Muffled impacts filled the dim and narrow underground passages of the sewers. Tongues of flames and intermittent flashes of light reflected a host of shadows on the walls — the shadows joined together and concentrated on a solitary likeness, but the other overwhelmed them all.
There were simply too many search parties, and their paths quickly intersected with Aza'zel's, followed by an eruption of numerous battles.
In these battles, Aza'zel realized that principles of combat that are way too profound might provide sufficient food for thought, and he could contemplate them for days, but the low-level battles had their promising qualities as well.
Things like situational awareness, preservation of stamina, strategic maneuvering, and plenty of other principles weren't something he could grasp from an exchange of high-level powers.
A battle that decides its victor after the exchange of one move wasn't suited for fighting, but rather more tailored toward killing.
Aza'zel didn't want to kill, he more so wanted to leave his opponent incapacitated, unable to fight back or trouble him in the future.
The underground passage was too narrow to permit the use of firearms, especially heavy caliber or high fire-rate arms, leaving the search pirates helpless in close proximity battles with Aza'zel.
He didn't abuse them much, as relying solely on his physical body, which was on a level well beyond ordinary humans, proved more than enough to handle a tight formation of five token soldiers.
These men in the first batch were contributed by Ribbon Raksha, as glimpsed from their conversations that Aza'zel just happened to hear during the ongoing battles. However, they were absolutely weak, and Aza'zel wondered if someone on par with Wendy Sunflower was going to show up sooner or later.
Fighting such a character would really help him consolidate his foundations for low-level battles.
"Have at my damn neck if this guy is truly blind!"
A man complained, though his complaints were cut short, followed by a desprate cry of pain as he felt his body flip overhead and smash into one of the brittle walls. The shallow cracks on the wall hummed in protest, their numbers intensifying, crisscrossing, and slowly they itched into the shallow surface.
The force from the impact buzzed through the wall for a few, dramatic moments before the same wall caved in, helpless to withstand the force. The man grunted and thereafter landed in a patch of squirming black.
The mass of darkness went still for a moment before erupting with mind-numbing squeals. Rodents that stretched as far as the eye could see, their gem-like eyes reflecting the radiance of fire in the dimness of the passage, as they flooded out like a river of ink.
Horrified, the man's pitch rose a couple of octaves as he felt rodents in his pants, under his shirt, on his head, and a curious rodent crawled through his parted lips and pried down the cavity of his mouth. The man instinctively bit down, and the rodent lashed out in pain with its sharp claws, finding no target in sight but a wobbly piece of pink flesh.
It didn't think—it couldn't think anyway… It simply clawed and bit down in retaliation.
Aza'zel couldn't see what happened, but he could guess the general situation based on the sudden gasps and the familiar screeching, squealing, and powerful smell in the air.
He had not expected to expose a wave of sewer rodents so suddenly, but he redacted quite quickly by retreating further from the stunned group of four. The poor men had yet to react when the wave of hungry little animals washed them down with great numbers, and some split off and chased after the distant Aza'zel.
The young boy felt his skin crawling with disgust, and excluding the morbid cries that weaved quite the imaginative stimuli of pain and misery, Aza'zel knew that this wasn't something one man—no matter how strong—can handle.
This foreign feeling—fear—was quite the novel sensation as anxiety bumped into his adrenalin, and the latter thereafter shattered the invisible shackles which bound his feet to the ground, allowing the young man to swiftly turn tail and bolt away without a sliver of delay.
Small they may be, but their numbers displayed a hint of invincibility as their small voices accumulated, drowning the pitiful screams of their victims and quacking the ground with their momentum.
In the adjacent passages, many felt the commotion, and their expressions quickly changed. Some of them, seasoned ruffians of Raksha Town, had understanding and horror all over their faces while soundlessly retreating.
"What's wrong with you?"
The man suddenly came to his senses in the midst of his subconscious retreat.
He looked over at the person who pointed out the question. It was a man with a ribbon collar on his neck, pink and in fact, quite disturbing to see around the neck of such a gorilla of a man. He responded, "During Skyslit over a decade ago, people weren't the only living organisms to have benefited from the mercy shown by the Gods Above."
The burly man was quite slow for his size, and couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and speak impatiently, "Talk human you dumbfuck! What Skysplit? What Gods?"
The earlier man's expression twisted between ferocity and a mask of fear. He was someone who had frequently undergone voyages to meet with the wasteland's vultures.
He heard many stories and saw many things. He wasn't so clueless as these ruffians of Raksha Town who only knew sex, food, and sleep. He took a deep breath, not knowing how to go about explaining radioactive evolution under the influence of the prismatic radiance that bathed this forsaken continent for an entire decade.
Eventually, he gritted his teeth and said, "Just know that some creatures from the ancient times—monsters the likes which you've never seen, and god have mercy on your soul, pray that you'd never get the chance to see them either, are slowly re-assimilating into the once dormant ecosystem of this continent."
The bulky man's face scrunched up in evident pain and struggle as he asked hoarsely with a pair of thick, sweat-drenched eyebrows, "What does ecosystem mean? Forget it! Fuck, you like to act all smart? Do you think we're idiots?! Fuck you!"
It was unknown what went through the man's mind, but he felt genuinely irritated by his own stupidity, yet didn't wish for others to glimpse his shame. He swung a heavy caliber double-barreled short shotgun from his waist and held it as though it was a standard military handgun.
The other man's face twisted hideously as he screamed a warning for his compatriot to stop, but it was a bit too late. Sparks flared, a tongue of flames and a resounding echo of igniting gunpowder, followed by a headless corpse plopping to the ground.
The brute of a man laughed happily, feeling quite satisfied with himself, completely oblivious to the ever-spreading cracks on the walls before him. He never bothered tracking the trajectory of his bullet, he didn't even spare the corpse a second look as he glanced back at the other three by his side.
One of them spoke hesitantly, "Erm… He's one of Scimitar Raksha's people…"
The euphoria of killing someone who made him feel stupid quickly faded away as the immensity of what he'd just done finally dawned on him. His eyes flared red with shock and fear, quickly followed by madness as his brain fetched a wonderful idea.
He said, "It wasn't me! I didn't kill him! Haha, no one can say otherwise!"
A young man in the group spat on the ground in disgust. However, he quickly read between the lines as his disgust morphed into unbridled, shocked anger.
"You motherfucker…"
He barely finished his sentence when the burly man acted, committing the quickest manslaughter to date in his life, with his bare hands. It couldn't be helped as reloading his gun would waste too much time… and ammunition.