bookpub Chapter 146 : Chapter 146
Chapter 146 : Chapter 146
Chapter 146. The Church of the Drowned
At this moment, Baron had completely shed the laziness he had shown during the day. He was in a state of extreme excitement, clutching a bloodstained whip and lashing it viciously across the back of an old man whose movements had been just a little too slow.
SNAP!
The sound of flesh splitting echoed through the cavernous workshop.
The old man swayed, then pitched headfirst into the scalding alchemical vat.
There was no scream.
Only a hiss, like a slab of raw meat being thrown into a pan of boiling oil.
Around him, the workers kept stirring in numb silence. Some of them even scooped out the bits of bone that had not yet dissolved and casually tossed them aside.
Killing intent burst from Sylvia in an instant, nearly tearing through Logaris’s illusion barrier.
“Wait,” Logaris whispered into her ear. “Look over there.”
He pointed toward the shadows at the edge of the workshop.
Several strange figures were standing there.
They wore dark blue robes with their hoods pulled low, their entire bodies tucked into the gloom.
But a closer look revealed that something seemed to be writhing irregularly beneath those loose robes. On the backs of their occasionally exposed hands was a layer of grayish, slick scales, and between their fingers hung a translucent membrane like webbing.
Logaris pushed up his sunglasses and rapidly searched through the intelligence database in his mind.
No match.
In this era, new cult organizations sprang up like mushrooms after rain, but this was the first time he had ever encountered one that reeked so strongly of the sea.
“The bishop of the Church of the Drowned will be here any moment now!” Baron was still on the platform, waving his whip and shouting. “If this batch isn’t finished, all you swine are getting fed to the fish!”
As he cursed, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the greasy sweat off his face.
Suddenly.
The dark-blue-robed figures in the shadows all snapped their heads up.
They had no noses. In the center of their faces were only two tiny holes, and those holes were now contracting violently, as though they were trying to catch something in the air.
“There’s the scent of the living…”
The voice that rasped out sounded like two pieces of wet sandpaper grinding together, carrying a cold, damp chill.
One of the leading priests turned around, and those murky yellow eyes with vertical pupils locked directly onto the spot where Logaris and Sylvia were hiding.
Logaris arched a brow.
These fish-brains actually had noses that sharp?
“We’ve been spotted.” Logaris sighed and took the initiative to dispel the illusion. “Looks like optical invisibility really does need to be paired with presence masking.”
Their figures appeared out of thin air in midair. The two of them were standing atop a crossbeam, looking down at the grotesque chaos below.
The noisy workshop fell deathly silent in an instant.
The whip slipped from Baron’s hand. His beady eyes went wide as he stared at the two figures who had appeared out of nowhere, as if he had just seen ghosts.
“Y-you two, who are you?!” Baron shrieked, his voice going off-key. “How did you get in here? Guards! Guards!”
“Stop shouting, fatso.” Logaris pushed up his sunglasses, the kind of grin hanging from his lips that made people want to punch him on sight. “Your guards are probably still outside at the gate counting stars. As for how we got in… we walked in, of course.”
He lowered his gaze to the vat of churning blue poison below, then glanced at the bizarre blue-robed figures.
“Five tons of Dream Sea Anemone, this much free labor, and a whole pack of brand-new ‘bodyguards’ that crawled out of some sewer somewhere. Quite the operation you’ve got here. So this is what you meant by ‘the Tarassa family rules’?”
The fat on Baron’s face twitched.
But before he could say anything, one of the dark-blue-robed priests moved first.
“Whether you’re rats or insects, since you have seen the blessing of God, you may stay behind as fertilizer.”
The priest violently swept his sleeve.
No arm emerged from within that wide sleeve. Instead, several tentacles made of murky water shot out from inside it!
With a shrill cry of rushing water, the surrounding air instantly turned wet and sticky, and a suffocating pressure descended from nowhere.
Fourth-Tier Water Spell · Abyssal Strangle.
Countless streams of pitch-black water condensed out of thin air. Laden with fierce corrosive power and enormous momentum, they came lashing down toward the two on the crossbeam like dozens of venomous serpents lunging for prey. Before those streams even touched anything, the acidic vapor coming off them had already made the steel beam sizzle with corrosion.
Faced with that torrent of toxic water, Sylvia merely raised her right hand, pressing her index and middle fingers together like a sword.
In the next instant.
A silver light bloomed from her fingertips.
There was no flourish to it at all, just a simple horizontal sweep.
Bzzzt—!
The corrosive flood rushing toward them froze in midair for an instant, then was directly severed and vaporized by some invisible force, instantly dissipating into a cloud of black smoke.
And that silver sword aura did not lose any of its momentum. Like a giant invisible scythe, it swept across the priest who was still in the middle of casting.
The priest was still holding the posture of swinging his sleeve.
Two seconds later.
The upper half of his body slowly slid off, the cut as smooth as a mirror. The filthy, sticky black fluid inside him had not even had time to spurt out before the residual aura scorched the wound shut.
The other priests, who had been just about to make their move, froze on the spot.
One finger.
No weapon. No buildup.
She had only flicked her fingers once, and a cult elite with fourth-tier strength had been cut in half as easily as tofu.
That was the true measure of a fifth-tier powerhouse.
“M-monster!” Baron collapsed onto the ground in terror, all the fat on his body trembling.
The remaining priests let out furious howls. Those sounds no longer resembled anything human. They were more like the cries of some deep-sea beast’s offspring.
“Blasphemer!”
They stopped holding back. Their robes burst apart, revealing the completely mutated bodies beneath. It was a disgusting half-human, half-fish structure, their bodies covered in dark green scales, with tall dorsal fins rising from their backs.
At the same time, they all raised both hands, and the water elements in the surrounding space began to riot violently.
Composite Water Spell · High-Pressure Water Prison.
The moisture in the air was instantly stripped away and gathered into several high-pressure water blades sharp enough to slice through metal, while a rapidly spinning sphere of water formed around the outside, trying to trap the two of them inside and grind them into pulp. With this kind of ultra-dense water attack, even steel could be crushed flat in an instant.
But at the very moment the water prison took shape,
Logaris simply raised his right hand, palm facing outward.
“Spatial Twist.”
The space before him crumpled like a sheet of paper someone had kneaded into a ball, warping into a bizarre distortion.
The high-pressure water blades and spinning water prison that could have shredded armor plating slammed into that twisted layer of space. Not only did they fail to break through, they rebounded from it as though they had hit a mirror. Their trajectories were forcibly bent, reversed, and then hurled back at their casters at even greater speed.
The high-pressure water blades screamed through the air as they flew back in a reverse torrent, slamming violently into those scaled bodies.
Ordinarily, those attacks would at most have broken a few of their bones. But with Logaris’s added spatial oscillation, that rebounding liquid transformed into countless miniature sawblades vibrating at high frequency.
The dark green scales were as fragile as damp biscuits, shattering instantly. Then came the muffled sounds of flesh being churned apart, followed by an explosion of thick, filthy black fluid that made the already fish-reeking workshop even more nauseating.
The leading priest let out a strange, drawn-out shriek. Before he could gather the water elements again, Logaris’s finger was already pointing at the center of his brow.
“Mind Blast!”