Chapter 515: Forces Of The Fog [III / Bonus - ]

Chapter 515: Forces Of The Fog [III / Bonus Chapter]

The clear heavy fluid cascaded from the lower fold of leathery gray skin with the violent force of an opened sluice gate.

SPLOOSH!

Another massive globule struck the flat permafrost four paces ahead of Silas’s boots, splashing across the polished stone before flashing away into fine odorless steam.

It left no acid bite in the air, no scorch marks on the dark basalt, and no lingering chemical sting.

Yet with every impact, the volume of the weeping eye’s discharge seemed to warp the subterranean pressure of the chamber, turning the stagnant chill into humid air.

Silas took two measured steps backward with the leather soles of his boots grinding small dry chips of shale against the frozen bedrock.

His fingers remained wrapped loosely around the grip of his sheathed longsword with his shoulders loose and his center of gravity dialed directly over his hips.

’The fuck...’

The creature had not expanded its physical frame.

Its internal mana reservoir remained completely flat... it was stil a pool of high-density Tier 5 energy that neither spiked with hunger nor thinned with fear.

It simply hung suspended within the wall of petrified black ice, staring straight forward with that wide twenty-foot horizontal pupil of dull lifeless stone-gray.

’It’s really just crying...?’ Silas thought, his eyes narrowing as he tracked another carriage-wheel-sized tear rolling down the bulging sclera.

The concept was completely absurd.

He had crossed blades with different kinds of monsters, but an unblinking twenty-foot eyeball leaking cataracts of clean water like an abandoned child was an entirely new category of bizarre.

’Is it feeling sorry for me? Or does it look at me standing in its nest and pity the meat?’

He swallowed hard as his throat dry against the dead air then the physical laws of the area began to unravel.

Where the falling tears struck the permafrost, the resulting steam did not dissipate into the upper shadows.

It thickened and it curdled.

The rising white vapor grew greasy, pooling outward along the black marble floor in churning milky currents that rapidly swallowed Silas’s shins.

FZZZZZZT!

Silas’s instincts flared before his eyes could even register the shift as he didn’t wait to see what the condensation would do.

With a sharp exhale, he rotated his torso and snapped his left palm downward, channeling a thread of wind mana through his fingertips.

"Hurricane Repulsion!"

BOOM!

A concussive ring of compressed atmospheric force detonated outward from his palm, scything across the stone floor in a flat high-velocity shockwave.

The violent draft blew the creeping white vapor back twenty yards, carving a clean circle of bare dark bedrock around his boots.

Yet the expelled fog didn’t scatter.

Instead of shredding under the gale, the white mist violently twisted upon itself, forming tight vortexes that sucked the humidity of the chamber into churning funnels.

SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH!

From the centers of the swirling vortexes, pale rubbery flesh began to knit together out of thin air.

Segmented hides rows of needle-like teeth, and twitching sensory stalks manifested from the fog with sickening rapid-fire speed.

In less than two seconds, eight new Corpse-Leeches dropped onto the stone, their bloated bodies shuddering as they shook the wet rime from their snouts.

Flanking them, three four-legged Mist-Spitters tore their way out of the fog, their armored throats already swelling with high-pressure fluid.

"GRAHHHHHH!"

The newly formed pack didn’t hesitate.

Driven by the blind reflexive impulse of the weeping eye, they lunged forward in a chaotic screeching wave, their claws and mandibles tearing across the stone straight toward Silas’s throat.

Silas drew his longsword with a clean shing.

SLASH-CHOP-CRUNCH!

He stepped inside the reach of the lead leech, his blade cleaving upward through its jaw, through the brain stem, and exiting the top of its skull in a continuous golden arc of light.

Without pausing, he pivoted on his back heel, driving a front kick into the chest of an approaching spitter that caved its ribcage inward and hurled it fifteen yards into the wall.

He backpedaled with his boots skidding across the frost as another five abominations threw themselves at his flanks.

’Fuck.’

A sour irritated taste filled his mouth.

He had spent the last two minutes staring at the eye like a tourist in an art gallery, completely caught off guard by the ridiculousness of a weeping monster.

While he had been standing there wondering about its psychological state, the creature’s passive bodily secretions were literally manufacturing a personal army out of the moisture in the room.

