No matter what, they certainly couldn't just sit around waiting for something to happen.
The two immediately decided to find the mayor and ask about the situation.
For example, whether anything unusual had happened in Goldweald recently.
"If you're asking whether something happened, there actually was one incident recently."
Julius didn't hide anything. Although he had no idea why the two of them were asking, he explained, "I believe it was three days ago. Hubard, a retired veteran, got drunk in the middle of the night and insisted on going out to pick a fight with a bear. We all thought he was joking at the time. After all, bears were what he feared most. But the next day, Hubard disappeared.
"We immediately went out looking for him. All we found were some of his belongings on a nearby mountainside, and there were signs of a bear in the area."
There was a touch of sadness in his voice as he spoke. After all, Hubard had been his friend for many years.
Luke thought for a moment after hearing the story.
"What happened afterward?"
Julius hadn't expected Luke to be interested in what came next, but he immediately continued, "We returned to town first, gathered our equipment, and prepared to kill that bear to avenge Hubard. Unfortunately, we found nothing. We've been searching for it for the past three days, but it looks like it fled far away. Your Highness doesn't need to concern yourself with such a minor matter. We'll definitely handle it properly."
"I trust your abilities."
Luke looked up and smiled at him before continuing, "But tell me more about the circumstances surrounding Hubard's disappearance. When you found his belongings, was there anything else around besides the bear tracks?"
"Uh..."
Julius couldn't help searching his memory and immediately found himself struggling.
Human memory could be narrow. When one detail of an event stood out strongly enough, people tended to overlook everything else.
For example, when Julius thought back on that day now, all he could clearly remember were the traces left by the bear.
He hadn't expected the prince to take such an interest in the matter.
He racked his brain, desperately trying to remember, and eventually something did come to mind.
"If you're asking about anything else, I remember hearing crows that day. Their calls were incredibly shrill, and they irritated me quite a bit. Other than that, I can't think of anything."
Just as he finished speaking, a young child's voice suddenly came from the staircase.
"Scarecrow..."
The room fell silent for an instant.
"Why did you come downstairs?"
Julius rose and walked toward the little girl, then turned back with an embarrassed smile.
"This is my daughter, Judy. She kept insisting that she'd seen a scarecrow that day. It's harvest season right now, so scarecrows are everywhere to keep crows, birds, and other animals away."
Luke gestured for him to move aside, then looked gently at the little girl.
"Can you tell me a little more? What did the scarecrow look like?"
"It looked like a person standing in the field. It looked really scary, and it kept staring at us. It wasn't like the other scarecrows."
Judy innocently described what she'd seen.
"I see."
Luke stood up.
There was no need to ask anything else.
He looked at Julius.
"Do me a favor. Gather everyone in town together."
"At once."
Julius seemed to sense the seriousness in Luke's eyes. Not daring to delay, he immediately went to carry out the order.
After he left, Lux couldn't help asking, "Did you figure something out?"
"I suspect it's a demon, and not an ordinary one."
Luke's brows furrowed slightly, his expression unusually grave.
There still wasn't much information to go on, but he was almost certain about his conclusion.
A potential threat had always lurked within Demacia, one that stood above practically every other demon, seated upon a throne among demonkind and serving as the very incarnation of fear itself.
One of the Ten Kings, Fiddlesticks, the Ancient Fear.
Luke had once suspected Fiddlesticks of appearing near another town, only to later confirm that it hadn't been responsible.
Thinking back on it now, that was probably for the best.
If it really had been Fiddlesticks back then and Luke had encountered it, he probably would've died on the spot.
Even with his current strength, facing something like that would be a tremendous headache.
After all, Fiddlesticks was one of the Ten Kings. Demons like Nocturne, Evelynn, and Tahm Kench coveted such heights, while Fiddlesticks itself stood among the three highest-ranked of them.
No wonder he'd felt uneasy the moment he entered this town.
It seemed he'd found the source.
Lux rarely saw Luke wearing such a serious expression. She immediately realized that the situation was probably far more dangerous than she'd initially thought.
The people of Demacia were extremely efficient.
Even though they'd only recently been summoned once already, when the call went out again, the townspeople quickly gathered together once more.
Luke stood on the platform and looked down at the crowd of at least several thousand people.
Goldweald was already the size of a moderately sized town.
He casually came up with an excuse and told everyone to remain in the square for the time being.
