bookbashuk Chapter 16 Burning Water Ghost Slayer
Chapter 16 Burning Water Ghost Slayer
The riverbank has now been transformed into a living hell.
Burning water ghosts tumbled and fled across the muddy ground, igniting the withered reeds into countless flickering torches. They dragged their burning bodies, leaving charred trails on the mudflats. Some fell into the shallow water, their flames hissing but not extinguished, for the grease on their bodies continued to burn for several seconds even submerged. Thick columns of black smoke rose from the riverbank, distorted by the river wind, like a group of ghosts struggling to rise.
Looking at those figures dragging their burning legs and running around, in the distorted air of the firelight, they really looked no different from living people from a distance.
He wondered if this scene would be seen by the military camp not far away, otherwise he might suddenly have a strange title the next day, just like some witcher.
La Valéry's Burning Massacre?
Hopefully, the Temurian regulars won't be like country farmers who, with their meager savings, waste their time drinking cheap ale in taverns and then go around spreading baseless rumors.
He didn't want to be unable to get work because of a cruel reputation.
Kiliam thought expressionlessly, unmoved by the horrific state of these inhuman monsters. With his back to the wind, he raised his silver sword, which appeared and disappeared in the thick smoke, each flash of its cold light bringing with it a spray of unburnt, putrid blood.
After dealing with the lucky ones who hadn't been burned, he bypassed the water ghosts who were running around in all directions because of the flames. His silver sword drew a graceful arc from left to right, and the water ghost's head flew high into the air. Foul-smelling blood spurted from his unburnt body and fell to the ground, forming a stinking stain.
Another one.
Another one.
His movements were devoid of any unnecessary flourishes—no rolling, no leaping, not even large-scale movements. Every step was precise to the inch, every sword strike used just the right amount of force. To the untrained eye, he didn't even seem to be fighting; it was more like performing a tedious and mechanical repetitive task, like a farmer harvesting wheat in a field or a butcher cutting pork on a chopping board.
Kiliam's rhythm only changed for the first time when an exceptionally strong water demon, enduring the searing pain of flames, charged out.
This water monster was almost a full size larger than its kind, standing four feet tall at the shoulder. Its forelimbs were as thick as two oak stumps, with barbed bone spikes at the tips of its claws. Its skin was dark gray and much thicker than that of ordinary water monsters. Flames burned on its body, but only scorched the surface slime, failing to burn through the tissue beneath. Enduring the excruciating burning pain, its turbid eyes filled with rage, it charged forward, its mutated, barbed arms drawing two deadly arcs in the air.
He deliberately let the blade wedge into the ribs of a corpse, and the moment the water monster leader lunged, he dropped the sword and leaned back, the steel nail fired from his left sleeve dart precisely piercing the monster's brow. The nail penetrated less than two inches into the brow bone, not enough to kill the powerful monster instantly, but enough to cause a brief blank in its brain for a critical fraction of a second.
That's just a fraction of a second.
Kiliam yanked his right hand back sharply, the silver sword slipping from the corpse's ribs and piercing the water demon leader's jaw from bottom to top, the tip protruding from its skull, bringing with it a spray of grayish-white brain matter. He didn't stop, using the force of the blade piercing the skull to continue pushing forward, shoving the entire monster's corpse to the ground like a broken shield.
These are mercenary techniques he learned at the Southern Arena.
Mercenaries always prefer clever tricks, which, though dirty, are exceptionally efficient, and to some extent, this aligns with the style of the current Serpent School.
After all, when facing a monster that wants to eat you, there's no need to talk about humanitarianism. Apart from the professors at Cowburg who have been in the lab for too long and have lost their minds, who might think that water monsters should also have human rights, most people living near the water would applaud Giliam's actions.
The heads and tongues of water ghosts are excellent alchemical materials. The purified substance from large quantities of water ghost brains is a crucial component of Swallow Potion, an essential potion for witchers. Water ghosts nearly burned to death by flames retain most of their body parts intact despite the high temperatures, and those that remain alive and moving are even better potion ingredients.
The water ghost wasn't slow on land, but it was nowhere near as fast as the agile witcher. The blade, dancing like a phantom, gleamed in the last rays of the setting sun. It swiftly bypassed the water ghost's hardest claws and plunged straight into its neck. Kilyam gripped the hilt tightly, using his shoulders as a pivot, and began to spin, instantly dethroning the water ghost's head.
The spinning blade traced a silvery arc in the twilight. As Kiliam's silver sword pierced the throat of the last water ghost, the engravings on the hilt caught the dripping crimson blood. He held the killing stance for three seconds, his hearing enhanced by the Trial of Grass confirming that there was no heartbeat within a fifty-step radius, before slowly exhaling.
On the riverbank, more than twenty corpses of water ghosts were scattered around him, forming an irregular radial array. Some were decapitated, some were impaled, some were burned to a crisp, and several were a mixture of various causes of death. The air was thick with the stench of burnt protein, rotting entrails, and boiling grease, so strong that even his enhanced sense of smell, mutated through mutation, found it somewhat unbearable.
If someone witnessed this scene from a distance, they would probably think it was the site of some kind of cult's sacrificial ritual, or the experimental ruins of some mad sorcerer.
The battle is over.
From the first sword strike to the last, it took less than a quarter of an hour.
Kiliam stood amidst the pile of corpses, slowly adjusting his breathing. His heartbeat was only slightly faster than usual, and his breathing only a few breaths deeper. The only traces of the battle left on him were the mud and blood splattered on his boots, and a few shallow scratches on his sleeves from the water ghost's claws. Those shallow scratches hadn't even broken his skin, leaving only a few white scratches on his leather armor.
He took out an old leather cloth tanned with petrified lizard oil from his saddlebag and, in the fading light, Kiliam wiped the blade. A sorceress had once given him a silk handkerchief embroidered with golden flames, but that 100 orens cloth was now wrapped around the severed finger of a baron, buried under the third oak tree in the back garden of Tritorg Palace—one of the few times he had carried out a frame-up mission.
The Golden Flame Flower only grows in the deserts within the Nilfgaard Empire. Legend has it that it grew from a drop of blood from the first emperor of Nilfgaard that fell into the desert. This suggests that the assassination was a spy operation by the Southern Empire rather than a political infighting within the Northern Kingdom.
However, the Witcher's silver sword doesn't need fancy accessories, just as their lives don't have room for romantic legends.
Except for one person.
He figured that was true of most witchers, but some guy with a reputation in the North, perhaps due to some mishap during a mutation ritual, clearly didn't share Kiliam's views. That guy was a womanizer, always seeming to manage a different kind of one-night stand with those dangerous and alluring sorceresses.
He wasn't envious at all.