Bear School Astartes

Chapter 913: Chapter 895: Serpent of Black Mud

The Knights drew their swords in unison, the sound cold and resolute.

That sudden commotion, without a doubt, drew the attention of Lorenzo and Priestess Emma, who had been quietly conferring.

The two of them turned their heads, looking toward the direction where the Losric Knights had raised their guard.

It was the corpse they had just now laid out with solemn ceremony... the former Knight Captain’s body!

At this moment, that corpse which had already sunk into the stillness of death suddenly seemed as if some living thing inside the flesh was thrashing about violently.

The body that should have been dead shook and convulsed as something inside rammed left and right.

Even his suit of armor started ringing again with the clattering sounds of metal in motion.

Something was clearly very wrong.

Lorenzo immediately shoved his way to the very front of the Knights’ defensive line.

He was a Knight Captain appointed on the eve of battle; at a time like this he had to take the lead. And that was his nature to begin with—otherwise he wouldn’t be using a Knight’s Greatsword, a weapon made for wild, ferocious offense and poor at defense.

”On guard! Form up!”

As he pushed forward he shouted the order, and the members of the Losric Knight Order, thanks to their uniformly high calibre, completed their response in an extremely short span of time.

They didn’t know what was happening to the former Knight Captain’s corpse, but at this rotten moment, at this critical juncture, they had to prepare for the worst.

Lorenzo stood before the old superior to whom he had just given a final farewell, and raised his Losric Knight’s Greatsword.

The more than two-meter-long greatsword probed carefully toward the corpse kneeling there, cradling its own severed head.

The corpse’s unnatural spasms continued, but at the rear of the Knight Order’s formation, Lann narrowed his eyes and tilted his head, as if listening intently.

Then the Demon Hunter’s slightly narrowed eyes snapped wide open.

His preternatural senses were feeding him information from a wide swath of the area around them.

He heard the sound of a waterskin being torn open, and mindless, inhuman howls!

”Back away, Loren—!”

He didn’t even have time to shout the name in full. Sound needed time to cross the air to Lann’s ears, and that was all the time the emergency needed to explode.

The moment the tip of Lorenzo’s greatsword finally, cautiously touched the convulsing corpse of the former Knight Captain, the corpse’s movements suddenly went still.

But that was not the calm after an anomaly had subsided... it was the tension of some ”thing” startled and gathering strength before it burst forth!

”Sriiip!”

Just like the distant sound Lann had heard through his ears.

The instant the blade tip touched it, that ”thing” inside the corpse lunged violently outward!

The upper half of the former Knight Captain’s body was like a juicy waterskin, ripped and torn from the inside out!

Even solid armor couldn’t withstand that inside-out rending.

Human blood sprayed out in a wild, surging gush, as if someone were flinging paint in all directions!

”Hssaaah!”

Then a howl that was nothing like a human voice erupted from the mouth of the thing that had torn its way free.

It was a mass of flowing, yet oddly formed, black sludge.

Viscous and fathomless, it congealed atop the former Knight Captain’s body into a tangled ball of coiled serpents.

But its size and bulk defied all sense.

The thing that crawled out of the former Knight Captain’s body was larger and heavier than the body that had contained it!

The Black Mud Snake Group was thicker than a normal man’s waist, and its largest head had a mouth as big as a person.

From within the Black Mud Snake Group, a single twisted claw jutted out and hung at its side, easily large enough to grasp a man in one hand.

Where a serpent’s eyes should be, two terrifying red lights burned steadily, and with even the slightest movement those seductive, hellish gleams traced afterimages in midair.

The massive Black Mud Snake Group coiled around the human upper body, leaving only two comparatively puny legs as its means of locomotion, staggering as it moved.

The thing’s strength was tremendous.

At the very instant it burst free, its tail of black sludge casually swept once across its front.

Lorenzo, caught within that arc, was swatted flying!

Even though the new Knight Captain, with superb battlefield reflexes, had instantly brought the wide flat of his greatsword up before him.

The monster’s tail-whip still struck with a deafening scream of steel, slamming him straight back into the Losric Knights’ formation behind.

With a heavy thud, the seasoned Knights holding their Shields upright had no intention of yielding the way for their commander.

They simply let their commander crash into the Shield Wall.

Lorenzo, for his part, didn’t make a fuss. His helmet had been knocked off in the blow; now he twisted his head hard and spat a mouthful of bloody froth onto the ground, then pushed himself up on his greatsword.

”What the hell is this thing?!”

The Losric Knight Order had swept away every enemy in this world; they had never feared battle.

