Chapter Ninety-Five: Fire Support

The massive human-faced rat had been dead for a long time. Its death was complete, and you realized that the rat plague it had unleashed had vanished with it.

You inferred that the rat-plague ability was somehow connected to dreams...

"To kill in dreams and have it equal death in reality... Then all the strange deaths in town must have been caused by it. No wonder we never saw a single rat. So the town itself should be safe now."

Colin could not help feeling a wave of relief. If that thing were still alive, he could not even imagine how troublesome it would have been to deal with.

Fortunately, it had all been resolved.

Afterward, Colin, long accustomed to strange beings, collected the carcass of the giant rat and stuffed it into Li Ugly's backpack.

By now, he no longer had the kind of questions he had on his first day, wondering why such a thing could grow so large and whether it violated science.

Carrying a lantern and sending its light into the dim church, Colin led his group inside.

The moment they entered, they were met by a heap of human bones.

They covered the floor, packed even more densely than outside, so densely that Colin could not even find a place to set his feet.

Near the entrance, stacks of tables, chairs, and wooden stools had been piled up, as if the people here had tried to block something.

Unfortunately, it had done them no good.

All of them had died beneath the horror of that giant human-faced rat, leaving behind pile after pile of gruesomely decayed bones.

In the sealed interior, Colin could almost hear the hellish screams that once echoed here.

Yet because the deaths had been so thorough, and for some reason the bodies had not transformed into aberrant forms, there was not much of a stench inside.

After a cursory search of the church, and finding no hidden room, cellar, or anything similar, Colin withdrew.

The only somewhat useful discovery was that in earlier times, the church had apparently worshipped thorns, not suffering.

There were no carvings of the crucified faithful at all.

Only thorns.

Still, the architectural style was much the same as the one outside.

Another interesting discovery was that the statue once enshrined inside had vanished.

As for where it had gone, the hint gave no answer, and Colin did not know either.

"It looks like there is not much valuable information left here. We can head to Water Manor now. And by then, the cannon should be about ready."

Colin thought it over briefly. That way, he could use the castle as a practice target.

If conditions allowed, he felt that a full bombardment and direct flattening would be the safest course of action.

Once he was certain no further information could be gathered, Colin led his group out of the town piled high with bones.

The party pressed onward.

After about three hours traveling through the barren, dead woodland, Colin and the others finally saw the manor at the foot of the mountain, now little more than a ruin.

"What the..."

Colin froze.

He did not even need to flatten it himself; the entire manor had already been reduced to rubble.

The manor's central fortress-like structure was so ruined that only a few fragments of wall and several stone pillars remained, with broken masonry scattered everywhere...

Even so, from the ruins alone, everyone could still faintly sense just how vast this manor had once been.

At that moment, Colin suddenly felt something, and his gaze shot toward one side of the ruins. Instantly, his eyes went still...

At the place where the manor's gate should once have stood, several lanterns had been thrown down, piled up like garbage.

You realized these were lanterns from some of the survivors, and they had not been discarded long ago.

...The group of survivors who had said they were going into the underground area? Had they died? Even their vital lanterns had been abandoned here...

Colin had a guess.

After all, while lanterns could not be stored in a backpack, no survivor would simply throw one away out of inconvenience.

At most, they would set it aside somewhere.

So clearly, something had attacked them, seized their lanterns, and tossed them aside, leaving them strewn here like trash.

And the thing that attacked them was highly unlikely to have been a survivor...

Because lanterns were valuable items.

As the thought flashed through his mind, Colin beckoned and led the group toward that direction.

Soon, he brought everyone to the gate and saw the lanterns, all of them physically smashed beyond use.

"Seventeen lanterns. All of them ruined..."

Li Ugly said in surprise while holding the parchment scroll. "What kind of thing did those people run into?"

As he spoke, he could not help but feel a fresh chill of fear.

After traveling this far, Li Ugly had come to understand something deeply: if you were not strong enough, and did not have someone powerful to lean on, a place like this would kill anyone who came here.

At the same time, Colin and the others caught once more that long-missed, nauseating stench of rotten flesh and blood.

That meant...

The smell either came from the decaying corpses of those survivors, or from the aberrant creatures that had already been lurking beneath the manor.

But Colin, hardened by long exposure to putrefaction, felt the odor was a little stale, not like something freshly dead.

He withdrew his gaze from the lanterns, now completely worthless, and instead looked at the interior side of a toppled iron-bar gate at a footprint.

The footprint looked human, but not quite. It was one large and one small, and horribly distorted.

Each print had traces of dark red left behind on it, already dried, like the remnants of congealed blood.

You realized that this creature had some human traits, but it did not seem to be an aberrant form.

If it was not an aberrant form, then what was it?

Colin was puzzled for a moment, but he had no doubt about the information provided by the hint, because aberrant attacks never cared whether lanterns were present.

"Whatever they ran into, it looks like they are in grave danger now."

Colin said that, then led the group to continue searching the area.

Following the trail of footprints, they reached what looked like the ruins of a room. On one wall of the ruins was carved a noble crest.

The crest had peeled and blurred with age, making it difficult to recognize.

But one could still faintly make out the main figure: a crowned lion.

This seemed to be the noble emblem of Water Manor.

Along the lower edge of the crest, there were also two carved words that seemed to mean "pureblood."

On the floor of this room was a dark stairway descending belowground. It appeared that the entrance had once been sealed with stones.

But at this moment, it had been smashed open from the inside by some brute force, revealing a passage leading downward.

The stench was coming from there.

The footprints continued down the stairway into the darkness.

You sensed that this seemed to be the family tomb of Water Manor, and faintly felt that there might still be some survivors underground.

...A family tomb, survivors...

Colin's eyes narrowed slightly. The best thing to do now would be to take an explosive barrel and blast a path all the way in, but that would not leave any room to care about casualties.

Save them, or not?

At that moment, Li Ugly, who had been holding the parchment scroll all this time, suddenly shouted, "They're here, they're here! The cannon support has arrived!"

...

At the same time, beneath the family tomb of Water Manor, several figures stumbled out of a dim room in a wretched state.

"We don't have time! Keep up..." the man in the lead said in a low voice.

But the next second, they all stopped at once, faces draining with fear.