volume 2 - Chapter 166 (1/2)
Chapter 166 – Gambler’s Roulette (3)
“I’m not seeing any enemies.”
“The left street has no enemies too.”
“This alley has none of the d.a.m.ned skeletons either!” The yell echoed in the empty street.
Jana’s anxious eyes glinted under the dim light. Her fingers were on her rapier; her doubts in her heart were growing so deeply that she felt she was drowning. Everyone was under the same state as they searched around the streets for the undead.
When the mercenaries did not discover their presence, they regrouped and advanced in the darkness. Their hurried footsteps were not curtailed and shuffled against the soil loudly. Under the unknown presence that threatened to lurk at every corner, they felt a chill entering their soul. Fear gripped their throats as every shadow in the vicinity seemed to move.
They strained their ears to listen for the faintest hint of noise, afraid that the undead would suddenly gush out from a random alley and surround them completely.
They crossed than half of the distance required to go to the west gate and found nothing. The undead supposedly overwhelming the city was not there.
[Did that young n.o.ble judge wrongly?]
The scrawny boy was recently recruited by Jana, and he still had signs of malnourished because of his previous impoverished life. His face held a terrible pallor, mostly because of the terrible atmosphere around him.
“Commander?” The boy said.
“What is it?”
“Has that n.o.ble judged wrongly? Is the undead moving towards the north instead?”
“Impossible,” Jana immediately rejected this suggestion: “Timing is everything in a war, and undead commanders are not fools.”
“But……” The boy wanted to say more, but he was interrupted a shout.
“Commander, we found something.” One of the mercenaries ahead of them shouted: “Come over and take a look!”
Jana exchanged glances with the boy before she nodded and ran over. When she got onto the crossroads, she was stunned—
The entire road had turned into something unrecognizable, and skeletons and human bodies were found everywhere.
It was as if a terrible battle had happened there. When she looked into the distance, there were almost no stone tiles that were intact. The pavements were filled with large holes as though they had been dug out. Boulders were strewn all over the ground, and the nearby buildings were smashed full of holes as though something huge had gone through it.
Some of them looked lopsided as though the ground had sunk; when she looked closer, she discovered wooden splinters leading to smashed wooden supports destroyed with a single punch each. The damage appeared to have been caused by a Silver-ranked fighter.
If it was not for the fact that they were unable to find even a trace of the Element powers disrupting the mana in the vicinity, they would have thought it was a situation where two Golden-ranked fighters fought each other.
“Who are these people?”
When she looked at them, she discovered their clothes were no different from the citizens living outside the city, but it did not explain the destroyed skeletons. She briefly counted the number of skeletons to a body.
It was in the ratio five to one.
[If this ratio is right, that would mean the citizens have a ridiculous amount of fighting prowess. How is it possible for Graudin to live until this day?]
The mercenaries were shaking their heads in disbelief.
“Do you see their weapons?” She suddenly realized something odd.
“We didn’t find any,” said the mercenary who shouted earlier.
“You didn’t find any?” Jana took a deep breath: “Are you trying to tell me these humans used their bare fists to fight with the undead? Are you telling me these citizens are from the Silver Lineage?”
“Commander, I’m not sure if you are joking by that last remark, but the armors’ dents on the skeletons looked like they are smashed by fists—” He said in a small voice.
Jana’s eyes narrowed. The events that happened tonight were a little out of her understanding. Before long, they heard a few sets of horse hooves cantering in the street. Three riders dashed through the swirling fog. The scouts sent out earlier by her had returned.
“What did you discover at the city gates?” She broke off from her thoughts and asked.
“Commander,” the rider greeted her before he answered: “There is a fight breaking out at the city gates between what looks to be undead skeletons and humans.”
[[[What?! Are you trying to say the city’s citizens managed to push back the undead?]]]
The mercenaries who heard this answer glanced at each other and had this thought in their mind.
========== Amandina’s POV ==========
A light in the dark felt like it represented hope. Even though it was nothing more than an illusion in their minds, people were still willing to walk forward towards the light.
A fire torch was flickering in the darkness.
A young woman was kneeling on her knees in front of the light. The red hue emitted from it colored her cheeks and body. In the midst of the unsteady intensity of the brightness when it flickered, the beautiful lines of her body were repeatedly drawn.
Her lips were pursed together with a relaxed expression, and she placed both her hands on her knees without moving a muscle. Her black eyes seemed to have a light dancing in them as the fire burned unsteadily.
The sights before her eyes did not affect her at all as if she cared nothing about them.
A tremendous bang echoed in front of her. Three impossibly huge vines which needed two men to hug it emerged violently from the ground, bringing stone fragments and soil up in the air, before they whipped across the gleaming white skeletons in the darkness.
The ten-odd meters long vines easily crushed and swept across the sea of skeletons, causing a cacophony of cracking noises as the crushed skeletons were knocked high up into the air before it smashed onto the ground.