Chapter 448: Mind-Controlling Worms?!

’Right before the monster’s scythes could make contact, Lord Silas released a point-blank burst of mana so intensely superheated that if I had received it at zero distance, even with my barriers, I would have been incinerated alive in an instant...’

Aurelia gulped.

’...And in that exact second of blindness, he executed a singular, flawless horizontal slash infused with high-frequency wind mana, cleanly severing all eight of the beast’s legs simultaneously, before pivoting smoothly to bring his blade down in a vertical cleave that split the Queen’s armored skull in one go!’

She gulped once more.

’All of it... the flame burst, the eight-fold leg amputation, and the skull execution... took place in less than a tenth of a single second!’

Aurelia looked at Silas’s broad composed back, her chest heaving with awe.

’How strong is my Lord truly...?’ she thought with her golden eyes becoming wide. ’A Demon King? No... a standard Demon King would have been cleaved in two just like that Orc. He is far beyond that. In my old realm, a being of this stature would be revered as a Demon Lord... or a Sovereign of War.’

Silas didn’t pay any attention to the dead spider carcass.

With an excited energetic jog that looked completely out of place for a terrifying Lord who had just split a Tier-3 Boss in two, Silas trotted around the severed legs and rushed straight toward the alchemical silk nest.

The nest had been slightly displaced by the concussive force of the execution, but the six royal spider eggs resting in the center were completely unblemished, shimmering with radiant mana.

Silas dropped to his knees right in the middle of the silk nest, completely unbothered by the sticky monster slime coating the dirt.

He reached out with both hands, lifting one of the massive glowing royal spider eggs high into the air.

His handsome face twisted into an expression of pure glorious greed that would have made the most corrupt goblin merchant in the cosmos weep with envy.

"I finally have you..." Silas whispered, his voice trembling with overwhelming ecstasy.

A wide grin spread across his handsome face, stretching from ear to ear as he threw his head back, letting out a booming, echoing laugh that shook the cavern stalactites.

"THE SPIDER EGGS! HEHEHEHE... AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Silas clutched the massive egg tightly against his chest, rocking back and forth in the dirt like a lunatic who had just struck the mother lode of the cosmos.

"I’M RICH! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH HIGH-TIER ALCHEMICAL SILK AND REINFORCED CHITIN WE CAN HARVEST FROM THIS BROOD?! THE UPGRADE POINTS! THE UPGRADES! HEHEHEHEHAHAHAHAHA!"

Silas hugged the crystalline egg close to his ribs, his mind already spinning through endless territorial blueprints.

’Once these royal beauties hatch, we can establish a permanent alchemical silk refinery right beside Thora’s foundry... We’ll weave ballistic shadow-silk into every uniform, extract high-grade paralysis venom for our scout arrows, and sell them out too to the Lord Association! But since their mother is dead, I’ll need to construct a special incubator in the Beast Pavilion to keep the clutch warm until they hatch...’

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A sharp chiming sound echoed from the brass timer strapped to Helen’s wrist.

The mechanical hands had struck the exact noon mark.

Silas paused his manic rocking.

He carefully placed the glowing royal egg back into the safe center of the silk nest, standing up and brushing a bit of dust from his trousers with a calm charming smile.

He turned toward the fifteen dazed recruit maidens, Aurelia, and the wide-eyed Princess, his blue eyes crinkling warmly.

"Well, girls," Silas announced in a perfectly normal, cheerful voice as if he hadn’t just been cackling like a madman in the dirt five seconds ago. "The timer just rang... Why don’t we head back to the surface and go have lunch?"

Meanwhile, roughly four miles to the southwest, in a desolate sunless basin canyon flanked by jagged obsidian ridges...

CLOP! CLOP! CLOP! CLOP!

The heavy pounding of dozens of feral paws against hard stone echoed through the narrow ravine, kicking up thick clouds of black dust.

Surrounding the perimeter of a wide, sunken rock clearing was an entire army of wild Umbral Wolves... easily more than fifty black-furred beasts, each standing seven feet tall at the shoulder with glowing bloodshot crimson eyes.

Standing back-to-back in the absolute center of the encircling pack were Reina and Vala.

Reina had her hands outstretched, her ash-blonde braided hair whipping wildly in the mountain wind as she tried to channel her [Beast Arrest] to pacify the beasts.

