The vanguard battled endlessly as the group ascended the mountain range, provided a new cloak of clover by the various slopes and jagged cliffs created by the structure. Blood was raining down from the tectiform covers made of meat and bones. Flesh Monsters crashed down over their heads, some debilitating themselves and others landing well enough to continue down to meet the defenders.
Frontal defenses were not the only thing that they needed. With monsters raining down from overhead, Hiel and several Climbers went above them to help keep them distracted as best as possible. His behemoth summon had claws sharp enough to puncture the ground, which meant it could efficiently scale the mountain as well.
Cross had ended up somewhere overhead too, leading his own small group of defenders.
Somewhere in the distance, War was faced with the worst of the onslaught. A never-ending tide of abominations were falling from the sky and trying to tear the man apart. Though he was alone, the group knew better than to worry about the Holy Knight. There were few things in existence that could threaten him.
Nevertheless, his might did not mean the battle against hundreds of abominations was an easy one. Each wave of monsters, flying or otherwise, slowed him down tremendously. If he did not eradicate them and instead opted to chase and join the Climbers, then they'd face the terrifying might of the wave with him.
Remaining divided from them was the best option. However, the complications did not end with their lack of a powerhouse in the vanguard.
Moving up the mountain in one massive group was going to be impossible while they were assaulted by enemies leaping down various ridges. That is why the defenders were divided into groups of a few dozen who could fight effectively, while the rest broke into smaller groups, taking similar routes.
"I'm going to say it," Worthy's crimson dagger swiped across the sky and severed the head of a hound-shaped abomination leaping at him from a ditch to the side of the path he ran up. "We should have waited and gotten more people on board."
A hundred people did not seem to be nearly enough for this journey now that they'd gotten to their second destination, the mountain range. With an endless amount of chaos happening and the group being forced to divide itself into smaller parties, the number felt feeble.
Some distance ahead of him, Esme was carrying a shortsword close to her chest. It was not enchanted, but it'd suffice.
"Yeah? Imagine these things absorbing a few hundred people. Think we'd be standing a fair chance then, hm?"
Worthy opened his mouth and then shut it, a chill going through his spine. He grimaced, hating to imagine how deadly the flesh abominations would be if they were of greater size and power. Without War, it'd be a hard-fought battle. There were strong fighters among them like Walkyr, Cross, and other defenders — the casualties the group would suffer from the presence of dreadful, titanic amalgamations of carnage would be too great even with their support.
"Point taken. Still, we're in a pretty crappy situation right now."
Esme looked at him and chuckled, "When haven't we been in a crappy situation? The Devil's Den was a death trap, in my humble opinion."
A lazy spirit could not survive the tower, and those who became comfortable in the Devil's Den to the extent of not wishing to leave were doomed to die when faced with merciless challenges the world delivered.
'Closed mouths don't get fed. Huh.'
The wide maws of the various monsters wished for a feast, though.
A tall, vaguely humanoid creature crawled its way up to the side of the group, only to have its head bludgeoned by a massive hammer wielded by a man equally as massive. Groaning as he lifted it back over his shoulder, he swung it just in time to throw another mass of gore away from the group.
Meanwhile, Walkyr was appearing throughout the mountain in random intervals.
Snap, snap, snap, snap.
His fingers kept snapping and people continued disappearing and re-emerging as they all moved. He was moving defenders around to optimal positions where they could best act.
Every so often, he'd take a short break to battle some of the flesh monsters himself, unholstering his firearm and delivering a bullet that eviscerated the bodies of any abomination caught in its way.
His six-shooter was a weapon of mass destruction that could extinguish the life of anything on the other end of its barrel. The projectiles fired were irregularly powerful, enhanced by an intricate working of runic engravings within.
Dozens of lives were saved whenever the gunslinger appeared with a snap.
When a monster snuck up on a woman and nearly sunk its sharp appendage into her spine, its body was blown apart by his intervention.
When one of the men from before, Oro, was at risk of falling into the maws of a beast on a lower path of the mountain, Walkyr blew the beast away with a precise shot from his weapon.
If not for his concern about being absorbed by one of the monsters through prolonged contact, and because of his important role to play in their travel, he'd have probably fought off an entire chunk of the horde on his own.
'This… this is a lot.' In all his days, Worthy had never seen such chaos before. Monsters were swarming them and everyone who could fight was fighting.
During his time in the slums, he'd seen his fair share of fights. He'd seen knights and poorer men battering each other with fists and driving their feet into whatever limbs were closest. There'd been more than a fair share of bloody matches with weapons, where men cut each other open. Sometimes, he'd even see the works of women who'd been paid to seduce and kill a man. Those were his favored moments, since the women often slipped him a few coins to keep his mouth sealed.
Yet, none of those things compared to the endless, relentless fighting. Furthermore, none of those compared to witnessing Rewards in action.
Not everyone had a Reward fit for fighting. Aciago Tower did not hand out utterly useless abilities, at least not commonly. There was an ample variety among the fighters, with some being able to create weapons, others having the ability to communicate through means other than words or signs, and the exceptional few who were equipped with Rewards that produced deadly results at wide degrees.
Among them, his eyes occasionally drifted to Robert. Worthy didn't know the nobleman's Reward because he didn't bother asking or speaking to him more than he needed to. Hell, they hadn't spoken much at all since the first time they met. Yet, he knew the sphere lazily hovering around the man was related to his Reward.
Robert, who was a coward, had somehow remained completely unharmed during their travels. He was exhausted, but he did not even have a droplet of blood on his person, which should've been impossible in a place like this. It was like he'd doused himself in water and washed away all the carnage that should've stuck to him through their sprint.
"Hey, Esme?" Curiosity getting the better of him, Worthy spoke to the gambler and decided to see if she knew anything. "Do you know what that ball around Robert does?"
Esme looked at him as she ran and shook her head, "No."
"No?" He repeated, taken aback by how blunt her answer was.
She answered, "No. I don't have a single idea what that thing is or what it does, nor how it works. I thought it was sort of cute, in an odd way. Just a little flying ball friend." Her voice softened when describing the hovering sphere.
"Eugh… Forget I even asked."
At the corner of his eye, Worthy saw something moving at dangerous speeds. He stopped just in time to duck down, however, one of the men behind him was not lucky enough to see the attack, nor was there enough time to warn him.
A clump of flesh shot over the child's head and hit the man in the stomach, knocking him off his feet with a grunt. "Guh?!"
Something had just thrown a clump of flesh at the child, but he could not see where the creature responsible was. It looked like it'd moved on to another target after successfully hitting something else.
Behind the child, there was a terrifying transformation happening, however.
"H—Help! Help me!" The man who'd been hit was yelling for help, because the flesh was spreading. It was stuck to his body, as if glued, and expanding as it swallowed his flesh and used it as fuel to replace him. People quickly went around him, all of them quickly analyzing and understanding the fact of the matter.
Even as he shouted, pleaded, and thrashed around in attempts at fighting the flesh, nothing worked. He was already dead, nobody could help him now, strictly because of where the flesh had landed. His center mass was compromised, and his abdomen was engulfed by a sea of flesh.
It was painful. It must've been painful, because the man would not stop screaming even as the flesh crept up and hugged his face and swallowed his person whole. The flesh abomination, which was once a mere ball, had grown and fully assimilated the human within only a matter of seconds.
Whoever the man was, someone whose name Worthy did not know, was rising to his feet as people sprinted around him.
No. The man was dead, just like that — replaced by an abomination of flesh and making the first of many casualties to come.