novelnext 398. Corruption zone
398. Corruption zone
As soon as Killian dropped onto the rooftop, lightning burst out around him in a violent wave and drove the weavers there backward. The one closest to him took the worst of it.His sword had already punched through its chest on the way down, leaving behind a smoking hole that hissed with scorched dead mana.
But he didn’t stop to see whether it would die from that alone.
At his current rank, a fall like this was not enough to do real damage to him, not with Balen’s armor wrapped around his body and the enchantments on it ready to absorb far heavier punishment. So the instant his knees struck the rooftop, he pushed back up, silently grateful that the structure had held under his weight, and moved again.
Another weaver was still reeling from the lightning.
Burns stretched over its chest and neck, and it was too slow to defend itself properly. Killian drove his sword into its chest just as the creature lashed down with one of its sword-like claws on pure instinct. He caught the blow on his shield, turned it aside, then stepped in and shoved with all his weight.
The weaver lost its footing at once.
Its legs scraped uselessly over the tiles before it slid off the rooftop and vanished over the edge. A second later, the sound of its body striking the street rose from below.
Killian had no time to breathe. A shriek tore out from right behind him.
He turned just in time to catch another claw on his shield, the edge of it screaming against the metal as it dragged across. The weaver pressing into him was taller than the others, broader through the shoulders, and it leaned forward immediately, trying to crush him down through sheer weight and reach. It shrieked in his face as it pushed, and from this close Killian finally got a proper look at it.
It was uglier than he had expected.
Its breath was foul enough to make the stomach twist, and parts of its face were no longer really flesh at all. They looked like dark mana given shape, some thick, sticky black substance holding the skull together where skin and muscle should have been. One eye bulged too far from its socket, while the other was half buried beneath a growth of dead, rocky matter.
Killian only had a glance, then he drove lightning through his blade.
At once, the creature screamed, the sound turning thin and ugly as the lightning bit deeper into it. Killian twisted away before it could collapse on top of him, letting it crash down onto the rooftop instead. Then he turned back immediately and drove his blade into the back of its neck, pushing with enough force that the rooftop beneath them cracked.
Dark blood spilled across the metal of his sword, hot and foul.
That was the last of the weavers on the roof.
For one brief moment, Killian stood there and looked around. The streets below were still thick with them. More crouched on nearby roofs and broken walls, some turning their heads toward him now, watching. A few even started toward him before stopping. They had seen what happened to the ones he landed among, and whatever twisted intelligence lived inside them had decided not to rush him blindly.
That alone told Killian enough.
These creatures were not like the earlier weavers he had fought in Vanderfall. They thought more, hesitated more and even measured danger better. But in the end, none of that changed what had to be done. Their task here was simple. Purge the town. Then move deeper into the corruption zone and do the same again.
He had just decided to jump down and start cutting through the nearest cluster on the street when the wind carriage finally lowered to the ground beside the building.
The Mages and Enforcers stepped out looking at him as if they had just witnessed something they were not fully prepared to understand. The newer recruits, especially the ones brought in after the civil war, looked the worst seeing the corpses. They had heard stories, of course, but hearing and seeing were different things.
Killian didn’t let them stand there staring.
He stepped toward them and said, “We clear the street first. Mages, get onto the roofs. You’ll have a better view from there. Two Enforcers stay with each mage group. The rest of you move with me.” His gaze swept over them. “I’ll lead. You only need to follow and do the job you were assigned.”
That was enough.
Whatever fear or shock had been holding them loosened, and one after another, they straightened and nodded.
They had already gone over most of their tactics against weavers and fiends in detail, and with how the town was laid out, this was the cleanest way to keep casualties to a minimum. Within a minute, the Enforcers and Mages had all stepped out of the carriage, and the wind construct began dissolving back into the air behind them.
Killian barely spared it a glance. His attention was already on the street ahead.
The mutated weavers there were watching them carefully.
They waited without rushing in, as if judging what the humans would do first.
Killian had no intention of letting that silence stretch.
