Chapter 108: Entering the Temple

As Daphne ran, she saw Kent bring down another kobold, and the admiration in her eyes grew even stronger.

She did feel that cutting at someone’s feet was perhaps a little... questionable.

But there was hardly time to stop and think about such things now.

Somewhere deep in Daphne’s subconscious, a simple belief had already taken root.

Whatever Kent did was right.

Kent, meanwhile, seemed to come alive.

In the battles that followed, he pushed shamelessness—

No.

Cunning—

to its absolute limit.

Whenever he used Wind Blades, he aimed for the kobolds’ feet.

If one of them happened to be wearing boots, Kent simply switched to Fireballs and set the fur on its head ablaze.

If the kobold had both boots and a helmet, then Kent used Earth Spikes instead.

And the target?

Right between the legs.

Whatever worked, he used.

It was not that Kent was unwilling to kill these kobolds.

The problem was that nearly all of them were Level Four or higher.

Actually killing opponents of that level in a short exchange was simply unrealistic.

So instead of trying to destroy every enemy outright, Kent focused on crippling them one by one.

Better to break one finger completely than merely injure all ten.

And his methods worked.

Every kobold struck by his attacks lost the ability to continue fighting.

By now, Kent and Daphne were less than a hundred meters from the temple’s enormous entrance.

Only a few more breaths.

If they could cover that distance, they would at least be temporarily safe.

But before they could reach the entrance, two obstacles still stood in their way.

Two elderly kobold mages.

They looked so old that they could barely walk.

Behind Kent, meanwhile, the cavern was filled with the miserable howls of wounded kobolds.

“Kent, be careful.”

Daphne spoke nervously.

She had spent enough time with Kent to understand one important truth.

Mages were not like warriors.

The older a powerful mage became, the more dangerous he often was.

Those two kobolds might look as though a strong breeze could knock them over, but anyone capable of holding a leadership position here could not possibly be ordinary.

Kent, however, smiled.

When it came to kobold mages, he knew far more than Daphne realized.

After all, he had several kobold prisoners of his own.

He knew exactly what these creatures feared most.

A mysterious smile appeared on Kent’s face.

He patted Daphne lightly on the shoulder.

“Relax.”

“The moment those two old fellows see what I’m about to do, they’ll be finished.”

“Water Healing.”

Kent raised a hand and cast two Water Healing spells directly at the elderly kobold mages.

Water Healing worked by forming a small cloud of mist above the target.

From that cloud fell droplets resembling fine rain.

Those droplets were composed entirely of pure water-element magical energy.

The moment they touched a living body, they were absorbed almost immediately, leaving behind only a faintly cool sensation.

“Kent, why are you—”

Daphne stared at him in disbelief.

She recognized the spell.

It was definitely Water Healing.

But casting a healing spell on an enemy?

No matter how hard she thought about it, she could not understand what Kent was trying to accomplish.

Yet before she could finish her question, both kobold mages suddenly shuddered.

Their bodies went limp.

Then they collapsed unconscious onto the ground.

Daphne’s eyes widened until they were almost perfectly round.

Kent still found it slightly strange whenever Daphne called him “big brother,” but seeing that his Water Healing trick remained as effective as ever filled him with smug satisfaction.

“You forgot?”

Kent grinned.

“I have kobold prisoners.”

“These fellows aren’t afraid of much, but there’s one thing they absolutely can’t stand.”

“Water.”

“And Healing spells are easy to lock onto because they use the target’s spiritual presence.”

“A Water Ball is much harder to aim properly.”

Kent’s smile widened.

“The kobolds I have locked up back home are so terrified of water that all I have to do is walk toward them carrying a ladle, and they’ll tell me practically anything.”

“Water...”

Daphne repeated blankly.

“They’re afraid of water?”

She stared at the two unconscious kobold mages.

Never in her wildest imagination had she expected powerful kobold spellcasters to possess such a ridiculous weakness.

“Mm. Come on, we need to move.”

Kent could already hear the furious roars of kobolds echoing from the surrounding passages, so he hurriedly urged Daphne onward.

But when he reached the two unconscious kobold mages, his eyes suddenly lit up.

Without the slightest hesitation, Kent crouched down and stripped the robes from both of them in a few swift motions.

He also took a strange metal staff and a book bound in beast hide.

The book clearly was not something the kobolds had made themselves.

A faint magical fluctuation radiated from its surface.

There was no mistaking it.

This was a spellbook.

“That smells awful.”

Daphne caught a whiff of the kobold robes from several steps away and immediately wrinkled her nose, muttering in obvious displeasure.

