Chapter 173: Chapter 173: The Wind Blows, Revealing Pale Golden Down
Beside Anno, Hattie struggled to shield herself with the skimpy bath towel. Her fuller curves made coverage precarious; even the faint evening breeze rustling through the woods teased glimpses of her forbidden zone.
Yet in that moment, Hattie shed her mask of panic. A serene smile touched her lips as she reassured Anno, "Don’t worry. Priest possesses an innate ability to Purify undead, fiends, and their corrupting pollution, wiping them from existence."
"He is the ultimate bane to these fiends. Unless stronger Demons emerge, we can safely wait here for him to handle everything."
Anno’s eyes widened, shimmering with awe. "Such a power? It sounds even more potent than a paladin’s Divine Smite..."
Divine Smite merely dealt extra damage to Demons—it couldn’t Purify the pollution they spread. Eradicating a Demon’s taint required holy water for Purification, or even 2nd-level spells like Lesser Restoration. Sometimes, not even paladins could fully Purify the corruption; specialized Pastors were needed, wielding 5th-tier spells like Greater Restoration.
But what struck Anno most wasn’t Charles’s ability—it was the realization that she knew so little about him. Secrets still lay hidden beneath the surface...
Theresa nodded emphatically, leaping to Charles’s defense. "Indeed, some powers defy convention. Against Demons, his gifts eclipse even a paladin’s light."
"Even against stronger Demons, we cripple them first and let the Priest finish the Purification. It’s far more efficient."
Her words carried a subtle subtext: Priest came to slay Demons, not ogle your naked form! Protecting Charles’s dignity while fostering tension demanded all her guile.
Unbeknownst to her, Anno’s straightforward mind missed the insinuation. To her, Charles charging to her aid mid-bath during a Demon attack was heroic pragmatism—nothing more. With his safety assured, relief washed over her.
Then, questions flooded her mind: What is the source of his power? Divine blessing? A relic? Or... awakened bloodline energies?
If the latter... Would our children be born paladins?
Her cheeks flushed. Heart pounding, wild fantasies spiraled: For the world’s sake, we’d need many children... a great dynasty...
Wait—his lost noble lineage... could that be true?
Anno’s gaze flickered toward Nidalee, who lingered nearby. The druid met her eyes, tensing instantly. Anno hastily looked away, scolding herself: It changes nothing. Whether his blood is special or not, he’s just helping Nidalee resolve her troubles. That’s all...
Nidalee’s guilt spiked under that glance. Fear of exposure warred with exhilaration—What if she pieces it all together?
As the girls spoke, Charles finished Purifying the last Dretch. Tossing aside his foul-smelling mask, he retreated from the stench and opened his system panel to tally rewards.
Eleven Dretch roamed here—each yielded a paltry 25 Purification Points.
Trash! Disgusting yet worthless—same as Skeletons!
He grimaced, dreading the hordes of vile Demons awaiting their investigation. Purification Points would be hard-earned.
Closing the panel, he returned to find the four women before him. Hattie and Anno stood nearly nude, clinging to flimsy towels that barely covered their chests and upper thighs. Smooth shoulders, delicate collarbones, and slender legs gleamed under the moonlight, searing his vision.
Freshly bathed, Anno glowed like a water lily, freed from days of grime. Damp golden ringlets cascaded over her bare shoulders. As she adjusted her towel, the clean hollows of her armpits came into full view—radiant with youthful vitality.
Charles’s pulse quickened.
Anno’s petite frame fared better under the towel than Hattie’s lush curves. The latter strained to conceal herself—one arm clamped over her chest to hide deepening cleavage and budding nipples, while she yanked the towel low to veil her thighs. Yet the coverage remained perilous. If she took a step...
Though intimately familiar with Hattie’s body, this half-revealed torment tested Charles’s control. Suppressing a visceral surge of desire, he forced his eyes away and rasped, "All clear. Resume your bath?"
