Chapter 67: Crawlers

The cavern throat narrowed, then opened into a wider chamber where the blue veins in the stone ran thinner and the floor turned soft with loose ground.

Ethan slowed, and the formation followed. He then and the Blood Raven higher until he could see a large part of the chamber.

Bef stayed at his left. The other two Beowolves held the front row in silence. Here, the air smelled less like beasts and more like wet soil and sand.

Something shifted as movement skittered through the dirt.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. The sound drew closer but he didn’t see anything in sight.

His eyes landed onto the ground and he saw something like furrows moving towards him.

He took one step back, and the ground erupted.

From it, six creatures burst free. They had slender bodies covered in decaying flesh and hands growing out of their sides.

Thier mandibles snapped once, and rushed towards him who scattered the formation as he rolled aside.

When he came up to a crouch, he looked at the beasts. "What are those?"

As if answering him, the system bloomed in his view.

```

[Ding!]

[You have encountered: Crawler]

[Rank: D]

[Description: Crawlers are subterranean beast. They posses a soft bodied multi-segmented frame resembling a centipede without an exoskeleton. It burrows at high speed and strikes from below and possess mandibles with enough force to crush stone.]

```

Ethan read through the info and before he could make a move, they scattered, moving towards him with too many stubby limbs working in sick rhyth.

Ethan dodged one, and was able to take a proper look at them... The system was right. No skeleton in sight. It just had muscle, mucus and speed.

’Okay, okay... I can make this work...’

However, ine punched up under a Beowolf and wrapped its around its foreleg before Ethan could call out a a command.

"Break—!"

Too slow.

The Crawler wrenched sideways and the Beowolf went down hard, tumbled, and came to a stop against the stone wall.

A second Crawler shot from a different hole, slammed the other wolf in the ribs, and vanished into a fresh tunnel before Bef could close in on it.

"Raven—!"

The Blood Raven dove but its talons ending up raking empty dirt.

He tried another string of commands, but the crawlers were just too fast. Before a wolf reacted, the Crawler he wanted to attack would burrow back into the earth and another one would be sent flying...

Rank D bodies against Rank E reactions. Frankly, this was a losing game.

Ethan clicked his tongue. "This isn’t working."

He thought for a moment. What exactly can he do against monsters that hit and run?

The Beowolves struggled against the Crawlers as he thought long and hard about what to do.

In the midst of it, he unconsciously caught the flapping of the Raven above him, and when he did, a plan slowly began to form in his mind.

These beasts were smart, so the reasonable thing to do would be to try and outsmart them...

"I got it." Her faced the two undead. "Fall back."

The two Beowolves moved towards him and dissolved into his shadow. That left the raven and Bef.

"No more reckless chrageay," he said under his breath, forcing the plan to fully form in his mind. "Raven, full height. I want you to track where they’re going the moment the go back into the ground. Bef, you attack where I ask you to."

A Crawler burst from the floor in front of Bef and the beast was able to veer sideways.

When the beast furrowed back into the ground, he commanded the Raven to go up and activated Death Link.

The world split, and he was now able to see the chamber from the raven’s height. It tracked the ground’s movement, watching multiple furrows move around erratically.

He tried to focus on all of them and when one suddenly began to move towards Bef’s side, Ethan saw it.

"There."

He did not point with his hand. He slammed the mark through the command link as a single fixed point.

Bef launched on that point at once, jaws driving into the exact patch of grit as the Crawler surfaced.

Flesh tore, and the Rank D monster came apart under Rank E teeth because it had been forced into the open on someone else’s timing.

The first clean kill landed wet and heavy. Bef’s teeth sank into the beast, and it made a sick *pop* sound as mucus sprayed from its head and its behind.

Ethan forced himself to look away, and shifted his focus to the raven, and from there, the battle took a turn into their favor.

Another furrow veered left, and Ethan marked it for Bef.

The wolf rushed forward and slammed it with its paw so hard that hit the stone wall with an impact that killed it.

Less messy... that would do.

The Raven’s talons pinned a third against stone when it tried to reverse burrow, and Bef finished it. Slowly their numbers decreased... The remaining Crawlers still had speed but they no longer had the element of surprise.

The battle dragged on. The remaining Crawlers must have noticed the change and started countering.

They would move, and slow down, and when they thought Ethan would had lost their track, they would spring up again and attack.

However, Ethan was not as stupid as they had hoped...

He did not fight them as a swarm. He fought them as a sequence: Raven sense, mark, then Bef would strike.

Sometimes, the Raven would interrupt if the target tried to dive early, and the fourth died in the middle of a furrowed opening.

The fifth almost took Bef’s hind leg and paid for it when the Raven hammered its exposed mid section with a force that sprayed mucus.

The sixth and seventh went quieter, already half way through retreat, which only made the marks cleaner. The eighth broke the wrong direction into open floor and Bef ran it down without needing an order.

Silence returned, only broken by the sound of body fluid dripping in dirt

The eight Rank D corpses that had tormented him for the past several minutes had finally gone still.

Ethan stood bent over, his hands on his knees for a quick breath. The constant command switched was making him dizzy. Though he noticed that he lasted longer this time without needing to catch a breather, the strain still lingered.

He looked around. Two out of them seemed to be in optimal condition: the ones the Raven had pinned and Bef had killed with a single bite instead of a prolonged mauling and the one Bef slammed into the wall.

He walked towards one of them, hesitated, and placed a palm on it as he pushed Death Energy into the corpse.

```

[Raise Undead (Basic) activated]

[Corpse Quality: Excellent]

[Energy Cost: 22]

[Result: Rank D Undead (Crawler)]

```

The segmented length convulsed, then rose in a stiff coil. Its pale flesh taking the green color between its segments and Ethan nodded as he went the second frame.

```

[Raise Undead (Basic) activated]

[Corpse Quality: Excellent]

[Energy Cost: 22]

[Result: Rank D Undead (Crawler)]

```

The two undead Crawlers settled into the link beside Bef and the Raven and he hummed as a new set of moves had been added to his list: Burrow, ambush, element of surprise.

He opened the system and checked his reserves purely out of habit

```

[Death Energy: 595/700]

```

About a hundred and five Death Energy points had been spent so far— recalls, Link bursts, and both raises.

It started ugly at the start, but turned out to yield good results not long after. For a Rank E Necromancer locked in a dungeon until he pulled up a Devil class raise, it was the first version of "doing well" that was not a joke.

Ethan rotated his shoulders, sent the Crawlers into a low furrow under the ground, and kept Bef at his side. The Raven climbed high again, scouting the chamber overheard.

He broke into a short run. He just needed to kill and raise and Devil class monster. The sooner he found it, the better.