Chương 276

The man went limp, the permanent grimace of agony smoothing into a slack, hollow peace. Numb, Orion stepped to the next cylinder. He gathered another dense point of gravity at his fingertip, calculated the required pressure, then fired. Another slump. He repeated the motion four more times, moving systematically down the row of vats, feeling strangely detached from it all. It wasn't battle jitters. He knew them all too well by now.

Even the act of killing someone had become familiar, however much he might despise the necessity. In fact, he was doing these people a mercy. Yet while his rational mind had long since made peace with the necessity and even agreed with Garrick that he'd benefit most from being the hand that dealt the blow, his emotions rumbled, leaving him confused. System Notification Defeated [Ironwood Druid] x6 [Lv. 92-121] Experience penalized for the targets' state. +185, 000 Exp Level Up!

Just four more levels, he thought as the System's script washed over his vision, bringing the familiar surge of energy to his exhausted muscles, but for once, the warmth felt thin and artificial. He dismissed the prompt with a quick blink, pushing the bitter taste to the back of his mind. He was harvesting lives to fuel his own progress. That harsh reality stripped away any illusion of a clean victory. Garrick watched him, offering a curt nod as Orion turned away.

The Adventurer hauled the lever for the exterior bulkhead, and the door ground open, admitting the cold, damp air of the riverbank. Immediately, alchemical crossbows were fired at them, but Verner's multi-layered shield caught their bolts, losing only three of its petals. That gave the warriors a chance to charge through the opening, and a moment later, they were dancing among the last remaining guards. A few machines tried to join in, but Orion took to sniping them before they could get too close.

Fortunately, none of them was any stronger or more resilient than a regular Burrower, so it didn't take much to punch through their armor and tear them apart. Erethemor, as always, made a show of himself, carving a bloody swathe through the enemies, tanking darts that would have pierced through Orion with ease, and drawing the enemy's attention to himself. That gave Garrick and Jordan the chance to herd the rest of the guards into place with just enough damage to weaken their armor, while Esmeralda waited.

Her eyes gleamed with malice, and [Hypotheticism] warned Orion that Charm magic was at work. None of it was directed at him, however, and he was soon treated to the sight of their enemies tearing each other apart. System Notification Participated in the defeat of [Iron State Cyborg Guard] x17 [Lv. 61-89] +101, 200 Exp They took a moment to scour the rest of the base to ensure no more enemies were lurking, waiting to strike when their guard was down, but found nothing else of interest beyond the bays, where the machines now on patrol would likely return. Erethemor carved thin runes to ensure a very warm welcome. Again, he shows he's much more than the brute he tries so hard to appear to be. I wonder if his faction leader sent him in hoping he'd become more mature.

It'd be funny if I didn't have to deal with it. That done, they finally got out, looking for their last team member and hoping he'd acquainted himself well. They found Daus slumped against a boulder just outside the entrance. His bark armor was cracked down the middle, leaking luminous green sap that pooled on the gray dirt. Yet signs showed it was repairing itself, and his chest rose and fell. Twisted sheets of iron, shattered glass optics, and severed hydraulic lines littered the ground around him.

A Centurion lay on its back, its chassis torn in half by thick, thorn-covered roots that had erupted from the rocky soil to drag the machine halfway into the earth. Three bipedal Walkers had been compressed into cubes of scrap metal, crushed by overwhelming force. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Orion stared at the wreckage.

He had known Daus was a Tier Three combatant, but seeing the sheer scale of the carnage the druid had unleashed while cut off from the forest's powerful nature mana was sobering.

"Nasty bastards tried to encircle me and drown me in Silence," Daus rasped, accepting a canteen from Verner. His hands trembled as he lifted it to his lips.

"They failed." Garrick gave the druid an approving look as he surveyed the ruined machines.

"Good work. Can you walk?"

"Give me a few minutes to finish healing and uproot," Daus muttered, pressing a bare hand to the soil to draw whatever meager nutrients remained in the poisoned earth. The sealing of his armor sped up ever so slightly, which meant it had to be doing something. As they waited, Orion pulled the logs from his coat pocket and joined Garrick at the river's edge.

"These confirm the guard's story. Two more outposts like this are upstream, and the main staging area for this region is twenty miles north. There are notes indicating that the other stations are just filtration points. We'd likely find more experiments, but no high-ranking officers or alchemists unless we got really lucky." He was still feeling unsettled from what he had to do, but he had enough professionalism to set it aside for now. Garrick crossed his thick arms, narrowing his eyes in thought.

"While a single attack might be dismissed, going after every base would reveal this is more than a mere chance strike. The staging ground would be locked down tight, and we would lose the element of surprise."

"We should just ignore them," Erethemor agreed, stepping over the Centurion's remains and kicking a piece of scrap metal into the sludge.

