System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 224
Shrieks rang out, and gusts of wind buffeted the tunnel.
Two Drowners closed in on the Witcher from left and right. Four claws scraped across the Quen Shield, tearing apart the yellow light that protected him.
The Witcher bent his knees in a swift half-crouch and vanished from the Drowners’ line of sight. Then, pivoting on the toes of his right foot, he swung Gwyhyr in a full arc. The keen edge split flesh and bone alike, shearing through the knees of both Drowners.
The Drowners wailed and collapsed, most of their fighting strength gone.
He let out a breath, kept low, and rolled forward along the ground without hesitation, coming up at the feet of another Drowner. One knee touched the floor. He looked up, and before it could react, the blade in his hand shot upward at a slant like a stroke of lightning. A short, dull sound of steel entering flesh followed, and the point drove through the Drowner’s jaw and into its brain.
Like puncturing a skin of foul liquid, hot, stinking blood ran down the bright blade, soaking his sleeve and splashing all over his face.
But the Witcher’s expression stayed cold and steady from beginning to end.
There was no time to wrench the blade free. He let go. The Drowner, rigid as a statue with the sword stuck through its jaw, toppled backward. Roy instead caught the hilt of the second weapon on his back.
The blade had barely cleared the scabbard when his other hand traced an upright Azure Sign in the air and slammed it forward.
At once, a hard, short burst of wind roared through the sewer. With a heavy thud, the Drowner leaping at him seemed to smash into an invisible wall. Its whole body staggered, balance lost.
The Witcher took the chance to stride forward, stepping past the creature’s body, and Aerondight in his hand sang with a low hum as it took the Drowner’s head.
At the rear of the Drowner pack loomed a larger figure, their commander, a Drowned Dead, taller than an ordinary Drowner, gray-black all over, with more pronounced dorsal fin and gills.
Drowned Dead
Gender: None
Age: 8
Identity: None
HP: 100
Attributes:
Strength: 6
Agility: 6
Constitution: 10
Perception: 6
Willpower: 4
Charisma: 0
Spirit: 5
Skills:
Leader (Passive Trait): As the dominant ruler among Drowned Dead, it can command all nearby ordinary Drowners.
Transfigured Body LV10: Some Drowners are formed from drowned corpses, their bodily structure fundamentally different from humans, granting immunity to poison and bleeding.
...
This big brute, unlike its subordinates, did not rush in blindly. Faced with the Witcher drenched in the blood of its own kind, it seemed to sense he was no easy prey, and turned to run.
Roy snatched up the hand crossbow and pulled the trigger. Whsst, whsst. Two bolts punched clean through both slick thighs.
Then he charged up and hit the limping brute with one Intimidate.
Shhk.
The longsword went through its skull.
“Defeated Drowned Dead, XP +50.”
“So the commander really is worth more than a common Drowner.”
On the other side, the battle of the three Knights of the White Rose had come to an end as well.
Though the foul sewer environment had unsettled them somewhat, leaving them tense and awkward in their movements, they were still trained Knights. After the first rush of confusion, they quickly steadied themselves. With solid Swordsmanship and the Witcher’s guidance, they managed to cut down the remaining Monsters.
All three were breathing heavily now, shaking all over as they slumped against the sewer floor, longswords still clenched in blood-slick hands. They seemed not yet to have come back to themselves after the violence of the fight.
One of them, a young Knight named Mars, had taken a light wound. A Drowner had raked a bloody furrow across his face.
“Knight Mars, if you don’t want your whole face to rot...” The Witcher tossed him a bottle of Potion. “Clean the wound carefully with it.”
“Master, it isn’t that bad, is it?” A trace of fear crossed Mars’s young face as he hesitated and took the Potion. “And I’ve heard Witcher Potions are full of poison. Can I even use this?”
“Relax. It’s just ordinary Celandine Potion. It won’t harm you.” The Witcher wiped the blood clean from his blade, then pushed down the hood at his back again, stuffing Griffin’s Vodyanoi head out of sight.
There had been fifteen Drowners in all, counting the stray from before. He had killed eight of them, seven ordinary ones and one commander, for a total gain of 190 XP, bringing him to Witcher LV6 (1670/3500).
The three Knights had dealt with the other seven.
“Good thing they were here. They took a fair bit of pressure off me...” If every Drowner had rushed him at once, the Witcher, even with Bombs on him, could have handled it, but not without taking some wounds. “So far I’ve only used one Thunderbolt. My body can still handle a second Potion, plus one stored Activation, and the Bombs ... more than enough for any sudden trouble.”
While the Knights recovered their breath and dressed their wounds, the Witcher dragged all the Drowner corpses into a pile, poured some liquid over them to mask the blood smell, and then began dissecting the bodies.
Waste was a sin. Drowner tongues and Drowner eyes were both useful alchemical ingredients, and Roy had no intention of leaving them behind.
The three exhausted Knights stared without blinking as the Witcher stood amid the heap of foul-smelling corpses, knife rising and falling, spraying blood and scraps of flesh with every motion.
The torchlight cast his shadow on the wall, like some humanoid demon dancing in madness.
Once he opened the Monsters up, his arms went straight into the bloody slurry of organs and tissue, groping through it. Every so often he would lift out a heart, an eyeball, a lung, and examine it. His face, smeared with blood, sometimes even showed a flash of pleasure. It was as ghastly a sight as anyone could imagine.
Roy’s luck was good too. Besides the usual useful organs, he found one small red mutagen in the pile of Drowner corpses. It could be turned into Drowner Pheromones, enough to hide the scent of a living human and deceive the noses of stronger Monsters such as a Swamp Hag.
On top of that, he found one ordinary-grade Mutagen, dropped by the Drowned Dead. That brought his intermediate Mutagens for class advancement to 4/10.
“Master ... what exactly are you doing?” Yagon stared fixedly at the Witcher’s back. He had thought his nerves had already strengthened since entering the sewers, but the Witcher’s way of butchering and carving up Monsters still made his skin crawl.
Roy neatly pulled a tongue the length of a forearm from a Drowner’s mouth and held it up for the three to see. “They look ugly, but they fetch a decent price, all of them. You lot helped in the fight, so you’ve got the right to a share.”
He loved money, but there were some things a man ought not to keep too tightly for himself.
The three Knights shook their heads frantically. Killing sewer Monsters was one thing. Cutting flesh off their corpses was something else entirely.
“You’re sure? Then I can just turn it into money and divide it that way.” The Witcher’s hands moved faster and faster. “I won’t hide it from you, I see Monsters much the same way I see pigs, cows, sheep, livestock. I’m simply following the principle of wasting nothing.”
“Witcher Roy, the Butcher of the Sewers...” Yagon muttered to himself. Slowly, his eyes began to shine.
“Then just a few ears will do. Enough to prove to Your Highness that we did our share.”
...
With a splash, the Witcher poured a great quantity of some unknown fluid over the heap of Drowner remains, then led the Knights onward.
Most of the organs he had cut out went into his Loot Satchel. The Knights each carried a small gore-smeared pouch as well, packed full of Drowner ears.
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