Krafft's Notes on Anomalies

The grease fell on the thing drilled out of the armor, spreading along the shape and covering the surface, coating it with a layer of changing bright colors.

As for itself, it is a translucent fluorescent white. You can see the mixed fibers and point-like sharp shadows in it. It squeezes towards the contact surface with the movement, stretches and wraps around each other, and crushes the molten prey like cheese.

The victim's struggle ended before the lamp oil was poured out, and the thing became more active and powerful. The wrapped remains collapsed with the sound of grinding and squeezing, turning into part of the semi-solid substance.

The incompletely digested bone fragments are incorporated into its amorphous gums and become an accomplice in chewing the next prey.

This makes human beings hate their intuition and imagination. Through the shadow under the translucent skin, they can imagine how the bodies are dissociated and integrated into each other, as if the two are one.

Green raised his torch and stabbed. Although it had no eyes, the mass clearly felt the approaching heat source, and the bulge formed some kind of tangled and extended structure, rushing towards him.

The shiny white substance tried to bypass the torch and wrap around his bare wrist, but the priest's swordsmanship did not allow him to miss at such a close distance.

The two collided in mid-air. From the point of contact, the greasy sheen burst into flames, quickly spreading to the entire weird shape, wrapping the stretched white, causing it to shrink reflexively.

It stagnated for a moment, then boiled.

The semi-solid image is as rich in water as it appears. The burst of heat vaporizes it, rapidly expands and bulges, and expands the wrinkled surface to form dense bubbles.

The clusters of blisters grew, swelled, and merged with each other in the flames, peeling off the skin from the contents. They then burst and released a gray mist like roasted bloody rotten flesh, emitting a wave of energy that seemed to be fermented from the souls of the desecrated ones. Vicious smell.

Some particularly frightening low hoarse tones came from the boiling fire, and they heard several familiar and incomplete accents, including one that they thought they would never hear again, being repeated parrot-like. , pronunciation by piecing together specious words and sentences.

The thing fluttered and continued to shrink, following its instinct and retreating towards its own shell - the armor, trying to get back into the defective part of the helmet. Large pieces of the dried part were gouged out by rusty iron burrs, taking away part of the fuel.

However, the second bottle of fuel was poured on the helmet in time, fueling the burning situation.

This time the armor did not protect. The metal with good thermal conductivity burned the water-containing tissue, and the sizzling oil-water mixture continued to drip and seep into the interior along the gaps.

The anthropomorphic voices gradually dropped as the last bit of grease poured in, turning the armor into a complete oven.

Flames spurted out from the inside, baking the visor grid into a burnt black color. The water vapor mixed with ashes made the burning scene even more blurry, making it impossible to gaze for a long time.

Green coughed several times with difficulty, avoiding the smoke and gasping for air, his eyes never leaving the armor.

The upper body of the armor twitched slightly a few times, then stopped completely, returning to the quietness that an ancient metal creation should have.

A moment of dizziness struck him, a symptom of severe mental exhaustion. He staggered a few steps in the water and supported the brick wall of the passage. The smooth touch made his palms touch several times before he found a crack in the brick for support.

"Damn it, we have to move forward." Green took off another torch with trembling hands, put it on the helmet that still had flames, and ignited it. "Give me some of the lamp oil you brought."

"I'm sorry, Father." The monk shuddered suddenly and came to his senses. What came before fear was shame.

The demonic fear made the limbs stiff at that moment, unable to make any reaction. This is difficult for people who claim to be religious and fearless to accept, and it is enough to cause the most serious self-doubt.

"Let's talk about it later. We are obviously not the first people this thing encountered." His confession was interrupted by Green, who looked at the wall he was holding on with some confusion and noticed something strange on the tunnel wall. The teaching pattern carvings seem less dense than the first impression.

There are gaps between the honeycomb patterns, rather than covering the entire wall, they are interlaced with the normal stone tiles.

It was as if part of the scene had been secretly removed when he was fully focused on the battle, and the front and back could not completely correspond. But in an unexpected situation, I had no chance to observe more before, so I could only treat it as an optical illusion.

Leaning against the wall to regain some strength, Green continued to move forward. He thought of something as he walked past the rusty armor that had cooled down slightly. He stopped and used his scabbard to sweep away the black dust and rust flakes on the back of the breastplate.

A gray golden mark was revealed, which was indeed a sword-shaped pattern. There were also very thin traces of light yellow powder around it, which meant that there had been more gilt paintings around it, but they were no longer identifiable.

Only the sword emblem in the middle, which was made of the most material, remained, squeezed crookedly by the somewhat twisted armor.

As a person with a limited fondness for nobles, Green's knowledge of heraldry was limited to some of the families around Dunling that he could still talk to today. It was too difficult to discern any information.

The status of swords in heraldry is roughly the same as the status of aquatic products in North's catering industry. It is synonymous with bad streets.

In a martial arts environment, families who like to add a sword to their coat of arms are conservatively said to account for 30% of the family members, and the degree of distinction is infinitely close to zero.

Even if the cost of armor can filter out most of them, the rest will still be a big challenge for heraldry researchers.

He gave up the idea of ​​solving it on his own and prepared to go back and check it out after seeing the whole picture.

But after removing more rust spots, the lower half of the sword-shaped pattern did not appear, and it completely ended at the middle of the sword body.

Green rubbed it vigorously again, confirming that it was not due to incomplete cleaning or falling off, but just that. There is only half of the sword pointing downwards, like...

[insert something upside down]

A very bad guess emerged.

Sword-shaped emblems are everywhere, but the image of something inserted upside down, judging from his meager but barely usable knowledge, the scope is very narrow.

"I hope it's just the ignorant who worry too much." Green shook his head and controlled himself to continue making random guesses, trying to get his mind away from the various conspiracy theories emanating from him.

The only thing to do now is to move forward, find the team, and then look back and think about whether to take this thing back.

Passing a fork in the road again, the sound of water ahead changed slightly. Several orange light sources flickered uneasily in the darkness.

The priest held the torch high and walked towards that direction. The water parted under his feet, and the occasional chill gradually receded and was left behind.

When he was about ten steps away, he heard an exclamation coming from the front.

"Father Green?!"

Before the collapse of the dead end, backed by a pile of rocks with gushing water, several monks holding weapons tightly and looking extremely nervous were guarding this side.

When they realized that it was their own side and not some strange thing, they put down their crossbows.

"Have you ever encountered that thing?"

"If you are talking about a pair of armor, then its stuffing is already ripe." Green wanted to show a forced smile to ease his mood, but the number of people present eliminated the last bit of luck, and even the cold jokes seemed dry. .

"Besides, you should have come back to notify us when you saw those symbols, instead of rushing in and waiting for someone to clean up the mess."

"Symbol? What symbol?" The rescued monks looked at each other with confusion in their eyes.

Because of exam preparation and all kinds of messy things, this period may be difficult. But how can there be times when it’s not difficult?

(ω`)