Total Annihilation

Chapter 16 · Total Annihilation

Deep in the sewers, in an area no adventurer from Elirila had ever reached, hundreds of thousands of giant rats had gathered. Rustling sounds constantly echoed through the pitch-black space, occasionally joined by the squeaks of giant rats. Strangely, their cries were filled with fear.

A closer look revealed that all the giant rats in the enormous chamber had gathered in the center. There was plenty of open space around the edges, but even though they were packed so tightly that their bodies had been deformed, the giant rats refused to leave and move into the nearby open areas.

"Eek, eek, eek!"

At the center of the sea of giant rats, several Shadow Rats roughly the size of ordinary humans warily surveyed their surroundings. The mass disappearances of giant rats eight days ago had caught the attention of the Rat King, Dikas. But at the time, he had been devoting all his attention to the Ancient Hero Bloodline gene and had not investigated personally. Even though the giant rats above were the breeding grounds of the entire Underground Kingdom, providing the Giant Rat Kingdom with vast numbers of elite giant rats and a small number of Shadow Rats.

Dikas had merely dispatched ten giant rats from his personal guards to the sewers above to protect those giant rats. In his view, the creature hiding in the darkness could not be very powerful. Otherwise, it would not have dared to hunt only the giant rats, which were Lesser Demons. With Shadow Rats that had awakened the Shadow Escape skill and become Lower Demons standing guard, they could at least slow down the hidden creature's hunting.

The remaining nearly five thousand Shadow Rats and nearly three hundred thousand elite giant rats were all guarding the Underground Kingdom. The closer they were to the kingdom's center, the more Shadow Rats and elite giant rats there were on guard. Once Dikas successfully devoured Diri, who possessed a modified Ancient Hero Bloodline, he would personally tear apart that presumptuous little thief as a celebration of his becoming a "perfect" life-form.

"Eek!"

At the center of the sea of giant rats, a Shadow Rat suddenly sensed something. Its shrill cry echoed through the dark sewers, and the previously calm giant rats turned toward it. A layer of purple mist had somehow filled the dark space, and the air carried a sweet, bloody scent.

The purple mist completely surrounded all the giant rats. In just a few minutes, the thin mist had grown dense, rolling toward the giant rats gathered in the center.

"Eek, eek, eek!"

The shrill screams of the giant rats at the very edge rang out as they died. The instant they touched the purple mist, their bodies melted completely, their bones corroding along with their flesh into puddles of thick liquid. As more and more giant rats died, the mist rolled faster and faster.

In the blink of an eye, nearly ten thousand of the hundreds of thousands of giant rats had died, and the speed at which they perished continued to increase as the dense mist churned.

Faced with the threat of death, some of the giant rats began charging forward, hoping to escape before they died. But every giant rat that stepped into the mist died instantly, then turned into a puddle of thick liquid.

"Eek, eek, eek!"

At the center of the rat swarm, the ten Shadow Rats, each possessing intelligence no lower than that of an ordinary human, cried out with increasing urgency. They knew that if they stayed there, every giant rat would die beneath the strange mist. Thus, they decided to disobey the Rat King Dikas's orders, have all the giant rats enter the Underground Kingdom, and seal the entrance to block the mist.

"Will they make it in time?"

Inside the purple mist, Lu Minghao absorbed the thick liquid left behind by the corroded giant rats while watching the ten Shadow Rats at the center of the swarm. They were the main course of the feast he planned to enjoy before leaving. How could Lu Minghao possibly let them escape?

That was right—the purple mist had been created by Lu Minghao. Using the Poison skill as its foundation, he had silently left sufficient quantities of venom throughout every part of the sewers, then transformed it into a mist.

With the boost from the sewers' enclosed environment, and at the cost of nearly exhausting his magic essence, Lu Minghao had successfully surrounded all the giant rats with poisonous mist. To prevent them from immediately burrowing into the Underground Kingdom and escaping, he had also weakened the poison diffused through the air.

That way, while the poisonous mist was killing large numbers of the giant rats at the outer edge, the rest would inevitably panic. During that time, the weakened poison in the air would gradually erode all the giant rats' bodies. By the time they realized what was happening, the poison would already have penetrated deep into them, leaving them no chance to escape.

Furthermore, to carry away enough provisions, Lu Minghao had thought of the way spiders fed. He directly used the poison to corrode the bodies of the dead giant rats into puddles of condensed liquid. Compared with his original cat-sized body, this allowed him, together with Gluttony's powerful digestive and absorptive abilities, to eat at least ten times more food than usual.

Meanwhile, under the command of the ten Shadow Rats, the more than one hundred thousand surviving giant rats had calmed down somewhat and begun crawling toward the nearest entrances. But after taking only a few steps, one giant rat after another collapsed. Some of the dead giant rats even blocked the entrances completely.

"Where do you think you're going?"

In less than half a minute, just as the remaining ten Shadow Rats realized that something was wrong and prepared to flee, a sky-blue, round body emerged from the shadows before them. The instant he appeared, the shadows twisted and transformed into rows of sharp spikes aimed at the remaining Shadow Rats.

"A slime?"

One Shadow Rat stared at the sky-blue, jelly-like monster before it, disbelief appearing on its rodent-like face. It simply could not believe that the slime that usually served as food for the giant rat race possessed such terrifying power.

"Oh? So you can talk too."

Across from them, Lu Minghao was extremely surprised that the Shadow Rats could suddenly speak. But then he remembered that in this world, monsters only needed to use magic essence to give voice to their thoughts, and his surprise quickly faded.

After all, even a slime like him, which did not even have a mouth and ate entirely through its body, could speak. There was even less reason to be surprised that the Shadow Rats before him, which had mouths, could do so.

"Slime, what exactly are you trying to do? Are you trying to save your fellow slimes?"

A Shadow Rat secretly signaled to its companions. The other nine Shadow Rats silently spread out, after which the one that had spoken looked at Lu Minghao and asked. As for Lu Minghao's reason for attacking the giant rat race, it could think of only one possibility. After all, with the giant rat race's enormous population, slimes were one of its largest sources of food.

Thanks to slimes' innate ability of Asexual Reproduction, they could be mass-produced as long as there was sufficient food. Moreover, slimes were completely undiscerning about what they ate—even the giant rats' excrement would do. Thus, after taking control of the giant rat race, Dikas had established a huge slime farm in the Underground Kingdom long ago.

"Save my fellow slimes? You're overthinking it. I just want to eat you!"

The moment Lu Minghao finished speaking, the Shadow Rats that had already spread out and surrounded him charged from all directions. Their sharp claws whistled as they struck his round body.

"Honestly, haven't you figured out why I bothered wasting time chatting with you?"

The next second, the Shadow Rats that had leaped at Lu Minghao in midair suddenly froze. The poison that had entered their bodies long ago finally flowed through their blood into their brains. Then, rows of Shadow Spikes instantly pierced through their bodies.

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