Across the wilderness, a silver-clad troop galloped forward at full speed.
Faint sparks of sacred light radiated from both their armor and the mounts beneath them.
This was the Ryan Empire's Knights of Condemnation, a specialized unit formed entirely of high-ranking paladins. Even their mounts were celestial warhorses summoned through divine magic.
They had all cast aside their original names, referring to one another solely by code names.
The paladin leading the squad was named Fanxing. He had driven the Knights of Condemnation onward for three days and three nights without pause, intent solely on reaching the City of Alchemy as swiftly as possible.
This was the first time since the founding of the Knights of Condemnation that they had the opportunity to face a legendary undead directly. Every single one of them was too thrilled to sleep, eager to fly straight to the City of Alchemy and purge all evil in the name of the Holy Light.
However, a vast distance separated the two nations. The Ryan Empire maintained frosty relations with its neighbors, making it impossible for a formidable armed force like the Knights of Condemnation to teleport directly onto foreign soil.
Fanxing had been forced to guide his comrades along a winding detour. Now, all that remained was to cross the canyon before them, after which the path would be smooth and clear. According to intelligence, however, this canyon was occupied by a massive gnoll tribe.
Gnolls were cursed, twisted creatures—born evil and brutal. Ever since usurping this canyon, there was no telling how many passing humans they had slaughtered. Fanxing had long prepared himself to eradicate this gnoll tribe, treating it as a warm-up before confronting the legendary undead.
Though the gnoll tribe numbered over a thousand, and though his squad had ridden hard for days on end, Fanxing was confident that the ten of them were more than enough to wipe out every last one of the monsters.
Yet, as they reached the canyon's perimeter, a teammate beside him spoke up: "Fanxing, something's not right up ahead."
Puzzled, Fanxing examined the area closely, and indeed spotted an anomaly.
The canyon ahead was veiled in a thin mist.
"A Cloud of Death that hasn't fully dispersed?"
As sworn enemies of the undead, Fanxing was intimately familiar with common necromantic spells. Cloud of Death was a wide-area offensive death spell capable of conjuring a cloud of lethal poison over a designated area.
Cloud of Death went by another name—the City-Slaughtering Spell.
If multiple necromancers joined forces to cast it, they could produce a Cloud of Death vast enough to blanket an entire city, wreaking immense carnage in a short span of time.
Gnolls had no aptitude for necromancy and naturally could not have unleashed Cloud of Death on their own doorstep. That meant a necromancer had passed through this canyon, and a battle had taken place.
"Deploy poison warding. We're riding in to look."
At Fanxing's command, magical radiance flared across every knight in the troop. Pale green patterns formed translucent shields, shielding the paladins from the vast majority of toxic effects.
Then, astride their celestial warhorses, they surged into the canyon.
The mostly dissipated poisonous vapor posed no threat to them, but as they charged into the crude encampment within the canyon, every one of them instinctively caught their breath.
Bodies of gnolls lay strewn across the ground in dense clusters, their deaths horrific beyond measure.
Fanxing vaulted down from his mount, warily inspecting the gnoll corpses.
He soon discovered that these gnolls hadn't simply perished from poison. Many had been impaled by weapons, had their heads violently ripped off, or were missing more than half their torsos as though devoured by ghouls... From these details, only one conclusion could be drawn: what slaughtered the gnolls was not an individual necromancer, but a massive undead army.
"Skeletons, zombies, ghouls, Death Knights, abominations... far too many signs of high-ranking undead." Fanxing felt a pang of worry at what he had uncovered.
The gnolls hadn't been caught unprepared in an ambush. It had been a frontal clash between two forces, and over a thousand gnolls had been wiped out with virtually no ability to fight back.
"Let's scout further in. No matter how powerful this undead army was, they couldn't possibly have left without losing a single skeleton. This was a tribe of over a thousand gnolls—a tribe this large must have had warlocks, a chieftain... They couldn't have gone down without putting up a fight." Fanxing's words served as both an explanation to his teammates and a morale boost for himself.
