There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)
Chapter 180 - 174. Lock and Load

Chapter 180: Chapter 174. Lock and Load

The air almost vibrated with the buzzing sound of flapping wings.

Zein couldn’t bring himself to count how many, because they were plenty enough to cover the light coming off the ceiling. With the way they came out of nowhere, undetected even by Bassena and Kei, they were either teleporting here after discovering the squad’s presence, or equipped with a very superior stealth skill.

"Flying termites," Zein muttered, observing the swarms from Bassena’s shoulder. There were dozens of those insects, each as big as a child, flying toward them with red eyes. Alone, the winged creature wasn’t such a problem, even two-stars esper could easily deal with it. But in swarms, they were categorized as high-level hazards.

Strangely enough, Zein didn’t feel anxious.

Even while they were seemingly screwed, jumping to a dark canyon while avoiding the beasts, the squad members didn’t look fazed at all. Except for Kei, who apparently hated flying insects as much as Han Shin hated worms. But it was more of a disgust than fear, so she was fiercely shooting at them instead of shrieking and running away.

Well, even if the swarms were high-level hazards, these people had been used to things that were much more dangerous, so they just calmly proceeded with Bassena’s orders. The espers in charge of guarding grabbed the one they were responsible for and jumped off the pathway, leaving the attack to Kei and Abe, and of course, Bassena. A flurry of mana bullets, fire arrows, and fleeting darkness stabbed the advancing termites.

With Zein on his shoulder and Han Shin dangling on his side, Bassena jumped from the narrow path to the jagged cliff below. Rather than plunging straight, they utilized the jutted boulders on the side of the cliff to descend into the canyon safely.

"Argh--can you stop carrying me like a sack of potato?!" Han Shin hissed, positively convinced his waist was already bruised at this point. And he was dizzy, dangling on Bassena’s side like this while the esper jumped from cliff to cliff.

"Beggars can’t be choosers," Bassena answered simply with a smirk.

"This is discrimination!" the healer yelled between Bassena’s laughter.

Meanwhile, Zein who was perching relaxedly on Bassena’s shoulder observed the swarm, which seemed to be endless, despite the attack from Bassena’s darkness and Abe’s fire arrows. While probing with his magic strands, Zein found several winged termites that were smaller in size, but fiercer in miasma level and protected by armor-like carapaces.

"Commanders," Zein muttered. Because of his position, even quiet words were easily caught by Bassena, who promptly reacted by sending a dark blob shaped like an orb in front of the guide’s face. Zein grabbed it instinctually and suddenly could feel Bassena’s sentient darkness that had been flying around slamming the insects to the cave wall.

"They’ll obey you,"

And so, Zein started to control Bassena’s children of darkness toward the commander-like beasts while the esper jumped down. The child of darkness moved following Zein’s instruction and stabbed one of the smaller, stronger termites.

The termite commander shrieked as more and more sentient darkness stabbed it, until one finally decapitated its head. Immediately after its death, some of the flying termites jerked in the air and started to fall, as if they lost their ability to move.

"Eww!" one of them fell right next to Bassena and almost grazed Han Shin, who immediately folded his body even more and clutched into Bassena’s clothes. "But cool, but eww--they looked like worms without their wings--fuck!"

"Naoya!" Bassena ignored the squirming healer and called out to the archer. "The smaller one!"

Abe jumped off a boulder and turned his body midair, creating an almost invisible bow and arrows made of belting wind. Three arrows launched into the air and Kei grabbed the archer’s coat before the man crashed into a particularly large boulder. Almost simultaneously, the arrows and the moving darkness found their targets and stabbed the commanders’ cores, causing giant termites to rain down on them and making Han Shin shriek in disgust.

Along with the falling insects, the descending groups finally reached the thin fog of miasma they saw from above. They braced themselves with a coat of mana around their body, and Carra cast barriers around Nadine and the porters as they breached the black fog.

What they saw below was an expanse of rock pillars and cracked soil forming a great labyrinth. A few glowing stalagmites made clusters here and there and acted like street lamps, allowing them visions of the land twenty meters below.

"Blind beetles on the ground, eleven o’clock!" Kei shouted once they pass through the black fog.

"Field hunt!" Bassena gave his order, to which Zhan and Gus responded with energetic exclaim.

"Yeah!!"

"That’s right! Come at me you fuckers!"

Zein glanced down, seeing the excited espers brandishing their weapons even before they put the person they were carrying down. Zhan leaped from the nearest boulder to slash the falling beasts, while Gus took out a giant hammer from his storage and smashed the unsuspecting blind beetles on the ground. By the time Zein’s foot touched the ground, all he gotta do was watch the two espers massacre the rest of the fallen termites and the beetles hiding on the ground.