But fighting some grotesque abomination they had never seen before left a cold knot of doubt in everyone’s gut.

Priestess Emma, standing beside Lann, had never seen such a thing either. Her lips trembled, but she had no information to offer.

”Is it the Abyss?”

Instead, Lann was the first to put forward a point.

”Those red eyes are way too distinctive.”

”It might be the Abyss, but this form...”

Priestess Emma muttered, lacking confidence.

Obviously, even a cleric who had fought the Abyss for years had never seen something like this.

This thing was extremely troublesome. In the short time from its appearance until now, it had moved toward the Knight Order on its two staggering legs, as if obsessively fixated on destruction and slaughter.

Right after, it displayed an attack rhythm that felt no pain at all, like a rabid dog.

The Knights’ blades and spears seemed to have little effect on it.

Their weapons could damage that black-mud-like substance, but they couldn’t make its writhing body hesitate in the slightest.

That enormous snake head, the tail, the malformed claws... with that twisted, viscous body, the Knights simply had no way to read its attack motions.

A Shield could only defend in one direction, and with no way to clearly distinguish its attack movements, many Knights had just raised their Shields, intending to brace against the monster’s biting head.

But in the next instant, the tail that had been dragging along the ground whipped around from another angle and smashed the Knight’s helmet flat.

From the visor slit, thick blood and brain matter dripped out together.

Under this monster’s assault, the stone bricks of Losric’s High Wall were as fragile as tofu.

With a casual rake of those twisted claws, an intact spread of paving bricks was shredded into fine rubble.

Lann drove his boot into a nearby Losric Knight with a heavy thud, kicking him away.

The next moment, the monster’s deformed claw slammed down on the spot where that Knight had been about to move in to attack.

The claw failed to pulp anyone, then swiped sideways. Lann, having already kicked the Knight clear, also flashed out of his original position under the push of the Acceleration Technique.

The claw snatched at empty air.

”Screeeaaa!!!”

The monster howled, continuing its frenzied slaughter.

This bastard... is a pain to deal with.

Lann silently recited in his heart.

Overwhelming strength, seemingly no sense of pain, its offense impossible to suppress. Its attack rhythm was chaotic and berserk, more rabid than a rabid dog.

Don’t be fooled by the staggering gait of those two human legs it used to move; once something entered its attack range, the snake group’s own telescoping motion was anything but slow.

And its whole body was like flowing black sludge, like asphalt.

That bodily trait made people’s visual misjudgment even worse.

The human eye simply couldn’t judge the spatial position of its body parts, and so even after being entangled with it for quite some time, these battle-hardened Losric Knights and Lann still couldn’t get a feel for the monster’s attack rhythm.

Because when this monster made a move, they couldn’t even tell which part of it was actually moving—everything was just a mass of flowing black.

If Lann used Spiritual Vision, he was confident that this rabid-dog-like thing and its simple motions would be seen through at once.

But Lann’s body already harbored darkness from peering into Elderidge’s inner being, and the thing before his eyes was plainly a product of the Abyss.

He couldn’t risk opening Spiritual Vision to observe it.

Priestess Emma had tried covering the monster with several Miracles, hoping to dissolve it with divine power.

Lann had also tried attacking this mass of black mud with the Lady of the Lake’s Sword imbued with Divine Lake Light.

But it was utterly useless; there was no special effect on the creature at all.

Because the Abyss does not equate to evil; it is merely the other side of this world built on flame, one of two sides of the same coin.

Intelligent beings couldn’t just brand that other side as ”evil” because they lacked the ability to survive there.

The battle had fallen into total stalemate.

The Knights didn’t even know how many more blows this thing would need to take before it would die.

On that flowing black mud, there were no visible wounds at all.

Their so‑called ”we’re hitting it” was nothing but a feeling transmitted through their weapons.

”Prepare to retreat!”

Lorenzo finally made his decision after almost getting half his body bitten off yet again.

He roared, planning to have one Losric Knight trade his life to tie up the monster while the others took the chance to withdraw, opening up distance.

They had no idea how to deal with this never‑before‑seen monster, and they had already wasted too much time and energy.

And the Losric Knight whom Lorenzo called out showed no ripple at all at the prospect of his own sacrifice; he simply prepared in silence to step forward and fulfill his duty.

In this world, many people no longer placed life as their top priority.

They were even somewhat indifferent to their own lives.

Lann watched this scene, frowning.

He hated seeing this kind of thing play out in front of him, but rationally speaking—

Faced with a powerful, troublesome monster whose countermeasures were unknown, being able to spend one life to pull so many people out could practically be called a ”success.”