Bear School Astartes

Chapter 940 - 922: Leap

"Holy Flower Shield."

Klimte had just gone to rummage through the shelves of standard supplies in this supply hut and hadn’t searched the corpses of the clergy, so when Lann drew out this Shield, his expression grew complicated.

Part regret, part delight.

The regret was that even this Shield hadn’t been enough to save that cleric’s life. The delight was that now they could use this Shield themselves.

"This is an ancient relic of the White Sect once called the ’Mage Slayer.’ The Battle Art on it is [Spell Parry]. Even Magic can be completely knocked aside if you time it right!"

"Then you take it."

Lann tossed the small Shield back to Klimte without even turning his head.

"I’m fast. Those spells will have a hard time hitting me. On the other hand, if it can protect you, that’s important. Your restorative miracles are crucial."

Klimte didn’t fuss about it. He simply strapped the small round Shield to his left arm, pairing it with the long spear he was leaning on.

Everything was for the sake of completing the mission.

After that, Lann and Klimte also busied themselves equipping the Winged Knights with some firebombs and other assorted trinkets suited for dealing with Mages.

Just from this supply hut you could tell: it wasn’t only the Mages who wanted to settle accounts for the clergy’s suppression in the past.

The clergy had also been preparing against the Mages for a long time.

With Ausloes’s suppression gone, and with the support of the two Princes, it would be strange if these factions with long-held grudges didn’t go to war.

And after making these final preparations against the Mages in this supply hut, the squad to rescue Geside was finally about to push into enemy-held territory.

Klimte, familiar with the Inner City’s layout, led the way, while Lann took charge of commanding the team and making plans.

On the road toward the Dragon Training Ground, they all kept their bodies as low as possible.

That was Lann’s demand.

When all was said and done, the objective of the mission was "escort the Daughter of the Angel, Geside, back to the Profound Church."

The ideal outcome was to slip away in complete silence after finding the target. Failing that, they at least had to get her out first and then fight their way clear.

Starting a fight too early would only waste the squad’s already limited combat strength and make the rescue much harder.

But the first problem: before you even entered the Dragon Training Ground, its main gate was practically built atop a miniature city wall—very much in line with the Losric Knight Order’s reputation as a brute-force institution.

Four or five crossbowmen and Warriors patrolled on the small wall.

From their vantage point above, as soon as Lann’s squad turned that corner, no matter how low they crouched, they would be spotted at a glance, without missing a single one.

But under Klimte’s sweat-beaded gaze, Lann merely scratched his chin with a finger and came up with a good idea.

The Demon Hunter’s catlike eyes swept his surroundings.

The corrupt fruits of Ausloes’s Dragon-Transformation experiments didn’t care about distinctions between Inner City and High Walls.

Those flake-like ashes drifted down indiscriminately, infecting any civilians without strong Soul Power or supernatural strength.

In the Inner City there was no shortage of people who had grown into tree-like forms, their roots and black oils driven into the gaps of the brickwork.

The Dragon Training Ground was under the Prince School’s control. They had cleaned out the monsters inside, but outside the Dragon Training Ground... there were far too many people polluted by the Dragon-Transformation experiments.

They simply couldn’t deal with them all.

And in just two or three seconds, Lann found his targets.

Two figures whose clothes had been torn to shreds, skin corpse-pale, hair all fallen out, the shape of their bones bulging beneath their skin.

Or rather—human-shaped sacs of human pus that had yet to burst.

Back in the Demon King Courtyard, Lann had observed these mad, rabid dog–like monsters in greater detail and drawn some valuable conclusions.

These human pus things, before they erupt, are not much different from ordinary wandering souls.

It’s just that if your eyes are sharp enough, you can see the black muck seething under their skin, and the jets of black oil squeezing from their pores, bursting into a blood-mist.

Ordinary people would have to get very close to notice these signs... close enough to trigger the human pus bursting out of the body.

But the Demon Hunter’s vision was clearly more useful than that.

Lann scanned the area and spotted two human pus wretches foolishly kneeling on the ground, hands raised to the sky in supplication.

He turned and gave an order to the two Golden Armor Feathered Knights behind him.

"See those two over there?"

Lann pointed toward where the human pus was.

"Throw them up onto that little city wall. Quick and clean. From closing in to throwing them, don’t take more than two seconds. Can you do it?"

The two Golden Armor Feathered Knights looked at each other, then turned to the targets Lann had indicated, and nodded.

To throw a person up onto a wall more than ten meters high would be pure fantasy for a normal person, a normal Warrior.

But for the Golden Armor Feathered Knights, just an upward sweep of their weapon was probably enough to send an enemy’s mangled corpse flying that high.

Perfectly normal behavior for them.

Lann’s order was carried out smoothly.

Before they rounded the corner, the two wandering souls polluted by the Dragon-Transformation experiments had already been flung up onto the small wall at the Dragon Training Ground’s gate.

The sound of flesh smashing into stone was like a water-skin bursting on impact.

