Free Web NovelChapter 216: Suddenly
"Are you sure this is the right way?" Stallus asked. And it must have been for the third time already.
This time Alex didn’t answer her immediately. With his eyes buried in the paper in front of him, he only looked up occasionally to point a new way. "Yes. Stallus. This. Is. The. Right. Way." He gritted out, annoyance in his voice.
Stallus rolled her eyes. Nobody could blame her since they’ve been at it for three hours now, looking for the location drawn on the map they found at the princess tower two days ago.
Alex agreed he could read maps, somewhat, and they decided to take a day off from active hunting and training to explore it. The result was that they’d been walking for three hours in what felt like the same trees surrounding them.
There’s no monster to bother them; they’ve killed them all. And of those they haven’t killed, they are too afraid to show their faces. So they walked around the forest, looking for the second mark on the map, some kind of tree, but thin instead of the sprawling branches of the trees in the forest.
Azaroth raked his eyes around, gazing at all the shades of green that the forest provided. "There’s something like that here, let’s move forward. Unless the tree has grown since the map was last updated."
That made Alex freeze and suddenly, he smiled. "Thank you, Azaroth!" He searched, and he didn’t have to for long before he saw the tree he was looking for, now a big tree with grey bark and branches as big as limbs, with roots that jutted out of the ground.
Alex walked around it a bit, then he turned left and pointed. "This way."
And off they went again. The undergrowth was thick, and Catena had to use his technique to clear the way for them, cracking small trees and roots away for them to pass. Small monsters jumped away from them with sharp cries as the ground shifted and rolled.
Under the canopy of trees, it was cool, the sun having less permission to spread its light. Alex buried his face in the map in his hand, looking up only occasionally to bark orders to Catena on where to move.
Finally, he stopped, then he looked up with a frown. They were faced with a wall of large trees grown tightly together to form a living wall. "Well, this is it, the map ends here."
Azaroth reached out with his senses, but he felt nothing strange around them except for the small insects and worms on the mass of rotting leaves on the forest floor. His eyes turned colder. Was the map worthless then? They would have spent the time wasted on hunting crypts instead of coming for something that wouldn’t be worth their time.
On a whim, Azaroth reached deeper, sending his senses into a wider range, and what he felt made him almost flinch. It wasn’t danger, but maybe a hint of it was there. There was just so much wrongness in the air, twisting about just behind the wall of trees.
He pointed, his voice sharp with a hint of urgency mixed in. "Break that tree wall, there’s something behind it I have to see."
Alex looked at him curiously, lifted his hand, and shot a bolt of white-hot, compressed lightning at the tree. It hit with a dull thud, followed closely by a crack as the attack blasted a hole through it, sending wet splinters flying.
"Huh." Alex said. The hole he made wasn’t enough for a single person to pass through, not to talk of the four of them. He raised his hand again and soon, he made a bigger one.
Azaroth wasted no time as he went through, his body heavily forged and his sword ready with his formation, but nothing jumped at him. No monster. But he froze as he saw what lay behind the wall.
He heard the others suck in sharp breaths behind him. "What’s going on here?" he heard Stallus say.
Instead of the normal moist, soft soil of the whole forest, the area in front of them was covered in dark grey ground, like stone but definitely not, because it was softer and there was no sign of life growing on it, no trees and not even the smallest plant.
But that wasn’t what really grabbed their attention, even though it was strange enough in a forest. It was the hulking mountain that dominated the middle. It looked like a mountain, but Azaroth had never seen a mountain like this before.
It’s tall, but the way it just stood there like a lump of something thrown there. The surface was the same dark grey color as the ground but with a few flecks of what might be silver or crystals. All around the body were tunnel-wide holes drilling into inky darkness.
Azaroth took a step forward and paused as a strong wave of wrongness washed over him. He hadn’t felt something like this before in his life, the feeling that this thing in front of him shouldn’t be here. A puzzle piece that doesn’t fit and kept eating away at the senses.
Suddenly, Azaroth’s eyes blazed and he wanted the mountain out. A wave of anger boiled forward like the fire he used, trying to burst out of him, but he took a deep breath. "This thing is a crypt?" His words ended in a question instead of the statement he intended.
Stallus shuddered, feeling both excitement and fear at the same time, each mixing together. "A crypt? We should hunt! Although I don’t know what the mountain is doing here."
"That is no mountain," Catena said, his voice dark. "That... it’s like something dead. A husk."
Alex shivered. "What are you talking about, Catena?"
Catena shrugged. "It’s like dead earth, that’s just how it felt to me." freewebnøvel.coɱ
Alex studied his tall team member. "Dead earth, I’ve not heard that before. But I’m ready to find out."
