Chapter 266: Guidance

To this day, Kraft has not actually experienced a true battlefield.

Undeniably, sometimes he feels he has already gone through it many times; after tasting the touch of human and non-human on his sword, even the most conservative person is prone to developing the thought that "it's nothing special."

That is a misunderstanding, an illusion brought about by picking off scattered enemies one by one and creating advantages through traps.

A real battlefield should be closer to the current situation: individual traits are eroded, the many become one, forming some vast, flaw-lacking whole, governed by a chaotic, sluggish consciousness.

This whole does not express will; there is only the advancing shield-armor, the noise of iron spikes scraping and striking, and the mumbling within that resembles human voices.

Green began to be grateful for the encounter in the sewer on that rainy night; if there had been no prior preparation, someone might have had a breakdown upon witnessing that form.

Of course, the present is no better; the most disciplined unit can do is merely maintain sanity and keep moving in unison within the passage.

Before fleeing, Yvonne picked up a short spear from the ground and threw it; the afterimage of that weapon was almost indistinguishable before piercing the darkness, striking the mechanism and producing a hum like a bronze bell.

This failed to halt the advance; accompanied by a teeth-grinding sound of metal expanding, the dent caused by the impact swelled back to its original shape.

A force lethal to an individual is insufficient to damage the integrated body; it seems to be some malicious joke on "collective power," literally twisting different bodies together, breaking down barriers.

Perhaps this is the perfect posture of a military formation in the ideal.

Kraft pulled Yvonne, dragging her into the center of the unit, retreating away from the dark wave.

Its approaching sound, folded and replayed through complex corridors, was everywhere, surging from every door opening in every stone chamber, closely following the unit's heels.

The bricks and stones trembled with an increasingly tight frequency, transmitting a micro-numbness like an electric shock. The chaotic ranks seemed to have received a summons from a long slumber, slowly completing their awakening, unfolding themselves in a way unconstrained by space.

Where it came from is unknown; this biomass wrapped in metal seemed like a flood released from some gate, rapidly filling the surroundings, even appearing in the direction the unit had come from, tormenting every eardrum with those sharp scraping sounds.

They were forced to abandon the plan to turn back and advance deeper into the three-dimensional labyrinth to increase the distance.

This process was not smooth; they had to separate and identify the relief patterns on the door lintels to find the correct route. The pressing time intensified the chaos; even though everyone tried their best not to show the boiling panic, several low-level mistakes of almost misreading the patterns made them realize the situation was dire.

Now it seems this method of marking the route was not only unclear but, in emergency situations, too prone to causing visual errors.

"Call out the direction, call out the direction!" Green shouted to everyone, "To the left!"

The sword-staffing guards guided them forward in a winding path, spiraling up and down from time to time; it is hard to imagine how one could navigate out of this labyrinth without discovering the pattern within.

"Straight ahead!"

"Right... no, I misread it."

Two voices sounded simultaneously, confirming the relief before their eyes again; the latter, in terror, discovered that before calling out the direction, he had almost not thought at all, nearly leading the unit to the wrong direction.

That was clearly a statue of a person holding a sword upward, distorted by subjective mental stress under high tension into the shape of an exit. "Wrong, what I just saw was..."

"Do not explain, look clearly, keep running!" The priest interrupted his explanation; this was the least needed thing right now.

The simple modification of calling out the direction effectively added a layer of insurance; after several correct turns, the unit quickly found its rhythm, and the chasing sound from behind slightly increased the distance.

It obviously does not use optical organs to find prey but perceives position directly through some special method; it is inevitable that it is momentarily hindered by various detours and long paths.

But the tide never needs to find a route; it just needs to pour into every place it can surge into until it swallows the target.

"Turn right!" A cultivator called out the next direction, but immediately, unexpected despair seized his feet, preventing him from advancing a single step.

Chaotic surging and metallic clanging appeared behind this door opening; perhaps it was a coincidence caused by countless branches, but part of the dark surge passed through some winding path and, at some unknown time, blocked the necessary path ahead.

The validity of distance definition seemed to be in a state of presence and absence for it; it could appear in places unreachable at that speed without constraint.

"This is impossible..." The cultivator could not explain how this situation occurred; the similar stone chamber environment further caused confusion of spatial sense, as if after making a big circle, he had sent himself back in front of that thing.

Green immediately reacted, "Don't stand there! Take other paths."

"Where to?" Deviating from the guidance is merely prolonging the inevitable; one might crash into a dead end at any moment.

Perhaps one won't even wait for that; the loss of guidance has already pushed the human mental state to a dead end; fear, uncontrollable, manifests through furrowed brows and flickering pupils.

Courage in the general sense cannot support a person in imagining the consequences of contacting that shield wall, let alone thinking about how the owners of those mumbling voices exist.

"Continue forward, turn left in the next room." A certain voice stabilized the situation, "This way can bypass it."

A voice too familiar; Green incredulously discovered that the usual calm state was still maintained in the professor.

How do you know? He wanted to ask this, but he understood even better the consequences of asking; unstable collective panic could explode at any moment due to questioning.

The recent mist-like fatigue enveloping Kraft was temporarily lifted, replaced by some state of excitement; the intuitive impression once felt on him became clear: a decent image is a solidified shell, containing secrets and some other things.

And now, "some other things" became more obvious, injected into the shell. They appeared as abruptly as the amorphous thing pursuing them surging into the labyrinth.

"Advance, turn left in the next room." Kraft repeated, his vision hazy and wavering, attaching itself to countless visible and invisible focal points in the space.

Green could be certain that some change had occurred; that was absolutely no illusion.

The unit moved, shuttling through guided by the guidance given two steps ahead.

The surrounding, approaching surging chaos appeared in every unexpected direction, yet always remained a step away from them, avoided and thrown behind in a pre-knower manner.

After an extremely complex transfer, the door opening with the relief of the sword-staffing figure representing the correct route reappeared before their eyes, and this time nothing blocked the direction.

Kraft choked his throat, opening his gills like a fish thrown onto the shore, exhibiting a strange false sensation of suffocation, and said in a painful voice with distorted tone: "Continue, do not stop, it is everywhere!"