Chapter 120: Away With Your Vermin

Two more shapes detached from the canyon walls, their pale, translucent skin shimmering as they phased in and out of the oily fog. They moved with a terrifying, liquid grace, their elongated claws clicking against the stone.

Aden didn’t move to help. He stood fifty paces ahead, his back to the caravan, his sapphire eyes fixed on the deeper darkness of the gorge. He could feel the pulse of the Abyss ahead—something larger, something older than mere scavengers.

“Eren, left flank! Lorelei, cover the rear!”

Aden’s voice wasn’t a shout; it was a vibration that settled into their bones.

Lorelei’s spectral form flared into a brilliant, haunting violet. She didn’t use a blade. She simply raised her hands, and the shadows around the trailing wagon began to solidify, twisting into ethereal thorns that impaled a Creeper as it tried to leap from a ledge. The creature thrashed, its pale blood sizzling against her energy, before dissolving into grey ash.

The mercenaries finally found their nerve. “Phalanx! Shields up!” the scout leader bellowed.

The iron-clad wagons lurched forward, the horses foaming at the mouth as they were driven into the fray. Crossbow bolts tipped with silver-salt whistled through the air, thudding into the swarming mass of blue eyes that now poured down the canyon walls like a living landslide.

The gorge was no longer silent. It was a cacophony of clashing steel, the guttural roars of dying men, and the rhythmic, high-pitched clicking of the swarm.

Eren was a whirlwind. Every time a Creeper closed in, he met it with a violent release of energy that sent the beast reeling. His face was set in a mask of grim concentration, his red irises burning so brightly they left trails in the air. He was a hammer, just as Aden had taught him, striking again and again until the pale shapes before him were nothing but meat.

But the swarm was endless. For every Creeper Eren decapitated, three more took its place. The mercenaries were starting to buckle, their shield wall splintering under the weight of the assault.

“They’re coming from the ceiling!” someone screamed.

A massive section of the obsidian roof seemed to detach itself. It wasn’t a swarm. it was a single entity—a Weaver of the Depths, its bloated, translucent body nearly as wide as the gorge itself. It descended on silken strands of dark energy, its dozens of eyes fixed directly on the lead wagon.

The scout leader paled, his sword trembling. “A Weaver… in the outer gorge? That’s impossible!”

Aden finally moved.

He didn’t run. He took a single, measured step forward, and the ground beneath his boot shattered. The sapphire mist in his eyes didn’t just swirl; it ignited, pouring out of his sockets like twin funeral pyres. He reached beneath his cloak and drew the dark steel blade.

The air in the gorge turned cold—not the natural chill of the shadows, but a soul-searing frost that made the Creepers pause in their frenzy.

“I told you,” Aden said, his voice echoing through the canyon with the weight of a falling mountain. “I’m the insurance policy.”

He vanished.

A silver-blue line of light bisected the darkness. The Weaver didn’t even have time to hiss before its massive, bloated head was separated from its thorax. The dark energy strands snapped, and the gargantuan corpse crashed into the gorge floor, crushing a dozen lesser Creepers beneath its weight.

Aden reappeared ten paces beyond the carcass, his blade held low, a single drop of black ichor sliding down the matte steel. He didn’t look at the dead monster. He looked at the thousands of blue eyes still flickering in the fog.

“Next,” he whispered.

The swarm, for the first time in the history of the Black-Stripe Gorge, hesitated. They looked at the boy with the red eyes, and then they looked at the man with the blue fire.

The hesitation lasted only a heartbeat. In the Abyss, hunger always outweighed fear, and the scent of fifty terrified men and a dozen lathered horses was a siren song the swarm could not ignore.

With a collective, wet screech that rattled the armored plates of the wagons, the landslide of pale flesh resumed.

“Hold the line!” the scout leader screamed, his voice cracking as a Creeper’s claw shrieked against the iron wood of the lead carriage. “Vanguard! Clear the path or we’re all graveyard meat!”

Aden didn’t turn back. He didn’t need to. He could hear the rhythmic thump-hiss of Eren’s Resonance—the boy was a heartbeat in the dark, a steady, violent pulse that told Aden his student hadn’t broken yet.

“Lorelei,” Aden’s voice cut through the cacophony. “Keep the children behind the iron. If a single claw touches them, I will burn this gorge into a glass trench.”

“Consider it done, Master,” her voice drifted through the air, cooler than the mountain mist. A dome of flickering violet energy erupted around the middle wagon, the translucent thorns lashing out like whips at any Creeper that dared to leap from the shadows.

Aden turned his focus forward. The Weaver’s death had cleared the immediate path, but the fog ahead was thickening, turning from an oily grey to a suffocating, ink-black soot. Something was suppressing the light. Something far more disciplined than a mindless swarm.

He blurred.

To the mercenaries watching from the wagons, Aden was nothing more than a strobe light of sapphire death. Every time his dark steel blade flashed, a dozen Creepers were silenced. He wasn’t hacking or slashing; he was dissecting the swarm. He moved with a terrifying economy of motion, his feet barely touching the blood-slicked obsidian as he wove through the wall of limbs and teeth.

Clang.

Aden’s blade met something that wasn’t soft flesh.

The impact sent a shockwave through his arm that would have shattered a lesser man’s shoulder. Standing in the center of the path was a Shadow-Stalker—a mutation of the Creeper lineage that had traded its pale skin for a hide of obsidian-hard chitin. It stood seven feet tall, its four arms wielding serrated blades made of its own calcified bone.

Its four eyes, glowing a sickly, necrotic green, locked onto Aden’s sapphire gaze.

“A Stalker,” Aden mused, his voice a low, dangerous velvet. “The Hive-Mind is actually sending its captains out today. I’m flattered.”

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