In the mist illusion, the Sword Saint Puchi finally gave himself away.
The underground city's passages ran deep and winding, glowing mushrooms hanging along both rock walls and shedding a faint, ghostly light.
The Sword Saint Puchi wove through the dim glow on [Flowing Body Step LV10], tentacles wrapped around four longswords. Every so often one flicked out at a speed the eye could barely follow, and another Puchi that had tried to close in was cut in two.
The Puchis' attacks never ended.
They squeezed out of rock crevices, dropped from the ceiling, even sprang up from the dirt underfoot, all trying to find even an instant's opening in the Sword Saint's guard. So far none had succeeded. If anything, even Little Pig had lost his head to the Sword Saint's blade.
He fought his way up from the deep layers, [Energy Sense] and [Mana Perception] wide open, hunting for any trace of a clue.
On the sixth floor he even found a hoard of treasure buried underground, but so far, nothing that might be the Boss's true body.
Reaching the fifth floor, he pressed on at full speed.
This floor was a special one. According to the guild's records, the Puchis had first appeared here.
What's more, only this floor was almost nothing but Puchis, with no other monsters at all.
Just as the Sword Saint was about to enter the swamp at the floor's center, the distant mushroom forest swayed wildly in a sudden gale, and a black shadow burst out of it, flying low, hurtling straight at him!
"Little Black? So the Boss had already taken her in by this point in time."
The Sword Saint finally stopped. Two tentacles raised his swords in a cross before him. The instant the shadow struck, he twisted his mushroom body, shed the force of the impact, and flung Little Black into the swamp mire.
"Awooo!"
Little Black righted herself, shook the sludge off, and wheeled around to fly at him again.
This time there wasn't enough distance between them for her to build up speed. The Sword Saint hopped nimbly aside and her pounce hit nothing.
Sword light flashed in the same breath, and a big black tail went flying high, tumbling over and over through the air before landing off to the side.
If this had been the present-day Little Black, strengthened by the [Ancient Dragon Path], dealing with her would have been some trouble.
But the Little Black of this point in the illusion, even with a dragonkin's advantage in raw stats, posed no threat to the Sword Saint whatsoever.
Suddenly short one tail, Little Black lost her balance and rolled past beneath him, spraying mud the whole way.
"Awoooooo!" she wailed, and scrambled on all fours back into the mushroom forest in utter disarray, not daring to come out again.
The Sword Saint didn't chase her. Instead, one sword stroke parted the mud, exposing a hollow space held up by mycelium beneath it.
A Knight Puchi leapt out, tentacle-blade thrusting straight at the Sword Saint's cap, only to be cut into five pieces in a single crossing pass and fall back into the swamp.
The Knight Puchi dealt with, the Sword Saint swept his senses in a circle and moved on, never once noticing that in some corner of the tunnels below grew a green mushroom that looked, from any angle, utterly unremarkable.
Only long after the Sword Saint's aura had faded did Little Black poke her head out from behind a toppled mushroom cap.
Sniffling, tears still sliding down through the gaps in her scales, she gathered up her severed tail with both claws, oh so carefully, and hid herself deeper in the mushroom forest.
The Sword Saint Puchi killed his way up from the deep layers to the first floor, then killed his way back down from the first floor to the deep layers, and found nothing.
Instead, on his way back down, a new ambush found him.
"Water Snake Technique!"
Niece, what are you...
The spell Inanna cast posed no threat at all, yet the Sword Saint felt a sudden urge to vomit blood.
How long the endless fighting lasted, he couldn't say.
He had long since given up searching for the Boss's true body.
That did not, however, mean it was over.
He discovered he couldn't get out.
Qisi, the Puchis, Little Black, Inanna, even the Burrowing Bugs. He had killed everything there was to kill, yet the mist refused to break. New Puchis kept crawling out of the underground city's fungal mat, like weeds that could never be cut down for good.
He was starting to regret not installing a [Flame Dragon's Breath] on himself.
With nothing but four swords against a fungal mat that covered heaven and earth, all he felt was helplessness.
