Chapter 125: Trench Hunter
Holden stood at the edge of the monster swarm.
The Void Mantle hung around his shoulders, its null-space fabric blending with the dark. His left arm was wrapped in a rough bandage. The dagger wound was still aching him badly, but the bleeding had slowed.
About fifty feet ahead of him, a pack of Rank 2 Ridgeback Wolves moved loosely through the mud. There were at least thirty of them, each one the size of a horse. Its yellow eyes scanned the dark, and their ears twitched back and forth like satellite dishes, catching every tiny sound.
Holden walked forward.
He stepped over a fallen log, pushed through a patch of dead scrub, and entered the outer edge of the wolf pack.
The nearest wolf was eight feet away.
But it didn’t look at him or make a sound.
Holden kept walking.
He passed between two wolves that were shoulder to shoulder. One of them sneezed, shook its head, and kept moving. The other lay down in the mud and started chewing on a bone.
They had no idea a human was standing right in the middle of their pack.
Holden smiled beneath the cloak.
He kept walking until he was through the pack entirely, then stopped and looked back. The wolves continued grazing and padding through the mud, oblivious.
Holden turned and moved deeper into No-Man’s Land.
The further he got from the base, the worse things looked.
The mud got swampier, and the rain changed to freezing sleet. Ugly, twisted trees started popping up out of the gloom, all charred and split open, reaching their bare branches up like claws.
This was the dead zone between the outpost and the dimensional rifts that spawned the monsters.
Beasts were everywhere.
A pack of armored hounds circled a dead tree, snarling over a carcass. A lone Ridgeback Wolf drank from a flooded trench. Two massive Crawlers, bug-like beasts with mandibles, burrowed through the mud fifty feet to his left.
Holden picked his targets carefully.
He went for the lone wolf first.
He circled around wide, using his Gale-Step technique to flash from shadow to shadow in quick, short bursts.
The wolf was drinking from a trench puddle, its back turned and its guard totally down.
One step. Two steps.
The Solar-Forged Sword appeared in his hand, its crimson edge dimmed almost entirely to prevent any glare.
He swung.
SHLICK.
The wolf’s head came off clean. The body dropped into the trench with a soft splash.
[Ding!]
[Ridgeback Wolf (Rank 2, 1-Star) Defeated!]
[+400 KP]
[2x KP Booster Applied!]
[+800 KP!]
The notification flickered and vanished. There was no reaction from the nearby beasts. The Void Mantle kept him hidden even as the wolf’s blood pooled in the water.
Holden moved on.
The armored hounds were next. They were clustered together, too close for a clean strike on all of them.
So he waited for the right moment to strike.
One hound broke from the group, lured by the scent of the dead wolf’s blood trailing through the water.
It followed the trail into a patch of dead trees.
Holden was waiting behind the trunk.
SHLICK.
[Ding!]
[+800 KP!]
Another hound followed. Then another.
The pack at the tree never noticed their numbers shrinking. They just kept snarling over the carcass, too focused on their prize to realize they were being hunted.
An hour passed.
Holden moved through the dark like a ghost.
Gale-Step carried him between shadows. The Void Mantle erased his presence while his Solar-Forged Sword drank blood without a sound.
He took down Crawlers by dropping onto their backs from above, driving his blade straight through the gaps in their armor.
He killed Ridgeback Wolves by slicing their throats mid-stride, catching their bodies before they hit the ground to keep them from making a splash.
He wiped out a trio of Spine-Tailed Lizards by ambushing them at a watering hole, taking all three down in six seconds flat.
[Ding!]
[+400 KP!]
[Ding!]
[+400 KP!]
[Ding!]
[+800 KP!]
The notifications blurred together in a steady stream of points.
He pushed deeper into the land.
The ground suddenly dropped away, forming a steep slope that led down into a massive crater in the earth. Holden stopped right at the edge and looked down.
It was huge, carved into the ground like something had punched through from below. The walls were sheer and black, slick with rainwater. Dark mist clung to the bottom, thick and unnatural, swirling in patterns that didn’t match the wind.
The mist wasn’t natural. It was deliberate. A concealment spell, layered over the crater to hide what was inside from aerial scouts and radar pulses.
Holden descended carefully, using the crater wall for cover, moving slow.
When he reached the bottom, the mist parted just enough for him to see.
He stopped breathing.
The crater floor was packed with monsters. Hundreds of them.
Ridgeback Wolves, Crawlers, Siege-Boars, Spine-Tailed Lizards, and beasts he didn’t recognize.
But they weren’t wild.
They were in rows.
The wolves sat in organized groups of six. The Crawlers lined up along the crater walls in even intervals. The Siege-Boars stood in a tight formation at the far end, their massive bodies arranged like living siege engines pointed at the crater’s exit.
At the center of it all, something moved.
Holden’s eyes narrowed.
A figure stood on a raised mound of black dirt, taller than the rest. It was humanoid but wrong. Too long and wide in the limbs and shoulders. It wore armor made of bone plates, fitted together with dark metal rivets.
In one hand, it held a massive bone blade that glowed faintly purple.
It was drawing in the mud.
Using its free hand with careful movements, it was tracing a map into the black dirt. A full layout of the Demon-Mouth Outpost, showing the walls, where the heavy guns sat, and exact spots for the gates.
Arrows marked attack routes. Symbols marked breaching points.
This wasn’t a random horde.
This was an army.