Slowly, she retreated until she was beside the knight.
Konehl-Ghervil noticed that Esli was still preoccupied with the issue of her eyes.
She had not detected the presence of those creatures.
Green Lizards possessed the unique ability to camouflage themselves, blending seamlessly with their surroundings.
Upon reaching adulthood, they could suppress their aura and become entirely transparent, achieving true invisibility.
Even if one stood directly before them, an ordinary person would find them nearly impossible to discern.
If Konehl-Ghervil failed to provide real-time directional coordinates during the ensuing battle, they would undoubtedly be at a severe disadvantage.
“What are our chances against at least three of those behemoths, each over twenty meters long?” she whispered, her voice low.
“We’ll only know once we try. Have they arrived?” Esli responded, shouldering her axe as she followed Konehl-Ghervil’s gaze.
Her eyes met only the empty, dim corridor, revealing nothing.
“They’re coming…”
Konehl-Ghervil’s eyes were fixed on the lizard, which slowly opened its maw—a clear prelude to attack.
Whoosh!
The air was rent by a sudden tearing sound.
“Northwest corridor wall, and the eastern side door!”
Two lizards attacked simultaneously; one swiftly lashed out with its tongue, while the other charged forward, its massive body swaying.
As Konehl-Ghervil’s warning escaped her lips, she dove backward, narrowly avoiding the tongue as it retracted, having missed its target.
Her evasion was a blend of keen anticipation and sheer luck.
Having dodged the attack, she scrambled to her feet and darted behind a large potted plant.
Seizing the opportune moment, Esli manifested a spear of solid ice in her right hand.
She leaned back, gathering power intuitively, and hurled it with devastating force.
Boom—
It struck the lizard’s right foreleg, piercing straight through the wall.
Regrettably, had the angle been slightly different, it would have pierced its heart.
A trail of foul blood stretched deep into the corridor, where the wall-clinging lizard, having lost a leg, retreated into the shadows.
Konehl-Ghervil, hidden behind the potted plant, was utterly stunned.
It wasn’t the knight’s astonishing attack power that amazed her, but rather the other lizard that was charging directly toward her.
Ignoring Esli completely, it brushed past, tearing toward Konehl-Ghervil with frantic speed.
“Did I steal your rice? Why are you so determined to get me?!” she burst out, unable to suppress a raw exclamation.
Its speed was too immense for her to even consider repositioning herself.
As a gust of wind ruffled her hair, confirming that the injured one had fled and would not return, Esli sprinted to the side.
With a sturdy lunge and a low crouch, she wrapped both hands around the lizard’s tail, shifting her center of gravity backward.
Her fingers locked onto the scales, digging deep into the flesh.
The gaping maw, having crushed the potted plant, halted less than thirty centimeters from Konehl-Ghervil’s face, its putrid stench so overwhelming that she could barely keep her eyes open.
Its limbs scraped and screeched across the floor; it strained to advance, yet to no avail.
The next instant, the lizard’s head was wrenched aside and away.
A colossal force sent it soaring, crashing into and demolishing a pillar and the adjacent wall.
Several more ice spears were then hurled into the rubble, silencing the lizard completely.
This…
This was simply too outlandish.
That creature must have weighed at least twenty to thirty tons.
Konehl-Ghervil was too astonished to speak.
Perhaps in the lizard’s eyes, Esli was the true monster, prompting it to target the seemingly weaker prey first (TL Note: A Chinese idiom, ‘xian tiao ruan shizi nie,’ meaning to pick on the weakest or easiest target).
“No need for such astonishment,” Esli stated. “My strength is rated at the Captain level; a typical elite knight would employ more efficient and less strenuous methods of attack.”
Esli shook her somewhat numb arm; bringing the rapidly moving behemoth to a halt had expended a considerable amount of her strength.
“Isn’t there still one more? Where is it—”
Bang—
Before she could finish, the figure before her vanished in an instant, leaving a massive crater in the ground.
“Esli!”
Konehl-Ghervil watched a thick lizard tail rise from the swirling dust.
Without pausing to wonder where the lizard had concealed itself, she chose not to flee but instead approached the crater.
The female knight lying in the center of the crater had her entire frost armor shattered into fragments.
Half of her body was mangled, and her right calf was bent sideways at an impossible angle, undoubtedly broken.
Her right arm was entirely gone, and blood continuously seeped from beneath her tattered clothes.
“Hold on!”
Stumbling clumsily to the center of the crater, Konehl-Ghervil knelt and pressed both hands firmly against Esli’s severed right shoulder, desperately attempting to staunch the bleeding.