Swordwork didn't burn much mana, but sustained, high-intensity fighting like this had nearly drained him dry all the same.
Standing before a stretch of fungal mat, the Sword Saint Puchi sank into thought.
Keep toughing it out, and the ending was certain: death by mana exhaustion.
Sitting down on the mat to recharge was obviously dangerous no matter how he looked at it, but it carried at least some chance of working.
Of the Fortress soldiers who had never made it out of the Mist, the vast majority hadn't revived as mushrooms.
The Sword Saint had no idea whether, in his current condition, he could still revive if he died in here.
Unfortunately, he had no other option.
The mist scenario was the entire underground city. He couldn't break out of it and recover somewhere free of fungal mat.
Puff.
The Sword Saint Puchi plopped straight down, and the mat's mycelium connected to his mushroom body as naturally as breathing.
The next moment, for the first time inside the mist, he heard the Boss's voice, and it was livid: "Finally out of juice, are we? Are we! And you've still got the nerve to steal a charge? Go die!"
"Sigh... of course..."
What little mana remained in his mushroom body was sucked dry by the mat in an instant. The Sword Saint Puchi's two short legs gave one last kick, and he died.
Consciousness rose up out of the sea. The moment Airaven woke, he found a ring of Puchis crowded around him, caps drooping low, their shadow covering him completely.
As always, the first thing to greet his revival was the Boss's voice in his head: "Oh, you're up, Lord Sword Saint who can't even handle the Mist."
The Sword Saint stood, rubbed his bottom with a tentacle, and owned up to it honestly: "Sorry, I blew it. How bad were the casualties out there?"
"Hmph! Casualties? Nothing to speak of. The reserve squads Little Pig set up caught the Mist, and it's about to enter its ebb phase. The coastline is still intercepting, but no more mist is coming in from the Empire's direction."
Hearing that nothing irreparable had been lost, the Sword Saint relaxed. "That's good."
"It is not good at all." A pack-mule Puchi walked up with his four swords wrapped in its tentacles and dumped them at his feet, the blades ringing bright against each other.
At the familiar sight, the Sword Saint's cap tilted a little. "Meaning?"
"While we were kneading you a new body, things turned critical. If you don't get to the front line right now... it's all going to be over!"
The Sword Saint's cap snapped up. "Critical? Are the dwarves truly that strong? Or did the Empire attack while we were occupied? Even then, with the Mushroom Fortress's strength, it can't possibly be anywhere near over, surely?"
"The Empire did attack. But what's about to be over isn't the Mushroom Fortress." Lin Jun paused, a helpless note in his voice. "It's the United Kingdom."
"?!"
"Don't blow it this time." Lin Jun offered no further explanation. Light flared beneath the Sword Saint Puchi's feet, a temporary teleportation array, and in a single flash he was gone.
His body was pieced back together on the other side. The Sword Saint had grown used to dying every few days by now, and almost the instant his consciousness settled in, he flung his perception wide.
An enormous mana shield covered the encircled city, its translucent surface shuddering violently under magical bombardment.
In the sky, No. 10 and Lorenzo were pouring out mana like madmen, pillar after pillar of lightning and beams of light hammering down outside the walls.
On the ramparts, humans, Puchis, and demons ground against each other in slaughter. The crack of clashing blades, the wails of the dying, and the booms of self-destructing Puchis all blurred into one.
On the open plain farther out, a Giant Puchi was pinned to the ground, being pummeled by an Abyss Beast, tentacles flailing, half its cap caved in.
The Puchis beside him snapped his last pieces into place and then charged for the walls without a second's pause, as if one step too slow would bring some terrible consequence.
The Sword Saint rose and stared at the familiar city drowning in the fires of war, his cap wrinkling into waves at the brim.
"Oath City... and it's surrounded! How can that be? What happened to the new defense line?"
Overhead, a ball of lightning dropped from the layered black clouds. It met the city's shield, and after one blinding flash of light, shield and lightning ball slowly dissolved together...
(End of Chapter)
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