However, he knew perfectly well that this wasn't a long-term solution.
Whether they gathered together or scattered, Fiddlesticks could easily make several thousand people disappear without a trace.
Luke didn't know why it hadn't appeared yet, but he felt that moment couldn't be far away.
Just as that thought crossed his mind, several crows flew onto the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.
Their feathers were pitch-black, while their red eyes stared down at the people like bottomless abysses.
A chill rose in Luke's heart.
Without hesitation, he grabbed a bow and arrows, nocked an arrow, and drew the string.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Several arrows shot through the air at tremendous speed, instantly piercing the crows.
The crowd erupted in surprise, marveling at Luke's extraordinary archery. Applause and cheers even rose from below the platform.
But Luke hadn't done it to show off.
He watched the crow corpses tumble to the ground.
Before long, several more appeared in the sky.
And there were clearly more of them this time.
So Luke shot down every crow that appeared.
Each time another crow fell, the crowd erupted in loud cheers. Countless people stared at Luke with admiration, looking at the living legend they revered.
But as he continued shooting, Lux and the others gradually realized something was wrong.
There were far too many crows.
A huge flock was now circling overhead.
Their mass cast a shadow across the town like a dark cloud before the birds finally settled across the rooftops, countless pairs of eerie eyes staring down at the crowd.
If no one could tell there was something strange going on after a sight like this, they might as well give up.
Quiet discussions quickly broke out among the people below.
"There's nothing to fear. It's just a demon causing trouble."
To prevent unnecessary panic from spreading, Luke directly formed arrows from mana and drew back the bowstring.
With a sharp rush of air, countless magical arrows erupted forth, scattering across the sky like brilliant feathers.
The miserable shrieks of crows filled the air.
A vast carpet of corpses appeared across the ground.
The townspeople hadn't expected Luke to be so skilled with magic as well. Their attention was immediately drawn to him again, and a powerful sense of security welled up within them.
The cheering continued.
Before long, another shadow swept overhead.
Even more crows appeared than last time.
There were probably already more than two hundred of them, a dense black swarm filling the sky.
Almost as though they were deliberately seeking death, they no longer remained perched on the rooftops.
Instead, they dove straight toward the square.
A few hundred crows naturally posed no real difficulty for Luke.
But he knew this couldn't continue forever.
One thing was certain.
Fiddlesticks was beginning to stir.
Lux stopped standing by and joined the fight, working together with Yurna against the flock.
Immediately afterward, the town guards and townspeople with hunting experience joined in as well.
The problem was that the more crows they killed, the more appeared.
It was almost as though they were being reborn from the corpses of their companions.
Every time one crow died, two more arrived.
The cycle continued endlessly.
Before long, crows were circling everywhere overhead, their shrill, piercing cries leaving people dizzy and disoriented.
Rooftops, streetlamps, windowsills, the ground, everywhere they looked was covered with ink-black crows.
Worse still, the corpses had begun releasing a rotten, bloody stench that burned the nose.
The townspeople weren't particularly frightened yet.
After all, Luke and Lux were here, and both were figures admired by countless people.
They were mostly disgusted.
At this rate, when would the crows ever stop coming?
"Why are there more and more of them?"
Lux moved closer to Luke and asked in confusion.
This was the first time she'd encountered anything so bizarre.
Just dealing with the crows alone was already enough to keep everyone occupied, and the demon controlling them hadn't even shown itself.
"I don't know either. For now, just keep killing them."
Luke noticed that the crows were becoming increasingly aggressive.
At practically every moment, hundreds of them were diving toward the square.
The square was large.
If this continued, sooner or later there would be places Luke couldn't protect.
And the pattern governing the appearance of the crows truly did seem to be one dies, two appear, continuing endlessly.
If they kept killing them at this rate, the corpses alone might eventually bury everyone alive.
The sun was beginning to set.
The light of dusk stretched across the land, making the cries of the crows sound even more mournful.
Darkness seemed to descend upon Goldweald ahead of night itself, making it look like a town approaching its final curtain.
The fear buried inside some people's hearts finally began to awaken.
And then it started spreading.
The circling crows seemed to smell something delicious.
They shrieked excitedly, attacking with even greater ferocity and an even more suicidal disregard for themselves.
Luke immediately realized what was happening.
Panic had started spreading.
And these crows were feeding on fear, growing stronger because of it.
