Chapter 285 Monsters in the village

The western side of the village streets had turned into a slow retreat dressed up as a defense.

After Selene’s Radiant Beacon and the steady pulse of her ward were finally dimmed, the monsters here no longer funneled toward a single glowing point. Now they spread. 

Most of the smallest creatures now started darting between legs and under carts to escape into the dark. Some dirt golems and bipedal lizards now lurched in uneven packs at them, but every few breaths another creature slipped past the ragged line and vanished toward the darker residential lanes behind them.

Monsters were finally escaping from them, toward the inner village.

Elara drove a scavenged shaft through a golem’s chest, twisted, and the golem broke down. Whenever she had to use body-enchantment, the incomplete blue shimmer of her body-enchantment flickered along her arms and then steadied again. She reset her stance and spoke without letting the next monster in front of her escape again.

“Lys. You said some women went to check the gate. Where are they?” Her voice stayed level, but the edge underneath it was clear. “We can’t keep going like this. More of them are getting past us every minute. At this rate, the monsters are going to overpower us and attack the villagers and houses.”

Lys cut a leg out from under a lizard-thing, making it fall, and finished it with a short downward stroke of his sword. Although he wasn’t really out of stamina yet, but his arms were aching a lot from all this constant swinging of his heavy sword. 

‘If even my arms are killing me like this, with all my system skills helping me, then it must be much harder for Mira and others.’

He didn’t answer her out loud.

‘I’d like to know that too. What the hell are those women doing over there? Why the hell haven’t they come back yet?’ 

Those three women had gone there to check on the wall and gate’s condition. But even after all this time, there was not a single response from them. Whether they had succeeded or not was the question Lys had in mind. Whatever it was, they had to know. How else would they know what to do from then on? And with monsters non-stop coming, they sure as hell couldn’t continue like this. 

Almost as if answering his question, a sound cut the constant screeching of monsters around them in half.

It was a deep, concussive boom that rolled through the streets like the sky itself had cracked open all of a sudden. The ground under Lys’s boots jumped. Every head on their stretch of the line snapped toward the western gate. Where the sound had come from.

For a fraction of a second the darkness ahead of them turned bright as late afternoon. A white-orange flare washed over the rooftops and the upper edges of the ruined gate, giving a long, sharp shadow down the lane. 

Then the light collapsed back into ordinary night, leaving only the afterimage burned across every set of eyes.

They had been pushed farther from the breach of the gate than Lys realized. Two crooked houses and a stretch of packed dirt now stood between their fighting line and the gate itself. That is why they still couldn’t see the western gate, even when the whole area lit up. The explosion had come from just beyond that corner.

Mira’s voice cut through the ringing in everyone’s ears.

“What the fuck is that?!”

“Language, Mira,” Elara said automatically.

Whether Mira cursed or not, no one cared. Everyone’s mind was screaming the same thing. “What the hell just happened over there?”

Lys’s grip tightened on CorpseSlayer until the leather wrapping he had done to it creaked. The three women who had gone ahead were not mages as far as he knew. None of them had carried anything that could produce a detonation on that scale. What could possibly make that kind of explosion was really beyond his knowledge. He was completely in the dark here.

‘Did something happen to them?’ As if his mind had gotten used to things like this, he feared the impossible might’ve just happened. 

Mira killed a chicken-monster with a sharp horizontal cut and immediately looked toward the same dark corner. Sweat and monster blood were streaked on her face, making her look like a butcher of some sort. The orange-colored long skirt and the white top she was wearing had already been turned to bloody red. But she couldn’t care any less about her looks right now.

“As far as I saw, those three weren’t mages,” she said, breathing hard as she kept swinging. “So what was that sound for? What the hell is happening over there?”

No one on their line could answer the question from this distance.

Lys made the decision before the last echoes of the boom had fully faded.

“Mom.” He stepped back from the immediate fight, already angling his body toward the gate. “I’m sure with you here they can handle everything on this stretch. I’ll just go check over there quickly.”

“Lys, wait…!”

Elara was about to stop him. She took one step after him, the blue shimmer flaring brighter around her legs…. But a pair of lizard-things broke through the thinning left flank at the same moment a dirt golem lunged for Selene. The priestess’s staff came up too slowly; the last dregs of her mana left her movements heavy. Elara’s head snapped toward the threat. 

Instinct overrode everything else. She pivoted, intercepted the golem with a swing of her arm that sent it flying, and put the first lizard down with a precise thrust through the soft tissue under its jaw. 

By the time she looked back, Lys was already ten paces down the lane and accelerating at the full speed she never knew he could run at.

“Lys! Don’t charge there alone like a fool. Wait for us.” She screamed.

But he didn’t turn, as he was too far from them to listen to her words.