Chapter 207: A Shattered World
The splaad were an extraplanar species so dangerous that even Ambrose found them alarming.
Because of certain deranged wizards, unhinged alchemists, and the occasional troublemaking god who simply couldn't resist stirring chaos, the fabric of space had long been unstable.
Many adventurers had experienced it firsthand: while exploring some random ruin or hidden realm, they would suddenly stumble upon a portal leading to another world.
Ambrose himself had once wondered if that was how he had ended up transported into this world in the first place.
The splaad were not from this plane. Rather, they came from a realm known as the Sea of Chaos.
Legend said that a god once attempted to use a divine artifact to calm the turbulence of the Sea of Chaos and prevent its disorder from spreading to other worlds. But the plan failed. The artifact was corrupted by chaos and transformed into a gigantic egg.
From that egg was born the first splaad.
These monsters, which had emerged from an artifact meant to halt the spread of chaos, instead became vectors by which chaos spread across the universe.
They looked like enormous toads, but possessed a horrifying parasitic ability. A single scratch from their claws was enough to implant a splaad egg inside the victim's body. Once the egg hatched into a splaad tadpole, the unfortunate host would be devoured from within, the body hollowed out as the new splaad emerged.
Even worse, the newly hatched splaad could inherit the host's appearance, and even some of their abilities.
The parasite was all but impossible to remove. Most known medicines and spells were useless against splaad eggs. In that regard, they were as terrifying as mind flayers. But mind flayers at least required a complicated ritual to establish their dominance: they had to completely subdue the host so the victim could offer no resistance. All the splaad had to do was wound their victim.
The creature crouching in the darkness stood nearly two meters tall even while hunched. Its red skin oozed poisonous pus as it stared fixedly at Catherine.
Naturally, the splaad could only prey on the living. The ones before them eyed Catherine and ignored Ambrose entirely.
Once Ambrose confirmed the creatures' identity, he immediately warned her, "Fall back. These creatures are extremely dangerous. Do not let them wound you."
He had barely finished speaking when the splaad lunged toward Catherine.
She raised her bow and fired an arrow instantly. The shot pierced through two splaad at once, the powerful magic in the arrow causing their bodies to detonate in midair. Foul-smelling liquid splattered everywhere, and a thick poisonous vapor spread through the air, causing Catherine to struggle to breathe.
"Let me handle this," Ambrose said. "The living aren't suited to fighting these things."
He conjured a whirlwind with a flick of his hand, sweeping the poison gas away. Then he cast a Wall of Earth behind him, separating Catherine from the attacking monsters.
With their prey blocked off, the splaad immediately shifted their attention to Ambrose.
He fired several Rays of Frost, leaving wide patches of ice across the toads' bodies. The effect was mediocre at best. Even coated in frost, the splaad could move with little difficulty.
Two of them leapt forward and were blasted away by Ambrose's Thunder Wave, yet they simply rolled across the ground and got back up as if nothing had happened.
He tried a Fireball next. The explosion hurled them back and injured them, but it was far from lethal.
Their bodies were covered in thick slime that provided remarkable resistance to magic. No wonder all the records described these monsters as extraordinarily dangerous.
Again and again the splaad lunged at him, and again and again Ambrose blasted them away. Eventually the creatures grew clever and began attacking from a distance.
Their tongues shot out like projectiles. Each one struck with the force of a cannonball, forcing Ambrose to raise a Mage Shield to block the barrage.
But there were too many of them. The repeated impacts nearly pulverized his body through the barrier.
"These things are the bane of spellcasters," Ambrose muttered. "Fortunately... I'm not just a spellcaster."
He opened his extradimensional space at lightning speed and stepped inside.
By the time he reappeared, he had transformed. Ambrose was now a mithril automaton.
The splaad hurled themselves at him again. Their heavy bodies slammed into his metallic frame, making it shudder.
Sharp claws scraped across his armor, sending sparks flying while leaving trails of sticky slime behind.
Ambrose knew exactly what that slime contained: splaad eggs. If he had still possessed a flesh-and-blood body, he would already have been infected.
Creatures with strong magical resistance, deadly parasitic melee attacks, and relentless aggression—the books hadn't exaggerated their danger.
But against a metal body, their greatest weapon was useless.
Ambrose's arms unfolded into anti-magic blades. He moved like a whirlwind through the monsters, the blades carving open their bodies and reducing them to mangled chunks of flesh.
The slime on their skin did little to protect them against his razor-sharp blades. Ambrose easily cut the splaad into pieces, yet poisonous gas continued to seep from the corpses, making the air even more foul.