The situation rapidly deteriorated.
The square, where nearly everyone in Goldweald had gathered, came under an all-out assault from the flock.
And the worse things became, the more panic spread through the crowd like a contagious plague.
Anxious voices grew increasingly common.
People began wondering whether Luke and Lux, despite being incredibly powerful, might still be weaker than the demon behind all this.
Would the capital send troops to reinforce them?
The behavior of these crows had clearly gone far beyond anything natural.
They had seen swarms of locusts before, but the crows now resembled a plague of locusts themselves, so numerous that merely looking at them made people's scalps crawl.
And an increasingly sinister atmosphere was settling over everything.
As long as unease existed, fear would inevitably be born.
As long as fear existed, it would inevitably become food for the crows.
It was a vicious cycle.
Lux keenly noticed something.
"These crows... don't they look bigger?"
Luke had noticed it too.
A moment earlier, he'd activated Destiny and surveyed the entire town along with the surrounding areas, yet he hadn't found any trace of Fiddlesticks.
He had no idea where it was hiding.
And given the current situation, Luke couldn't leave the square to search for it.
If he left, Lux and Yurna alone might not be able to stop the flock's attacks.
Protecting themselves wouldn't be a problem.
But they also had to protect several thousand ordinary people.
By this point, even the town guards could barely hold the crows back.
Worse still were the birds attacking directly from overhead.
They could completely bypass the defensive lines and attack ordinary people directly.
And even higher above them, an enormous mass of crows simply circled without descending.
As the vicious cycle continued, Luke suddenly had a premonition.
Something big was coming.
"Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw!"
Shrill cries exploded across the sky.
All at once, every crow circling above the square launched its attack simultaneously.
Countless more surged out of the surrounding alleys.
It was as though darkness itself were closing in.
At that moment, a hidden expert among the crowd finally made his move.
Blue light flared in his eyes.
He raised both hands and let out a shout as two streams of lightning-like magic erupted forth, racing toward the flock.
The instant they struck the first crow, the magical energy began conducting wildly outward.
Like a bolt of lightning expanding farther and farther, it tore sharply and powerfully through one crow after another.
Brilliant blue light flashed throughout the entire square like a sudden thunderbolt.
When his magic faded, the crows hadn't even left corpses behind.
Only piles of black ash remained on the ground.
At the same time, Lux stopped holding back.
She raised her staff and unleashed a dazzling aurora that tore straight through the flock, proving extraordinarily effective.
Working together, everyone managed to withstand the crows' massive assault.
Strangely, the moment the attack ended, the entire sky suddenly fell deathly silent.
Not a single crow could be heard.
Then everyone blinked.
The countless crows that had filled the sky moments earlier had completely vanished.
Not one remained.
Even the corpses had disappeared.
The townspeople couldn't help feeling horrified and bewildered.
Those crows had unquestionably been real.
What kind of power could make them disappear without a trace in an instant?
"Is it over?"
Someone couldn't help asking, desperate to know whether the ordeal had truly ended.
"Don't panic. Everyone remain calm. Spreading fear will only make the demon stronger."
Luke looked toward the crowd and spoke loudly.
"This isn't over yet. Until the matter is resolved, no one is to leave this square."
Naturally, the townspeople obeyed him.
They gradually quieted down.
Although they were still afraid, the strength Luke and the others had displayed gave them a sense of security.
Luke then turned his attention toward the mage who had intervened earlier.
The man wore a cloak, and his entire presence was strangely mysterious.
After a moment of thought, Luke invited him over.
"Friend, why don't you join us so we can discuss the situation together?"
Truthfully, Luke hadn't sensed this mage hiding within the crowd beforehand.
But the immensely powerful magic he'd just displayed made it obvious that he was no ordinary mage.
He had clearly used some method to conceal his presence.
Only when he could no longer stand by and watch had he finally been forced to reveal himself.
The man didn't refuse.
He followed Luke and the others into the building where they planned to discuss the situation.
When he removed his cloak, even Luke couldn't help freezing for a moment.
The mage had blue-violet skin covered with mysterious markings. His weathered face and exhausted eyes spoke of countless hardships and a long, weary journey.
A name immediately flashed through Luke's mind.
Ryze, the Rune Mage.
Luke hadn't expected to encounter him here.
//Check out my P@tre0n for 30 extra chapters on all my fanfics //[email protected]/Razeil0810