He pushed mana into his legs and leapt from the roof, using [Lightning Step]. This time gravity did not take him right away. He hadn’t perfected the technique yet, but he had been refining it for a long while now, and the burst of lightning beneath his boots let him step against the air itself for a brief instant. He used that opening to cross the street faster than the weavers expected.
One of them moved anyway. It sprang upward, claw thrusting out to skewer him in midair.
Killian dropped his technique the moment he saw the strike coming. His body fell at once, and the claw sliced through the space just above his head. While the weaver was still overextended, Killian swung upward and cut across its stomach before hitting the ground and rolling through the landing.
The weaver crashed into the street on the far side hard. But not hard enough to kill it.
Killian came up out of the roll with more mana already pouring into his blade, prepared to finish it before it could rise again. But the moment the creature turned toward him, spells rained down on it.
Fire, wind, and force spells hit one after another, slamming into its body before it had the chance to move.
Fire and wind hit it almost at the same time, scorching and carving through its flesh. Even if the weaver had mutated, its body had still once been human, and that weakness remained. Burnt flesh split open under the spells, and parts of it sloughed off onto the street.
But there was no time to watch it die.
More shrieks rose from every direction.
One after another, more weavers dropped down onto the street and rushed toward Killian and the Enforcers who had finally reached the ground. Unlike him, the Enforcers did not break formation. They moved in groups of three, tight and disciplined, taking on the evolved weavers exactly as they had been trained to do.
Killian, meanwhile, found himself met by two at once. Both slashed at him together.
If it was years ago, he’d have panicked but now, he gave ground, stepping back just enough that their long claws tangled for a breath as they crossed in front of him. That single mistake was all he needed.
Killian moved in immediately, stepping up over the clash of their limbs and driving lightning from his blade straight into both their faces.
The current struck cleanly.
Flesh blackened at once, smoke curling from it, but Killian did not stop there. His sword edge came around in the same motion and bit through the head of one of the weavers. The second was only just trying to recover when Killian reached into his pouch, pulled out three small metal spheres, and hurled them at its face.
They exploded on impact.
The blast tore through the thing’s head in a spray of dark blood, and the body dropped a moment later without so much as another twitch.
They were one of Balen’s newer inventions.
Killian had no idea how they worked, only that they were brutally effective. He had hundreds of them in his pouch now, and how they did not all explode on him at once was a mystery he had no great interest in solving.
As the two weavers dropped, he moved again and soon found his rhythm.
As the leader of the party, his role was not simply to kill as many weavers as possible, though that certainly helped. More than anything, his job was to keep the formation from breaking and step in wherever the Enforcers started to lose ground. That was exactly what he did. He moved across the street from one fight to another, weakening a weaver here, finishing one there, always arriving where the pressure looked heaviest.
Fortunately, that was not needed often.
The Enforcers held their lines well. They kept the rhythm of the battle better than Killian had expected, their formations staying firm while spells rained down from above to break the momentum of the mutated weavers. Even twisted like this, the creatures were not as numerous as he had first thought they might be. Killian briefly wondered if some of them had torn into each other before his group arrived, or if there was another reason their numbers were lower than expected, but in the end it did not matter much. What mattered was that they were thinning.
Only once did the battle threaten to slip away from them.
Two of the weavers suddenly broke off and made for the rooftops where the Mages were positioned. The Mages reacted quickly, turning their spells on them at once while Enforcer Tarien and Enforcer Nole moved to intercept, but the creatures twisted around the attacks and kept climbing. Killian saw it happen and moved without thinking.
Lightning burst beneath his feet as he used [Lightning Step] to scale the side of the building in seconds. He came down on the first weaver’s back hard enough to drive his blade deep into it, then pushed off immediately and crossed to the second before it could reach Mage Hade and Liora.
After that, the rest of the street fell back under control.
The rhythm returned. Steel, lightning, fire, wind, then another body falling. In barely ten minutes, they had managed to clear the street of weavers entirely.
But when Killian looked up and out across the town, he knew better than to feel any real satisfaction.
The town was far too large, and their work had barely begun.
