Chapter 256: Sword Festival (IX)

’…Fucking hell. It looks as disgusting as it does in the books…’

Its hide looked like layers of wet stone fused with raw meat.

Thick segmented plates overlapped each other from head to tail, each one the size of a large shield, colored in dull shades of grey and sickly brown.

Between those plates ran thin seams of softer tissue that pulsed slowly, expanding and contracting with the creature’s sluggish breathing.

The head rested near the far side of the chamber.

If it could even be called a head.

There were no eyes.

No nose.

No features that belonged on a normal living creature.

Instead, the front of the worm ended in a massive circular maw that looked less like a mouth and more like a tunnel carved into flesh.

Rings of jagged teeth spiraled inward along the inside, dozens upon dozens of them, layered like the blades of a grinder.

Some were broken, and others were stained dark with what seemed to be old blood.

Ckrr… ckr…

Every slow breath the creature took made those teeth shift slightly with a faint grinding sound.

’Jasmine,’ he called out inwardly.

’What realm is this thing?’

[Late King.]

’…Not the saint-realm one, huh?’

[Yeah… I can feel a few vibrations through the ground, and although I can’t exactly pinpoint its locations, it should be in a radius of a mile or so.]

’…That’s quite close. That means that this could be an offspring of hers…’

Gray looked at the creature for a long moment.

Then he looked at the weak point.

The base of the first segment behind the head, where the plating hadn’t fully calcified, was visible from where he stood, a slightly softer discoloration in the tissue between the first and second plates, the seam there wider than the others.

Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but that was something Gray had been looking for specifically.

He kept holding his breath and slowly started walking towards the big fat worm.

His rapier shone in the faint light coming from miniature holes as he continued approaching the worm, now being only ten meters away.

Ckrr…

The worm moved slighly, and this movement caused Gray to stop completely.

The creature’s massive body contracted once, a slow ripple that moved from tail to head through the segmented plates, the grinding sound from the teeth intensifying briefly before subsiding back into its resting rhythm.

Gray waited for five full seconds.

Then he kept moving towards it.

Seven meters.

Five.

The smell at this distance was substantial.

Three meters.

He could see the weak point clearly now, the tissue there visibly softer, faintly luminous in the way that living tissue was luminous when it hadn’t been hardened by calcification yet.

The seam was approximately the width of two fingers, running in a curved line that followed the circumference of the first plate segment.

He raised the rapier.

One meter.

He placed his left hand on the plate above the seam, feeling the slow pulse of the creature’s breathing through the hide, timing it, waiting for the specific moment in the exhale when the plates separated by their maximum distance and the seam widened by the fraction that made the difference between a strike that reached the core and one that didn’t.

Ckrr…

The exhale came.

The seam widened.

Gray drove the rapier in.

Fwip!

Splat!

The blade found the core through the soft tissue with the precision of something that had been aimed at exactly this point from the moment he dropped into the hole, and he felt the resistance of it give way completely as the tip reached what it was looking for.

The worm’s body spasmed.

Once, massive and total, every plate slamming against every other plate in a single simultaneous contraction that sent Gray staggering back two steps, the rapier still in his hand, the creature’s body shuddering through its death in long, diminishing waves.

Ckrr… ck… ck…

Then… it stopped, meaning that it was dead.

But Gray still didn’t absorb his body with the [Ring of Gluttony] as he wanted to confirm if this was truly an offspring or not.

“Fuu…” He exhaled once and reached down to wipe the blade.

SHAKEEEEEEEE!

Then the ground suddenly moved, the entire chamber floor lurched, stone grinding against stone, dust raining from the ceiling in sheets, the dead worm’s body sliding several inches sideways from the force of it.

Gray grabbed the wall.

The vibration came again, stronger, the interval he had felt through the floor in the passages above, but amplified enormously, so strong now that it arrived in his chest rather than his feet.

He looked at the dead worm.

Then, at the hole in the chamber wall that was considerably larger than the one he had dropped through.

’…It really was the offspring.’

[Yeah. Did you have a plan to deal with it?]

’I did.’

Gray looked at the circular maw of the dead worm, the rings of jagged teeth spiraling inward, the darkness of the tunnel it contained.

“Ugh… this is going to be an awful experience.’