“I need them for research. Research.”

Kent defended himself at once.

“I’ve never seen this kind of material before. And there’s no way these clothes were made by kobolds.”

He hurriedly bundled up the spoils as he spoke.

“Just look at the style. It doesn’t resemble anything kobolds normally wear. Think about the ones we ran into earlier. What were they wearing? Nothing even remotely like these robes.”

There was no time to examine the items more carefully.

Kent wrapped everything together into a rough bundle, then ran into the temple with Daphne.

“Whoa...”

The moment Kent entered, he realized that the interior was even larger than he had imagined.

Yet despite its size, the place was almost completely empty.

A faint glow radiated from the ceiling high above, illuminating the temple in a pale, hazy light.

The walls around them were covered in murals so exquisite that they could easily have been called works of art.

There were stairways leading both upward and downward.

Kent barely hesitated before choosing the stairs leading up.

There were visible traces of passage along those steps.

And as far as Kent was concerned, a route that someone had already walked before was usually safer than one that appeared untouched.

He and Daphne climbed cautiously.

Soon, they reached a small hall on the second floor.

“Ugh!”

The instant Daphne saw what was inside, she bent over and vomited.

Her face turned deathly pale.

“Damn...”

Kent’s expression changed as well.

He forced down the nausea rising in his throat.

At the center of the chamber stood a massive stone platform.

An altar.

Bound across its surface were dwarves, gnomes, dark elves, and humans.

Every single one of them was dead.

Fresh blood covered the enormous altar.

It ran along carefully carved grooves in the stone before disappearing somewhere beyond sight.

But that was not the worst of it.

The corpses lying on the altar were slowly withering before Kent’s eyes.

Their flesh seemed to dry and collapse as though something were draining away every trace of vitality left within them.

Scattered around the altar were more than a hundred mummified bodies.

Dry.

Shriveled.

Completely devoid of life.

Even Kent, who had endured more than his share of gruesome sights, felt his stomach churn violently.

He was only barely able to stop himself from vomiting beside Daphne.

“An Evil Altar...”

After getting a clear look at the structure before him, Kent could not help murmuring the words under his breath.

His expression immediately became far more serious.

In truth, sacrificial rituals were extremely common on this continent.

Most of them, however, used magical beasts or other offerings instead of living people.

The followers of the Goddess of Harvest, for example, offered newly gathered grain during their ceremonies.

Human sacrifice was not unheard of, but any altar that demanded living people was generally known as an Evil Altar.

And the deities worshiped through such altars were, more often than not, sinister beings.

Kent slowly circled the altar, examining every part of it as carefully as he could.

Unfortunately, his knowledge was far too limited for him to identify what sort of deity this particular altar had been built to serve.

The magical formation carved across its surface, however, immediately caught his attention.

Kent leaned closer and studied it.

Before long, his eyes began to blur.

The array was simply too complicated.

Lines intersected with lines, runes overlapped with symbols, and countless magical pathways intertwined in ways he could barely follow.

Eventually, Kent had no choice but to give up.

Any magical formation important enough to be engraved directly into a sacrificial altar had to be among the highest class of arrays.

Kent could only stare at it reluctantly before shifting his attention elsewhere.

The altar itself covered more than fifty square meters and stood roughly a meter high.

Kent did not understand most of its structure.

But there was one thing he did know.

Every magical formation required a source of power.

A formation this large was not so different from an engine.

Kent might not understand enough to stop the entire engine from turning, but if he could find the equivalent of its fuel line and cut it off, then the whole altar would lose its function.

“Strange...”

Kent muttered as he searched.

“Why can’t I find it?”

His current method was not much different from that of an apprentice repairing some complicated machine.

He could recognize the individual components in front of him, but not how the entire system worked.

So the only thing he could do was examine them one by one and try to figure out which part was important.

It was slow.

It was clumsy.

But at least it was a method.

Even after searching for quite some time, however, Kent failed to discover anything unusual around the altar.

With no better idea, he took Daphne with him and continued deeper into the temple.

After exploring for a while, Kent eventually counted three altars in total.

One was the black altar currently in use.

Another was blood-red and covered in a thick layer of dust.

The third was gray and equally dusty.

Judging by their condition, neither of the latter two had been used in a very long time.

And they shared one obvious feature.

A massive crack ran straight through the center of each altar.

As for the rest of the temple, most of the rooms on the third and fourth floors were empty.

A few doors were locked.

Kent examined them carefully and discovered that they were protected by magical locks.

Without the proper magical keys, he had absolutely no intention of trying to force them open.