By Zephyria As soon as he entered, the first thing that caught his eye was the light balls that occasionally illuminated the darkness where he couldn’t see an inch ahead, and the countless scales that surrounded them and sparkled. Leonardo realized that his assumption had been correct.
The name of those sparkling scales was Sawtooth Fish. They were fish with saw-like teeth that mainly lived in the deep sea.
Sawtooths were small in size, but because they traveled in schools, they would attack prey much larger than themselves and tear them apart indiscriminately.
The unpleasant eyeballs attached to those scales felt the vibrations caused by Leonardo jumping in and all turned toward him.
Encountering them, Leonardo immediately swam quickly to a deeper part of the water. Then the Sawtooth swarm also began to chase him at a very fast speed.
Leonardo used magic in the water as if he were using flight magic in the air and went down, but the resistance of the water was high, and his speed was significantly slowed.
When he discovered a graveyard of bones while moving along the procession, he had suspected that the scratches on the bone fragments might be traces of Sawtooths, but he never thought that the deep-sea fish would really be in the middle of the peninsula, in a salt-free lake in a high-altitude crater.
However, thinking about the unidentified demon beast that had been coexisting with those guys in this lake, he was somewhat convinced that the Sawtooths were surviving here.
The Eldermilli Peninsula was formed by the uplift of the ground and the eruption of submarine volcanoes, so there was a good chance that deep-sea fish had flowed into the peninsula.
However, the key was how the saltwater fish survived in freshwater, and if the toxic component of the demon beast was the same as the poison of Illeaptor and replaced the role of sodium chloride, then that was not entirely impossible.
Thanks to that, Leonardo, less than a minute after making the pledge to only use close-range attacks, reached out his hand toward the huge mass of Sawtooths and expanded hot air in the vicinity, causing an explosion.
As the air exploded in the highly resistant water, a strong vortex was created, and the guys scattered in confusion.
Having bought himself some time, he shifted his gaze and looked down. The soldiers below were also disrupting the Sawtooths and preventing them from getting close, and only a few of them were chasing and attacking the giant demon beast.
He wondered why they hadn’t taken care of it right away, but it seemed that there was a variable called Sawtooths.
Leonardo quickly confirmed the location of the moving demon beast and used teleportation to move to the expected location, matching its speed. However, the demon beast’s movement in the water was unimaginably fast, and as soon as he moved, it immediately brushed past him, and Leonardo was pushed away by the resulting current.
Another reason why he hated underwater combat was this. Because the image formed on the retina in the water was different from when he was outside, it was difficult to gauge the exact location with teleportation.
Meanwhile, two soldiers clung to the demon beast and cut off its legs, and the demon beast wove several strands of legs together and pulled the soldier it had grabbed toward the center of its body. It seemed to be trying to use the soldier as a shield.
Squad Leader 8 firmly stabbed her sword into the demon beast’s body and endured the water pressure, launching a magic attack at the body as it was.
The demon beast’s hide, filled with air, swelled and burst as it couldn’t withstand the internal pressure, but only for a moment. Regeneration seemed to be faster in the water, and the flesh quickly writhed and grew back. After repeating the process several times, it seemed as if the creature’s body was getting bigger and bigger.
Leonardo frowned and used teleportation again in the direction the demon beast was moving. This time, the location calculation was accurate, and the demon beast’s leg was right in front of his eyes. He immediately threw himself and snatched the leg.
However, the leg of the demon beast he was holding onto was so slippery that he felt like he would lose his grip soon. Leonardo, who was constantly scratching at the demon beast’s hide with his fingertips, ignited flames in his hand and cooked the demon beast’s flesh before plunging his fingers into it.
The demon beast writhed in pain, creating a strong water pressure. Before falling, Leonardo once again concentrated high heat in his hand, crawled towards where the squad member was trapped, firmly grabbed the leg constricting him, and tore it apart.
The cross-section of the torn area twitched, and as the flesh tried to regrow, Leonardo seared the area with flames, immediately sealing it off. Then, the movement gradually stopped, and it no longer regenerated.
More than half of the intertwined leg strands were cut off in chunks, and the remaining strands were continuously sliced off by the squad member who was clinging nearby. Then, the unconscious squad member floated into the water, still tied to the severed leg, and the area sliced by the sword regenerated again, trying to grab the detached leg.
Leonardo created a flame sword in his hand, cut off the growing area once more, and kicked the floating severed leg far away so that the demon beast could not grab it. Then, he grabbed the arm of a squad member next to him and threw him there as well.
The squad member, suddenly thrown by Leonardo, rolled around in the water, dumbfounded, before glaring fiercely at him. But soon, he discovered his unconscious comrade floating in front of him and slung him over his shoulder with one arm.
