Volume 3 Chapter 97 The Swamp Adventure II
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
Even the city’s sewers reek like this──
As Kian silently sprinted through the thick, ghostly-white fog and the darkness of night, a wave of nostalgia washed over him.
Coming over from across the sea to East End, the very first quest he got was cleaning out the sewers.
The foul stench was so overwhelming, he’d never smelled anything like it──his nose was burning.
He gagged and spat out the contents of his stomach, tears blurring his eyes, exhausted beyond words.
Finally finished, he barely managed to stumble out, only to be attacked by a ghoul.
He threw down his pack and bolted, the monster’s claws tearing at his heels.
The other Adventurers in East End just laughed at him, nothing but a rookie’s stumble.
And yet, Kian had changed so much since those clueless days.
Now he moved with calm detachment, unmoved by the mud splattering from his ‘Silver Ice’.
His sharp eyes tracked the white shadow ahead──steady, unwavering.
Deep in the swamp, past the sparse, withered trees, a tiny girl’s white figure fluttered softly in the air.
She wasn’t jumping or bouncing on her own.
Her body was paper-thin, trembling weakly in the humid swamp breeze.
Her limbs hung limp, and her head──so perfectly straight──made it look like a wire was threaded through her neck.
It was surreal──her unnatural pose, floating just within Kian’s line of sight, weightless as a feather.
Lure──
Or maybe a faint glow meant to attract tiny fish from the deep.
No matter how sharp Kian’s senses were, he couldn’t hear her breathing or heartbeat.
That girl──the one he watched──was just the shell, drained of all life.
Whatever once made her, long gone now.
If he chased her, he’d only walk straight into an ambush──some predator waiting in the shadows.
But that’s exactly what he wanted.
The greater the danger, the better.
Overcoming threats──that’s how he would grow stronger again.
”────”
Suddenly, a slicing wind howled from his right.
Kian crouched instinctively.
Something thin whipped past overhead, whipping around a nearby dead tree trunk──abandoned there, forgotten.
He turned his head slowly, scanning behind him.
(Vines…? Thorns?)
After a brief hesitation, he refocused ahead.
And the girl’s shadow──her ghostly presence──had vanished completely.
”────!?”
In her place…
Before Kian’s eyes, a humanoid monster covered entirely in thorns materialized out of nowhere.
It stood on 2 legs like a human, complete with a head and arms.
It had 2 eyes on its head.
Its mouth was dark, breathing roughly.
It must have been just under 2 meters tall.
It gave off a slender impression.
From a distance, one might even mistake its silhouette for a human’s.
Its entire body was wrapped in thorn vines, like bandages, disguising its true appearance.
Kian’s enhanced vision saw the dark green vines covering the monster’s face, pulsating like blood vessels, throbbing with life.
”Who are you?”
Kian brandished the Windsong Blade with a flourish and demanded an answer.
But the only response was from a distant monster.
Swoosh, from beyond the milky mist, the ring of Sword Cain echoed.
Meanwhile, the thorn-covered creature before him remained silent and motionless.
”Are you the monster attacking the nearby villagers?”
Humanoid.
And with the intelligence to lure new prey using a girl as bait──it pieced the puzzle together.
Yet, predictably, no reply came from the thorn monster.
”────!”
Suddenly, the ground erupted beneath him, and he leaped back.
Upon landing, a girl’s face was right in front of him.
Chestnut hair.
Cat ears.
A pale, bloodless white face.
The face of a cat Beastmen girl.
”Ah”
Their eyes met.
But her eyes were hollow.
Jet black and perfectly round.
Her mouth was pulled up, as if smiling.
For a moment, time seemed to stop.
After a beat ── from the girl’s eye sockets, her mouth, and the sleeves of her soiled work clothes, countless dark green vines overflowed.
What was once a lovely girl’s body now oozed vines like sludge, grotesque and profane.
Even Kian couldn’t help but twist his features in disgust.
”Ugh”
He retched and dodged, kicking the girl in the chest.
The sensation that returned from the sole of his boot was neither soft flesh nor brittle bone, but the firm, flexible feel of countless tentacles.
Kian dodged, slashed, and trampled the thorns jutting from the earth with precise movements, putting even more distance between himself and the danger.
”I see…”
He looked up at the quivering girl, nothing but skin.
Her lower half was gone, replaced by tentacles stretching from below.
The tentacles connected to the ground, where the vines,
”You’re connected to this, aren’t you?”
Kian locked eyes with the misshapen monster across from the girl, its arms plunged into the earth.
’Kian, watch out for those thorns,’
”I know, just shut up for a minute.”
(Finish it in one strike.)
’No, wait──!’
”Cry, Windsong Blade──!”
Kian sliced through the thorns and leaped into the air, his silver magic sword gleaming.
With a gust of wind, he swept and tore, freezing everything in his path.
It was a high-powered magic attack that could take down a colossal monster in a single strike.
The magic sword in Kian’s hand let out a scream that echoed across the entire swamp.
”Disappear!”
A flash of light swirled around him.
An immense light, surpassing the one that had buried the horde of Shield Cains, burst from the magic sword.
A sharp semicircle carved into the ground with Kian, mid-leap, at its center.
The silver magic attack should have cleared the thorns covering the girl’s skin, reducing the thorn monster on the other side to dust──
”Ack!”
But, unbelievably, after the Windsong Blade tore through the girl’s skin, the light was absorbed by the thorn bundle, fading away into nothingness.
The dark green vine bundle wasn’t even halfway destroyed, just slightly scratched on the surface.
Naturally, the monster plunging its hands into the ground beyond the tentacles seemed mostly unharmed as well.
”What!?”
Thorn vines shot towards Kian from all directions as he landed.
He swung the Windsong Blade, but couldn’t counter the attack from his right rear, feeling the thorns brush past his cheek.
The thorns merely scraped his skin.
A thin, thread-like wound ran across Kian’s cheek.
But in that fleeting moment, a crushing sense of exhaustion hit him, as if his waist was about to shatter.
His legs gave way, knees buckling.
In a flash, his right hand lost its strength, and his face was shoved into the muddy water.
”…Huh!?”
Poison?
A curse?
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
Thanks for reading.
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