Age of Adepts

Billis was still wandering through the depths of the forest.

The existence of the planar suppression caused his fundamental abilities to weaken severely. It further caused the various side effects from the teleportation to persist until now.

If Billis hadn’t previously fully understood his master’s choice of sending a pseudo-summoner bug adept like himself to be the scout, instead of a pure combat adept like Mary or Sabrina, he did now.

The terror of interplanar teleportation was so horrifying that he still shivered at the memory. Those layers after layers of spatial distortions, and the shattered space around him. A slight misstep and he would have died, even with the guidance and protection of the magical array.

Moreover, when that damned Alice irresponsibly tore apart the plane barrier of the Goblin Plane and tossed him in like that, there wasn’t even the shadow of a magical defense cast on him. If it weren’t for Billis’ immortal body of bugs that allowed him to negate part of the spatial force’s corrosion of his soul origin and core, he might have been torn to pieces in that ferocious and violent spatial maelstrom.

Even so, his immortal body of bugs had still fallen apart at the last moment. He had taken great pains after the matter to recollect the remaining parts of his body.

It was only now that Billis fully understood his master’s thoughts.

It seemed he had been chosen as the vanguard because of his immortal body of bugs. If it had been Lady Mary instead, things would have been very different. Even though her combat prowess was several times that of his, her ability to adapt and survive when faced with such disastrously harsh environments fell short of Billis’.

Billis gloated over this fact for a short moment, before being distracted by his rumbling belly once again. His body was severely damaged, and his energy reserves were lacking. It seemed it was time to go looking for some blood meals!

Billis recklessly hunted in this tropical, Amazon-like forest with the aid of his fifteen sting scorpions. It didn’t matter if they were rabbits, mice, wolves, tigers, or jaguars; as long as they were within range of Billis’ life sensing ability, none could escape the earth-attribute attacks of the sting scorpions.

The fifteen sting scorpions were like fifteen stealthy demons, weaving underground between the roots of plants. Every time they found a target, they would silently sneak to the spot beneath it before using a sudden earth spike to exterminate the enemy in one hit.

If the sneak attack didn’t manage to kill the enemy, the sting scorpions would emerge from underground and use their terrifying jaws to bite the enemy’s throat, causing it to bleed to death. If the scorpions didn’t want the prey’s struggling to attract new enemies, they could even use their poison stingers to inject excessive amounts of earth elementium into the victim, forcing them to die in despair while utterly paralyzed.

Naturally, Billis didn’t have Greem’s ability to analyze and decipher the planar laws rapidly. That was why his solution to the planar suppression was brutal and straightforward. That was… to eat!

He would only have the strength to resist the planar suppression once his hunger was satiated. By the time he devoured sufficient native lifeforms, he would be able to obtain adequate gene factors from the lifeforms to change his external life traits. It was actually a camouflaging ability that most predators possessed!

As a classic carnivorous predator, Billis the Bug Adept was extremely proficient in this aspect.

Billis shambled through the green sea of trees, a thick black cloak on his shoulders. He looked like the god of death come to life as he made his way through the vines, branches, and bushes, turning every place he passed into a land of death and decay.

No living creatures detected by Billis’ Spirit could escape the slaughter of the combat sting scorpions. Behind him, the formerly lively woods had been reduced to a place void of any life. Apart from some bugs the size of fingernails and other microscopic lifeforms, Billis had thoroughly cleansed all visible creatures from the sections of the forest that had been swept through by the sting scorpions.

Billis could feel the planar suppression weakening thanks to his slaughter. Without the support of these tens of thousands of lifeforms, the mediums and carriers that the planar consciousness could lean upon decreased. The strength that it used to suppress an external intruder like Billis unavoidably declined.

Billis’ magical knowledge was insufficient for him to see through the planar consciousness and its nature. However, his base instincts allowed him to sense that the planar suppression weighing upon his body weakened as he killed more native creatures and the faster he killed them.

With this rudimentary knowledge in mind, the amoral Billis immediately began his slaughter without holding anything back.

Just as he was commanding his sting scorpions to surround and blockade three windwolves in a nearby cave, a loud noise from the horizon drew his attention.

Billis repeatedly adjusted his compound eye modes and finally managed to capture the silhouette of a strange object through the dense foliage.

