Chapter 799: Escaping The Black Hole [Bonus - ]

Chapter 799: Escaping The Black Hole [Bonus Chapter]

The damp stone ledges cracked and tore free from the bedrock in huge ten-ton slabs that went flying through the air like loose pebbles.

Dozens of monsters shrieked in hopeless terror as the force caught their legs.

Crawlers, brutes and swollen spitters were ripped out of the mud and sent spinning helplessly through the air, dragged inward by the dozens toward the swirling dark vortex in the middle.

SNAP! KRACK! KRRRSH!

A bramble brute dug all four of its wooden claws into the stone and tried to hold on.

The rock it was gripping tore loose with it, and both of them went tumbling end over end into the dark.

A swollen spore pod popped like a soap bubble the moment it got close, and its poison spray was sucked straight down into the middle with everything else.

Three crawlers tried to run up the side of the bowl at the same time and got dragged backward, scrabbling at the stone with all six legs, leaving long white scratch marks behind them until they disappeared.

SKRRRRRK! FWOOMP!

The moment they crossed into it, they were crushed into powder.

The whole middle of the hollow turned into a dead zone of screaming wind, shattered stone and crushing violet force.

"FALL BACK!" Lupina barked from the eastern ledge, her wolf ears pinned flat as she scrambled backward and dug her claws into a high rock to keep from getting sucked in. "RUN! SHE’S EATING THE HOLE!"

"Everyone up to the ridge!" Ther’Abella’s voice cracked with panic as she scrambled up a loose slope on all fours, her muddy boots slipping. "Move your legs, you idiots! Get out of the hollow!"

The five new Shieldmaidens turned and ran for their lives, their armor clanking frantically as they scrambled up the western slope and threw themselves over the rocks at the top just as the mud behind their heels was ripped away into the void.

"I’m too young to get eaten by a hole!" one of them wailed.

Standing on a lower stone shelf, Aki watched the whole thing with her jaw hanging open and her blue hair whipping across her face in the violent pull.

’What kind of strength is that...?’ Aki thought, her whole body shivering with awe as she watched entire boulders get crushed into dust like stale biscuits. ’She’s so quiet... and she just made a disaster with her bare hands?! How does Silas have people like this?!’

The wind howled louder, and the ledge under Aki’s boots let out a sharp sickening groan.

KRRRACK!

The shelf gave way.

Aki gasped as her footing vanished and her boots slid backward down the crumbling slope.

The vortex caught her and dragged her toward the screaming middle of the hollow at a terrifying speed.

"Aki!" Elowynn shouted from the far ridge, reaching out a hand that couldn’t possibly reach.

Before the pull could take her, a wall of pure immovable strength cut through the howling wind.

Morrighan moved like a crimson thunderbolt.

Her heavy mythril boots slammed down onto the crumbling ledge and punched straight through the mud into the solid bedrock underneath.

She stood rock solid without sliding an inch.

THOOM!

With easy unstoppable strength, she reached out with both armored arms, scooped Aki clean out of the air and pulled her in tight against her chest.

FWUMP!

Aki blinked and found herself cradled securely against the demon’s broad unyielding armor, wrapped in the faint smell of sulfur and polished steel.

A sudden bright flush bloomed across her cheeks. She felt remarkably small and fragile in the tall demon’s arms.

"I... ah..." Aki stammered softly, looking up into Morrighan’s carved-stone face. "Thank you, Morrighan... I lost my footing..."

Morrighan’s expression didn’t change at all.

Her molten gold eyes stayed fixed on the churning vortex below, but behind her armored legs, her heavy spade-tipped tail gave one slow contented flick against the rock.

"It is no trouble, Lady Aki," Morrighan said, her voice flat and steady despite the hurricane roaring around them. "Hold on tight."

In the cold calculating depths of her mind, though, a very different conversation was happening.

