Chapter 550 — The Dragon and the Crater
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
To be honest, Amber was no stranger to the whole adventurer's expedition routine—she wasn't one herself, but the adventurers she'd co-oped (read: bamboozled) over the years could almost have mustered enough manpower to conquer a viscounty. In her mind, whenever you faced an exploration target like a magic forest, an ancient cavern, or a secret dungeon, the standard procedure usually began with assembling a team, preparing supplies, and gathering intelligence—then cautiously entering the target area, scouting along the way, mapping the terrain, disarming traps, and fighting monsters... Nine out of ten adventurers did it that way; the tenth, the stubborn one, usually ended up dead somewhere along the road.
And yet now, Gao Yang had proven with hard fact that the vast majority of that procedure could be compressed into half a basic load of ammunition...
The deafening roar of cannon fire shattered the Black Forest's savage order of a thousand years—a fire of civilization, more savage than savagery itself, burned every plant at the forest's edge to ash, and with them every dangerous monster in range was annihilated: poisonous flora, cunning beasts, greedy predators, and sinister spirit-eaters... all of them sublimated along with Art—sublimated clean away.
Safe, efficient, clean, no lingering hazards: no traps in a crater that had been blasted flat, no monsters in a forest that had been burned to cinders.
Gao Yang stood on the high ground before the Shadow Experiment Ground cavern, surveying with satisfaction the great road the cannon fire had leveled—well, "leveled" was a stretch for a road pocked with craters, but it was far easier to traverse than the Black Forest had been. Beside him stood Amber, jaw hanging open, wearing an expression that plainly said, "Are you messing with me?"
"You actually went and did it..." The half-elf felt as though she'd been shown an entirely new world. "Aren't you afraid of drawing the monsters of the Black Forest down on us..."
"Monsters? They should be dead by now," Gao Yang said indifferently. "I'm not giving blind orders—no one knows the magic-tide contamination zones better than I do. This is a thin-contamination area; the main hazards are the mutated plants, the poisoned water sources, and a few weak, insignificant monsters. Truly powerful tide-beasts don't gather in regions like this—the thin chaotic magic here can't sustain their activity for long."
Just as Gao Yang said, he had given the order only after deliberation, choosing to open a path with cannon fire only once he'd confirmed the environment was suitable—and in this dangerous Black Forest, blasting everything flat was essentially the most appropriate way to clear the way.
A squad of elite steel rangers was quickly assembled, and under Suojilin's personal command, the unit set out alongside Gao Yang and Amber.
Though Gao Song's "firepower reconnaissance" always left one feeling something was off, Amber had to admit that the Black Forest, once plowed over by artillery, at least seemed much safer. She saw countless shattered plant remains strewn among the rubble and craters—plants that not long ago had been lethal poisons ready to kill at any moment—and among the plant debris were the remains of monsters fearsome to look upon, their twisted, mutated flesh still smoking, some of the carcasses even twitching faintly—but now they could never leap up to attack her.
Suojilin held his short bow at the ready, scanning the surroundings as he led the party forward. Though the cannon fire had flattened a large area, and most nearby monsters would likely be cowed by the magic-cannon's power and keep their distance for the time being, many creatures under the magic tide's influence could not be judged by reason—a fearless mutant monster might come charging out of the distant thicket at any moment. In years past, no small number of pioneers had died to such ambushes.