The Jester of Apocalypse

Chapter 57: Serpent Mother

Monsters using weapons wasn’t an uncommon sight. Many of the weaker humanoid monsters sharpened sticks or used rudimentary tools, becoming capable of creating more proper weaponry later.

The problem was that it was never good news when a monster used what seemed like proper equipment.

The lizardmen that jumped out of the portal all wore crystalline purple armor. They wielded predominantly spears and halberds shaped out of the same material. Many even held shields.

They moved in formation and created a line of defense. This was a good sign—a good sign that shit was about to hit the fan.

It didn’t take long for Xondir to approach this newly forming line of defense. He took a swing with his scythe and crushed one of the lizardmen. A relatively undesirable outcome, given that he was trying to eradicate the entire line.

With speed and skill much greater than he expected, the lizardmen moved at once and thrust their weapons toward him. He morphed into shadow and swiftly dodged the attacks.

Soon enough, most of the other more prominent members of big sects also moved into the fray.

Everyone below the platinum path was forced to stay back and deal with the snakes.

The blonde woman and the macho man shot out toward the lizardmen. With a wave of her sword, butterflies enveloped the entire formation of lizardmen. They couldn’t do anything to them individually, but some found their way into a few rotting wounds created by Xondir.

They wormed inside and spread veins that paralyzed the lizardmen.

Suddenly, a woman dashed from among the defense formed by the members of the Kurlore sect. The Kurlore sect were defense experts. This naturally also included extensive knowledge about how to break defensive formations.

The woman was brunette, hair was cut short and mostly hidden beneath her helmet. She wore maneuverable leather armor, heavily reinforced wherever possible without compromising mobility. Rather than a bladed weapon, she wielded two bucklers.

It was a common misconception that shields weren’t weapons. An illusion she utterly shattered as she rammed the line of lizardmen with tectonic force.

Cracks spread through the ground, shaking the floor beneath everyone in a hundred-meter radius. While the top cultivators of the peak sects within the empire had extensive training on how to deal with compromised footing, the lizardmen most certainly didn’t.

It was hard to tell Emperium cultivators apart purely by their exterior looks, all except their eccentric young master, that was. Still, it was self-evident who the top dogs among them were.

Several long-haired elders slithered their way into the compromised lizardman formation. They stood near one another as they triggered qi techniques in tandem, sending intense waves of sword slashes at the lizardmen.

Although the lizardman’s formation had been completely disassembled, and many of them had suffered injuries, the serpentine soldiers that had been killed could be counted on one hand.

At this moment, another purple shape made its way down from the portal high in the sky, sneaking in among the ordinary soldiers.

One of the Emperium elders barely defended himself as a massive halberd swing smashed him. After he barely managed to save his life from the devastating attack, the lizardman sent a kick straight at his midsection.

The elder was thrown toward a line of lizardmen, who began swinging and cutting before he even landed. With the skill acquired by countless years of mastery, the elder weaved through the air and dodged a spear thrust and a halberd swing. He almost made it through to the other side of the group of lizardmen.

Out of nowhere, one of them threw itself in its way. His eyes shot wide open, and he readied an attack. He thrust his sword and landed a lethal wound on the scaled warrior, but he lost his momentum and found himself surrounded by opponents.

He blocked attack after attack, desperately holding back the onslaught. He couldn’t spare even a fraction of his attention for anything else. Not even the giant soldier that had made it toward him.

He saw it pull its halberd back and readied himself to defend yet again. This time, however, he didn’t have the luxury to devote all his effort to defending himself from a single soldier. He was stabbed and cut and had to sacrifice an arm to survive for another moment.

That moment passed as swiftly as it began as the halberd swing struck his meager defense. His sword snapped in two, and the halberd continued its journey, tearing into his torso from his shoulder and nearly splitting it in two.

The air grew heavier around the cultivators. It wasn’t merely a matter of the lives of ordinary people being at stake.

Nobody was safe from this attack.

At this moment, just as the focus of everyone shifted toward the dying elder, a small, black-haired child slithered its way toward the massive soldier. The focus of everyone was shifted right back as they witnessed something awe-inspiring.

Neave appeared below the giant lizardman, body practically vibrating with every boost he could execute. Then he swung his fist toward the lizardman’s armor.

Several dozen meters around him, the mist and debris were blown away as a shock wave knocked some of the nearest lizardmen back. Hairline cracks spread through the crystalline armor of the big lizardman, and it recoiled from the momentum.

Before everyone could regain their bearings, Neave punched yet again. The sheer force behind his strike made the other cultivators’ hearts tense up for a moment. One could genuinely feel the tremendous impact behind that move.

And then he did it again.

As Neave got into the groove, he threw out countless attacks, splintering the armor of the lizardman into pieces. It desperately tried regaining its bearings, but it was no use. Once the damage had stacked enough to shatter the armor, Neave pulled the sledgehammer out of his dimension ring again.

Golden runes lit up in the air around him as the hammer came crashing down with the weight of a moon. The lizardman was crushed into a paste, and the shockwave cost several weaker cultivators their hearing for a few moments.

As far as the crowds were concerned, whoever this child was had pushed themselves to their limit and beyond to deliver the damage to this lizardman. Everybody expected to have to rush in and preserve the life of this newly arrived hero.

But he started laughing instead.

“Hahahahahaha! Yes! Now that’s more like it! Damn, why haven’t I just been using a sledgehammer this whole time? Or maybe I should make a gigantic sword instead?” Neave shrugged, “I’ll see if I feel like it.”

Neave rotated his shoulders a bit and cracked his neck. Then, the true slaughter began.