’I didn’t get the most kills,’ Morrighan thought, her eyes narrowing as the wind started to peak. ’Rowenna cheated with that giant hole, and the wolf stole three of my clusters in the brush... But Lord Silas watches everything and he cares about this woman. Catching his precious little blue-haired woman out of the jaws of that thing has to be worth more points than fifty overgrown splinters... Heh. I’m a genius.’

Right as she finished patting herself on the back, a high whistling sound tore through the air from her right.

FWEEEEEE!

Morrighan’s horns twitched as she tilted her head two inches to the left without even looking.

WHOOSH!

The severed twitching top half of a thorn-crawler, still dripping black peat and broken roots, flew past her ear, missing her cheek by a hair before it tumbled harmlessly into the vortex below.

Morrighan’s molten gold eyes snapped toward where it had come from.

Standing twenty paces away on a narrow outcrop, safe from the pull, was Ther’Abella.

The silver-haired elf stood with her boots planted wide, her tunic shredded and her hair matted with swamp muck, and her arm was still raised from the follow-through of a furious spiteful throw.

She was glaring straight at Morrighan with her lower lip pushed out in a big childish pout that threw seven hundred years of dignity right out the window.

Morrighan’s left eyebrow twitched.

’You...!’ Morrighan thought, a vein pulsing at the base of her horn as her tail slapped hard against the rock. ’You miserable mud-eating twig... The next time you go flying through the air, I won’t be throwing you to the side. I’ll be throwing you into the ground.’

Ther’Abella stuck her tongue out at her and Morrighan’s tail slapped the rock again harder.

THWACK!

Down below, the pull hit its peak.

The whole sinkhole groaned as the bedrock gave out underneath it and caved in on itself.

It swallowed the last of the spore pods, the twisted ferns and every leftover monster carcass in the hollow.

RRRRRRUMMMMBLE!

Silas moved instantly.

He didn’t need a tab to know what happened when a gravity point like that ran out... Everything it had crushed together was about to come back out.

He stepped between Solenne and Kaelia.

His left arm wrapped around Kaelia’s waist and pulled the shrieking chef in against his side, while his right arm swept around Solenne and gathered the fox and all nine of her tails into a tight protective hold.

"Hang on, girls," Silas laughed.

POP!

He blinked through space and carried all three of them fifty paces back along the ridge, well clear of the rim.

The instant his boots touched the dry moss behind the tree line, the singularity hit zero then it rebounded.

KA-BOOOOOOOOOM!

A tremendous blast of released force and shattered purple mana burst outward from the middle of the hollow.

The shockwave spread out flat like a dome of compressed air and swept across the whole sunken hollow in a single heartbeat.

The jagged crags left standing were knocked flat, the rocky ledges were sheared smooth as glass, and the humid green mist was blown straight up into the sky in a billowing cloud of white steam.

...When the blinding light faded and the roar settled into a gentle whistling breeze, the hollow was gone.

In its place was a huge perfectly round bowl of smooth flattened stone, swept completely clean of every root, vine, pod and monster that had been there ten minutes ago.

There was not a single blade of grass left.

Morrighan vaulted up the ridge and landed lightly on the dry turf five paces from Silas, then set Aki gently down on her feet.

Aki took a deep shaky breath, her azure eyes wide and round as she stared down into the terrifyingly smooth crater where an entire monster nest had been.

"W-what in the world was that?!" Aki breathed, her voice trembling with dazed disbelief. "I-is everyone alive?! Did anyone get caught in that?!"

One by one, the girls gathered along the tree line.

Lupina came jogging up, shaking gravel out of her wolf ears, with Elowynn walking briskly beside her and wiping a streak of soot off her neck.

Ther’Abella trudged up at the back, glaring at the dirt, and the five new Shieldmaidens lined up in a neat and slightly shaken row behind her, their shields dented but whole.

...Every single one of them had made it out without a scratch.

From the edge of the flattened ridge, a quiet delicate laugh drifted through the settling dust.

"Ahaha..."

Rowenna teleported down out of the sky and landed beside Silas with a soft whisper of a tap.

FWIP!

