Chapter 61

One step.

The moment Hector’s combat boots sank into the black mud, the swamp seemed to exhale a foul, bubbling sound as if the whole place were a single enormous beast. The mud wrapping his ankles was cold as a corpse, and it gave the illusion that something slimy was sliding across his skin.

“Everyone, hold formation! Do not break ranks!”

Hector’s heavy voice echoed through the mist. The Shadow Blade and the Ghosts following him silently tightened their grips on swords and daggers. Their faces showed a primitive fear of the hell before them, mixed with mutual distrust.

The swamp seemed to try to swallow them, revealing darker depths with every step. The twisted trees that blotted out the sky looked like the ribs of a dead giant, and the dense fog threading between them was no mere steam. It was poison itself, rotting flesh and bone.

“Cough! Cough…! Damn, I can’t breathe…”

One of the Valerian Empire’s Ghosts coughed and sank to his knees. His face went pale and black spots began to spread across his skin.

“The toxin is stronger than I thought.”

Cypher clicked his tongue and motioned, and the other Ghosts quickly shoved a black pill into the fallen man’s mouth. They used their trained dark qi to purge the toxin, but it had its limits.

By contrast, Hector’s Shadow Blade were oddly untroubled. They advanced as if inhaling the swamp’s poison meant nothing. Cypher noticed that the seemingly ordinary scarves around their necks gave off a faint magical glow and were purifying the air.

‘Is that also the power of that “artifact”? Not just weapons, but armor too…’

Cypher’s suspicion hardened into conviction.

Then it happened. The black pool they were standing on suddenly began to convulse.

“Fall back!”

As Hector roared, something gigantic surged up from the center of the pool. It resembled a great leech formed of dozens of human limbs tangled together. Faces of victims who had died in the swamp were embedded across its body, screaming in agony, and at its center gaped a huge, ravenous maw.

“Kraaaaa!”

The ‘Swamp Devourer.’

With a horrific cry, it shot dozens of tentacles from its body and snatched the nearest Ghost.

“Gah!”

The scream was brief. The tentacle-wrapped Ghost was dragged into the Devourer’s maw without time to resist, bones crushing with a sickening crunch as he was swallowed whole.

“Spread out! Avoid its jaws and find a weak point!”

Cypher ordered coldly. True to their merciless assassin nature, his men did not waver at their comrade’s death and scattered in formation to strike at the Devourer’s flanks and rear. Their daggers struck like snakes but the creature’s thick hide repelled even attacks laced with dark energy.

“Damn, its hide is too tough!”

At that moment, Hector moved.

“Shadow Blade! Charge the front! Fix its attention on us!”

Hector and his men didn’t fall back using the Valerian spies as shield; instead they lunged straight toward the most dangerous front. Blue auras swirled like a storm around the hardened steel blades forged by dwarves.

“Die, you filthy monster!”

Hector’s blade came down on the Devourer’s head. Crunch! Part of its head was torn away, yet it rampaged even more savagely as if feeling no pain.

In that instant, Hector’s true purpose was revealed. His strike wasn’t meant to kill the beast; it was bait for his comrades. While he drew the creature’s attention, other Shadow Blade members climbed the beast and precisely stabbed the eyes of the victims embedded across its body.

“Kraaaaaargh!”

For the first time, a cry of genuine pain erupted from the Devourer. Its weak points were not its hard shell but the souls of the victims parasitically bound to its body.

“Now!”

Seizing the chance, Cypher’s Ghosts moved again. Their dark energy lashed like whips, constricting the writhing Devourer and binding its movements.

Finally, Hector focused all his aura into the tip of his blade.

“This ends now!”

His sword plunged into the inner flesh of the Devourer’s maw and detonated aura from within.

Kraaaang!

The Swamp Devourer ballooned like a huge bladder, then burst, spraying rotten flesh and black blood in all directions.

Amid the stench and silence, the two surviving groups looked at one another. Distrust still lingered in their eyes, but there was also a strange bond budding, the kind only those who had fought back-to-back could share.

From the shattered remains of the beast, Hector found something familiar: black spores. They were the marks of the Ashen Worm cult he had seen in the Karnak mines of the Western Continent.

Cypher saw the spores too, but his conclusion was different.

‘That terrible vitality and rot… this must be a fragment of power emanating from the Dragon’s Heart. Those spores are surely a curse guarding the treasure.’

Hector did not bother to correct his misunderstanding.

“Let’s go. Deeper.”

Hector said, his gaze fixed on the deepest darkness of the swamp, where the Weeping Tree, said to wail with the voices of the dead, might stand.