a stable sky overhead. No one wanted to be crushed into a pulp by tens of millions of tons of earth and stone while they slept.

So Cabby’s claim that this had once been the ruins of a Shining City made some sense, judged purely from the terrain.

After passing through the habitats of several subterranean races, perhaps influenced by the lizardmen’s disastrous defeat, they all clustered in the distant darkness and did not rush recklessly forward to attack.

Thus, in a scene fraught with danger, the swamp alligator at last reached the end of its long journey.

When Grimm rode the alligator through a massive archway, the space before him suddenly opened up. A vast cavern appeared, dim and somber, filled with a hazy, fantastical aura, spreading out before his eyes.