"It's more important to strike the head of the snake before it can bite than to care for those who are already too far gone." Orion looked back at the open facility door. He knew exactly what was happening in the other outposts. Two bases meant more people suffering in the vats. Intervening would grant those prisoners the same mercy he had just shown, but it would jeopardize the mission. It was callous, but as he'd just seen, he could be very callous when necessary. Garrick was right.

"We should bypass them," Orion agreed, his voice flat. Daus didn't seem very pleased at the thought of leaving his brethren in such conditions, but the others agreed that the overall mission was more important than a few people who were already too far gone to save. Once the druid was well enough to travel, they left. The terrain grew increasingly hostile as they pushed north. The river's gray water thickened into a corrosive paste that hissed against the rocks, bubbling with foul-smelling chemical reactions.

The Silence fog pressed in, heavy and suffocating. Their Sanctum-crafted bracelets hummed constantly, filtering the caustic ash from the air before it reached their lungs, but the stench clung to their clothes and skin, no more pleasant than when they'd first left the forest. It was easy to see that the environment was taking its toll on the team.

Esmeralda walked with a severe grimace, her usually pristine state now much more rumpled, and the mere fact that she hadn't changed gowns after the battle was enough to show the depths of her annoyance. Worse, the total absence of life meant a total absence of blood; the region was an absolute desert to her senses. Erethemor exhaled puffs of gray smoke, clearly agitated by the mist. Orion kept trudging at a steady pace and didn't even notice when he fell in beside Jordan near the back of the formation.

The paladin's armor was covered in a fine layer of soot, but he didn't seem particularly troubled, making him the most pleasant company of the lot. Not that Orion himself was in much of a mood for small talk. He just didn't want to have to endure others' irritation while he was trying to make sense of his own thoughts. For several hours, they enjoyed a companionable silence.

"Garrick was right to make you do it," Jordan said quietly, keeping his gaze fixed on the fog ahead. Orion glanced at his friend.

"To get the experience points."

"That too, but mostly to bear the weight," Jordan corrected. He tightened his grip on his scabbard, the metal groaning under the pressure.

"When they broke into the canyon... the machines kept coming. We had wounded. Squires who couldn't walk. The senior paladin ordered me to collapse the pass. To bury the road so the Iron State couldn't follow." Jordan's jaw shifted, a muscle ticking beneath his cheek.

"I did as bidden and brought the canyon walls down. It halted the advance and gave me the boost I needed to rank up, but it also buried eleven of my brothers." Orion stayed silent, letting the words hang between them.

"It's horrible, but you have to run such calculations," Jordan continued, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

"You need to weigh the lives lost against the objective gained. It's the only way to win a war like this. But you can never let the act become easy, Orion. The moment condemning an ally becomes just another move rather than a last resort... that's when you turn into the very thing we are fighting." The paladin turned his head, offering a fleeting, tired smile. For a moment, the ghost of the cheerful young man from the Valderun gym shone through his hardened exterior.

"Don't let it hollow you out."

"I won't," Orion promised, and the conviction in his voice surprised him. He was a scientist by nature, prone to viewing the universe as a series of solvable equations, but the revulsion he felt in the vat room proved his humanity was still intact. The march dragged on through the afternoon. The fog turned the sky into a featureless gray dome, stripping away any sense of the sun or the passage of time.

They moved like ghosts through a ruined world, passing the occasional petrified husk of an ancient tree that died before the Iron State came and the remains of beasts that had not yet begun to rot. The only good thing about the environment was that no monster attacked them. Orion would have expected more to adapt, given that it had happened in the mountains, but perhaps these areas were simply too heavily patrolled. Still, there's something about this place that's more eerie than just the fog.

Perhaps it was the dark direction his thoughts had taken, or the talk he'd had with Jordan, but he felt raw and exposed, and focusing on the data streams fed through his glasses helped. The more they walked, the more he became aware that something was happening in the distance, though the fog prevented any clarity. He eventually stopped, holding up a hand. Garrick halted immediately, reaching for his sword, while the rest of the team tensed. Orion crouched, pressing his palm against the rocky soil.

He had been sensing it for the last mile, but it was finally clear enough to isolate. It wasn't, as he'd first thought, the erratic movements of an approaching monster or the marching steps of a mechanized patrol like the one they'd dealt with before attacking the outpost. No, this was a steady thrum, pulsing through the bedrock with unerring precision. It was the sound of industry.

"We're close," he said softly, standing and brushing the dirt from his knees. With much greater care, they crept forward, wrapped in multiple layers of stealth magic, yet still too paranoid to do more than flit from one shadow to the next. The fog ahead seemed to deepen, only to coalesce into sharp, unnatural geometric angles. High above them, piercing the gloom, the faint red glow of alchemical warning lights blinked through the mist. The staging ground lay before them.