Killian looked over the Enforcers and Mages after the last weaver fell. Relief was written plainly across many of their faces, but there was also disbelief there, the sort that came after surviving something they had been sure would go badly. A few of them kept staring at the corpses in the street, as if needing to see them still and ruined before they could believe the fight was actually over.
Killian clapped once, sharp enough to pull their attention back to him.
“You all did well enough,” he said. “But the town is large, and we are nowhere near finished. We keep formation and move to the next street. There should be more weavers waiting there.”
They all nodded, and that was enough.
Killian led them onward through the town, keeping his senses spread for any creatures they might miss while the Mages and the Enforcers assigned to guard them moved along the rooftops. Whenever there was a gap between buildings, Mage Liora and Talia raised wind shields to bridge it so the others could cross without slowing. In that way, they kept pace with the fighters below.
For the next hour or so, Killian and his group cleared two more streets in quick succession.
Part of that came down to luck. Neither of those streets had many of the larger, mutated weavers. Most of the creatures there were the more ordinary human-sized kind. Those were much easier to handle. They were more predictable in how they moved, and the Enforcers could meet them directly by locking into a shield wall while the Mages rained attacks down from above.
Since the weavers in those streets had not been corrupted for very long, their flesh still gave way more easily to steel as well, and every Enforcer Killian had brought had at least awakened their elemental abilities by now, which made the work even cleaner.
With each battle they won, Killian could see confidence growing in them.
By the time they reached the third cleared street, even the Mages had stopped looking like prey and had started dealing with any weaver that tried to rush them on their own.
Killian was glad to see their confidence rising, but he did not let it turn into arrogance. That was the fastest way to die, especially in a place like this where the weavers were not even the worst threat around them.
The real danger was the environment itself.
Even with full armor sealed around the Enforcers, and the Mages wearing masks and gloves treated against corruption, there was still always a chance of dead mana finding its way in. So Killian kept reminding them to watch every step they took, and when they entered the next street, all of them understood immediately why that warning mattered.
This street was far worse than the others.
Dark patches had swallowed almost every surface in sight. The walls of the buildings were blotched with thick layers of corruption, the blackness spreading over stone and wood as if the town itself had begun to rot while still standing. The street beneath their feet was cracked open in long, ugly veins, and through those fractures seeped an oily liquid that pooled in shallow stretches along the ground. It reflected no light properly, just sat there thick and wrong, with bloated insects breeding inside it—some the size of a fist, some smaller, all of them twitching and skittering over one another in clusters that made the skin crawl.
And then there was the smell.
It sat in the air like something halfway between swamp rot and burnt flesh, so foul that even breathing near it felt heavy. The purification seals on their helmets and masks stopped them from taking in the worst of the poison, but they did nothing about the stench itself. It lingered in the back of the throat and made every breath feel dirty.
Still, what bothered Killian most was not the street. It was the silence.
Where were the weavers?
The Mages on the rooftops had clearly started wondering the same thing. He saw Mage Hade glance down more than once, and Enforcer Tarien kept his shield a little higher than before. But no one said anything at first. They simply kept moving deeper into the street, waiting for the attack that should have come already.
It never did. That was what made Killian slow. They took one step. Then another, until nearly ten minutes passed when Tarien spoke.
“Knight Killian, do you—”
Killian raised a hand immediately, cutting him off. His head turned slightly to the left.
He had heard something—a faint sound beneath the rot and the silence. His face paled a little.
“Shields up! Stay tight!”
Before anyone could even ask what he meant, the answer came on its own.
A huge mana fiend burst through the side of one of the buildings, smashing stone and timber apart as if the structure had been made of dry twigs. The thing looked like some nightmare blend of an elephant and dead mana itself. Its body was massive and uneven, all swollen flesh and dark corruption, with thick legs that cracked the ground beneath it.
Parts of its hide looked melted into blackened plates, while other parts oozed that same oily substance they had seen in the street. Its head was broad and twisted, and where its eyes should have been there were only pits glowing with a murky, poisoned light.
It stared at them for a second, then it roared.
And the moment it did, its trunk lashed straight toward them. Killian stepped forward and slammed his shield up in front of him.
“Everyone! Behind me!”
***
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