Chapter 734: A Giant Cave Centipede Colony

Before the second sentry could turn its head toward the sudden weight falling beside it, Sol was already in front of it.

He clamped his bare hand around its dripping mandibles, smothering its screech, and drove the Dreadwing blade straight up under its lower jaw and into its braincase.

Click.

Silence returned to the tunnel.

Sol extracted his weapons, letting Orphos quietly drink the twin soul-streams. He looked around the vast, arched tunnel, noticing several other dark fissures branching off in different directions.

This is just one gate out of dozens, Sol realized, wiping his blade. An entire subterranean network, completely untouched.

He stepped past the fallen guards and pushed through the archway.

After another a thousand paces, the narrow tunnel abruptly ended, opening up onto a massive, cliff-like stone shelf that overlooked a colossal subterranean sinkhole.

Sol stopped at the edge of the shelf, looking down into the abyssal chamber below.

His breath caught slightly in his throat.

The chamber below was gargantuan... a natural underground amphitheater easily a mile wide, its ceiling lost in the high, impenetrable gloom.

Suspended across the massive void were thousands of thick, glowing red tendrils of subterranean vine, casting an eerie, crimson light over the entire sinkhole.

And covering the floor, the walls, and the stone pillars of this colossal abyss was a living, writhing sea of nightmares.

A giant cave centipede colony.

Hundreds upon hundreds... perhaps thousands... of giant subterranean centipedes were crawling over one another, nesting in deep rock crevices, and guarding vast mounds of glowing, translucent eggs.

Sol’s crimson eyes swept over the squirming sea of chitin and venom, his advanced perception instantly analyzing the energy signatures vibrating off the horde.

The weakest, juvenile centipedes crawling along the outer edges possessed energy signatures equivalent to Layer 2 warriors.

However, the vast majority of the adult population... hundreds of armored, forty-foot monstrosities patrolling the central mounds and hanging from the high vines... were fully matured Layer 3 equivalents, their bodies radiating cold, deadly subterranean essence!

And at the absolute center of the sinkhole, resting atop a massive mountain of bleached bones and glowing crimson crystals, lay three colossal, sixty-foot Mother Centipedes whose dark, armored carapaces flickered with the distinct, terrifying density of Peak Layer 3 and Early Layer 4 terrors!

It was a massive, self-contained subterranean hive of high-tier, essence-rich beasts, undisturbed by humans for centuries or maybe millennia.

Sol stood alone on the high ledge, looking down at the vast, writhing sea of monsters that could easily obliterate a surface tribe similar to Veynar.

Slowly, the surprise in his eyes faded.

A wide, slow, and thoroughly wicked grin spread across Sol’s face, his neon-crimson eyes blazing with unbridled, dark euphoria in the crimson light of the cave.

To an ordinary warrior or even a tribe, stumbling upon a hive like this was an apocalyptic nightmare.

To Sol, looking down at his insatiable, soul-devouring compass, he had just walked straight into a goldmine.

"Orphos..." Sol drawled softly, as he looked at the hive below. "...looks like we’re gonna have a feast today."

Even with the dark excitement humming through his veins, Sol didn’t just hurl himself off the edge into the middle of a thousand venomous jaws.

He wasn’t stupid. Jumping headfirst into the center of a nest that size was a quick way to get swarmed, pinned, and drowned in corrosive acid before he could even flex his sun core.

Crouching at the lip of the stone shelf, Sol rested one knee against the damp slate, his neon-crimson eyes narrowing at the vast, writhing crimson abyss below as he began calculating the strategy of the slaughter.

The heat rising from the sinkhole brought with it the thick, suffocating stench of rotting carcass, raw venom, and ancient damp slate.

Below him, the sea of chitin, venom, and twitching antennae continued its ceaseless, primeval rhythm.

Thousands of giant centipedes crawled over one another, their dark carapaces glinting like polished jewels under the crimson glow of the ceiling vines.

At the center of the sinkhole, the three massive Mother Centipedes lay coiled around their mounds of glowing eggs, their Peak Layer 3 and Early Layer 4 essence pulsing like deep, rhythmic drumbeats through the bedrock.

Any other strong warrior thirsting for power might have been intoxicated by the sight of so many high-tier targets, or perhaps paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of the numbers. But Sol’s mind was cold, sharp, and calculating.

Jumping straight down into the middle of that mess would be monumentally stupid, Sol thought, his lips curling into a dry, self-deprecating smile. Even with my physical strength and my powers, if a thousand of those forty-foot bastards dog-pile me at once, the sheer volume of corrosive venom alone would dissolve my body, after all no matter how resilient it may be, it’s still human. I’m here to harvest souls for Orphos, not to play the heroic martyr.

A brute-force assault was for muscle-brained fools who wanted to die an early death. Sol was a hunter, and a hunter knew how to bleed a hive one piece at a time.

He needed an attrition strategy... a clean, systematic method to draw the colony out piecemeal, test their biological limits, and dissect their combat mechanics before he turned the entire sinkhole into a slaughterhouse.

Sol quietly backed away from the ledge, retreating thirty paces down the dark, downward-sloping tunnel he had just traversed.

He stopped near the arched stone gateway where he had silently executed the two sentries earlier.

The air here still smelled faintly of bitter hemolymph and damp stone. Sol looked down at his feet, spotted a fist-sized chunk of dense, calcified slate resting in the gravel, and picked it up.

He weighed the stone in his palm, testing its balance, then turned toward the upper passage where he had killed the first three centipedes.

With a flick of his wrist, Sol hurled the rock back up the tunnel.

CLATTER-CLACK-BANG!

The stone bounced violently off the cavern walls, the sharp, echoing clatter bouncing through the hollow stone passage like a falling stalactite.