The Paladin in the Abyss

Chapter 101 Phil's Explosion

Shuni's Holy Emblem emitted a bright red light, filled with positive energy and symbolic of life force, which surged into Bruto's body. The wounds on his back and shoulders healed at a visible rate. Bruto blinked and realized that the pain had left his body; the formerly dire wounds had now become no more serious than scrapes from a fall.

Thanks to Bruto's reckless move, the previously dire situation of several Temple Guards had greatly improved. Each of the Dwarf Warriors was injured, but none severely. Dwarves, too, possessed a fine warrior tradition, with military prowess no less inferior to that of the Demons.

After Lancelot and Bruto each killed a Beard Demon, the number of Beard Demons decreased to six, turning the tide immediately. Now outnumbered, these Demons were caught between attacks from the front and the rear.

"Good heavens, Lancelot, you arrived just in time," came a voice from behind the Temple Guards. It was a Goblin, sounding lively and completely unharmed, "What in the world is this bearded Succubus? Is it that fool Bruto?"

"You're the fool! Green-skinned Dwarf melon!" Bruto roared back in the roughest voice a Succubus could possibly have and charged forward again, swinging his hammer.

Meanwhile, Lancelot was entangled in a fierce battle with the remaining two Beard Demons. While the Demons were assaulting the city, many more battles awaited him that night. To conserve his True Qi, he now relied solely on his physical strength to fight, still holding the upper hand despite facing two opponents.

The Demons had seen Alamir heal Bruto and, after witnessing Lancelot's superb swordsmanship, they understood clearly they had no chance of winning.

Suddenly, one of the Beard Demons shouted something in a very rough language, and the Demons sprang into action. A Beard Demon launched a fierce attack on Lancelot and the Temple Guards, while the remaining four without hesitation fled down a nearby small path.

As a cleaver from a Beard Demon suddenly stabbed at him, Lancelot executed his signature sword move — a downward swing followed by a turn and Horizontal Slash, ending with a stabbing thrust.

His first downward swing knocked the enemy's weapon into the ground, the following Horizontal Slash severed the unretreated arms of the Beard Demon at the elbows, and the final thrust pierced directly into the Beard Demon's face — he remembered Kalalin had said the weakness of Demons was the heart, and that of Demons was the brain.

These swordsmanship skills he was already highly proficient in had been further enhanced by his physical augmentations as a Spiritual Cultivator, enabling him to execute the triple-move as fast as lightning, almost within the blink of an eye. However, the enemy's purpose was still achieved, as another Beard Demon, which had also been engaging Lancelot, had now escaped dozens of feet away. Read new chapters at empire

The situation was similar on the other end. Faced with an enemy's sudden burst of attack, the Dwarves reflexively chose to tighten their defense. By the time they realized the Demons' intentions, the other three Beard Demons had already ran beyond their attack range, meeting up with the one that fled from Lancelot, they all sprinted along a small alley to escape.

Lancelot frowned, it seemed that he couldn't conserve his True Qi after all. He was about to perform a Wood System Divine Skill, summoning vines from the ground to entangle the enemies, but he stopped his hand movement mid-air as Kalalin acted quicker.

The Scholar activated a scroll he had prepared earlier, and yellow Magic Aura gathered around him. As he uttered the last word of the Spell, it vanished in the direction his finger pointed. Simultaneously, a vast expanse of gray-white webs appeared out of nowhere beneath and around the fleeing Demons, completely blocking the Beard Demons' escape routes.

Three Beard Demons were almost instantly entangled in the webs, but one, using agile movement techniques, managed to dodge the webs' ensnarement. Seeing its companions all trapped, it cursed but showed no intention of stopping to help. Instead, it swiftly darted to the side, trying to skirt around the web-covered area via a wall corner.

At that moment, Lancelot had drawn a sharply-edged silver coin, but another unexpected aid made him stop again.

A figure suddenly leaped down from the rooftop of a building on the street side, and the fleeing Demon only looked up in surprise as the figure was almost upon it.

Two short swords glowing with a green light thrust into the Demon's eye sockets, pierced the eyeballs, and then dug into the brain behind them.

Leveraging the force of the descent, the assailant's twin swords directly penetrated the Beard Demon's skull, then twisted the Demon's head backward to an impossible angle, emitting a clear snap of breaking vertebrae.

Meanwhile, Kalalin had already pulled out his sling, ready to launch cold iron projectiles at the Demons who could neither fight back nor dodge, but a large round bomb had already landed in the web, marked with a skull, with only half a foot of fuse left burning rapidly.

"Damn it, Phil to hell with you!"

The assailant cursed loudly, in response was the goblin's unpleasant laughter. Lancelot recognized it as the voice of old Reap, the spy disguised as a bartender from Twin Bridges Town.

Old Reap suddenly ran towards Lancelot's side, Lancelot noticed that the bartender was now in a half-Werewolf state. Apart from his nails that seemed excessively long, his body was still mostly human, but on his neck was a terrifying wolf's head, running while frequently turning to check the fuse's burn.

Lancelot was startled by his actions, flapping his wings instinctively forward, causing his whole body to slide backward.

When the bomb's fuse was finally about to burn out, old Reap had already run more than twenty feet away. He abruptly threw himself to the ground, firmly covering his head with both hands.

This posture stunned everyone, but after a few seconds, nothing happened.

The Beard Demons, trapped in the web, also stared tensely at the bomb, heaving a sigh of relief and opening their mouths as if to say something.

Just then, the explosion occurred.

First, there was a strong flash of light, followed by burst flames that engulfed all the Demons, and then a circle of visible shockwave followed.

Lancelot sharply turned around, his wings tightly wrapped around his body, using his sword to brace against the ground, barely managing to stabilize himself.

Bruto and Kalalin didn't react as quickly, their Succubus wings like sails absorbing too much wind, blasting them backward like sheets of paper fiercely blown away.

"Oh haha! What a beautiful explosion!" Phil's voice came up, filled with a sick frenzy.

All of a sudden, Lancelot particularly understood old Reap's earlier reaction, noting that the Werewolf apparently wasn't a first-time victim of this goblin's explosive schemes.