But despite her higher affinity, the fifty wolves did not respond to the calming mana.

Their lips were pulled back in violent unnatural snarls, their muscles twitching with jagged spasmodic convulsions.

Beside her, Vala stood in a low combat stance, her dark elemental blade drawn and crackling with volatile mana.

Vala’s sharp dark eyes narrowed with sudden, intense alarm as she looked closely at the foreheads of the surrounding wolves.

SQUELCH... WRITHE!

Tearing directly through the bone and flesh between the ears of all fifty Umbral Wolves, a grotesque three-foot-long segmented purple worm monstrosity burst outward, waving its pulsating lamprey-like maw in the open air like a grotesque antenna.

Vala’s grip on her sword tightened until her knuckles turned white, her voice dropping into a cold dangerous whisper.

"Mind-controlling worms...?"

Vala shifted her weight, the dark leather of her armor creaking softly against the jagged obsidian stone beneath her boots.

Her right hand held the hilt of her elemental blade in a loose lethal grip as the tip angled toward the ground at a thirty-degree slant.

"Vile," Vala whispered, her dark eyes narrowing with unvarnished revulsion. "Truly... completely disgusting."

"You took the words right out of my mouth," Reina agreed, her nose scrunching up in distaste.

CLINK!

With a practiced, fluid motion, the ash-blonde beast tamer reached behind her back, drawing her twin-pointed ash-wood spear from its harness.

She spun the shaft across her knuckles, letting the butt of the spear rest firmly against her palm as she dropped into a balanced low-center combat stance.

Despite the fact that fifty Tier-2 dire beasts were glaring at them with bloodshot manic eyes, neither woman felt a single drop of genuine panic.

Branded deeply across the back of their right knuckles, the glowing emerald Genesis Runes gifted to them by Lady Eluned pulsed with a warm steady heartbeat of life-force.

They knew the reality of their condition... As long as the Goddess held domain over the basin, death was impossible.

Shattered ribs would fuse in milliseconds and severed arteries would knit before a single drop of blood could hit the gravel.

’Dying isn’t the problem,’ Reina thought, her brow furrowing as she gripped the polished spear shaft tighter. ’The problem is our mission. Lord Graves sent us out here to tame and expand our cavalry corps... How on earth are we supposed to pacify beasts when their skulls are being puppeteered by oversized parasites? Do I have to personally dig into each of their cranial cavities and pull the squirming freaks out one by one?’

"Vala," Reina called out in a low, tight voice, her eyes sweeping across the twitching circle. "Cover my blind spots for five seconds. I’m going to force a wide-band mental override."

"Understood," Vala replied with her voice sounding deadpan. "Do what you must."

Reina closed her eyes, drawing a deep focused breath of the dry sulfurous air.

VUUUUUUUM!

A radian, golden-blue halo of spiritual mana ignited around Reina’s braided ash-blonde hair.

"Beast... Arrest."

A translucent ripple of tranquil pacifying soul-force expanded outward in a thirty-yard ring, washing over the fifty snarling wolves like a soothing spring breeze.

In normal circumstances, this resonance bypassed a beast’s primal aggression, harmonizing their spiritual core with Reina’s will to establish a bond of pack loyalty.

PING!

The moment her soul-force touched the wolves, an unnatural discordant screech reverberated through Reina’s mind.

It was not a beast resisting with wild stubbornness.

It felt like her consciousness had slammed headfirst into an iron wall coated in slick repulsive grease.

Her golden-blue mana shattered on contact, violently rebounding straight back into her core.

"Nngh...!" Reina grunted, stumbling back half a step as a dull ache throbbed behind her temples.

She opened her eyes, watching as the fifty purple worms vibrated violently in synchronized unison as their translucent skin flushed a toxic glowing magenta.

’It didn’t just fail... it completely deflected,’ Reina analyzed, a drop of cold sweat rolling down her cheek. ’Worms are primitive invertebrates with barely a cluster of nerve nodes. There is no way a parasitic worm has the cognitive architecture or spiritual capacity to deliberately counter an awakened beast-taming skill. That means...’

"The Umbral Basin is looking scarier by the minute," Reina muttered under her breath, adjusting her grip on her spear. "These things aren’t acting on instinct..."

KRA-CRACK!

The obsidian shale beneath the lead alpha wolf violently shattered.

