Chapter One Hundred: The Strange Ice Mist (5)

Damn it! The stench was even more nauseating than Garlowe’s filth!

Veil only felt a wave of sickness churn in his stomach, but he had no time to care about that now. He sprang off Garlowe in a single leap, gripping his wand tightly as he fixed his eyes on the grotesque head of the thing before him.

"Graaah...!"

Grodor let out a shrill, tearing cry, its body twitching slightly as the immense form hidden within the mist finally revealed itself in full.

When Veil saw the true shape of this undead creature, he could not help but freeze for a moment. This size was far too monstrous.

His brows knit together, and he stepped back warily. The Grodor in front of him was simply enormous, standing more than ten meters tall. Its gray-white carapace was mottled with dark green patches, and even more shocking was the fact that those patches were not ordinary markings at all, but living eyes that blinked and moved.

Though the surrounding mist was dense, they stood so close that Veil could even count exactly how many of those strange, revolting eyes covered the creature’s body. The eyes kept fluttering beneath their green lids, and from the corners of each one oozed a trickle of murky yellow slime from time to time.

With a soft splat, a drop of the yellowish slime fell onto a nearby plant. In an instant, the dark green plant seemed to lose all vitality and wither away. Worse still, from leaf to stem, the entire plant was corroded by that single drop in merely a few seconds, until only a pile of blackened waste remained.

Watching those drops of murky yellow slime continue to fall onto the ground one by one, Veil’s disgust turned in an instant to shock.

This vile, yellowish liquid could not only devour vitality, it also possessed terrifying corrosive power.

It had to be said that, setting aside the fundamental difference in nature between the two, Grodor’s bizarre ability was almost comparable to evil dark magic.

Veil silently marveled at this, and just then Grodor suddenly opened its mouth and gave a strange, guttural roar. A huge, black skeletal claw swept out in a violent arc, crashing down on Veil like a hammer.

"Shield of Light!"

Veil barked the spell under his breath and flicked up his wand. A pure white radiance burst forth from its tip, surging out in an instant to form a blinding sphere directly before him. Upon that sphere, anyone could clearly see layer upon layer of rippling waves sliding across its surface, and in the blink of an eye the sphere transformed into a white shield of light.

At that very moment, Grodor’s skeletal claw slammed squarely into Veil’s shield.

Veil knew these undead creatures were innately afraid of light magic, so instead of using the highest-ranked fire spell for defense, he had chosen a fourth-tier light shield. Even so, with his level of proficiency in light magic, he still could not withstand Grodor’s attack. With a sharp crack, the shield shattered like broken glass, and the black skeletal claw easily pierced through his light defense, lunging straight toward him.

"Roar!"

Seeing this, Nasa let out a furious shout. He twisted his waist and hurled the two short spears in his hands with brute force at Grodor’s head. But the creature’s carapace was exceedingly hard; the two spears, thrown with all Nasa’s strength, could only leave two faint scratches across it before being bounced away by the hardened shell.

Realizing that his full-strength throw had been useless, Nasa immediately understood that with his current power he could not break through the creature’s armor. He flashed back to Veil’s side, but at that very moment a mocking gleam suddenly flickered in Grodor’s eyes. Nearly a hundred of those disgusting eyes locked tightly onto the two of them. With another bizarre shriek, the ten-meter-tall giant body suddenly surged forward, and two massive skeletal claws came crashing down on Veil and Nasa.

"Damn it!"

Veil’s pupils shrank. Acting almost by instinct, he whipped his wand through the air and cast three layers of magical defense before him in succession: a light barrier, an ice barrier, and a fire barrier. Yet even so, these three defensive layers were still nothing more than ornaments before the massive Grodor. The two giant skeletal claws slammed down on Veil’s defenses, and with a crisp crack, they shattered his outer two barriers with effortless ease. The final layer also broke apart in the blink of an eye.

PS: I hit a snag. I kept writing and revising, but I just could not get into the right state of mind. I know this is too little; I’ll make up for it tomorrow... I’m bowing my head in apology. Feel free to go easy or hard on me, everyone...