Chương 218

The northwestern ridges of the Silvermount range were quite a bit different from the frozen peaks they'd been trudging through so far. It's not that it isn't cold, but it feels less harsh. Here, the biting mountain air waged a constant war against the dense, earthy mana seeping up from the Ironwood canopy just a few miles below. Hardy, dark-leaved shrubs pushed through the snow, and the smell of ancient pine—something that could have been a very pleasant change—clashed violently with the scent of distant burning.

Orion kept his breathing even as he moved across the rocky incline on foot, while scanning the sparse tree line. The sky to the northwest remained thick with oily black smoke, making it very hard to forget the kind of tragedy his mother was flying into, and the fact that the high winds had carried the smell here felt almost like an omen.

"A lot has gone wrong here," Selene murmured, gracefully sidestepping stones even without looking. Her eyes were wide open, but unfocused as they followed the currents of fate.

"I can sense violence and desperation even through the corruption the Silence causes." Before anyone could say anything, a booming roar echoed through the cliffs, followed by the unmistakable sound of shattering rock and tearing wood. More importantly, it was coming directly from the same direction as the canister. The squad didn't need to say anything. They broke into a run, cresting the nearby ridge and looking down into a shallow, snow-covered basin.

Orion did his best to absorb as much information as possible and immediately realized there was no time to prepare for the upcoming fight. Pinned against the cliff wall was a lone figure wearing torn, bloodstained remnants of a deep-green cloak that he remembered seeing in Valderun on a druid of the Ironwood Sentinels. And looming over the wounded man was something that the war had pushed up the mountain, as it clearly didn't belong in the snowy landscape.

It was a chimera native to the deep forest, but the Silence had warped it beyond recognition. Its leonine body was covered in fur that looked like rusted iron shavings, and its goat-like horns emitted a gray glow. In the middle of the snowy landscape, it stuck out like a sore thumb, but that didn't seem to have helped the druid escape it.

Corrupted Iron-Mane Chimera - Displaced Predator Class: [Ironwood Stalker] [C-rank] Level: 88 Mind: 21 Attunement: 309 Body: 441 Traits: Iron Fur [C-rank]; Silence Miasma [C-rank]; Savage Brutality [C-rank]; Internal Mana Manipulation [C-rank] Never an easy fight, eh? The beast raised its paw to deliver the killing blow to the defenseless Sentinel, and Orion began giving orders.

"Dorian!"

"On it!" Dorian vaulted off the edge, dropping twenty feet directly between the Chimera and the druid. The moment his boots hit the packed snow, golden hexagons burst outward. The monster's paw slammed into the wall of light with a loud thump, but it didn't break through. Its sheer force would have crushed a Tier One shield, but Dorian's new spell simply absorbed the impact, dispersing the heavy blow across the interlocking panels with a low hum.

The beast roared in confusion, which quickly turned into rage once it realized humans were trying to save its prey. With its next roar, a thick cloud of dark miasma engulfed the shield. The golden light flickered, but Dorian stayed firm, reinforcing his shield once more. When its paw slammed into it again, it held, though the hexagonal pattern cracked briefly.

"Take its legs!" Dorian grunted, shoving the massive monster away. Normally, Orion would have preferred to take his time fighting the beast, to observe all its abilities and develop a theory about how its kin operated, because he was pretty sure that if the forest's monsters were already starting to spill out when the Iron State had not yet advanced beyond the druids' communities, that meant more would be coming. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

But the urgency of the situation was too great to delay any longer than absolutely necessary, so Orion pinpointed the beast's center of mass, and a moment later, a localized pulse of gravitational pressure slammed into the Chimera's spine, forcing the creature to its knees as the stone beneath it cracked.

"Luna!"

"[Pierce the dark!]" she called out, swinging her wand down with a grunt of effort. A razor-thin line of searing orange light shot from her wand, bypassing the beast's magic-resistant iron fur entirely, and punching cleanly through the unarmored joint of its front shoulder. The Chimera shrieked, collapsing forward as its leg gave way. Selene was already in motion before the beast fell. She glided down the slope and cast a crescent blade of pure moonlight.

It materialized above the downed beast's neck and dropped, severing the corrupted spine in a single strike. The heavy, iron-furred body slumped to the ground, dead before it even realized it had been outmatched. System Notification +37, 200 Exp Orion exhaled, feeling the tension drain from his shoulders. A while ago, an Iron-Mane Chimera would have pushed them to the limit, but with Dorian and Luna's new rank and his and Selene's greater experience, they managed to overpower it in less than a minute.

Of course, it was a lone monster against a team that knew each other's skills inside and out, so it wasn't really a fair fight, but that kind of thinking didn't apply in these circumstances. Giving the monster one last wary glance, he quickly moved toward the crevice in the mountain, where he discovered a wider opening than he expected. Inside was a lair, one that had been inhabited for quite a while, judging by the smell.

However, he didn't need to wonder about the original occupant, as a carcass of a sabertooth cub was rotting to the side, where the larger chimera had smashed it against the wall. At the back of the cave, he found the canister they'd come here for, and quickly slipped it into the void-silk bag with a careful use of antigravity.

