Monarch Chapter 192 (Patreon)

Chapter 192

The moment the explosion rocked the sewers, part of the ceiling immediately gave way.

Rayne had been expecting something like that after seeing how violently the first blast had shaken the walls, so he reacted before the first large slab of stone could reach them, spreading threads from [Weaver’s Protection] across the group and creating a web of protection overhead.

Rocks and chunks of ancient stone slammed into the threads, some being caught and others redirected, but there was simply too much falling debris for the skill to protect them from every direction.

A large amount of sludge that had been thrown into the air by the explosion also came crashing down with the rubble, covering their armour almost instantly.

Even Rayne found himself completely submerged beneath the filthy mixture for a moment, with thick sludge running over his helmet, shoulders and arms before some of it even managed to force its way through the narrow gaps in his armour.

Lyra had already created vines around herself to protect her since she wasn't wearing full-body armour, but even that wasn't enough to keep everything away, and several clumps of sludge stuck to her clothes.

She frowned heavily as she looked down at herself, her expression making it seem as though she wanted to rip her clothes off right there, but whatever disgust she felt was nothing compared to the soldiers covered from head to toe in the mire devourer's remains.

Rayne quickly looked around once the falling stones had stopped, making sure the monster was nowhere in sight.

Only after confirming that he couldn't see even a trace of the creature did he take out his helmet and begin removing the sludge from his armour, scraping it away and pulling out the disgusting material that had somehow slipped inside through the armour's slits.

The others did the same, with some looking far more miserable than others.

Kesh eventually gave up on trying to wipe himself clean and simply dropped to his knees, pulled out his canteen and poured the entire thing over his face before letting the water run down his armour.

"I fucking hate sewers," he muttered while wiping his face. "I will never ever come back here."

Rayne couldn't help but chuckle despite himself as he washed the sludge from his own face. "We will have to traverse through the sewers more than once for sure. At least the monster is—"

He stopped before finishing the sentence, and his expression changed immediately.

He hadn't received any notifications.

Rayne's hand froze against his helmet as the realization struck him.

He had been so relieved to see the monster getting blown apart that he hadn't even thought about the notifications that usually came after killing something.

There had been no familiar buzzing sensation in his mind, no indication that the monster had been defeated.

The explosion had been enormous. It had torn through the mire devourer's body, blasted its sludge apart and thrown pieces of it everywhere, but apparently that still hadn't been enough.

The monster wasn't dead.

"Damn it," Rayne muttered, his eyes immediately scanning the pool.

He had barely spoken when Lyra, who had somehow managed to get over her disgust, stepped toward the pool of sludge.

What had once been dirty water was now almost entirely filled with the devourer's remains, making it look more like quicksand than water.

She raised one hand and created another spell, a single thick vine emerging from the ground before moving toward the pool. It pushed down into the sludge and began searching beneath the surface.

"What exactly are you doing?" Rayne asked, watching the vine disappear deeper into the mess.

"Trying to get the core so it can't regenerate," Lyra answered simply.

Nate, who was sitting on the ground after the blast, looked up at her. "It isn't dead yet?"

"I don't think so," Rayne replied.

"I didn't feel any buzzing sensation in my mind," Heins said, still wiping sludge from his armour. "The gods haven't rewarded us for the kill yet."

Rayne nodded. "Yes. It's alive. But it can regenerate?"

"Yes," Andrew answered. He was inspecting his sword while speaking, his armour also covered in far more sludge than the others but he didn't seem to care. "We were lucky we were able to hit the core, but the cores normally take more to destroy. These types of monsters always come back because of that. It should be trying to get its body back even now."

As Andrew said this, he pointed toward the far edge of the pool. "There. I see movement."

Everyone immediately looked in that direction.

For a moment, Rayne could see nothing except the dark sludge slowly shifting across the ancient stone floor, but then something moved beneath it.

Lyra's vine reacted instantly, sliding through the sludge and searching around the area.

It disappeared beneath the filthy surface for several seconds before suddenly tightening. Lyra's expression changed, and she smiled as she pulled the vine back.

Something came out with it.

She placed the object on the floor between them, and everyone stared at it.

It was a crystallized ball roughly as large as a football, though much of its surface was still covered in thick sludge.

A faint light could be seen beneath the grime. The core pulsed faintly, almost like something was alive inside it.

Looking closer, he realized that the sludge surrounding it wasn't simply stuck to it. It was slowly moving toward the crystal, gathering around it and attempting to form something.

The monster was already rebuilding its body.

"So should we finish it?" Kesh asked, staring at the crystal.

Lyra nodded, but a complicated expression immediately passed across her face. She crouched beside the core and looked at it for several seconds before sighing. "Honestly, I would have liked to harvest it."

Rayne raised an eyebrow. "You would?"

"Of course." Lyra looked at the enormous amount of sludge surrounding them. "A core from such a big monster isn't something you find every day. But I don't want to carry this thing back."

She glanced toward the tunnel behind them, then toward the crystal again. "We also don't know if even Weskins has the tools to get anything useful out of it.”

Rayne couldn't argue with that. They had come into the sewers for a completely different reason, and none of them had expected to fight a level sixty-five monster in the middle of an ancient drainage system.