Driven by a sudden, jagged spasm of the parasite embedded in its skull, a colossal, eight-foot-tall Umbral Wolf launched itself across the gap at blinding speed. Its jaws snapped open, dripping strings of thick saliva, while its front paws unleashed razor-sharp pitch-black claws aimed directly at Reina’s exposed throat.

"Reina, stay still," Vala’s voice sounded right beside her ear.

SWOOSH.

Vala didn’t just step forward... her entire silhouette dissolved into a dark frictionless blur of compressed mana.

SHING!

A clean, crescent arc of midnight-black elemental mana traced through the air.

Vala’s blade moved with such instantaneous velocity that the displaced air formed a visible vacuum slice.

WHOOSH!

The edge of her sword caught the lunging wolf mid-air, slicing cleanly through the thick fur, jugular, and spinal cord in seconds.

CLANG!

Without even glancing at the decapitated beast, Vala brought the flat of her blade up in a horizontal block, effortlessly intercepting the ferocious bone-shattering downward swipe of a second wolf that had leaped immediately behind the first.

Bright orange sparks erupted as the beast’s blackened claws scraped violently across the tempered steel.

Vala’s boots didn’t slide an inch against the stone.

With a sharp contemptuous twist of her wrists, she redirected the beast’s downward momentum, slamming the hilt of her sword squarely into the center of its snout with a sickening crack.

SPLAT-THUD!

The first wolf’s bisected body crashed heavily onto the gravel, rolling to a dead halt as dark viscous blood pooled beneath its neck.

Yet, even with its head completely severed from its shoulders, the purple worm embedded between its ears continued to writhe and pulse for three whole seconds before finally withering into gray ash.

"They’re completely dead inside," Vala remarked calmly, stepping back to flank Reina with her sword held steady. "There is no mind left to tame in the physical host... The parasite has already hijacked the nervous system entirely."

Reina’s golden eyes narrowed sharply. Her sharp brain rapidly pieced the puzzle together.

"It’s not the worms," Reina said, her voice dropping into a determined tone. "These parasites aren’t acting independently. They’re biological relays. There’s an outside entity... a master puppeteer projecting a hive-frequency into this entire pack from the shadows!"

"Can you trace the frequency?" Vala asked, parrying a lunging snap from a third wolf with a casual flick of her forearm.

"Watch my back and find out!" Reina shouted.

Reina planted her boots into the fissures of the obsidian ground.

Instead of casting a wide-area pacification wave, she condensed her entire soul-force into a single, needle-thin beam of pure golden mana, aiming it directly at the pulsating worm atop the nearest snarling wolf.

"Beast... Arrest."

BZZZZZZZZT!

The golden beam struck the purple parasite dead-center.

The worm shrieked... a high-pitched squeal that vibrated the very air.

The golden mana didn’t pierce the worm’s flesh at all, instead, the foreign command frequency pushed into the beast violently repelled Reina’s intrusion.

PING... FWIP!

The repulsive psychic force bounced off the parasite’s hide, deflecting outward at a sharp forty-five-degree angle and shooting a shimmering purple tether of mana straight toward the jagged, shadowy cliffs rising barely three hundred yards to the northwest.

Reina’s eyes tracked the psychic ricochet in an instant.

"FOUND YOU!" Reina grinned fiercely, pointing the gleaming void-iron tip of her ash-wood spear straight toward the rocky crags. "The puppet master is hiding in that ridge! It’s barely three hundred yards out!"

"Then we stop wasting time on the pawns." Vala nodded, her blade humming with elemental power.

"Vala, on me! MOVE!" Reina yelled.

THUD!

Reina kicked off the stone, breaking into a full-speed sprint straight through the narrowest gap in the surrounding wolf pack.

Vala followed a half-step behind, her sword blurring in fluid defensive arcs that deflected snapping jaws and sweeping claws with metallic clangs as they blasted their way through the perimeter.

"AWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Behind them, the remaining forty-eight Umbral Wolves threw their heads back in synchronized unnatural howls, their purple head-parasites glowing with furious magenta light as the entire army surged across the canyon floor, giving wild relentless chase.

[Author’s Note]

Bonus Chapters won’t be done this month, they’ll be added to next month’s Mass release to make it quite bulkier. Thank you for all the support and gifts, I’m glad you all are enjoying the book. Happy new month in advance btw