“Cough…”
The female knight coughed up a significant amount of blood foam, turning her head slightly to look at Konehl-Ghervil.
Her voice was barely a whisper, imbued with extreme weakness.
“So cold… did I lose my clothes?”
Rip—
Konehl-Ghervil tore off a large strip from her skirt to wrap around the wound, attempting to bind it.
“It will be alright… as long as we can stop the bleeding…”
“Try to freeze the wound… if you can…”
The strips torn from the white skirt were quickly exhausted, yet no matter how many layers she wrapped, the overflowing blood refused to cease.
“If only I had spotted it sooner… you wouldn’t have been ambushed…”
Esli slowly raised her only functional arm, her left.
“It’s not your fault… cough… go now, I don’t want this mission to fail…”
As if deaf to her words, Konehl-Ghervil’s eyes glazed over, and she continued to press the torn fabric onto the bleeding areas, performing the same futile action again and again.
It was not until a wave of foul, metallic air swept from behind her that Konehl-Ghervil turned, only to behold a monstrous maw stretched to its utmost, capable of swallowing her whole with terrifying ease.
Turning her body fully, her eyes locked onto the sight, she attempted one final act of defiance.
However, a fierce wave of dizziness washed over her, and she collapsed to her knees, unable to remain upright.
It had failed.
A putrid shadow enveloped her, and just before consciousness fully faded, she heard a voice laced with perverse excitement,
“Finally, I have you, you cunning little lizard.”
Innumerable ice spikes erupted from the ground, instantly impaling the lizard and riddling its body with holes.
Konehl-Ghervil was yanked backward by her arm, narrowly escaping the lizard’s collapsing maw.
Everything transpired with such suddenness that her mind struggled to catch up.
It took her a full three seconds to remember to check if the lizard was truly dead and if the knight was merely feigning death.
But there was no need.
The deceased lizard lay motionless, while the figure behind her stood ramrod straight, dusting off their clothes and wiping blood from their face, despite the fact that their right arm was indeed severed.
“…You were faking it?” she asked, a note of hesitation in her voice.
No anger stirred within her, only a sense of relief.
“One of the knightly doctrines… hmm… which article was it again?”
“Never mind, there’s definitely such a rule, and I recall the most crucial part: Never reveal your trump card unless absolutely necessary, even if your life and your comrade’s are at stake.”
“That sounds like a rule reserved for foes that are truly insurmountable,” Konehl-Ghervil observed.
Konehl-Ghervil immediately surmised the doctrine’s intended scope.
It was excessively stringent; she could only conceive of it applying when a minor misstep could lead to utter annihilation, rendering individual trump cards utterly insignificant.
Regardless, the threat had indeed been neutralized.
To admonish her now would be utterly ill-mannered.
A faint smile touched her lips.
“Can you still walk? Do you require the assistance of a nun?”
“How incredibly thoughtful of you!”
Esli limped over and leaned onto Konehl-Ghervil’s shoulder.
‘You certainly aren’t shy.’
No sooner had Konehl-Ghervil steadied the female knight’s left arm than a violent tremor shook the ground.
Cracks spiderwebbed outward, originating from the very spot where they stood.
“Damn it, the ground beneath us is collapsing!” Esli exclaimed, her gaze fixed on their feet.
“We must leave quickly!”
Konehl-Ghervil tugged hard at the female knight’s arm, but Esli remained utterly unmoving.
“What are you doing?!” Konehl-Ghervil demanded, increasing her pull as she realized something was amiss.
“It’s too late.”
Rumble—
The ground collapsed into a sinkhole roughly twenty meters in diameter, sending both women plunging downward.
In mid-air, Esli’s left hand seized Konehl-Ghervil’s arm in a reverse grip and flung her away.
Ignoring the stinging pain in her backside from the fall, Konehl-Ghervil scrambled to the edge of the chasm on all fours and peered down.
It was incredibly deep.
Drawing upon her bloodline power, she discerned a colossal maw below, one that filled the entire pit and dwarfed the previous three lizards.
There were no tools available to offer assistance.
Yet, she could not simply stand by and watch Esli fall into the beast’s jaws; in a rush of desperate impulse, she prepared to follow.
Her arm was suddenly seized by an inexplicable force, leaving her suspended at the edge of the gaping hole.
Terrified, she looked up, her gaze meeting a face and the hand that gripped her.
Her eyes, cold and indifferent, belonged to the person she had been searching for: the Baron’s daughter, Penelope-Rose, her disguise now shed, revealing her true appearance.