I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 849: Desperate Straits

Just as Jie Ming was preparing to take the research deeper still.

Suddenly the magical network terminal of his puppet in the outside world buzzed once, and an emergency communication was automatically patched through.

Jie Ming split off a thread of consciousness and returned to the outside world.

A light screen unfolded of its own accord, and the projection of a fifth-level wizard of the Augusta family surfaced upon it.

Only, right now there was nothing left on the man’s face of that earlier composure.

His robe was in tatters, and the violent explosions sounding endlessly behind him set off the alarm in his expression.

“Wizard Jie Ming! We have run into an ambush! Requesting support!”

The words had barely left him when a deafening roar went up in the background of the transmission, followed at once by a violent shaking of the image.

Watching the feed cut out on its own, Jie Ming stroked his chin. “Interesting…”

He released a black giant legion to stand guard beside the rift in the plane barrier, then rose and flew toward the position that wizard had called from.

…

…

Rumble…

The earth shook without pause, gray-yellow strata of rock rising and falling like waves.

Inside the caverns, countless mushroom-men bored out of the split seams in the stone and converged in a frenzy on the battlefield at the center.

And at the far end of the mushroom-men’s advance, that vast underground hollow had already turned into a gray-brown sea of fungus.

At the center of the battlefield, a young fifth-level wizard of the Augusta family hung in midair, his face long since gone pale.

His robe was covered in dust, which meant his shields had been blown apart one after another.

And the fluctuations of his mental energy had sunk low, which meant his power was near exhaustion.

He looked all around him, at the mushroom-men hurling themselves in from every side, from the ground and even from the rock overhead, and his throat bobbed before he could stop it.

“How is this possible… how are there this many?!”

They had come to clear out this stronghold on Jie Ming’s orders.

At first everything had gone smoothly. The black giant legion had rolled straight through, and they too had pressed down underground level by level, wiping out mushroom-men in great numbers.

But as the fighting wore on they found the enemy’s numbers not merely failing to fall but growing ever larger, as though they could never be killed off.

By now the entire black giant legion and the cannon-fodder legions had fallen wholly into an encirclement.

And the situation was still getting worse.

On every side were gray-brown shapes squirming without end, treading over the corpses of their own kind as they surged madly forward; the instant the front rank went down, the ones behind filled the gap.

As far as the eye could see, that whole sea of fungus held scarcely a gap anywhere.

Boom!

With a violent tremor, another attack slammed into the cavern roof above.

Searing flame burst outward, and a cluster of mushroom-men that had just bored down out of the roof were charred black in an instant.

But a strike that in theory could shake a continent got no further than that before layer upon layer of mushroom-men drained its energy dry, leaving in the end only a crater a few hundred meters across in the cavern roof.

And before the flames had even fully dispersed, the rock walls around that crater were already “growing” at a rate visible to the naked eye, soon “healing” back into their original shape.

“It is no use… we cannot make a dent in them.” Another wizard beside him let despair through in his voice.

As half-elementalized creatures, the mushroom-men not only had absurdly high defensive power, they were also thoroughly adept at manipulating rock and earth as matter.

The young wizards were already regretting having charged in so rashly. In underground caverns like these, the field belonged entirely to the mushroom-men!

Another young wizard’s forehead was likewise beaded with cold sweat as he directed the line and swept his gaze over the battlefield again and again.

“This is bad. It is not just ordinary mushroom-men; there are more and more sixth-level units too!”

His words had barely fallen when a muffled roar burst out in the distance.

Boom!

The terrible shockwave left every wizard present feeling a tightness in the chest.

A sixth-level black giant several hundred meters tall was roaring as he swung his great black axe, sending two sixth-level mushroom-men flying with the blow.

But before he could follow it up, another five sixth-level mushroom-men lunged at him from the side all at once.

Several kinds of attack came down together, and for all the black giant’s astonishing strength, he was driven back step after step.