The scene before them was far too absurd, stirring a terrible premonition in his chest.
Advancing deeper into the canyon, they still saw nothing but gnoll corpses. At most, they found traces of rotting flesh clinging to the claws and weapons of the dead, likely left from clashing with the undead.
Yet there was still not a single skeleton bone in sight. What they did find on the ground were numerous massive hoofprints. This was the mark of a disciplined formation of Death Knights charging in unison; their nightmare steeds could ignore rough terrain and plow straight through gnoll lines.
Evidently, before the gnoll warlocks could even cast their spells, they had been impaled on the lances of Death Knights and trampled into mush.
Proceeding further, they finally spotted the mangled remains of a ghoul. Likely because it was utterly dismembered, it hadn't been retrieved. Surrounding these ghoul remnants were a hundred times more gnoll corpses, crowned by a gargantuan gnoll comparable in size to a grizzly bear lying atop the heap.
This was clearly the chieftain of the gnoll tribe. Judging by his sheer build, he had possessed the brute strength to tear tigers and leopards apart with his bare hands. Yet this mighty chieftain's body had been completely hollowed out, every organ in his chest and abdomen devoured—a quintessential mark of a ghoul assault.
Fanxing examined the body closely and reached a conclusion.
The chieftain had been run through by a Death Knight's lance, and his corpse had then been tossed aside to feed the ghouls.
In life, he hadn't managed to inflict any harm on his enemies, for the giant battleaxe in his hands bore not a speck of blood.
As for that torn-apart ghoul, it had most likely been slain when the ghouls turned on one another while fighting over food—making it the army's sole casualty.
What shocked Fanxing even more was that the Cloud of Death had only been cast after the battle ended. The sole purpose seemed to be saving themselves the hassle of cleaning up the battlefield.
"They didn't come to harvest corpses, nor did they care about plunder. They were simply passing through, and in quite a hurry at that. These gnolls just happened to be in their way."
As Fanxing stated this conclusion, the expressions of all the paladins turned grim. Experts in dealing with the undead, they understood precisely what this battlefield signified. A massive undead army had passed through here, advancing straight toward the City of Alchemy.
This undead host numbered at least several dozen Death Knights, thousands of skeletons, alongside ghouls and other undead varieties—and, crucially, a substantial contingent of necromancers.
That raised the question: what kind of powerhouse could command such an undead legion—one so formidable that they didn't even deign to claim the bodies of these gnolls?
Fanxing gazed in the direction of the City of Alchemy, sensing that this mission would prove far more arduous than anticipated.
"Stay on your guard, everyone. This time, we might have to face more than one legendary undead."
Fanxing's warning made every paladin tense. But soon, a teammate remarked, "If such a massive undead army is heading toward the City of Alchemy, could they be preparing to assault it? If so, we might be able to borrow the city's strength to deal with them."
The suggestion made Fanxing's eyes light up. That was indeed a sound approach.
"Right. Let's pick up the pace! Ideally, we can bypass this undead host and reach the City of Alchemy ahead of them!"
Fanxing produced a spell scroll of Mass Fly. Before long, the band of paladins streaked across the sky like shooting stars, taking great care to steer clear of the vast undead army marching on the ground below.
Yet they failed to notice that even higher up in the sky, an immense shadow hovered within the clouds. Only after they had vanished into the distance did a massive dragon skull poke out from the cloud layer.
A gargantuan bone dragon measuring thirty to forty meters in length plunged from the heavens, landing before an enormous carriage. Crafted entirely of pure silver, the carriage was pulled by sixteen hell nightmares, resembling a miniature palace of unparalleled nobility and extravagance.
The bone dragon let out a low rumble toward the carriage: "Sister Rose, why didn't we just kill those annoying paladins?"
A cool, indifferent voice answered from inside the carriage: "Didn't you say that back in the Ryan Empire, you saved Gareth, and that was why he fell in love with you?
"I want to try it too."
Chapter 46