Blind Box World - SSS-Rank Eye of Truth

Chapter 56: The Entrance

Ethan knew that look.

He had seen it in Victor Hale’s eyes, in Nolan Greaves’s eyes, in the Anomalous Coordinate, when they looked at Laira and calculated how much a Mythical rank Partner was worth.

But the look in these Harpies’ eyes was far more primal.

Victor and Nolan wanted to possess her.

This lot wanted to eat her.

And amid the shrill calls of the Harpy flock, a fragment of old memory surfaced in Ethan’s mind. An afternoon in the library at Aurora Academy, when he was still an ordinary trainee who hadn’t awakened, sitting reading a book that hardly anyone bothered to borrow.

’The races living outside the bounds of the safe zones follow a law of survival entirely different from human society. To them, every creature possessing energy is a resource. They don’t only hunt humans. They hunt one another. Absorbing the flesh and blood of a higher-tier creature is the fastest and most common path of advancement in the wild world, and it is also why the races beyond the walls rarely manage to form a stable civilization.’

’In the wild, being more intelligent is not a good evolutionary path favored by survival.’

Back then, Ethan read that line and saw it only as dry knowledge for an exam.

Now, standing on this hill, he understood what it meant.

To the twenty Harpies surrounding them, Laira wasn’t a creature. She was a feast. A Mythical rank Crimson Dragon, carrying the Solar Flame Seal within her, walking straight into the middle of their territory. To creatures used to eating carrion and fighting over each scrap of one another’s flesh, this was something a hundred generations of their ancestors had never gotten to taste.

They were working out how to divide her up.

The calls of the Harpy flock grew more urgent, more excited. A few began to advance, claws scraping across the stone.

Ethan frowned.

And he decided not to give them another second to imagine it.

He didn’t shout. Didn’t draw a weapon. Didn’t say a single word to Laira.

He only blinked.

[Eye of Truth.]

The world before Ethan faded into two colors, black and white. And on the bodies of the twenty Harpies, twenty red points flared up all at once. One at the base of a wing. One at the hollow of a throat. One deep in the ribcage, where their energy core was beating.

Only an instant.

Beside him, Laira blinked faintly along with him.

And in her mind, the entire battlefield appeared all at once. Twenty targets. Twenty death points. The order already arranged: which was nearest, which was most dangerous, which was trying to circle around behind them.

Ethan closed his eyes. The pain behind his eyeball passed through, then died out.

Laira’s lips curved.

She flicked her hand.

There was no roar. No display.

Countless arrows of fire shot out of Laira’s palm all at once, splitting into clusters, tearing through the wind along twenty entirely different trajectories. They didn’t fly straight. They curved, weaving past the rocky outcrops, arcing around behind the ones trying to flee.

Each arrow sought out a red point.

The nearest Harpy fell first, an arrow through the hollow of its throat. Two more on either flank collapsed after it, the bases of their wings ablaze. The one about to take to the air hadn’t even left the ground before an arrow punched through its ribcage, shattering the energy core.

Twenty Harpies.

Less than five seconds.

Not a single arrow off the mark.

When the last arrow went out, the hill fell silent again, and twenty corpses lay scattered across the stone, each with exactly one wound, precisely at the most fatal spot.

Laira dusted off her hands and turned back to look at Ethan.

He only gave a faint nod.

Lěng Ruò Yān stood there, her mouth hanging open.

She couldn’t get a word out.

She knew this Crimson Dragon was strong. She had felt it last night, when Laira’s heat had set her wooden puppets smoking just from standing nearby. She had silently filed Laira away as the kind of opponent she shouldn’t face head-on.

But this...

This wasn’t strong. This was an entirely different level.

These Harpies weren’t second-rate monsters. In this wildland, a mature Harpy was usually rank C, some reaching rank B. In terms of tier, they were at least equal to Bronze, some touching Silver. Twenty of them, surrounding an ordinary team of four or five Bronze-tier Awakened, and that team would be wiped out within minutes.

And yet she had just waved her hand once.

Once.

And the thing that chilled Ruò Yān most wasn’t the dragon’s power.

It was the precision.

Twenty arrows, twenty fatal points, not one miss, not one wasted shot, in a fight where the dragon hadn’t even had the time to look her opponents over. That was impossible. Even the most seasoned assassin needed time to locate a weak point.

Unless someone had told her where.

Lěng Ruò Yān’s gaze slowly shifted to Ethan.

She recalled his blink just beforehand. The blink she had dismissed as meaningless.

These two hadn’t exchanged a single word. Not one signaling gesture. The dragon hadn’t even looked in his direction.

And yet she had known exactly where to shoot.

A chill ran down Ruò Yān’s spine.

And in her head, an image from last night suddenly rose up. Her, standing in the middle of that open ground, aiming seven puppets at this person. Her, sending a puppet to reach its claws into where he slept. Her, telling him she would be the first to finish him.

And he had only tapped his dragon on the head once, and told her to stop.

Lěng Ruò Yān swallowed dryly.

’Lucky.’

’Lucky I didn’t go too far last night.’

