Chapter 46 Death
It was a selfish thought but Nial hoped that the corpse of the Original that laid in front of him was not Shana.
He felt light-headed right now and was unable to decipher the remnants of the corpses' mana fluctuations clearly.
As such, he gulped down his saliva before approaching the corpse with slow steps.
Even if it wouldn't affect someone with a rational mind, visualizing the dead corpse of another human made him shudder.
His mind blanked out, and after bracing himself for the worst outcome, he turned around the corpse once he was in front of it, and finally witnessed that it was of a different female student and not Shana.
This caused him to feel relieved, but at the same time, he was able to visualize the corpse of the young student which was nothing to be happy about.
Her innards were spilling out of her abdomen with some of them had been viciously bitten, torn out, and eaten.
Meanwhile, her eyeballs were missing, followed by large chunks of flesh.
At this moment, Nial was happy to not be able to see something, for the first time in his life.
Chills spread over his entire body, and he took a moment before he could finally think again.
Thus, he enveloped the corpse of the young female student with his mana which allowed him to store the corpse inside his spatial ring.
'I should at least give her family the opportunity to give her a proper burial…' Nial was not sure if he was doing the correct thing, and he was not even sure what he would want to happen if one of his family members were to die.
Would he want to see the mutilated body of his loved one, or hope against hope that a miracle would happen and save them?
He was not sure, but that was not his decision, to begin with.
In the end, he decided to hand over the corpse to the military.
This would free him from the responsibilities, and guilt he would feel if he were to simply pass by the student's corpse.
The death of the female student had left a bad taste in his mouth and his mood dipped but there was no time for sorrow.
He had to become even more vigilant about possible dangers if he didn't want to end up like her.
That was the only reasonable thing to do because there was one stronger type of beast, and if his assumption was correct, his estimate of several hundred petrification rats was completely off the mark too.
Rather, it was ten times that, which caused Nial to feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, after making all kinds of predictions, while using the proven information, it would be stupid to ignore the fact that the number of several hundred petrification rats was nothing but a foolish thought, and a gigantic underestimation.
This assumption was proven correct because he came across more groups of petrification rats that varied in size, some were larger, while others were small in size.
In the end, he was able to defeat all of them and sustained minor scratches because the surrounding environment was becoming more difficult to use to his advantage to fight than before.
The ground was wet and slippery, and he had to move even more carefully than before in order to avoid slipping and falling to the ground because this would be his definite death sentence.
With that in mind, Nial became more careful about everything he did, which was the cause of his injuries as he was unable to vigorously attack the masses of petrification rats as before.
Thus, even after being surrounded once in a while, he fend them off while simultaneously enduring the rats' attacks, and the pain they caused.
Fortunately, owing to the leather armor he wore, his vital spots were protected, and he merely sustained flesh wounds that were quickly infested with countless deadly bacterias.
Yet, owing to blacksmith Arnold's generosity, Nial had more than enough vials with antidotes, and disinfection pastes inside.
Because of that, he didn't have to be worried about getting ill through infection and his wounds festering into something bad.
This was an advantage that the other students that entered the two-element dungeon five days ago didn't have.
That being said, he couldn't help but think that many students might have been strong enough to survive until now, but that infections should have caused them great harm.
After thinking about this possibility, Nial felt that it was the only reason for the students to be unable to reach the surface, apart from death…other than that, he couldn't think of many plausible reasons.
However, sometimes, fate worked in mysterious ways, even less inside dungeons, let alone anomalistic dungeons!
As such, he was baffled when he encountered one of the biggest groups of petrification rats fighting against three Originals.
It had only been a few hours since he had found the student's dead body, and right now, he could hear the pained screams of two young men and one woman.
Their flesh was just torn out of their body, but that was not something Nial could see. He was barely able to perceive the weakening mana fluctuations of the three Originals that were buried under the masses of petrification rats that were viciously attacking them.
In their haste and greed to devour human flesh and blood, they trampled fellow brethren, while solely being focused on the direction in which they smelled fresh blood.
The moment Nial perceived this, he instinctively acted.
He might be too weak to defeat more than a hundred petrification rats at once, but they were currently distracted while tearing apart the three Originals.
As such, Nial was able to act without hesitation, using the Fang in its glaive form in order to slash apart the petrification rats that were trying to push aside their brethren in order to reach the severely bleeding Originals.
