Chapter 23 - Serpent Mother

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

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

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, also, was never a good sign.

It didn’t take long for Xondir to make his way toward 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 annihilate 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 got out of the way as quick as possible.

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 any of 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 shot out 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, although her hair was cut short and 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, compromising the footing of 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 radically 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, the lizardmen that had actually 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 managed to defend himself as he was smashed by a massive halberd swing. Even after defending from that, the lizardman sent a kick straight at his midsection.

The elder was thrown into a pile of lizardmen, who began swinging and cutting before he had 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.

Until his head was cut clean off.

It was a mere moment, but it felt like everything froze for that second. It wasn’t merely a matter of the lives of common people being at stake.

Today, even platinum path heads would roll.

At this moment, just as the focus of everyone shifted toward the dying elder, a small, black-haired child slithered its way toward the big lizardman. The focus of everyone was shifted right back as they witnessed something awe-inspiring.

Neave appeared below the giant lizardman, body practically vibrating with every single boost he could execute. Then he swung his fist toward the lizardman’s armor.

Several dozen meters around him, the mist and debris were blown away as a shock wave knocked some of the nearest lizardmen back. Hairline cracks spread through the crystalline armor of the big lizardman, and it recoiled from the momentum.

Before everyone could regain their bearings, Neave punched yet again. The sheer force behind his strike made the other cultivators’ hearts tense up for a moment. One could genuinely feel the tremendous impact behind that move.

And then he did it again.

As Neave got into the groove, he threw out countless attacks, splintering the armor of the lizardman into pieces. It desperately tried regaining its bearings, but it was no use. Once the damage stacked enough to stun it, Neave pulled the sledgehammer out of his dimension ring again.

Golden runes lit up in the air around him as the hammer came crashing down with the weight of a moon. The lizardman was crushed into a paste, and the shockwave cost several weaker cultivators their hearing for a few moments.

As far as the crowds were concerned, whoever this child was had pushed themselves to their limit and beyond to deliver the damage to this lizardman. Everybody expected to have to rush in and preserve the life of this newly arrived hero.

But he started laughing instead.

“Hahahahahaha! Yes! Now that’s more like it! Damn, why haven’t I just been using a sledgehammer this whole time? Or maybe I should make a gigantic sword instead?” Neave shrugged, “I’ll see if I feel like it.”

Neave rotated his shoulders a bit and cracked his neck. Then, the true slaughter began.

The crowds of cultivators were forced back into combat, one way or another, but it was impossible not to keep one eye on Neave’s antics. He crushed the lizardmen as if they were little more than bugs and ate them whole, armor included.

Neave spotted a woman with an interesting style. It was the armored woman with two bucklers. She fought primarily with kicks and shield bashes, a seemingly simple technique, but it was surprising how much utility such a style provided. It also helped that she had some force-related spirit power.

Something Neave really wanted for himself as well.

Given that the movements of the lizardmen were brutally monotonous to Neave, he found himself observing the other cultivators most of the time.

Xondir, or rather the edge lord as Neave had dubbed him, fought very interestingly as well. A scythe wasn’t a good weapon for proper combat. Sure, qi techniques and spirit powers could compensate for some of its intrinsic limitations, but that didn’t change its core issues.

The style this man had, however, almost wholly changed Neave’s opinion on scythes. The edge lord swept his scythe as if harvesting wheat and cleaved many lizardmen's legs by sneaking powerful strikes right below their defenses.

He also swung the scythe upward, moving it beneath and behind their shields to deliver precise stabs at the heads of the lizardmen. The way he wielded the scythe against his opponents was mostly about utilizing leverage and the unusual attack pattern of the unconventional weapon.

There was a whole load of sneaking between and behind defenses, disarming opponents, sometimes quite literally, and a whole load of bisecting. He would do this badass move where he thrust the scythe behind one of the lizardmen by sneaking it between its legs, then jumped over its head while pulling the scythe through its body.

Now that was a proper way to split an opponent's body in two, Neave thought, just as he smashed a lizardman’s midsection so hard its body split apart.

Neave felt a deep itch all over his body as he watched the swordsmen of the battlefield embarrass themselves. These were the cream of the crop that the empire had to offer?

Still, Neave envied them a bit for their ability to use actual swords in the fight. He resorted to using the sledgehammer due to its bulky construction, which resulted in a much more durable tool.

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. It was confirmed that the spiritual weight didn’t bother him. But it was also true that he couldn’t really 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.

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. Perhaps it was time to start managing his goals a bit better?

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 he could use in this fight. There was almost every type of weapon imaginable within the ring, but they were either too high rank for him to use, or too fragile to survive for longer 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 simply stiffened up mid-air, and he couldn’t move. In the corner of his vision, he spotted an ethereal purple girl. It was a ghastly creature roughly in the shape of a humanoid child, but it 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, 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 ethereal 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 a little, still unable to get a hold of his movements.

Before he could land on the ground again, the little girl gripped him in the middle of the air, and he felt his body convulse and deform into the shape of a ball. If it wasn’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, all his current worries were eclipsed 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.

With a purple flash, the world lost some color, only to be washed away by a flood of violet.

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 with terror as the creature opened its maw, and violet light began gathering deep within its throat.

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