Ambrose destroyed every last splaad, then spent a long time freezing the bodies and dispersing the toxic fumes before finally dismissing the Wall of Earth.
Pinching her nose, Catherine glanced at the frozen carcasses scattered across the ground. "When we first entered these ruins, we didn't see any monsters like this. What's going on? And what's up with your new body? How did you suddenly turn into a magical construct?"
This was Catherine's first time seeing Ambrose's mithril body. She was so shocked she almost forgot about the disgusting splaad bodies all across the ground.
Ambrose belatedly realized that she hadn't yet seen his new transformation. But how exactly was he supposed to explain his ability to imbue materials with new properties? "It's just alchemy. Don't make such a fuss."
"Don't make a fuss?!" Catherine was so exasperated she didn't know what to say. For a moment she even felt the urge to twist his head off.
If Ambrose could swap his body for a mechanical one so easily... could he swap it for a living body too? If he could do so, would he still be called a lich?
Ambrose quickly changed the subject. "When we excavated these ruins, we never found any splaad carcasses. That means someone must have cleaned them up. If that's the case, there's probably another passage leading outside."
His words made Catherine temporarily forget about his mechanical body. The elven queen summoned several small birds and sent them exploring the ruins. They found something shortly.
Pointing into the darkness, Catherine said, "There's something strange over there."
Ambrose extended his senses in that direction. The space seemed to stretch on endlessly, as if it were an infinite expanse.
"That's odd... how did we miss this before?"
He strode toward the darkness, summoning a few skeletons from the splaad carcasses to serve as scouts.
But after a short distance, he suddenly lost contact with the skeletons.
"Something's funny about the nature of space here..."
Ambrose stepped forward to where the connection had vanished and conjured a glowing light.
The illumination revealed what lay ahead. Catherine gasped. "Is this... another world?"
Behind them lay the abandoned underground city—dry, eroded, and buried in sand and broken stone. But only a short distance ahead stretched a lush, overgrown swamp.
Two completely different worlds had been crudely stitched together. At their boundary, the air rippled like water. Ambrose's skeletons had stepped into that other world, breaking their connection with him.
"It's like two worlds were forcibly fused together," Ambrose said slowly. "I've never seen a spatial anomaly like this. How did we not notice it when we first entered the ruins?"
"Look, the swamp is shrinking!"
Catherine noticed something amiss immediately. As they approached the boundary, the swamp began to shrink steadily, as if their presence were causing the two worlds to separate.
"No time to figure out what's going on," Ambrose said. "Let's go. This might be our only way out."
He stepped directly across the boundary into the swamp. Whatever this place was, it was better than being trapped underground forever. At least there was a sky here—if necessary, they could simply fly away.
Catherine could only follow suit. The moment they crossed over, the underground ruins behind them vanished completely. The two worlds' connection seemed to have been severed.
Then Ambrose noticed something strange. The splaad he had killed earlier were here in the swamp as well. Their bodies were still frozen exactly as before, lying at the same distance from him as they had been moments earlier, only now on swampy ground instead of stone.
So that was why he wouldn't find their bodies in the ruins in the future.
Catherine frowned. "What just happened? If the splaad are back here, why are we still in the swamp? Why didn't we get sent back into the ruins?"
Ambrose thought for a moment before answering. "Because we don't belong to either world." He looked at her. "Did you forget? We've traveled back in time. Under normal circumstances, we shouldn't exist here."
"That... makes sense. But how are we supposed to find our way back? We have no idea where we are. And I swear this swamp feels like it's staring at me."
The moment Catherine finished speaking, more glowing lights appeared in the swamp.
More splaad lay in wait: one blue, more than a dozen red. Among them stood a green splaad, walking upright like a human and holding a strangely shaped staff.
Splaad were divided into four ranks: red, blue, green, and gray. Gray splaad were the equivalent of legends. Both green and gray splaad were capable of spellcasting.
Ambrose was just about to strike first when he noticed shadows moving across the swamp, more and more of them. The entire swamp was crawling with splaad.
Without any hesitation, Ambrose grabbed Catherine and launched into the sky.
But the moment he rose above the swamp, the sight before him left him stunned.
The swamp below was actually very small, perhaps only a few square kilometers large. And it wasn't even attached to the ground. It was floating in midair.
Beyond it drifted countless other fragments of land, each with its own terrain—forests, deserts, mountains—scattered across the void.
It looked as if a god had taken a complete world, crushed it, and scattered the fragments in a sea of chaos.
This was bad, very bad. They weren't in their original world at all.