The crowds of cultivators were forced back into combat, one way or another, but it was impossible not to keep one eye on Neave’s antics. He crushed the lizardmen as if they were little more than bugs and ate them whole, armor included.

High-rank materials dissolving into his blood could be a problem, but this crystal specifically seemed alright. The moment it reached his stomach, he felt it evaporate into a thin purple smoke he swiftly ejected from his body.

Neave spotted a woman with an interesting style. It was the armored woman with two bucklers. She fought primarily with kicks and shield bashes, a simple technique, but it was surprising how much utility such a style provided. It also helped that she had some force-related spirit power.

Something Neave really wanted for himself.

Given that the movements of the lizardmen were brutally monotonous to Neave, he found himself observing the other cultivators most of the time.

Xondir, or instead, the edge lord, as Neave had dubbed him, also had an intriguing style. A scythe wasn’t a good weapon for proper combat. Sure, qi techniques and spirit powers could compensate for some of its intrinsic limitations, but that didn’t make it better than a sword.

The blade's curve made it inconvenient for most conventional attacks and optimal swings.

However, this man's style almost wholly changed Neave’s opinion on scythes. The edge lord swept his scythe as if harvesting wheat and cleaved many lizardmen's legs by sneaking powerful strikes below their defenses.

He also swung the scythe upward, moving it beneath and behind their shields to deliver precise stabs at the heads of the lizardmen. He wielded the scythe against his opponents by utilizing leverage and the unusual attack pattern of the unconventional weapon.

There was a whole load of sneaking between and behind defenses, disarming opponents, sometimes quite literally, and a bunch of bisecting. He would do this badass move where he thrust the scythe behind one of the lizardmen by sneaking it between its legs, then jumped over its head while pulling the scythe through its body.

Now that wasa proper way to split an opponent's body in two, Neave thought, just as he smashed a lizardman’s hip so hard its body split apart.

Neave felt a deep itch all over his body as he watched the swordsmen of the battlefield embarrass themselves. These were the cream of the crop that the empire had to offer?

Still, Neave envied them a bit for their ability to use actual swords in the fight. He resorted to using the sledgehammer due to its bulky construction, which resulted in a much more durable tool.

It was massive, tough, and made of non-mundane material, and he wielded it quite well.

But it still got bent way out of shape. At this point, it resembled scrap metal on a stick. And with his next swing, that bit of scrap metal flew off and pulverized the head of a lizardman. Neave kept using the metal shaft.

There were a lot of purple crystalline weapons lying around. Neave wanted to use one, but the spiritual weight was too much.

Although Neave could technically use iron rank metals without any issue now, that was only partially true. The spiritual weight didn’t bother him, but he couldn’t truly utilize those weapons properly, either.

All an iron-rank material could provide Neave was its superior durability and toughness. A good portion of the potential was wasted on him. Literally. Because he simply couldn’t realize it.

Neave’s qi was pathetically weak. Foundation realm qi didn’t have all that much potency, so even if it did cycle through his weapon, it could only barely bring out the superior characteristics of the metal.

He wanted to finally find a way to improve his cultivation. But he just didn’t have the time for it yet, since he had so many other things on his list.

This fight was starting to bore Neave. He noticed two more of the bulkier lizardmen dropping among the ordinary soldiers. He jumped into the air and intercepted the first, snapping its neck and eating it whole before it could even fall to the ground. Then he assaulted the other and overwhelmed it with superior force, the same way he did the first one that appeared.

Neave scoured the dimension ring but found little else to use in this fight. There was almost every type of weapon imaginable within the ring, but they were either too high rank, or too fragile to survive more than a few strikes.

Neave’s instincts screamed at him. He sensed something unusual in his spirit senses. He noticed many cultivators pulling back. Was there something he couldn’t feel properly due to his low cultivation?

Suddenly, Neave froze. Quite literally. His body stiffened mid-air, and he couldn’t move. In the corner of his vision, he spotted an ethereal purple girl. It was a ghastly, partially transparent creature roughly in the shape of a humanoid child but had no distinct facial features.

It held one hand up, and Neave could feel it forcefully restraining his movements.

What the…?

Before Neave could even sense it, a massive spike of purple crystal stabbed him right through his body. This broke the paralysis, so Neave broke off and freed himself. He turned around to spot a tall, male build, ethereal humanoid, much like the little girl. This one had tons of tiny purple shards floating around it.

Countless weapons and armor pieces from the dead lizardmen floated up into the air and fired toward Neave.

Neave was on his way to dodge them, but suddenly, a third figure arrived. A muscular man that moved with impeccable skill, almost impressing even Neave, rushed at him and kicked him in the stomach.

Neave flew through the cloud of crystal shards, several embedding themselves into his head, arms, torso, and legs. The muscular one whirled and jumped toward Neave, reaching him before he landed, and smashed him with a downward kick, crashing his body into the ground.

Neave bounced off the floor, still unable to get a hold of his movements.

Before he could land on the ground again, the little girl grabbed hold of him, and he felt his body convulse and deform into a ball. If it weren’t for his elastic body, he would have been crushed to paste, and even with the power, he felt his body strain under pressure.

Suddenly, something else eclipsed all his current worries as he felt another creature appear from the rift.

It all made sense now. Neave could see thin ethereal strands from these humanoids extending toward the newcomer. They were nothing more than the power of the next monster that arrived.

Purple light flashed, and the world lost all color for a second, only to be washed away by a flood of violet moments later.

It wasn’t huge, only around five or six times bigger than a human. But it was fast. And to anyone with spirit senses, it was overwhelmingly powerful.

Neave watched in terror as the creature opened its maw, and violet light gathered deep within its throat.

He helplessly hung in the air as the purple dragon blasted his body into pieces.