She let out a long tired sigh, quickly smoothed down the front of her coat, tucked a stray lock of violet-black hair behind her ear and tilted her head up toward Silas.

Her pale cheeks flushed a soft lovely pink, and she gave him an impossibly sweet innocent smile, like she’d just finished watering a bed of violets instead of dropping a black hole on fifty living things.

"I did my best, Lord Silas," Rowenna said softly, her blue eyes shining with quiet hopeful triumph. "I-I think that got forty-two of them all at once. So that means... I have the most kills now."

"FORTY-TWO?!" Lupina howled, her ears shooting straight up. "That’s not fair... You just dropped a hole on them! That’s not even fighting!"

Behind her, Morrighan didn’t say a word.

Her face didn’t move at all but her tail, which had been wagging the whole way up the ridge, went completely still and drooped to the ground.

Silas looked down at her, and his dark blue eyes narrowed a little as the gold ring in them pulsed with amused deadpan disapproval.

He crossed his arms over his chest.

"Rowenna," Silas said in the stern voice of a man scolding a naughty kitten. "Do you remember what I told all of you before we jumped into that hole? I said take it easy... I said don’t overdo it... This isn’t like our fights back home, Rowenna. We came here to help Aki, not to delete her map."

Rowenna’s innocent smile crumbled instantly.

Her lips pushed out into an adorable tragic pout, her eyes dropped to the grass, and her shoulders slumped.

"I-I only wanted..." Rowenna mumbled, digging the toe of her boot into the moss and taking her scolding like a student caught doodling in her textbook. "I didn’t even add the Gravity Well... I held back..."

"You flattened half a ridge, you little terror," Silas chuckled, reaching out to ruffle her bangs until she let out a tiny embarrassed squeak. "I’ve got to admit, though, that was beautiful."

Ten paces back along the tree line, leaning against the trunk of a tree, Elowynn Embershade watched the whole exchange with her mouth hanging open.

She’d heard every word.

’Not like their fights back home...?’ Elowynn thought, her eyes locked on the huge perfectly smooth crater in the ground. ’That was... that was over a hundred monsters! There were brutes that could crush a wagon, crawlers with armor like iron, and a boss as big as a longship... and he calls that taking it easy?!’

A cold heavy shiver ran down her spine, and she swallowed a thick dry lump in her throat.

GULP!

Her heart hammered with a huge overwhelming respect for the girls of Blessed Land.

’If that’s them holding back...’ Elowynn thought, her eyes moving from Morrighan’s horns to Lupina’s bloody claws to Rowenna’s quiet little notebook. ’Then what kind of monsters are they fighting over there? What’s coming at their walls every single day that makes a whole nest of these things look like child’s play?! Blessed Land must be fighting monsters every day...’

Before she could spiral any further, Aki stepped forward and broke the heavy silence.

"Silas," Aki said, her voice bright and warm as she looked back at Rowenna. "Please don’t scold her! I’m not angry at all! Seeing runes like that was amazing for all of us! We cleared this whole nest in less than twenty minutes!"

"Yeah!" Lupina barked with a cheerful laugh, throwing a playful punch at Rowenna’s shoulder that the shy runemaster barely dodged. "She blew up the whole sandbox, but a win’s a win!"

"The recruits held the line, and nobody got hurt," Ther’Abella muttered grudgingly from behind a mud-caked glove. "Tactically... it was a success."

Aki beamed, her pride surging back into her chest.

She turned, raised her right hand and swiped two slender fingers through the warm air.

PING!

A shimmering golden interface appeared in front of her eyes, hovering against the canopy.

The Lord Leaderboard.

Aki’s azure eyes went straight down the list to her territory’s row and scanned the freshly updated numbers.

Her breath caught in her throat, her lips parted, and her hand froze in midair as her eyes went wide.

Aki stared at the glowing golden text, and after three long breathless seconds, she let out a slow shaky breath that sounded like all the air had been squeezed out of her lungs.

"Whoo..."