’It’s not sad... It’s an engine. Does that mean it’s useless by itself?’

He raised his left hand, aiming his index finger directly across the cavern toward the center of the giant gray pupil.

"Stop leaking, you ugly bastard," Silas growled.

"[Incineration Ray]!"

ZAP-BOOOOOOM!

A blinding razor-thin beam of pure solar fire detonated from his fingertip, piercing through the dark immediately.

The concentrated heat was enough to melt through a foot of reinforced mythril plate in the blink of an eye.

Yet, five paces before the beam could strike the cornea, the dense wall of fog in front of the socket violently imploded.

SPLAT!

A massive armored monstrosity... a hulking six-legged brute made of condensed petrified fog-ice materialized directly in the path of the beam!

The solar ray struck the beast dead-center in the chest!

KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!

The impact blew a three-foot molten crater through the creature’s torso, incinerating its internal organs and blasting its hindquarters into white ash.

The charred husk tumbled heavily onto the permafrost, completely dead but it had served its sole purpose.

The giant eye behind it remained untouched.

SCHLUCK!

Another colossal wave of tears washed over the leathery lids.

The mist doubled in volume as the cavern floor disappeared entirely under an undulating sea of churning white foam, and from the deep shadows, dozens of new clicking sounds as well as growls and wet shrieks began to multiply with terrifying exponential speed.

’I need to kill it right now,’ Silas thought, his blue eyes hardening into murderous focus. ’If I let it keep crying, it’s going to fill this entire vault until I’m wading through three hundred Tier 3s and Tier 4s with no room to swing...’

He had expected a boss battle.

A physical clash against a terrifying titan where they traded blows until the stone collapsed.

"Haah... Fuck me..."

He hadn’t expected an immovable weeping tumor that acted as an automated summoning gate.

Silas drew in a deep burning draught of the freezing air.

The Mythic Gold Core within his sternum spun into rapid violent rotation, flooding his muscular pathways, tendons, and eyes with dense golden mana.

VUUUM!

On his left shoulder, the obsidian bird looked up toward the ceiling stalactites with its wings twitching as it prepared to abandon ship and fly to safety.

"SQUAWK—"

The avian’s beak snapped shut with a dry choking gasp.

Circling high in the vault, weaving through the jagged stalactites, were four winged abominations... leathery, bat-like horrors with razor-sharp ice beaks that were actively patrolling the upper airspace.

The bird swallowed an audible nervous lump, pulling its crested head down between its wings and digging its talons hard into Silas’s vambrace, realizing there was nowhere to run.

"Told you to have some balls," Silas muttered, shifting his grip on the golden longsword. "Hold on tight."

BOOM!

Silas detonated forward.

He channeled a continuous stream of compressed wind mana beneath the soles of his boots as a [Cyclone Slipstream] that negated the friction of the permafrost and propelled him across the stone at blinding velocity.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The air shrieked behind him as he carved a vacuum corridor straight through the sea of fog.

Three Bone-Scuttlers lunged from his left flank with their jaws wide—

SHING-SHING-SHING!

Silas didn’t even turn his shoulders.

The golden blade blurred in three clean backhanded sweeps, severing their heads before their feet could touch the ground.

’Faster... I have to cross thirty paces before it can spawn another wall.’

WHOOSH!

He reached twenty paces.

He locked his gaze onto the giant weeping pupil, cocking his sword arm back for a devastating rotational strike—

FWUMP!

The giant eye didn’t fire a beam and it didn’t summon an armor plate either. The twenty-foot organ simply... tilted?

With an agile, horrifying elasticity that defied its mass, the leathery gray skin of the socket puckered, and the entire eye shifted four yards to the right along the curved ice wall with the frictionless speed of an oiled piston!

Silas’s strike whistled through empty air!

KRA-CRACK!

The phantom heavy-water edge of his longsword cleaved three feet deep into the bare black ice where the eye had rested half a second prior, sending massive shards of petrified rime exploding outward into the dark!

’It moved?!’ Silas’s eyes widened.

Before he could wrench the blade free, the eye opened wide from its new position on the right wall.

SPLOOSH!

A massive geyser of tears erupted from the socket, flooding across the floor and instantly solidifying into four armored Spine-Hounds that lunged at his exposed back.

Silas didn’t look back.