"Phew--that was fun," Bassena commented as he watched the over-energetic espers clear the field. Well...the early stage was usually still fun, unlike they ended up in poison swamps.

"Indeed," Zein said with a subtle smile behind his mask, giving Bassena a pleasant surprise.

"Not. Fun. At all."

Of course, not everyone shared the same sentiment, particularly Han Shin that was crouching on the ground while clutching his bruised ribs. It was fortunate that he was a healer.

Bassena just chuckled, and they waited there for a while until Zhan and Gus finished their hunt, sitting on a large boulder while checking for headcounts. "Anyone injured?"

"No, Sir."

"Good," Bassena nodded and gave a signal to the scout, who immediately disappeared again. "Let’s catch our breath for a bit while Kei does her things."

"Here?!" Han Shin parted his lips, looking at the carcasses scattered around them with a grimace.

Bassena just shrugged and replied nonchalantly. "Loots," he said, while pointing his thumb toward the surveyor and the porters that had started to scavenge the battlefield and scoured the environment.

"Ugh--"

* * *

In the end, they decided to continue their advance after the surveyor put on a beacon at the site of their first fall. They also searched for the end of the cliffside path that they were supposed to end up with initially, and put another beacon there.

Because of the landscape, they couldn’t really see anything beyond the stone pillars that acted like a wall. The place was also much more spacious than they initially thought, because Kei gave up on scouting far to prevent getting lost. She stopped scouring the place after finding a big cluster of glowing stalagmites, and the group decided to make a camp there.

"How big is this place?" Han Shin whined the moment the group finished clearing the field around the stalagmites from beasts. He found a boulder and sat there, looking around the space. "I feel like I’m in a giant world or something."

Which wasn’t really an exaggeration. The field around the stalagmites itself was as large as a sports stadium, and the ’roads’ they had been traveling in were as wide as a highway. The beast itself consisted of giant insects, and with all those large boulders and giant stone pillars, it gave a sense that they were being miniaturized and thrown into a canyon somewhere.

"My detection still can’t sense the edge of the wall," the scout spread the map she had been making on the way. "Which means it’s at least more than ten kilometers wide."

"Basically a whole town, huh?" Bassena stared at the map, feeling like looking at an ant nest. Well, they did encounter some ants on the way--and crickets, and spiders, and centipedes that got Han Shin cursing so much. "What do you think, Ong?" He looked at the surveyor, who had finished setting up another beacon and registering the map that Kei made.

"It’s basic cave beasts," the man said. "But cave beast usually does not include undead."

"That one was a surprise," Bassena chuckled, recalling the way they were betting on what kind of insect would come out next, only to be faced with a swarm of undead locusts--which were technically an insect too, only trickier to kill.

Dungeons spawning on their world was basically an interdimensional bridge connected to other corrupted worlds that had fallen because of Celestial Wars. Because of this, dungeons usually had fixed environments and types. It could be a jungle desert, or even underwater. Consequently, undead beasts usually only came from undead dungeons.

"They still shaped like an insect, though," The surveyor tapped on his chin in contemplation. "So it’s most likely an artificially induced mutation."

Zein cast a glance at Bassena and the esper immediately explained as usual. "Something--an item or a creature, turned these insects into undead."

"Seeing that not every beast turned into undead, it’s probably an item located in a specific section. As the beasts passed the place, they are turned into undead," the surveyor added.

"So, if we trace where those undead insects come from, we can find this item?" Zein asked.

"Uh-huh,"

"Wait, we’re going to trace them?" Han Shin raised his brows.

"Better than roaming this place blind," Bassena shrugged. "We can’t just casually take our time to explore this huge-ass place. We have to be cautious about the possibility of time dilation as well. Since this is our only lead for something substantial, we’ll check it out."

"Hmm...that’s true. But haa...undead is such a drag, though..."

That sentiment received a lot of agreement this time, especially from the damage dealers. Even Zhan, the battle maniac, paused eating his packed meal to let out a sigh. This reaction came from the fact that they would need to exert a bigger amount of magic energy every time they attacked.

Different from normal beasts, the undead had an inherent ability to reduce physical damage taken. To be able to effectively attack them, the espers would need to coat their weapons with magic energy. But doing so fastened the corrosion process in their system, because the mana gates they opened to channel their magic energy outward would, in return, absorb the miasma from their surrounding. This meant they would have to be careful and manage their skill usage more to avoid eruption.

"I could never go all out facing undead," the spearman lamented. He liked to swing his weapon at the beasts to his heart’s content, just absorbed in the fight and didn’t have to think about how much mana he should put out or tracking down his corrosion level every minute.

The briefing team--Bassena, Kei, and Ong--responded to that reaction with a wordless stare. Eventually, Nadine voiced the unspoken meaning behind the silent gaze. "Why do you think we guides come inside the dungeon with you, then?"

"...oh!"