"So, are those supposed to be undeads too?" wondered Ilmna after caving the skull of an infected in.
"Ilmna, they have life force and you can see it, of course they aren't undeads!" responded Milleral in the distance, struggling to hit an impossibly thin one that kept slipping into cracks.
This was exactly why he avoided associating with other heroes, spending any prolonged period of time with any was certain to increase his blood pressure.
He couldn't understand how she could sometimes be so smart but be like that the rest of the time.
"Hey, how high is your intelligence stat Ilmna?" he asked her after cutting his stick-thin infected in half.
"Wouldn't you like to know? I don't share that but it is my highest stat with wisdom!" she responded truthfully, leaving the snake hero with no understanding of how things worked anymore.
'I see, so it is purely physical...' he concluded as their new third member, Molarine walked over after dealing with her own batch of infected.
"They are definitely getting stronger the deeper we go in but their numbers are getting lower and lower, unless their is a sudden spike in power, it seems like we'll be able to clear the majority of these mutants" she remarked as she shook blood of her hands.
"Won't there be some that will get past us though?" looking into the distance, the heroine spoke up.
"That is unavoidable but the forces of Laparadi are plenty capable and mostly weaklings will be able to escape, I trust that they won't get overwhelmed by this sort of mutant"
The utter destruction of mutants continued as they traveled further in, as it had been expected, while they got stronger, there were much less of them, up to the point where only a single one would show up before them and thus get destroyed because of the numerical advantage.
"By the way, why are dragging the corpse of that one?" questioned Ilmna, curious about it, even though she should have known already.
"That's for Laura, it seemed a bit special so I figured that it would be the best to take back for her to use for divination" responded Molarine as she raised the corpse of a mutant with abnormal lungs sticking out.
Laura had asked for them to look out for that but Ilmna had apparently not been listening, she had been there for sure but she didn't hear any of it.
"If if is the work of someone, which it most likely is, she should be able to point us toward their direction, they might be a sin or lesser sin after all, although I don't know what is so special about that one in particular, I would have just taken the corpse of the stron-" the hero of the snake was interrupted as he noticed that something was off.
He let the snake slither on the ground as it could sense the vibrations in the ground quite well, it hadn't picked up anything through tasting the air but the way the ground received vibrations was clearly different.
He stopped while raising his fist in the air, an indicator for the others to stop too.
The ground... Wasn't soil or rock like before, it hadn't felt any different when walking on it but it was something else, something softer.
Since, it didn't seem to know that it had been figured out, Milleral took his time to prepare for a strike, the snake climbed up on him, growing in size as it bared its fangs, beside his size, he focused on increasing the potency of its toxin.
By making it purely a venom instead of a mix between that and a poison, he increased its overall potency, by following a strict set of movements it also did just that, he felt like he needed to kill this thing before it could actually show off its power.
Not that it was overly powerful but if its body was the very terrain, then it would have a severe advantage.
Bringing his hand down, as he made a movement imitating the snake plunging down and burying its fangs deep into the flesh of the mutant beneath.
Screaming out in the pain, various objects and structure around the three of them lost their camouflage, revealing various limbs that had been there the whole time.
Hands and tentacle of flesh, shot out at a laughable speed, the movements sluggish and easy to counter, the venom was working wonders.
The mutant, the last and stongest mutant present died very easily, it probably had poor senses and waited for things to brush off against one of its hidden limbs, once something, their wasn't much the prey could have done when literally on the hunter.
"Welp, things went well, the main target didn't run away!" cheered Ilmna, reminding Milleral of the past failures.
"Let's just go around to see if we can get any other mutants before heading back" spoke Molarine but this idea was quickly interrupted.
None of the three had seen it coming but a man with a potato bag over his head was just standing in their way, a long trail of blood behind, the trail was peculiar too, it was like someone had contiuously thrown blood bags as it was linear at all and chaotic.
He wore a long dark coat and let his arms just hang loosely.
"Who are you?" the three of them got ready to fight the unknown man but he simply put his hands forward, every single part of his body was covered by something and something was off about him in general, something ugly was beneath that coat.
"I am not here to fight you, at least not yet" spoke the suspicious man, speaking normally and without a hint of deceit in his voice.
"I was just told to watch over the mutants and I must say, very good job with that last one! I wouldn't have been able to do it so cleanly!" the man praised them before suddenly shoving his hand into the flesh of the mutant and pulling out a portion of its large guts.
"Sorry but I will take that for myself, you can keep that other one though, you want to find the culprit for this right? I am sure you will but that would be playing with fire" he advised them as the guts inexplicably started being slurped up inside of the man though a small opening that just appeared in his glove.
In an instant, it had all been absorbed without any change happening to the man.
"You are probably thinking of saying something along the lines of 'where do you think you're going', so let us be clear, you can't stop me" spouted the man before suddenly vanishing, a new trail of blood had just appeared, going right in between them.
"Man, he really just did a little speech and then left, it seems like we truly can't stop anyone from running away from us" remarked Ilmna with a slight laugh.
"I hate this" spoke Milleral.