TALES OF A WITCHER - Season 9 Episode 12

Nightingale soon discovered that she was right.

Most demonic hybrid beasts could not locate her, so hardly any beasts could clamber onto the cliff to block her. The flying beasts swooping in the mid-air looked terrifying but always missed her like an arrow that missed its target. As long as she kept moving, it was uneasy for those beasts to hold her back.

The only beasts that could “spot” her were those mutated ones with sickle-shaped forelegs. They writhed their robust bodies and nailed their supportive legs in the stones so that they were able to move about the cliff. Under the command of the monster, they moved towards the dome of the cave, intercepting Nightingale and the alerted Magic Eye.

She had to destroy those beasts before meeting head-on the monster.

The vast dome of the cave had become Nightingale’s personal battlefield. Fighting alone had been an experience she had not had for a long time.

She had been walking alone in the Mist in the past and had been forced to serve her wicked aristocratic relatives until Wendy had found her and helped her out of such miseries.

But her feeling at present was dramatically different from the feeling she had had when she had roamed in the Silver City.

Alone she was, she felt no boredom or hatred in the least, for she volunteered to participate in this dangerous duel without being compelled or threatened.

Her mind was saturated with the faith to protect her companions.

Nightingale did not feel alone at all, for she was in the protective suit made by Soraya, with the explosives produced by Agatha in her bag, and the gun designed by Roland around her waist, which was engraved with the words “To Veronica”.

All of these gears gave her a feeling that everyone was fighting alongside her.

As she revolved a multitude of thoughts in her head, the enemies were drawing near. The beasts started to close up, their sickle-shaped forelegs in the air.

There was a total of 16 of them.

Nightingale took out the pistol, pulled the safety, and waited until the nearest beast was within a few paces. Then she went out of the Mist as she pulled the trigger.

The beast lurched to her at the same time.

Its powerful tail and supportive legs enabled them to dash forward. The strike was completed in a split second, as quick as a predator plunging at its prey.

It was more like that the beast struck the bullet itself than the other way around.

Even though the beast was shot, the shockwave of the bullet could still wound Nightingale.

But she had prepared for this.

The moment the bullet left the muzzle, Nightingale re-entered the Mist and stepped onto a fast receding borderline that represented the contour of the earth.

This was perfect timing.

An outsider might think she leaped backward all of a sudden for a few meters; but in fact, it was the ground underneath that was moving backward.

“Bang!”

The bullet smashed into the sickle monster’s pointy head and blew it up. Its shell and brain splashed like a blooming flower. The magic glow dissipated quickly and its invisible body twitched and reappeared. The lifeless beast fell to the subterranean lake like a stone dropping into the water. Yet in Nightingale’s eyes, the dead body moved headlong upward, as if it were sucked down to the bottom of the surging lake.

Taking advantage of the changeable lines in the Mist in this way, Nightingale chased and fought against her enemies. Even though the beasts moved very fast, they succumbed to the negative impact of the gravity. When Nightingale lured them into the battlefield on which they had had a fight earlier, they had to slow down to make sure their legs were deeply rooted in the rock, as the previous battle, which had left hundreds of holes in the rocky walls, greatly reduced the friction between their legs and the surface.

But her tactics were not flawless. Because she had to step out of the Mist and expose herself temporarily to fire at the enemy, she had drawn increasing numbers of beasts to her. What was worse, she had become more vulnerable to the flying demonic beasts because those deformed winged monsters had started to hover in the air close to the dome to bide their time, rather than “swoop down” blindly as they did before. When she fired at the enemies, those flying beasts would dodge the bullet so that she had to hide in the Mist again to relocate her target. Sometimes she had to relay on the borderline in the Mist to dodge the massive attacks from the enemies.

Nightingale got injured in less than seven minutes after the battle began.

After all, she could not find a good hiding spot in the Mist every time after she fired. The change of the lines in the Mist was not subject to her will, so the misty world was as perilous to her as to everybody else. A battle of such high intensity was a challenge both to her physical strength and her mentality.

The greatest injury was to her ribs.

She had failed to dodge a strike when being besieged by two flying beasts. Their razor-sharp claws had torn her coat, leaving a deep cut from her flank to her waist. The coated protective suit made by Soraya had saved her from being gutted, but the coating could not block the power of the strike. The pain almost took away her breath, and she had to rest for a long time to recover herself.

Evidently, it was Multi-eyed Demon that manipulated the frantic demonic hybrid beasts, for those hybrid beasts, which were usually prone to fight against each other, actually worked together and launched fierce and continuous attacks this time. That made Nightingale even more determined to destroy the demon. She did not understand why it would rather hide in this Great Snow Mountain than attack Neverwinter. But the demonic beasts with a commander would be a great threat to Prince Roland.

Her 10 bullets had all been used up, and there were still four sickle monsters left —10 of the beasts had been killed directly by the bullets, and two fell into the lake during the battle. Judging from the turbulent currents of the lake, Nightingale believed that the two beasts barely got a chance to survive and come back to the battle.

The violent attack from the demonic beasts left Nightingale no time to reload the bullets, and neither did she intend to. She tucked the pistol back to her belt and leaped over an invisible beast and reached its back when a swarm of demonic hybrid beasts came to her. She then pulled the invisible beast into the misty world.

The beast got shocked as his vision changed from the battlefield to the world of black and white.

Nightingale’s magic power streamed from her fingertips. The following beasts that clashed with the first one were all pulled into the mist subsequently. As the number of the beasts entering the Mist increased, her magic power exceeded the consumption limit and began to drain. Just at that moment, one of the lines constituting the dome the misty world curled up and went flying toward her.

This was the moment she had been waiting for. As more beasts had been pulled into the misty world, her magic power quickly drained and the misty world became unstabilized. The twisting lines had thus become a lethal weapon, although at other times they helped her leap a few meters away.

The white line swept over the beasts, and their figures suddenly froze.

It was like those beasts had vanished instantly, and in a split second, a “blank space” emerged in the sky of the misty world. But when the beasts reappeared, the weirdest thing happened. The lower parts of their bodies remained in the place where they had disappeared, while the upper parts several meters away as if a sharp longsword had cut all of them into halves with one swing and the body parts had been transported and floated in the air.

The bodies suspended for a few seconds before they hailed down into the lake, creating numerous water columns.