I use it much more often than basic telekinesis these days, but it was such a big part of my scientific career that it's much easier to cast it through Knowledge and resist the Silence with it, despite being less precise.

"Orion, get over here!" Luna yelled from outside, and when he rushed out, he found her on her knees beside the wounded Sentinel. He engaged [Hypotheticism] the moment he laid eyes on the man. The druid was in his late thirties, pale-faced and slick with cold sweat, but it wasn't the claw marks on his arms that were causing him distress, despite being quite deep. Embedded deep in the right side of his chest, just below the collarbone, were three pieces of dark metal.

To his physical eyes, they looked like regular shrapnel, but to his Trait, it was clear they were something much fouler. They were weeping a gray ichor directly into the man's bloodstream, and considering that the man couldn't be higher than tier two, Orion doubted he'd last much longer.

"I can't heal him," Luna said, and, as if to emphasize her point, the glow around her hands flickered and disappeared the moment they neared the wounds.

"The metal is interfering with my magic, and I don't have the Knowledge needed to cast this using your method."

"It's another silence-based weapon," he assessed. It wasn't anything he'd seen before, but it was clear that the shards created a localized dampening field inside the druid's body, blocking his ability to draw mana and preventing his cells from regenerating even with outside help.

"Can't you just pull them out?" Dorian asked, keeping his shield raised to guard the perimeter. Orion examined the jagged edges of the metal with his enhanced vision before clicking his tongue in frustration.

"No. The shrapnel is barbed. If I pull it out with forceps or any magic, the jagged edges will tear his subclavian artery, and he'll bleed out in seconds." The druid gasped with a wet, rattling sound that echoed in his chest, indicating his lungs were filling with fluid. His eyes fluttered, pupils dilated with shock, and Orion knew there would be no help coming from him.

"I'll have to levitate them out perfectly straight," he muttered, calculating the exact vectors required. He'd have much preferred flying back to base camp, but that wasn't an option.

"The moment the metal leaves the tissue, the artery is going to rupture from the lack of pressure. Luna, I need you to cauterize the wound the absolute millisecond the shard is clear."

"Cauterize?" Luna swallowed hard.

"Orion, if I make a mistake, I'll burn a hole through him."

"Don't use the Needle," Orion instructed with clinical calm.

"Use a soft flame, something just hot enough to seal the blood vessels. [Hearth's Ember] might be good for this; I remember you managed to cast it very early. If you focus, I know you can do it. And if you can't… Well, he would have died anyway." Luna took a deep, shuddering breath, clearly not very reassured by his words, but she gathered her courage and nodded. The tip of her wand started to glow with a faint, cherry-red light, and he knew she would do her part.

With that settled, Orion hovered his hands over the dying Sentinel's chest and carefully drew the Field inward, gathering all the power he thought he'd need for this and using it to create a microscopic, hyper-focused bubble of [-g] around the first piece of shrapnel. The dark metal quivered. Slowly and smoothly, the barbed shard began to lift out of the torn muscle.

Orion held his breath, keeping the perfect vertical course so the barbs wouldn't catch the fragile artery walls and cause even more damage than they already had.

"Now," he commanded softly. The shard slipped free of the skin, and a spurt of bright red arterial blood immediately surged upward, but Luna was already there. She pressed the glowing tip of her wand against the tear, and a moment later, a sharp hiss of steam and the smell of burning flesh filled the air, stopping the bleeding on the spot even as the druid's groans turned into whimpers.

"One down," Orion said, feeling his spirit lift even as he maintained the immense concentration needed to overpower the localized Silence field with pure physics-magic.

"Two to go." It took five agonizing minutes to finish the operation. Orion's hands trembled with the effort of controlling the microscopic gravity fields, fighting against the dampening effect of the shrapnel every step of the way. Luna was pale, her lips pressed into a thin line as she sealed the arteries behind each piece of metal she removed. When the third and last shard clattered onto the stone, Orion collapsed back onto his heels, gasping for air. System Notification +1 Mind +67, 300 Exp Level up!

Orion ignored the prompt and looked down at the druid. The anti-magic field was gone, but the man was still teetering on the edge of death from shock and blood loss. From the shadows cast by the cliff wall, Pauline stepped forward. She didn't say a word and knelt beside the Sentinel, uncorked a crystal vial filled with a brilliant crimson liquid, and tipped it past the man's pale lips. That's a high-quality potion.

I guess Mom must have stocked her up before leaving, since she won't be around to watch over me for a while. It was surprising that Pauline would use it on a complete stranger, someone not from the Sanctum, but he could see the calculation in her eyes and knew she was doing it because the man probably had valuable information. Almost immediately, color started to return to the Sentinel's cheeks.

His shallow, rattling breaths grew deeper, and the terrible burn scars Luna had left behind began to heal as they were replaced by healthy, pink tissue. Pauline rose and smoothly vanished into the shadows, leaving the squad alone with the survivor. The Sentinel's eyes snapped open a moment later. He looked up at the grey sky, and panic immediately took over his face. Scrambling backward, his hands frantically searched for a weapon he no longer had.

"Easy," Orion said, keeping his hands raised and open, and preparing to attempt a gentle interrogation.

"You're safe."