At Leonardo’s hand signal telling him to go up, the squad member was reluctant but nodded immediately and swam towards the surface.
Leonardo watched him follow his instructions unexpectedly well with satisfaction. At that moment, the demon beast’s leg suddenly wrapped around Leonardo’s ankle and pulled him violently. Because of that, he momentarily exhaled the breath he was holding and swallowed water, causing his breathing to become rapidly unstable.
He immediately grabbed the leg tied to his ankle and tried to tear it off, but this time, another leg came and bound his entire body, preventing him from even moving a finger.
‘Does this thing have a death wish?’
Leonardo felt his breath growing increasingly short and struggled to escape from the legs that were tightly binding his body. But once he was actually caught by the demon beast, the pressure was so strong that it felt like his bones would be crushed first.
Eventually, he tried to ignite flames throughout his entire body to make the demon beast release him on its own. As he writhed, drawing heat from his core, Squad Leader 8, who he didn’t know where she came from, suddenly approached quickly and struck the demon beast’s leg wrapped around his body with a sword imbued with mana.
The legs that had been constricting him in multiple layers were cut off in an instant, and Leonardo took advantage of the gap to quickly escape from among the fragmented flesh. Squad Leader 8 glanced at him, who had safely escaped, and immediately turned around, striking down the regenerating flesh and unleashing indiscriminate attacks towards the torso.
Leonardo watched her back as she saved him, but his breath was reaching its limit, so he went back to the surface to breathe.
* * *
Hugo took off the glove on his left hand and wiped away the black blood that had splattered slightly on his face with his hand. He stared at the black blood that had gathered on his fingertip before creating water to wash it away cleanly.
In his right hand, he held a massive greatsword made of ice.
The greatsword, exuding a chilling aura, had black blood flowing down its blade, dripping to the bottom, and some of it froze, engraving patterns on the blade. The fallen blood darkly stained the ground, and the ground looked a little strange.
Hugo was standing between the cliffs of a deep valley, where there used to be a valley full of water boiling with magma’s heat. But now, the valley was completely frozen solid, and even the blood dripping from the greatsword turned into thin ice as soon as it hit the ground.
Beneath Hugo’s feet, within the ice, was a massive shadow, a demon beast that looked like a combination of a lizard and a fish. It was frozen in a vivid state, with its mouth wide open, revealing sharp teeth, and its bright yellow eyes gleaming, just before it lunged at him.
Amidst that bizarre scene, Hugo checked the watch on his left hand and clicked his tongue.
‘Did I delay too much?’
Hugo and two squad members had ventured out a little further while searching for a route to the next destination spot. It was because they had encountered a malformed demon beast.
Since the characteristics of a malformed demon beast that they saw for the first time were unknown, it was quite dangerous, so they had to capture only two or three for investigation if possible and eliminate the rest as soon as they were discovered. That was why two demon beasts that had fainted during capture were caught in a net next to Hugo.
Fortunately, they had made contact with a messenger from another battalion nearby, and they were waiting for a while so that they could hand over the captured individuals when some of the exploration team arrived here.
One of the squad members came out from between the valleys and reported to Hugo as he approached.
“Squad Leader, we have confirmed all the nests.”
His combat uniform and sword were also covered in black blood, and he looked a little tired from the battle. Hugo, who was checking his watch, turned his eyes at his words and asked.
“What about the remaining ones?”
Just as the squad member took another step forward to answer, the eyes of the massive demon beast frozen beneath Hugo’s feet rolled eerily and turned towards where the squad member was.
When the approaching squad member saw it, he stopped in his tracks, and Hugo raised the heavy greatsword with one hand and slammed it down hard towards the demon beast.
Then, a loud roar echoed through the valley, the ice he was stepping on cracked, and the greatsword was driven into the crack. The tip of the sharp greatsword accurately pierced the center of the demon beast’s eye.
As a result, a whirlwind blew around them. The squad member closed his eyes at the scattering ice fragments and turned his head away for a moment. After the wind stopped, he checked the eyes under the ice that could no longer move and shifted his gaze back to Hugo.
“They’re all dead.”
Hugo nodded once and took out a spare glove, replacing the one he had on, and said.
“Good work. Let’s wait until the exploration team arrives.”
The squad member took the glove that Hugo had taken off and looked around the valley.
This place was near a volcanic zone, so the temperature was quite hot when they first arrived. But now, the cliffs in this area were all covered in ice, and a chilling coldness lingered.
Moreover, within a certain radius around Hugo, all the massive demon beasts had their torsos dismembered, spilling black blood and sprawled out.
The demon beasts’ blood flowed down the cliffs and froze like black waterfalls, and most of their corpses had sharp ice piercing through their necks.
At that sight, the squad member felt quite embarrassed to hear the words “good work” from the Squad Leader.