Blood splattered through the cave as well as organs and decapitated bodies that were flying all around but luckily Nial couldn't see the sickening sight.
He massacred the petrification rats that hindered his path towards the Originals like a tornado sweeping away everything in its wake.
Even though he was sure that he didn't know them, letting them die was not something he could do as long as he was able to move.
He was not someone who would allow people to die when he knew that it was possible to save them.
With that in mind, he loosened one hand from the Fang Glaive and swung it around with only one hand, while his other hand moved towards his belt.
The moment Nial wielded his weapon with only one hand, even the most ignorant petrification rats had noticed him.
However, it was already too late for them to do something because Nial had been holding the pin of the flash grenade in his hand while the remaining part was in the air.
It was less than a second later that he threw it towards them and the moment it touched the ground, it exploded, issuing an ear-piercing sound that was followed by the painful squeals of more than 50 remaining petrification rats that threw their half-burned, half mutilated bodies, writhing in pain and trying in vain to escape death.
This indicated to Nial that the flash grenade had worked, allowing him to move through the rows of petrification rats, smoothly slashing through their largest batches without showing any signs of remorse.
Following that, his face was already smeared with blood and flesh and gastric fluids that had splattered through the air owing to his merciless slashes.
Thus, he paved his way through the ground that was littered with blood, intestines, brain mass, and corpses as he reached the young Originals.
Freeing a hand once again, he quickly pulled out his healing serums before throwing them at the young female who was the only conscious person, while the other two young men had tried to protect her, bearing with the endless pain of being eaten alive.
Luckily, Nial had arrived before the worst could happen.
While continuing to wail and sob, the woman's trembling hands accepted the serums which she quickly gave to her friends, hoping for the best.
She had only taken a single glance towards Nial, and after seeing how he wielded the Fang Glaive, she knew that he would be fine, otherwise, all of them would die!
As such, while she gave her friends the healing serums, Nial was killing the remaining petrification rats.
Only a few minutes passed because the petrifaction rats seemed to possess sensitive eyes which he blinded owing to the flash grenade he had used.
Once he was done, he quickly returned to the female student handing her a first aid kit before distancing himself to allow her to continue crying.
There was nothing he could do right now because he had never learned how to administer a bandage or comfort a sad person.
It might not look like one could do many mistakes, but that was not exactly wrong as disinfecting wounds and applying bandages to the injuries created by carriers of pathogens was not exactly something one should do nonchalantly.
Because of that, Nial just gave the young female student everything he assumed to be somewhat useful before he picked up the origin crystals.
There were quite a few of them, and when he picked up the last crystal he noticed something odd.
'An ability crystal?' He wondered, only to insert a trace of mana into it as three words manifested in his mind.
[Petrification eyes(Poorest)]
It was a common grade, lowest quality ability with the same tag as his Innate ability 'poorest'.
Yet, his innate ability would grow stronger while the petrification eyes would remain of the poorest possible quality.
With that in mind, he realized that they might be worth at least something under specific situations, and with enough mana utilized they might as well be extremely powerful.
However, for Nial, they were utterly useless.
Nevertheless, he stored it away, and prepared his mind to sell it in order to earn some money which he could use to tend to his sister's illness!
It had been a few days since he had seen his sister, and parents, and Nial began to wonder how they were doing. He hoped that they wouldn't worry about him and that they wouldn't ever find out that he was currently in an anomalistic two-element dungeon!
How could Nial know that only fate could tell whether he would meet his family ever again, let alone the fact that they had other things to worry about than Nial's well-being.
That was even more so the fact for Sabrina, who was currently lying inside a ginormous room, crying out in pain as her heart began to palpitate.
Her entire body was glowing in a bright white hue stemming from the fact that her heart was enveloped in layers of whitish-silver membranes that began to infiltrate her weak heart, slowly causing a metamorphosis.
At that moment a middle-aged woman looked at Sabrina with a vibrant smile on her face and she merely said one sentence to the other people that were in charge of observing Sabrina before she left.
"If anything goes wrong, or she dies, each one of you will hope to have never been born!"
With these words, amplified by her aura that immensely pressurized the minds of the people wearing white coats, she left the room in an imposing manner, unbothered by the pained cries of Sabrina.
**
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