He released the hilt with his right hand, spun on his heel, and slammed his open palms down into the permafrost.

"Tectonic Rupture!"

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOM!

High-tier earth mana flooded the bedrock beneath his gloves!

The solid granite floor violently buckled and a twenty-foot wave of jagged stone spikes tore upward from the ground in an explosive, circular eruption, impaling all four lunging hounds mid-air and shattering their ribcages into fine bloody gravel.

Silas tore his longsword from the ice, vaulting atop one of the freshly raised stone spires.

"You think you’re fast, you overgrown marble?!" Silas yelled, his voice echoing off the ceiling vault.

He leaped from the spire, wind mana detonating behind his shoulder blades to rocket him toward the eye’s new coordinates.

The eye blinked once.

SCHLUCK!

It shifted again as it slid vertically up the ice wall, retreating twenty feet into the shadows near the ceiling arch with the terrifying effortless mobility of an insect skittering across a window.

Silas’s second thrust struck empty stone.

BOOM!

"Third time," Silas snarled, twisting his body mid-air.

He didn’t fall.

He kicked off the vertical ice face with his boots leaving two cracked indentations in the frost, and drove himself straight upward toward the ceiling shadow where the eye had relocated.

VUUUM!

Golden lightning began to crackle along his forearm... Dangerous arcs of electric mana coiling from his Gold Core straight into the steel of his longsword!

"Fulgur Annihilation!"

CRACK-BOOOOOOOOM!

A blinding bolt of golden thunder detonated from the blade, screaming across the ten-foot gap straight for the pupil.

SWISH.

The eye dropped.

The leathery folds detached from the ceiling anchor, letting the twenty-foot mass freefall into the dense fog below like a dropped boulder, dodging the lightning strike by less than three inches.

The golden thunderbolt slammed into the ceiling, obliterating a five-yard section of solid basalt into raining gravel and dust.

Silas landed heavily on the permafrost below with his knees flexing to absorb the impact.

He was breathing hard, not from mana exhaustion, but from frustration.

"Three times," Silas growled, wiping a fleck of rime from his cheek with the back of his glove. "A twenty-foot eyeball with zero legs is dodging me like an oiled eel?"

Was he that slow...?

Across the chamber, forty paces away, the eye surfaced from the sea of white mist.

It didn’t look damaged and it didn’t look tired either.

The gray horizontal pupil stared at him with that same dull empty stillness.

Then, the leathery lids peeled back further than they ever had before.

GURRRRR-GL-GL.

A deep sickening sound rose from the base of the optic socket... This time it was not the clean splash of weeping tears, but a churning of something solid being forced through an opening.

The thick blackened veins across the sclera flared with a violent purplish-black mana.

SQUELCH.

From the lower rim of the eye, beneath the leathery skin, the monster didn’t spit a leech.

...It vomited a man.

’Huh?’

Silas’s boots locked to the stone as his eyes narrowed to pinpoint slits and the figure landed on the frost with a silent and perfectly balanced crouch.

It was roughly six feet tall, humanoid in silhouette, but composed entirely of condensed petrified fog and midnight-blue chitin.

It wore no armor, yet its skin was layered in overlapping razor-thin scales that absorbed the light like a void.

Its face was a smooth featureless mask of polished obsidian, lacking any sort of eyes, nose, or mouth.

And in its right hand... It held a long single-edged blade forged of translucent razor-sharp black ice.

VUUUM!

[Target Analyzed: Phantom Blade-Construct (Tier 4)]

"A swordsman..." Silas murmured softly.

The construct took one slow, deliberate step forward.

The weight distribution in its hips, the angle of its lead knee, the micro-tension in its forearms, and the low forty-five-degree tilt of its black ice blade were so utterly immaculate that Silas’s breath caught in his throat.

’Eh...? It’s far better than me...’

This was not a mindless beast swinging claws. In terms of pure, mechanical sword technique... the construct was better than Silas.

Silas knew his strengths.

He was a Lord. He commanded massive elemental firepower, a Mythic Gold Core, and adaptability too.

But the Entity before him was a pure swordsman.

FZZZT!

The construct vanished.

There was no sound of boots striking stone and no displaced air.

SHING!

A razor-thin line of black light cleaved diagonally through the space where Silas’s neck had been.