It was an odd alchemical flying device with two weak soul fluxes in it.

Billis gave up on his direct command over the sting scorpions and allowed them to fight with the windwolves by themselves. He carefully examined the strange combination in the air through the leaves.

His master Greem had specially bestowed him with plenty of knowledge and matters of caution regarding planar wars before he crossed over. Among them, the first thing he had to do was to hide and conceal his existence. The second was to quickly find out the racial composition of the plane and find a way to assimilate into the local intelligent species. The third thing was to come into contact with the race that held the dominant position on the plane and to discover their weaknesses and strengths to exploit at a later time.

Billis only had a vague impression and concept of this plane. It was the fact that this was a small plane where the goblins held the plane dominance!

Goblins? These greedy, weak, and stupid creatures could dominate a plane?

Billis almost hadn’t believed his ears when he first heard of this.

However, when he thought of the sly fellow that always accompanied his master, Billis had no choice but to admit that green goblins still had wits of their own. At least, in the eyes of his master Greem, that green goblin Snorlax might have been of slightly higher status than himself.

An actual terror of a bug adept like himself was of lesser status than a green goblin who was the natural equivalent of the words weak and stupid. Billis could not lie to himself, though he was extremely reluctant to admit this to be true. That was because this was the reality!

Billis finally gained a vague understanding of something when he set his eyes on that strange flying device.

If this plane was filled with those naked and weak goblins who fought with wooden bows and short spears, he alone would have been able to crush them all with his ever-growing army of bugs.

However, now, two ’stupid’ goblins, who were so weak that they would lose to a beginner apprentice, were flying in the sky with the help of an odd alchemical construct. That was more than enough proof that these goblins were completely different from the ones in Billis’ mind.

If he were foolish enough to attack them head-on, then the tragic scenario of a great bug adept being chased around by a bunch of ’weak’ goblins might actually come to fruition.

The flying device that the two goblins were driving in was remarkably swift. Billis’ judged from his observations that its velocity was around fifteen to twenty meters per second. This speed was already equal to the speed of adepts flying with the use of Fly.

On the one hand, you had normal goblins who couldn’t sense any supernatural auras. On the other hand, you had adepts who had mastered powerful abilities. If the weak goblins were able to display adept-level powers through some unknown means, then this invasion might be extremely difficult.

While Billis silently contemplated, the cruel and bloody slaughter ended. Three sting scorpions had killed the three adolescent windwolves at the cost of some light wounds.

As expected, the goblin plane was a low-magic plane. Even after scouring the entire forest, the number of magical creatures that Billis could find was few and far between. Ordinary beasts would not have been able to deal any visible physical damage to the scorpions, regardless of how numerous they were. However, these three windwolves were considered part of those rarely seen magical creatures. They possessed the ability to manipulate wind elements.

It was the violent wind blades that they released as a final struggle that caused some slightly more obvious damage to the scorpions. The storm of wind blades had severely cut the shell on the back of a sting scorpion. Some of the blades had even cut through the shell and caused purple and black blood to flow out.

However, as the wounded scorpions feasted, their wounds healed at a rate visible to the naked eye.

With a soft whistle, the scorpions scattered in the nearby woods hurried back to Billis.

Still cloaked in his black robe, he led them as he ran towards the direction the mysterious flying device had disappeared.

Billis felt like there was a need to understand the opponent before he clashed with them in a frontal conflict. And as a bug adept, the only way he could understand an opponent was… to eat!

…………

Beta Town was a goblin town that neighboured a vast forest.

The ones that lived here were, naturally, a group of lively and cute green goblins.

One could even see quite a number of individuals from various other races in the town. However, most of them were being ordered around by the goblins and used as slaves.

The buildings in Beta Town weren’t all that large. That clearly had something to do with the height of the goblins themselves. The construction materials used many large metal parts, causing Beta Town to look shiny from afar. There was a taste of blood and steel to its image.

There were round mushroom cottages, wrapped in a layer of metal on the outside. They possessed thick, heavy metal doors, disc-shaped roofs, and windows. White steam lingered in the air above the town.

When Billis looked at the town from the edges of the forest, he saw a capital of iron and steel filled with a sense of strength.