Chapter 57: Serpent Mother

Chapter 57: Serpent Mother

Monsters using weapons wasn’t an uncommon sight. Many of the weaker humanoid monsters sharpened sticks or used rudimentary tools, becoming capable of creating more proper weaponry later.

The problem was that it was never good news when a monster used what seemed like proper equipment.

The lizardmen that jumped out of the portal all wore crystalline purple armor. They wielded predominantly spears and halberds shaped out of the same material. Many even held shields.

They moved in formation and created a line of defense. This was a good sign—a good sign that shit was about to hit the fan.

It didn’t take long for Xondir to approach this newly forming line of defense. He took a swing with his scythe and crushed one of the lizardmen. A relatively undesirable outcome, given that he was trying to eradicate the entire line.

With speed and skill much greater than he expected, the lizardmen moved at once and thrust their weapons toward him. He morphed into shadow and swiftly dodged the attacks.

Soon enough, most of the other more prominent members of big sects also moved into the fray.

Everyone below the platinum path was forced to stay back and deal with the snakes.

The blonde woman and the macho man shot out toward the lizardmen. With a wave of her sword, butterflies enveloped the entire formation of lizardmen. They couldn’t do anything to them individually, but some found their way into a few rotting wounds created by Xondir.

They wormed inside and spread veins that paralyzed the lizardmen.

Suddenly, a woman dashed from among the defense formed by the members of the Kurlore sect. The Kurlore sect were defense experts. This naturally also included extensive knowledge about how to break defensive formations.

The woman was brunette, hair was cut short and mostly hidden beneath her helmet. She wore maneuverable leather armor, heavily reinforced wherever possible without compromising mobility. Rather than a bladed weapon, she wielded two bucklers.

It was a common misconception that shields weren’t weapons. An illusion she utterly shattered as she rammed the line of lizardmen with tectonic force.

Cracks spread through the ground, shaking the floor beneath everyone in a hundred-meter radius. While the top cultivators of the peak sects within the empire had extensive training on how to deal with compromised footing, the lizardmen most certainly didn’t.

It was hard to tell Emperium cultivators apart purely by their exterior looks, all except their eccentric young master, that was. Still, it was self-evident who the top dogs among them were.

Several long-haired elders slithered their way into the compromised lizardman formation. They stood near one another as they triggered qi techniques in tandem, sending intense waves of sword slashes at the lizardmen.

Although the lizardman’s formation had been completely disassembled, and many of them had suffered injuries, the serpentine soldiers that had been killed could be counted on one hand.

At this moment, another purple shape made its way down from the portal high in the sky, sneaking in among the ordinary soldiers.

One of the Emperium elders barely defended himself as a massive halberd swing smashed him. After he barely managed to save his life from the devastating attack, the lizardman sent a kick straight at his midsection.

The elder was thrown toward a line of lizardmen, who began swinging and cutting before he even landed. With the skill acquired by countless years of mastery, the elder weaved through the air and dodged a spear thrust and a halberd swing. He almost made it through to the other side of the group of lizardmen.

Out of nowhere, one of them threw itself in its way. His eyes shot wide open, and he readied an attack. He thrust his sword and landed a lethal wound on the scaled warrior, but he lost his momentum and found himself surrounded by opponents.

He blocked attack after attack, desperately holding back the onslaught. He couldn’t spare even a fraction of his attention for anything else. Not even the giant soldier that had made it toward him.

He saw it pull its halberd back and readied himself to defend yet again. This time, however, he didn’t have the luxury to devote all his effort to defending himself from a single soldier. He was stabbed and cut and had to sacrifice an arm to survive for another moment.

That moment passed as swiftly as it began as the halberd swing struck his meager defense. His sword snapped in two, and the halberd continued its journey, tearing into his torso from his shoulder and nearly splitting it in two.

The air grew heavier around the cultivators. It wasn’t merely a matter of the lives of ordinary people being at stake.

It was massive, tough, and made of non-mundane material, and he wielded it quite well.

But it still got bent way out of shape. At this point, it resembled scrap metal on a stick. And with his next swing, that bit of scrap metal flew off and pulverized the head of a lizardman. Neave kept using the metal shaft.

There were a lot of purple crystalline weapons lying around. Neave wanted to use one, but the spiritual weight was too much.

Although Neave could technically use iron rank metals without any issue now, that was only partially true. The spiritual weight didn’t bother him, but he couldn’t truly utilize those weapons properly, either.

All an iron-rank material could provide Neave was its superior durability and toughness. A good portion of the potential was wasted on him. Literally. Because he simply couldn’t realize it.

Neave’s qi was pathetically weak. Foundation realm qi didn’t have all that much potency, so even if it did cycle through his weapon, it could only barely bring out the superior characteristics of the metal.

He wanted to finally find a way to improve his cultivation. But he just didn’t have the time for it yet, since he had so many other things on his list.

This fight was starting to bore Neave. He noticed two more of the bulkier lizardmen dropping among the ordinary soldiers. He jumped into the air and intercepted the first, snapping its neck and eating it whole before it could even fall to the ground. Then he assaulted the other and overwhelmed it with superior force, the same way he did the first one that appeared.

Neave scoured the dimension ring but found little else to use in this fight. There was almost every type of weapon imaginable within the ring, but they were either too high rank, or too fragile to survive more than a few strikes.

Neave’s instincts screamed at him. He sensed something unusual in his spirit senses. He noticed many cultivators pulling back. Was there something he couldn’t feel properly due to his low cultivation?

Suddenly, Neave froze. Quite literally. His body stiffened mid-air, and he couldn’t move. In the corner of his vision, he spotted an ethereal purple girl. It was a ghastly, partially transparent creature roughly in the shape of a humanoid child but had no distinct facial features.

It held one hand up, and Neave could feel it forcefully restraining his movements.

What the...?

Before Neave could even sense it, a massive spike of purple crystal stabbed him right through his body. This broke the paralysis, so Neave broke off and freed himself. He turned around to spot a tall, male build, ethereal humanoid, much like the little girl. This one had tons of tiny purple shards floating around it.

Countless weapons and armor pieces from the dead lizardmen floated up into the air and fired toward Neave.

Neave was on his way to dodge them, but suddenly, a third figure arrived. A muscular man that moved with impeccable skill, almost impressing even Neave, rushed at him and kicked him in the stomach.

Neave flew through the cloud of crystal shards, several embedding themselves into his head, arms, torso, and legs. The muscular one whirled and jumped toward Neave, reaching him before he landed, and smashed him with a downward kick, crashing his body into the ground.

Neave bounced off the floor, still unable to get a hold of his movements.

Before he could land on the ground again, the little girl grabbed hold of him, and he felt his body convulse and deform into a ball. If it weren’t for his elastic body, he would have been crushed to paste, and even with the power, he felt his body strain under pressure.

Suddenly, something else eclipsed all his current worries as he felt another creature appear from the rift.

It all made sense now. Neave could see thin ethereal strands from these humanoids extending toward the newcomer. They were nothing more than the power of the next monster that arrived.

Purple light flashed, and the world lost all color for a second, only to be washed away by a flood of violet moments later.

It wasn’t huge, only around five or six times bigger than a human. But it was fast. And to anyone with spirit senses, it was overwhelmingly powerful.

Neave watched in terror as the creature opened its maw, and violet light gathered deep within its throat.

He helplessly hung in the air as the purple dragon blasted his body into pieces.