Chapter 262: Chapter 46: Disturbance in the Wilderness, Halting Before the Hall

However, this brief moment of tranquility did not last long.

The Guardian Knight from the Western Territory was the first to notice something was wrong. He cocked his head to listen, his expression changing slightly. "What’s that sound?"

The three of them immediately held their breath, listening intently.

At first, there was only a faint rustling, coming from all directions.

Then, a faint but continuous tremor ran through the ground, like the beating of a distant, heavy drum.

Knight Armand leaped to the top of a massive boulder and peered into the distance.

In the relatively flat stretch of scorched earth they had just crossed, clouds of dust now churned. Vaguely visible within them were countless crimson figures, swarming out from all directions and converging.

Then they began surging toward the fractured terrain where the Knights were—or more precisely, toward the deeper regions of it!

Their charge was no ordinary wandering!

"Dammit! Is this a beast tide? How could it happen so suddenly...?" The Great Knight from the Ernest Kingdom paled.

"This doesn’t look like a directionless migration..." Knight Armand’s gaze was sharp. He noticed that although the monsters moved with a frenzy, they seemed to share a common direction. Moreover, the Energy Fluctuations emanating from some of them were far more violent than those of the creatures they had encountered before. "It’s more like... they’re being summoned or driven."

He was suddenly reminded of the Saint Cyril Bishop’s words about "a potential enemy far beyond your imagination."

’Is it some kind of will in the Deep Red Wilderness, something that can command these monsters?’

"We can’t stay here!" Knight Armand made a swift decision, leaping down from the boulder. "Follow me! Deeper into the fissures! Find a narrow, defensible spot! Now!"

They had originally planned to use this spot as a base for a slow exploration, but the sudden, massive monster migration had completely upended their plans.

If they remained in this relatively open entrance area, the consequences of being hit head-on by that surging torrent of monsters would be unthinkable.

Without another moment’s hesitation, the three Great Knights abandoned their temporary base. They turned and plunged into the deep, winding, complex terrain behind them, hoping to use the landscape to stall the impending crisis.

...

Similar scenes were playing out in multiple locations across a radius of several dozen kilometers around the Rift Valley Slope.

The representative from the Golden Coast and a few companions were run ragged, chased along a scorching subterranean river by suddenly frenzied cave monsters. They only managed a narrow escape after losing one of their own.

A burly man from the highlands, clad in a wolf pelt, relied on his savage intuition and fierce bravery. He brutally carved a bloody path through the monsters just before they could encircle him, plunging into a misty stone forest that even the creatures seldom entered. He had temporarily escaped his pursuers, but he was now completely lost.

Even the ten well-trained Temple Knights, moving in formation toward their designated anchor point, encountered organized ambushes and sieges far beyond what they’d anticipated. Their Holy Shields were battered by repeated impacts, drastically slowing their advance. One Knight was even severely wounded.

The Observer’s command was like a giant stone dropped into the bloody pond of the Deep Red Wilderness.

Its initial target may have only been to create a ripple at the Rift Valley Slope, but the actual result was a storm of chaos that swept across more than half of the mission zone.

All the surviving Great Knights and Temple Knights were stunned to find that the "malice" of the Deep Red Wilderness had abruptly intensified.

The monsters seemed to have been organized once again by some unseen force, becoming more purposeful, more frenzied, and far more difficult to handle.

It was already a perilous struggle for survival in the Otherworld; now, things had gone from bad to worse.

...

And at the very heart of this storm of chaos, before a ruined hall deep within the Rift Valley Slope.

Murphy stood before the narrow entrance to the fissure, an ancient spirit coin resting quietly in his palm.

The sense of resonance from deep within the hall grew increasingly clear.

Yet, he turned around without a moment’s hesitation.

’Why go to a dangerous place?’

’Just completing the mission is enough.’

’Exploring secrets... that’s not the right move.’

He took one last look at the deep, dark fissure, then prepared to retreat the way he came, replan his route, and get far away from this troublesome place.