He grabbed the outer ring of the maw, ignored everything about the experience of doing that, and pulled himself inside.

“…Fuck.”

The inside of the worm was exactly as bad as Gray expected.

Much worse, actually.

The walls of the passage within the maw were slick with something he obviously didn’t want to identify, warm in the specific way that living tissue was warm.

The smell was total and immediate and the kind that settled into clothing and hair and stayed there for considerably longer than the experience that produced it.

He pressed himself against the inner wall and found the gap between two of the innermost tooth rings, a space just wide enough to see through if he kept his head at a specific angle, and looked out.

BOOOOM!

A much larger worm came from a hole in the wall.

[…This is the Saint-level Creature.]

’Yep… it does indeed look different from its offspring.’

The dead creature outside was grey and brown and quite large, but this one was in a whole different league.

It was fifty meters long, moving through the chamber as if it didn’t belong there. Its body wasn’t the dull grey of its smaller counterpart; instead, it was a deep black with strange patches of sickly green that pulsed lightly as it breathed.

Gray noticed that it was bioluminescent, something he obviously hadn’t expected.

The teeth in its mouth were longer than his forearm, and they were clean, not broken or stained like the smaller creature’s teeth.

There were so many teeth that it was hard to count them all.

The creature’s massive size made the chamber seem too small, like it was meant for something else entirely.

Once again, Gray was forced to hold his breath.

’…Why does this always happen to me? Am I that unlucky?’

Grrrk…

The Saint-level worm moved through the chamber slowly.

It had no eyes, same as the offspring, same as every Ground Devouring Worm in the literature.

But it moved as if it didn’t need eyes to know exactly where everything in its environment was, its head sweeping in a slow arc across the chamber floor.

It stopped.

Gray watched through the gap between the tooth rings.

The Saint-level worm’s head lowered until it was nearly touching the dead offspring, the massive maw hovering inches above the still body.

“….”

The green patches along the parent’s body pulsed three times in rapid succession.

Then once more, slowly.

Then the Saint-level worm did something he hadn’t expected.

It pressed the side of its head against the offspring’s body.

Then it straightened and drove itself into the chamber floor.

KRAAABOOOOM!!!

The impact shook the entire network, the chamber walls cracking in thin radiating lines, the dead offspring’s body lurching sideways from the force of the parent’s entry into the stone.

A new tunnel opened in the floor, enormous, the edges of it compressed outward by the same pressure pattern Gray had identified in the passages above, but on a scale that made those look like scratches.

The vibration that followed was massive, and then gradually, over the course of several minutes, it became less massive, and then less than that, and then it faded to a pressure in the feet rather than the chest, and then to nothing.

Silence returned to the chamber.

But strangely, Gray stayed where he was.

One minute.

Two.

Five.

He didn’t move.

[It’s gone.]

’I know,’ he replied, nodding lightly.

[The energy signature has moved significantly deeper. It’s not in detection range anymore.]

’I know,’ he repeated.

[Then why aren’t you coming out?]

’Because a Saint-level creature with sentience just found its dead offspring,’ he sighed inwardly. ’And left without doing anything about it.’

Jasmine paused at his words.

[…You think it’s waiting for you to come out?]

’It’s a possibility…’

’A creature that’s been alive long enough to reach Saint-level and develop sentience doesn’t react emotionally. It reacts strategically. It found the offspring dead, confirmed no threat was present in the chamber, and withdrew.’

[Which could mean it accepted the death as a natural event.]

’Or it identified that something killed the offspring and withdrew to a position where it could monitor the chamber without being detected.’ He looked through the gap at the empty chamber.

’And if something comes out of that maw, it knows exactly what killed its offspring.’

Jasmine was quiet for a moment.

[…How long do you plan to stay in there?]

Gray looked at the chamber through the gap.

’Long enough,’ he said.

[You’re inside a dead worm.]

’I’m very aware of that.’

[It smells terrible in there, doesn’t it?]

’I’m not discussing that.’

[That’s a yes.]

Gray said nothing.

He shifted his position slightly against the inner wall, found a marginally less unpleasant surface to press his shoulder against, and kept his eyes on the chamber through the gap.

It seems that Seraph was indeed going to wait for a while.

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