"What was that?"

"On guard!"

On the wall, voices rang out—some steady, some panicked—accompanied by the clatter of armor and the hiss of blades leaving their sheaths.

But in the very next instant, all that clamor was crushed beneath a single sound—

The roar of black mud ripping through human flesh, like a rabid beast gone berserk!

"Screeech!" *2

The Black Mud Snake Group had already been primed to burst out the moment the two Golden Armor Feathered Knights approached, triggered by stress.

It was only because the Winged Knights let go so quickly that the "pus of man" finished its transformation atop the wall.

"Bang bang bang!"

The narrow terrain on this small section of wall was practically the favorite battleground of the "pus of man."

Those thick, burly bodies and that frenzied, utterly unpredictable movement—just turning around was enough for the Black Mud Snake Group to crush a human body against the parapet.

Let alone two of them!

In an instant, the entire small wall section descended into chaos.

The Prince School clearly knew the "pus of man" feared fire, but under the frenzied onslaught of the two Black Mud Snake Groups, not a single person had the chance to throw their firebombs.

Screams, the sound of flesh and armor being torn into shreds...

These two "pus of man" might be taken down by the Prince School, or they might slaughter the entire garrison in this tower and then, in their mindless staggering, tumble off somewhere and curl up in some unknown corner.

Either way, they weren’t in the party’s way right now.

That was all that mattered.

Taking advantage of the bloody, chaotic mess atop the tower, the group slipped past this lofty observation point and entered the Dragon Training Ground.

The scene in the training ground matched the Losric Knight Order’s speculation from the high wall.

A great number of Fire-Transmission Knight Order members had been killed, their bodies strewn across the ground in poses of final resistance.

It looked like they’d only been roughly gathered up into a few piles.

The Prince School seemed to have wanted to give them a proper traditional rite, but there were simply too many dead, and they couldn’t keep up. So only some bodies had had their heads neatly hacked off.

Blood had flowed down from the bright armor, congealing together with the tabards outside the armor into filthy, hardened crusts laced with dust and grit.

A few massive wyvern corpses had also crashed into the Dragon Training Ground, shattering and collapsing the solid stone-brick pavement.

"Next we have to pass through the Knight Order’s great chapel before we can reach the bridge that leads to the Great Library."

Klimte tugged his robe free from a Losric Knight’s corpse; the jagged break on the Knight Armor had snagged the hem.

"Don’t talk nonsense, Klimte."

Lann frowned as he spoke.

"We can’t use that trick in the great chapel. There’ll definitely be top-tier Knights inside! We’re going over by air!"

"You’re commanding a bunch of Winged Knights with actual wings. Why would we fight our way through when we can fly over?"

If the enemy hadn’t held the high ground just now, Lann would’ve already exploited their mobility advantage.

The archbishop froze for a moment, then hurriedly nodded.

He really wasn’t used yet to commanding a squad of Knights capable of short-range flight.

So the way he drew up plans, in Lann’s eyes, still looked rigid and old-fashioned.

The archbishop with the grizzled beard looked around this Dragon Training Ground that had once been majestic and awe-inspiring, now nothing but corpses and shattered stone.

He finally settled on a direction.

"We’ll fly over that wall! It’ll put us directly behind the great chapel!"

No time to waste—Lann immediately began giving orders.

The uproar from the tower above was already starting to die down.

The Winged Knights fluttered the ridiculous yet effective little wings on their backs, their heavy bodies vaulting over the wall’s obstruction, carrying Klimte with them.

Lann, meanwhile, moved far more nimbly; he fired his Projector’s hook to latch onto a crack in the broken stone atop the wall, then vaulted over in just a few quick motions.

Having gone through it once already, Klimte adapted quickly to this efficient and stealthy mode of movement. He began discarding his old notions about the Mountain City’s verticality and walls as obstacles.

And he took the lead, guiding them straight toward the Great Library.

On the way, Lann’s group did indeed spot a few Fire-Transmission Losric Knights hiding in corners and out-of-the-way spots.

Using the Knight Commander’s Ring on his hand as proof, Lann let them know there were still Fire-Transmission footholds on the high wall, and that their forces were regrouping.

These Knights, who had thought the Prince School already controlled the entire city, felt a faint spark of hope rekindle in them.

After a series of short flights, the team sent to rescue Saint Gecide finally crossed a bridge spanning the sea of clouds and reached the Sages’ lair—the Great Library.

"Now, use your perception again."

Retracting the hook from the Winged Knight Armor, Lann spoke to Klimte.

"We’re already at the Great Library. We need a more precise pointer."

The hooded archbishop nodded and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, Klimte’s gaze instinctively lifted toward the sky.

"The Saintess is... on the top level of the Great Library!"

Hearing this, Lann and the Winged Knights followed Klimte’s gaze and looked up.

Between the jagged, interlocking Gothic spires at the top, the dusky yellow sky was flowing with the same dusky yellow clouds.