Chapter 705 — After the Behemoth Falls
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
With these somewhat mechanical words, the tall female imperial magister with the long silver-gray hair raised her head and looked into the distance. A pale blue halo of runes spread outward from her waist; she left the ground at once and flew toward the outer rim of the crater.
"Conditions within the警戒 zone normal... External appearance of all energy conduits normal... Other sentinels observed, visual normal... Now crossing the outer ring of the ruin zone..."
Reporting the situation mechanically, the female magister swept swiftly over the crater and finally landed smoothly on the corrupted, torn wasteland beyond its rim.
"Reached the outer patrol zone of the ruins. Calibrating monitors..." As she spoke, she raised her head and looked around at the desolate, ruined soil of the old capital. The same bleak scenery, unchanged for centuries, entered her polymer eyes, projecting clear images within her optical sensing crystals.
Her sweeping gaze stopped abruptly. A monster—tall, deformed, bloated all over, as though congealed from flowing red mud—had suddenly entered her sight.
"Threat organism sighted. High arcane resistance unit. Commencing elimination."
Before the cold, mechanical voice had faded, the female magister had already launched a ferocious assault. A complex halo of runes flared abruptly behind her, and at the same time she drove both legs hard against the ground; accelerated by this double force, her tall figure became a blur and charged at the distant aberrant at a speed near a knight's charge.
The aberrant noticed its swiftly approaching attacker as well. The monster gave a chaotic roar, corrupting mana surging over its body; it raised its arm high, and already a mass of black-red corrupted energy had swiftly taken shape. But before it could loose this destructive energy, the female magister in the outdated uniform had already rushed in. She raised her arm; an alloy blade sprang straight from her palm and swiftly severed one of the arms the aberrant used for casting. Then her figure flickered, the blade whirled, and she cleanly cut off the monster's other arm—two flashes of blade-light, and her strength and speed were a match for any excellent swordsman!
The aberrant gave a chaotic, unnameable roar and struggled to turn its body to catch the "magister's" movements, but its attempt was only half complete when an alloy blade had already cut through the weak point at its back.
The giant blood-red monster howled and fell; its filthy blood and mud swiftly disintegrated. The female magister raised her arm and the alloy blade retracted into her body, while the great cloud of dust released by the aberrant's death enveloped her.
Suddenly, the dust that should have dispersed naturally froze in place. Another threatening energy reaction appeared in her senses. She raised her arm in an instant, trying to lock onto the threat's position, but the dust hanging in the air briefly interfered with her judgment—and in that instant of interference, a vine like a withered branch suddenly pierced up from the nearby ground and thrust straight at her back!
With a harsh sound of rending metal, the dry-skinned vine pierced the alloy shell on the "magister's" back. Her body shuddered violently; then, with a crackle and a series of strange mechanical noises, the tall female "magister" finally fell still.
On the ground, the spot where the vine had emerged gave a rustling sound, and a great mass of plant structures squirmed up out of the fragile corrupted soil, tearing open a wide stretch of the nearby surface along with them. The plant structures that broke through the ground squirmed and reorganized in a way that made the skin crawl, and soon coalesced into the form of monstrous, grotesque giant trees.
One of the giant trees swayed its branches, and the twisted, wrinkled features in its bark squirmed: "It feels good to move freely... We spent seven hundred years laying down the root network, and now at last it can be put to use."