Anno began to nod, but Hattie wrinkled her nose in complaint. "The stench lingers. How could we bathe here now?"
She was right. Without wind to disperse the foul air beneath the trees, the clearing reeked.
"A breeze would help..." Theresa mused, shooting Nidalee a pointed look.
The druid caught her cue. Gust of Wind was child’s play to her. "I’ll scatter the stink!"
She raised her hand. "Gust of Wind!"
Charles opened his mouth to protest—Return to camp! I’ll wait outside—but Nidalee’s spell erupted too fast. A gale tore through the clearing—
"Ah—!"
Hattie shrieked, doubling over as her towel billowed upward. One arm anchored the fabric against her thighs, shielding her forbidden garden—but her full cleavage and rosy buds lay exposed.
Anno froze, slower to react. Wind snatched her towel’s hem—
—revealing pale golden down.
Charles jerked his gaze aside, blood roaring. His 15 Constitution amplified primal urges, and this provocation threatened to unravel him.
"Nidalee!" he roared into the wind.
She cut the spell, blinking with feigned innocence. "Liberl Port folk are so fussy!"
Translation: I’m a wild child—your rules mean nothing!
Charles massaged his temples. He glared at Nidalee, then at Theresa—whose smile urged him onward.
Done battling their games, he turned and strode toward camp. "Finish bathing! I’ll rest at camp!"
He vanished into the trees. Theresa watched his retreating form, fingertips brushing her lips.
Her smile deepened.
...
The next day, in the afternoon.
Beneath yet another stone crag, some ten satyrs marched in formation, silently chanting incantations as they advanced, following the trail of demon pollution. Behind them, more than twenty half-orcs led five tall, powerful chimera, moving slowly in their wake.
These half-orcs wore crude animal hide armor and wielded heavy iron greataxes. Their faces were painted in varied patterns—by those, one could distinguish shamans, beastmasters, and ordinary warriors among them.
Their numbers seemed small, but with such iron-forged weapons and five chimera at their sides, this party’s strength in these mountains ranked them as overlords in their own right.
Chimera were towering three-headed monsters, typically possessing the hind legs of a goat, the forelimbs of a lion, and the wings of a dragon, with all three heads as well.
This combination of bodies made them far larger than your average lion—nearly two meters tall and weighing over a ton, as massive as a buffalo.
Still, with dragon wings upon their backs, these beasts could fly, and depending on the dragon head’s breed, unleash various types of Dragon’s Breath.
When such massive monsters swooped down, belching fire or acid, even the mountain’s bandit gangs could collapse in an instant!
The Adventurer Guild assigned a challenge rating of six to creatures like these, but these five, especially robust chimera, clearly surpassed that. Outfitted with makeshift armor and polished, sharpened claws, it was clear these half-orcs understood how to cultivate the chimeras’ battle power and weaponize them for war.
These people, of course, were tribes from the Alliance of the Mountain Purifiers—specifically the Green Vines and Chimera tribes. Through countless experiments, they had discovered a method for keeping chimeras calm for long stretches, even making them obey commands and fight alongside them. With this, even with scant numbers, they could call themselves one of the true powers of the mountains.
Naturally, such methods were not foolproof. These brutal abominations were the original creation of the Demon Prince Demogorgon, forcibly merged from many creatures through terrible magic.
Because of this, they had inherited all the madness and savagery of demons. The three heads always vied with one another; if one—say, the goat head, which craved grass, or the lion, meat, or the dragon, fire and magma—was satisfied, the other two would inevitably be driven to rage and then attack everything around them.
On normal days, such rage could still be soothed, but now, with demon pollution everywhere, the chimeras’ inner fury was only magnified, making them even harder to control.
If not for these five chimeras being so exceptionally well-trained, and their bonds with their beastmasters so close—not to mention the tribes had no other options—the Chimera tribe would never have risked bringing them out on an expedition like this.
"This should be the place."
