Chapter 46: Corpses Still Struggling

"Hurry, hurry!"

"The north gate has fallen! The monsters are already inside the town!"

More than a dozen squads of dwarf warriors had received their lord’s orders and were rushing to reinforce the gates in every district.

But before they could even reach their posts, the orders were changed.

They heard the reason from their own captains.

The north gate had fallen!

No matter how pessimistic the warriors were, none of them had expected their town’s north gate to fall so quickly. They had not expected that, before they even reached the battlefield, they would be dragged into deadly chaos and street fighting.

"Roaaar!"

"Ahh, help me!"

One of the squads, on its way to the north gate, ran into something nobody had prepared for.

Heavy thuds began to sound from all around, and Grimstone, already in chaos from the invasion, became even more chaotic.

In a narrow alley beside the street, a short and sturdy dwarf girl, a cute one, was in real danger.

She was wearing a patterned dress, running and screaming. Behind her chased an imp that had completely lost its mind.

White foam dripped from the corners of its mouth, like a rabid dog, and it roared and bit at everything around it while chasing the girl.

"Don’t be afraid! I’ll help you!"

The youngest dwarf in the squad drew his weapon without a second of hesitation and rushed in, taking the steps three at a time.

His captain opened his mouth to stop him, to remind them that their mission was to support the main force, not to waste time on a single enemy. But he shut it again right away.

In the blink of an eye, the young warrior was already locked in a fight with the imp.

The other warriors drew their weapons and moved in to help.

The captain could say nothing more. He knew very well what their mission was, but killing one imp wouldn’t take long. Letting a lovely girl die, when he could spare a few meaningless seconds, was not something he could stomach.

Still, it had to be said that a single imp, after being drenched in Karolith’s poison mist for so long, had grown far stronger.

It feared no pain. Its strength and speed had both increased by a huge margin. An imp that used to die to a single sword stroke now forced the dwarf to fight hard just to kill it.

"Thank you, great warrior."

Once she was safe and had come to her senses, the dwarf girl walked up to the warrior who had saved her and gave him a kiss.

Before he could even say his name, his captain and the rest of the squad pulled him away and set off again.

Sadly, they did not get far.

More and more heavy thuds sounded all around them.

One after another, imps tainted by the Matriarch climbed out of the cages that had held them and attacked every living thing nearby.

The squad finally realized, with growing helplessness, that more and more townsfolk were calling out to them for help.

And nearly every one of them had suffered the same fate.

Imps had dropped from the sky, and after landing, they hunted the townsfolk down like mad things.

’Heavens, so many people are begging us for help. We can’t just ignore them...’ the captain thought, looking at the mess around him.

But his hope was doomed to fail.

Because all of this was exactly what Koda wanted.

Koda himself had orchestrated this chaos.

"Karolith, throw one at the third point I marked."

The moment he gave the order, Karolith, who obeyed her lord completely, took a cage with an imp inside from her chest.

She wound up, and then hurled it high into the air.

The imp would take heavy damage on impact, but imps had never had any rights, or rather, no demon rights. So neither Karolith nor Koda needed to worry about that.

The ones who needed to worry were the people of Grimstone.

And the dozen squads fighting desperately to get to them.

* * *

On the city wall, a dwarf captain watched Karolith eat a third dwarf warrior alive and flew into a rage.

"Damn it! Sabo, you two, drag the Dragon Crossbow out of the storeroom!"

"I’ll kill that monster myself!"

Hearing the captain, Sabo and the others, who had only just made it to the wall, ran into the storeroom and pushed out the Dragon Crossbow, which had gathered dust for years.

The Dragon Crossbow was not made from dragon materials, as its name suggested. It was called that only because the design it came from had once shot down a dragon in the wars of ancient times.

"Captain... huh? Where did the captain go?"

Sabo and the others, drenched in sweat, finally got the crossbow into place and found something strange.

The man who had given them the order, their own captain, was gone.

"He probably went to help somewhere else. Forget him, Sabo, let’s kill that ugly monster first! You load, I’ll aim!"

That was what Sabo’s teammate said.

Sabo hurried to load the bolt into the Dragon Crossbow.

But the moment he finished, he noticed something terrifying.

The teammate who had been standing right beside him a moment ago...

Was gone too?

What on earth was happening?

Why were his teammates vanishing, one after another?

Just as a chill ran down Sabo’s spine, a small shadow appeared beside him.

The shadow began to grow.

Thud!

With a huge crash, two bloody, mangled corpses burst apart next to Sabo.

The mystery was solved.

The moment Sabo looked up, a winged Lesser Demon clamped onto his shoulder and carried him away from the ground he knew.

In the air, Sabo looked down at Grimstone, a town both familiar and strange, and his eyes filled with despair.

From where he hung, he could see that the whole town had no chance left.

Countless demons had cut it into pieces, one district after another, without anyone noticing.

The calamity called demons was raging.

And they were nothing more than corpses that were still struggling.