But she had no time to digest that feeling.

Because a scream tore the sky open.

It didn’t resemble the shrill calls of the Harpies just now. This scream was lower, thicker, and it carried a pressure that forced all three of them down onto one knee.

From above, a figure dove down, landing amid the corpses.

This Harpy was nothing like the flock from before.

It stood nearly three meters tall. The feathers on its wings weren’t dull gray but pure black, gleaming like metal. On its head was a ring of bone grown naturally, curving up like a crown. And its eyes, not round and lifeless like the others’, were narrow, razor-sharp, full of intelligence.

It looked down at the twenty corpses beneath its feet.

Then it lifted its head, and it spoke.

In human speech.

"You." Its voice was raw, warped, as if its throat hadn’t been born to pronounce this language. "Have killed. My. Descendants."

Lěng Ruò Yān went bloodless.

"The Harpy Queen," she whispered. "Run. Run now!"

But it was already too late.

The Harpy Queen tilted her neck up to the sky, and screamed.

And from every direction, the sky went black.

Not twenty anymore. This time it was hundreds. They poured in from every corner of the wildland, answering their queen’s call, and in the blink of an eye, the whole hill was blanketed by the sound of beating wings.

Laira immediately blazed with fire, shielding Ethan.

But Ethan seized her hand.

"No." He looked around, assessing the situation in a flash. "Too many. You could kill hundreds, but you’d run dry. And that one..."

He looked at the Harpy Queen, and the [Eye of Truth] gave him the answer he didn’t want to hear.

On the Queen’s body, he saw no red point at all.

Not because she had no weak point. But because she was too strong, too far above his tier, to the point that his eye couldn’t see through her.

Gold-tier equivalent. At least.

"Run," Ethan said.

"Run where?!" Lěng Ruò Yān shouted, running while swinging her arm to drive her three puppets into the Harpies diving at them. "The way back to the village is cut off! They fly faster than we do!"

Ethan looked around as he ran, his mind working furiously.

The road back to the village: cut off. And even if he could make it back, he’d be bringing an entire Harpy flock right to the very village he had promised not to endanger.

Run into the dead city: the Bone Demon Serpent was there.

Run out onto the open ground: surrounded and torn apart within minutes.

There was only one direction left.

Ethan lifted his head, looking toward the horizon, where the murky yellow pillar of light still towered up into the sky.

"Toward the pillar of light," he said.

Lěng Ruò Yān whipped around, her eyes going wide. "Are you insane?! What did I just tell you? There’s a—"

"There’s a whole crowd of monsters gathering there," Ethan cut in, his voice cold and clear. "Including the Bone Demon Serpent. Including that bird. Do you think these Harpies dare fly in there?"

Ruò Yān stopped short mid-stride.

She understood.

This wasn’t a plan. This was a gamble. Ethan was about to use a bigger danger to scare off a smaller one.

"You’re about to throw yourself into certain death to escape death!"

"Yeah." Ethan didn’t deny it. "If you have a better idea, say it now."

She didn’t.

The three of them changed direction, charging straight for the pillar of light, with hundreds of Harpies and a Queen right on their heels.

The closer they got, the more the air changed.

The pressure in the space began to warp. The bits of loose stone beneath their feet trembled faintly then floated up. The murky yellow light from the pillar washed over everything, making it all look as though it were sunk in amber.

And exactly as Ethan had calculated, the Harpy flock began to slow.

They called out in panic. Some circled, not daring to advance further. Even the Queen’s urging screams couldn’t drag them in.

But the Harpy Queen herself didn’t stop.

She kept chasing, her metal-black wings tearing the wind, her razor-sharp eyes locked onto the three of them, and the fury of one who had just lost twenty descendants was clearly greater than her fear.

"She’s still coming!" Laira yelled.

"I know!" Ethan ran with everything he had, the pillar of light now towering right in front of him, so tall he had to crane his neck to see the top. "Just keep running!"

"Keep running and we slam straight into that pillar!" Lěng Ruò Yān shouted.

And that was exactly when all three of them realized something.

This pillar of light wasn’t a pillar of light.

At close range, beneath the murky yellow glow, Ethan saw it clearly: the thing he had taken for a dense beam of light was actually a surface. A plane slowly rotating, and within it, hazy, he glimpsed shapes that didn’t belong to this place. A sky of a different color. A different ground.

The eye on his forehead lit up on its own, and a line of notification drifted past.

[Independent spatial entrance detected.]

[Difficulty cannot be determined.]

[Contents cannot be determined.]

Ethan understood, and in that moment, every piece fell into place.

This wasn’t a pillar of light.

This was a gate standing open.

This was the very thing Vesna had spoken of, the thing the Bone Demon Serpent was watching, the thing the colossal bird and the hundreds of bizarre creatures were pouring toward.

This whole wild world wasn’t gathering here out of curiosity.

They were lining up to walk in.

Right at that moment, the Bone Demon Serpent, like a pillar propping up the heavens, its body rearing more than a hundred meters high, suddenly turned its head to look toward them.

"What the—?!"