Chapter 32: Desperate

Chapter 32: Desperate The four’s actions naturally caught the other human traitors’ attention. How could they not figure out The camp’s leadership had already decided to cut and run. What little fight left in their hearts immediately vanished. "Run!" They scrambled toward the gate. The three Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards chasing them took their sweet time, letting them rush toward the gate. Howell, about to reach the gate, suddenly slammed on the brakes with her massive body—her boar transformation picked up a funky scent. Wolf and the other two saw Howell stop and quickly hit the brakes too. But among the mob of human traitors behind them, many hadn’t caught this and charged forward. "Haha, we’re almost home free!" A skinny traitor Concealer, about to step through the gate right in front of him, couldn’t help getting pumped. Just then, purple light flashed! "Crack!" Blood rained from the air as this skinny Concealer instantly became two halves. The human traitors a few steps behind him looked scared shitless, wanting to turn tail and run, but it was way too late. More purple light flashed as over a dozen corpse pieces appeared before the gate. "Creak!" "Creak!" "Creak!" Three Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards radiating terrifying vibes slowly walked in from outside the gate. Fresh red blood dripped from the greatswords gripped in their bone claws. Each step heavily stomped on the hearts of human traitors wanting to escape through the gate, nearly choking them out. "Three more!!!" Howell and the others looked at the three Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards watching the front gate, their faces looking like death warmed over. Looking back, three equally terrifying Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards were going on a killing spree. The human traitors’ numbers had been slashed by almost two-thirds in no time. Caught in a pincer move, sneaking out was pretty much impossible. "Miss Howell, what do we do?" Many human traitors put all their eggs in Howell’s basket—they’d come here at her call. "Quit your whining! Fight our way out with everything we’ve got! The three monsters at the gate definitely can’t stop all of us!" Howell roared impatiently, "Boar Transformation!" Howell suddenly took a deep breath, rapidly blowing up several sizes. Her surface spikes stood up one by one, like a wild boar, as she charged toward the rightmost Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guard with most people hot on her heels... ... Outside the camp, on the small hill, Carlos watched patiently through his alchemical telescope. "The traitor with souped-up skills should be this camp’s heavy hitter, right." In the alchemical telescope, the humanoid boar was going toe-to-toe with a Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guard. It kept trying to leap over the Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guard and cross the gate, but kept getting slapped back by the skeleton guard’s sword. "Front and back gates locked down for this long, and human traitors cut by two-thirds. They really don’t have any aces up their sleeve?" Carlos’s mind raced as he gave orders to the three Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards not yet in the fight. "Go speed up their destruction!" In the camp, under the human traitors’ soul-crushing gazes, Three more equally terrifying skeleton monsters showed up, going absolutely nuts slaughtering everything that moved in the camp. Meanwhile, the three Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards at the gate formed a line, creating a terrifying wall of death that let nobody through. After several failed breakout attempts that only burned more lives, the remaining human traitors started trying to hide, attempting to dodge the Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards’ hunt. ... In a dark woodshed, four camp leaders hid with various battle damage. Wolf was in the worst shape—one arm chopped off at the shoulder, his face now white as a sheet as Chapman stopped his bleeding. "Cough! Damn! Those monsters! Three at the front gate, three at the back, six roaming and killing in the camp!" Stuart coughed up blood, cursing with total despair in his voice. "They’ll track us down eventually!" Desperate, dark vibes spread. "What do we do?" "Can’t fight, can’t run! Are we just sitting ducks?" "Sitting ducks... hehe... sitting ducks... hehe!" The silent Howell suddenly burst into psycho laughter like she’d lost her marbles. Her voice growled: "Before I bite it, I’m taking someone down with me!" Her gaze was wild and crazy, sweeping over the three men. "Whatever tricks or schemes you’ve got, lay them out now—you won’t get another shot!" The three felt chills, afraid they’d get wasted by their own people before the monsters got them. After a few seconds of dead silence, Chapman spoke first, his voice still gravelly: "If this old man’s eyes aren’t playing tricks, those skeleton monsters aren’t Dark Mist monsters at all, but juiced-up skeleton soldiers!" "Chapman, you’re not pulling our leg, right? Those could be bottom-feeder skeleton soldiers?" Everyone knew skeleton soldiers were the dregs among summons—cannon fodder among cannon fodder. Even maxing out skeleton enhancement skills would only make them bigger cannon fodder. Yet those terrifying skeleton monsters outside were insanely tough to handle one-on-one, completely flipping everything they knew on its head. "This old man is also a Death Herald! Though those skeleton monsters look pretty different from skeleton soldiers, you can still see the overall build is that of skeleton soldiers! And only this way do we have a prayer of escaping, even fighting back!" Howell mulled it over: "You mean if we smoke or control the skeleton monsters’ puppeteer, the danger naturally goes away." Everyone knew Death Heralds specializing in summoning were necessarily way weaker than their peers, giving them a shot to break the stalemate. Stuart said grimly: "Even if Chapman’s guess is on the money, it probably won’t be a cakewalk. From start to finish, that mystery puppet master hasn’t shown his face. Hell, we don’t even know if such a person exists." "This is our only shot. Since he won’t show himself, we’ll draw him out! Worst case, we just duke it out with these monsters!" Howell immediately made the call, and the others got on board after thinking it through. They started plotting how to make that mystery ’Death Herald’ appear. As for whether things would go down like they imagined after he showed up, they’d leave everything to Lady Luck. ... Outside the camp, Carlos constantly kept tabs on the battle situation. "The kill notifications in my head are getting scarce. The fight’s almost wrapped up." Just as Carlos was about to have the Purple Thornblade Skeleton Guards start sweeping and clearing again, In his alchemical telescope view, four human traitors were sneaking toward the front gate with sketchy movements.