The puppet they had found earlier suddenly seemed much more convenient to carry than a monster core through miles of filthy tunnels, especially because it was still alive.

Hence, Rayne stepped toward the crystallized core before simply saying, "Let me break it up.”

There wasn't much reason to argue with that, and the others nodded in agreement.

Rayne tightened his grip on his sword and pushed death mana into the blade, dark energy spreading along its surface before he plunged it directly into the crystal.

The blade struck the core with a sharp crack, but the damage was far less than he had expected.

A small fracture appeared around the point of impact, while some of the grime covering the crystal simply stuck to his sword.

Rayne frowned and pushed harder, putting his entire body behind the blade as he forced it deeper. The crystal resisted for several seconds before another crack echoed through the sewer.

The fracture spread rapidly across the surface, and the core finally began to give way, slowly breaking apart as pieces of crystallized material flew in different directions.

Rayne continued forcing his sword downward until he finally reached the bottom of the core, and at that moment the entire thing suddenly released a strong glow.

The light grew brighter for a brief instant before shutting down completely.

Almost immediately, the remaining pieces of the core broke apart into dozens of small fragments that looked almost like pieces of glass.

Notifications also rang in his head, but he decided to check them when he was back in his room.

Kesh and Heins immediately moved to pick them up. They still frowned at the grime sticking to the pieces, but still did the work.

They put the fragments into one of the empty bags they had brought with them, making sure not to lose any before tying it shut.

Rayne watched them for a moment before looking down the dark tunnel ahead.

They had already spent several hours inside the sewers, and whatever curiosity he had about what lay farther ahead was being overwhelmed by common sense.

"Let's move back," he said. "We've been here long enough for today."

He still had mana remaining, but he wouldn't be able to keep [War Pulse] active throughout the entire journey, and he doubted Lyra had much mana left either.

From what he knew about her skills, the exploding seeds she had used against the mire devourer consumed a considerable amount of mana.

That was another reason why continuing deeper into an unknown sewer without their usual advantages would simply be foolish.

He turned them around, and they began making their way back toward the entrance.

Rayne didn't activate [War Pulse], since there shouldn't have been any monsters in the section of the sewer they had already cleared, and thankfully that assumption proved correct.

The journey was far less tense than the one that had brought them here, though nobody was particularly interested in lingering.

Halfway through the return journey, Lyra used one of her vines to pick up the puppet they had discovered earlier, carrying the bronze body behind them as easily as though it were another piece of equipment.

They continued at a steady pace until they eventually decided that walking was taking too long and began running.

It took them roughly two hours to reach the entrance, but by then Rayne had recovered enough mana to activate [War Pulse] again.

He immediately checked their surroundings before leading everyone out of the sewer and back into the ruined city.

It was already evening by then, and darkness was beginning to settle over the ruins.

They didn't stop for anything else and simply walked briskly through the ruined streets, keeping their formation tight and avoiding unnecessary encounters.

Thankfully, they managed to reach the outer areas without another fight.

Once they finally left the ruins behind and entered Blackstone City, the first thing they did was report to Prince Caelan.

Caelan was obviously surprised when he saw what they had brought back.

The presence of a mire devourer in the sewers wasn't particularly shocking to him. The Godless Ruins contained countless monsters, and something powerful eventually making its way into an underground network wasn't difficult to imagine.

The puppets, however, were another matter entirely.

Caelan immediately took the bronze puppet from Lyra and spent more than half an hour inspecting it, turning it over, examining its joints and searching every part of its body for some kind of identifying mark.

He was looking for something that could tell them who had created it, but there was nothing. No crest, no name, no inscription and no obvious indication of the mage who had constructed it.

Eventually, Caelan sighed and placed the puppet back down. "I don't know enough about puppets to tell you much more than that," he admitted. "But if you found more of them in the sewers, then there is a possibility they were being mass-produced."

Rayne frowned. "Mass-produced?"

Caelan nodded slowly. "A single puppet is expensive enough that most mages wouldn't waste one on something as ordinary as maintaining a sewer. But if a mage cabal had enough resources, they might have been producing them in large numbers for a specific purpose."

After that, they discussed things a little more, especially the fact that there was still dirty water running through the sewer.

According to Prince Caelan, that was unusual. Even Rayne and the others had noticed it, considering how old the ruins were, but in the end, they could only guess that there might be some monsters living inside the sewers that were responsible for it.

Once they had finished discussing it, they were dismissed.

Caelan decided to keep the puppet and the broken core fragments so he could give them to Weskins for examination, while also promising that he would tell Captain Edran about everything that had happened.

Of course, that would be a different version of the events since he can't tell him about the sewers.

For now, they had done enough and simply went to rest.

All of them got dinner first, and Rayne also checked with Dean about how things had gone with the squad while he had been away since he had handled them in his absence.

Thankfully, there hadn't been any major problems, and after hearing everything, Rayne finally returned to his room.

He didn't do any more training that day. After everything that had happened in the sewers, he simply lay down and allowed himself to rest.

Yet even as drowsiness slowly took over him, he couldn't help but wonder about the puppets they had found down there.

There had to be a reason they were in the sewers. But he didn't know then that he was going to find about it soon enough.