The vanguard of the Sacred Expeditionary Army had been almost completely wiped out during the arduous advance.
The finest knights had died on the battlefield, the most devout priests had fallen face-first into the dirt. War with the creatures of Chaos was a merciless meat grinder. Those merciless, unyielding, cold-blooded, brutal monsters knew only destruction, and in battle against them, the end came only when one side was utterly destroyed.
And the price of that horrific sacrifice was a four-kilometer advance.
After advancing four kilometers, Spiral Hill had grown slightly larger in their field of vision. This distance was enough for Lockmadon to sense a threat—if that chaotic tyrant was even capable of such an emotion. The cannon-fodder forces of the chaotic monsters began surging out of the smoke and storms with even greater ferocity, while another, even more terrifying kind of monster appeared on the battlefield.
They were fleshy beasts that seemed like giants to ordinary people. Standing four to five meters tall, they vaguely resembled humans, but every limb was grotesquely swollen, and enormous, rotting tumors covered their bodies. Their bulging muscles and blood vessels seemed ready to burst out of their skin. They had no distinct heads. Atop their ugly bodies grew an irregular black lump, across which two full rows of dark-yellow eyes twitched frantically. The sight made one shudder.
These terrifying monsters looked bloated, but were actually incredibly swift. They seemed to possess an innate ability to control gravity, their swollen bodies perpetually floating three or four meters above the ground. Countless sinister runes crawled across their skin, granting them various protective effects and powers of corruption. Within several hundred meters of these monsters, all things withered and decayed. Life rapidly ebbed away, weapons quickly rusted, and even the mind seemed infected by a plague,