Across the whole battlefield, much the same scene was playing out very nearly everywhere.

The sixth-level black giants responsible for spearheading the assaults and leading the formations were by now all pinned down by sixth-level mushroom-men several times their own number.

And as time went on, the black giants were visibly and steadily losing ground.

Outside the caverns, things were going no better for the Tentacle Tree fleet.

Warship after warship poured out beams without pause, vaporizing the mushroom-men swarming up below by the swathe.

Yet more and more mushroom-men still launched themselves skyward in the gaps between the volleys, hoisting heavy slabs of rock above them and pounding at the hulls like cannon shells.

Crack…

Suddenly the shield of one Tentacle Tree warship shuddered violently, and as another wave of mushroom-men slammed into it, the ship’s shield shattered with a roar.

The other mushroom-men seized the chance and struck again, caving in one whole side of the hull by main force.

At last the warship could bear the assault no longer and blew apart into a ball of flame.

The Tentacle Tree crew inside it dissolved in terror into a mass of golden light and vanished.

After that, more and more battleships began to fall, or to turn into fireballs.

Inside the caverns, watching casualties begin to appear, watching black giants dissolve into golden light amid their screams, the young wizards grew paler and paler.

“Why? Why are their numbers still increasing?” Someone could not help muttering to himself.

But another turned to the somewhat more experienced fifth-level wizard beside him. “Has the spatial blockade still not lifted?!”

“It has not!” the fifth-level wizard answered through gritted teeth. “It is the earth-element concentration these things have gathered, so high that it is disturbing space itself. There is no spatial blockade at all…”

At those words every face changed completely.

There was no escaping. They could only be trapped here until they died!

“Then what about support? Did they say when it arrives?!” Someone shouted, breaking down.

Another answered, his expression grim. “The request went out long ago. All we can do now is wait!”

Wait…

That one word left them all silent.

For the first time they discovered how very long a thing waiting for support could be.

Boom!

At that very moment, a crash even more terrible than before erupted in the distance.

They whipped their heads around to see a sixth-level black giant already completely overwhelmed by a dozen or more sixth-level mushroom-men.

He was covered from head to foot in wounds, half his body already blown open.

Looking at the enemies hurling themselves at him from all sides, the black giant’s eyes abruptly lit up.

The ruined great maw in his chest split wide in a ferocious grin. “For my lord!”

Boom!!!

Blinding light burst out, the black giant’s entire body swelled abruptly, and then… it detonated with a roar!

The terrible shockwave swept through the cavern. Dozens of sixth-level mushroom-men were blasted apart on the spot, and the thousands of ordinary mushroom-men around them were turned in an instant into a sky-filling mist of blood.

Even the cavern, absurdly solid until now, was left tottering, the whole of it widening steadily outward.

When the explosion subsided, a brief empty zone had opened for several kilometers around.

Yet the young wizards felt not the slightest joy at it.

Because that blank space did not last long before still more mushroom-men, pouring in from every side, filled it back up.

Watching the sea of fungus press back in as crowded as ever, and the cavern swiftly “healing” itself, a deep despair welled up in every heart.

There was no killing them all.

There truly was no killing them all.

And at that moment, heaven and earth abruptly fell quiet.

Every mushroom-man seemed to pause for an instant.

Then an indescribably terrible pressure came slowly down from the vault of the sky.

Hmmm…

The elements congealed; the atmosphere trembled.

Mushroom-men mid-charge and black giants drenched in the blood of the fight alike stopped moving despite themselves.

Every living thing present felt that terrible aura, and though they knew there was nothing overhead but cavern rock, they all raised their heads at the same time without thinking.

The young wizards felt as though an entire sky had been pressed down onto their shoulders; their bodies stiffened, and even breathing became difficult.

“This… this is…”

But just as their despair deepened further, the black giants around them erupted in a deafening cheer.

“Master!”

“It is my lord! My lord has come!”

“Kill!!”