At the head of the column, the satyr matriarch Willo Green Vines, chief of the Green Vines tribe, halted and furrowed her brows, staring at the cave ahead. "A foul aura pours continually from inside—it’s likely a major pollution node... perhaps even a portal to the Infinite Layers of the Abyss!"
She turned, worry heavy in her eyes, to the largest, gaudiest-painted half-orc from the Chimera tribe. "Danche, are your chimeras all right?"
That half-orc, the tribe leader’s son Danche, was stroking the lion’s mane of the chimera at his side, soothing it. "Barbary, good boy, just hold on a little longer and we’ll be done..."
At Willo’s question, his face darkened and he shook his head. "Not well. Barbary is in agony... I’m sorry, madam, but we cannot move any closer."
"Then don’t go any further." Willo nodded softly. "You and your warriors wait out here. We’ll go in and perform the purification. If anyone comes to interfere, everyone in the Chimera tribe, please help us hold them off!"
Clearly, the filth in this cave was too corrosive for any ordinary mortal. The demon-worshipers who established such a pollution site would never leave it unguarded, so most likely their foes were lurking nearby, ready to pounce when she started the purification.
"Understood!"
Danche nodded, signaling to the beastmasters to lead the chimeras further away—at least as far as possible from the cave, to prevent the demon taint from further eroding their minds.
The remaining warriors spread out as sentries to guard against being ambushed. Finally away from the cave, Danche could feel his chimeras settling somewhat—the goat head even stuck out its tongue to lick the salt from his bare arm.
At that moment, a sentry suddenly rushed back. "Captain, someone’s coming!"
Danche’s face hardened.
The demon-worshipers, so soon?
"Prepare for battle!" he growled. "Do not let anyone near this cavern!"
The other warriors instantly snapped into formation. And a hundred meters away, just past a curve in the cliff, five human silhouettes slowly came into view.
Spotting the white-haired figure in the lead, Danche’s eyes narrowed sharply.
People from the Empire of Sein?
Wait, could all of this be part of a vast imperial conspiracy?
He had no idea—but he hefted his greataxe regardless. Nearly every tribe in the Alliance of the Mountain Purifiers bore a grudge against Liberl Port; he only wanted to slay the demons because of their effect on the chimeras.
If these were Sein people, he had no qualms about killing them first.
Of course, this group was Charles and company. Last night’s encounter had been ambiguous and provocative, but once everything cooled off, there was no question—they had finally tracked down the demons’ trail.
After a night’s rest, Anno had activated Divine Sense at sunrise to pursue the demons’ presence. Even weighed down by heavy plate armor, her pace never faltered; she pressed on tirelessly, determined to reach her quarry before the trail vanished.
They marched through woods overgrown with bloody, tumorous trees, across rivers clouded ink-green by taint and teeming with carnivorous fish, even dispatching frenzied goats whose jaws sprouted countless rows of shark-like teeth, just to track the corruption here.
As a paladin, Anno could sense the demon presence with even greater keenness than the satyrs, and before noon she had located the very origin of the rot, hidden in that distant cave.
But when they arrived, others were already there.
A cluster of unmistakably Mountain People—half-orcs and their chimeras.
Anno halted, her eyes full of wariness. The rest of Charles’s party quickly stopped and assumed defensive postures, warily facing the distant opposition.
With the enemy’s true strength unknown, neither side wanted to make the first move. At that moment, anxious frustration gnawed at Anno; she could distinctly sense that a wellspring of demon corruption was locked away in that cave, still spewing foul energies without end.
"Our target is inside that cave," she muttered, glancing at her group. "What do we do? Should we just attack?"
As a member of Blackstaff Tower—and fully aware of the Alliance of the Mountain Purifiers’ enmity toward the port—Anno’s suggestions were utterly uncompromising.
Charles was about to speak, but at the last instant held his tongue, turning instead to Nidalee. "You all probably know best how to talk to them, right?"
He’d realized that his white hair marked him as an outsider and complication. This situation, he knew, was better left to a fellow Mountain Person—like Nidalee.
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