Internet Mage Professor-Chapter 62: Knight Scouts

Far away from the Silver Blade Academy, beneath the gray-tinted skies and the scent of rust and old war, a town lay in ruins.

Cobblestone paths were broken, streets warped with time and trauma.

Old brick houses stood half-demolished, some scorched, others painted with dark blood long dried into crusted runes on their walls. But today, fresh blood joined the ancient stains.

Bones cracked, split, and splattered onto the blackened stone. Sinew dangled from rooftops like grotesque wind chimes. A crimson mist clung low to the ground.

And through it all, they marched.

The Mana Knight Scouts of Black Vale Territory—towering figures in obsidian-and-steel armor, their gauntlets carved with enchanted runes that glowed with a muted sapphire hue.

Each step they took echoed with brutal confidence.

Behind their blank, expressionless helms, grins widened with every kill.

There were ten of them—elite, Initiate-level knights sent ahead to investigate rumors of the same tentacled creatures stirring deep in a rumored long-abandoned village.

What they found was a playground.

"Cut them down!" barked Rethon, the self-proclaimed vanguard, as his blade sliced clean through a black, slick-skinned creature.

Its tentacled arms reached high before collapsing, its skull split open like overripe fruit. Blood sprayed onto the brick walls.

"Disgusting, but so satisfying," Rethon chuckled, flicking his blade to the side with theatrical flair.

"Aren’t you loving the sound they make when you split their heads? Like squeezing rotten tomatoes!" another knight laughed as he shoved his broadsword through one’s chest and dragged it upward, cleaving it open entirely.

"They squeal, they scream, and yet they’re so damn weak!" shouted a knight as he impaled two at once, his sword impaling from chin to crown with one and ribcage to shoulder on the other.

"Spineless vermin," muttered the tallest among them, Gelrik, who decapitated one creature mid-air after a vertical leap. "We came here expecting resistance."

One of the knights stomped a writhing creature to death, grinding it into the cobblestones until only black mush and twitching flesh remained.

They were loud. Obnoxiously so.

Rethon lifted his blade high into the air, laughing manically. "Let the blood of these parasites coat our blades! Hah! What a day!"

"Blood for the rusted ground!" shouted another knight, stabbing downward again and again into a creature’s twitching body, even long after it stopped moving.

But then—suddenly—Gelrik’s expression twisted behind his helmet. He stepped back. His hand moved slowly to his chest.

"My Mana..." he murmured.

A pulse echoed through the air like a deep, invisible shockwave. One by one, the knights felt it.

"My reserve—" one started.

"Is dropping... What the hell?"

Rethon paused mid-swing, blade hovering above another writhing target. "No... it’s being drained?"

In a moment, they could all sense it.

Their peak Initiate-level energy was now trembling, weakening.

The strength they wielded effortlessly minutes ago now felt... thinner. Tamed. Slipping through their fingers.

"Something’s wrong," said the most anxious among them, Caven. "I’m down two whole Stages—I’m at Tenth Stage Novice now!"

They checked.

And it was true.

Their strength, speed, even the clarity of their battle instincts had dropped drastically. They hadn’t been injured. They hadn’t cast spells. It was something else. The air?

Their Mana had simply... bled away.

But even then, the others barely flinched.

"Still above them," Rethon growled, stabbing the creature below him without hesitation. "They die all the same."

"Still soft," another knight said, smiling beneath his helm as he beheaded two more, ignoring the slow fatigue settling in his bones.

"It must be the steel. The Calming effect. Works like a seal to prevent full Mana expenditure," Gelrik guessed. "Maybe it’s only temporary?"

"If so, then good. We needed a handicap."

They all laughed. Loud. Cocky. Their confidence drowned the tension.

"We’re still more than a match for anything in this wretched dump!" bellowed a knight while skewering a four-armed black creature that lunged from behind a crumbling chimney.

"Besides," Rethon added with a grin, "we haven’t seen anything higher than Novice Mana Beasts in the Third Stage. If something over Fourth shows up while we’re stuck below Fifth, then we’ll reconsider."

Caven didn’t look convinced. He wiped grime off his visor, eyes scanning the dark alleys around them.

"We shouldn’t be doing this," he muttered. "We were supposed to inspect. Then raze the area tomorrow. Not today. Not now."

"Shut it," snapped another knight. "If we leave, these pests might multiply. Better to crush them while they’re still swarming like bugs."

"And we’ve got the swords, don’t we?" one knight yelled, swinging his enchanted blade in a horizontal arc, cutting down a group of charging monsters in one brilliant flash of mana-steel light.

They surged forward, louder now. More vicious. They slashed and hacked and screamed in thrill.

Creatures shrieked in turn. Some tried to run. Some fought with desperation—tentacles whipping, bodies crawling over walls, but it was no use.

They were cut down, severed at the joints, dismembered, and hurled into piles.

Rethon caught one creature mid-lunge by its tentacle arm and ripped it clean off, using it to beat another one to death while laughing like a drunken beast.

Gelrik’s blade sang through the air, carving glyphs of destruction into the air that cleaved even through blackstone walls, splitting anything hiding behind it.

"Keep pushing! Cut them until the streets run black!" one shouted, completely drunk on bloodlust.

Caven, however, was hyperventilating.

"It’s not going up," he whispered. "Our Mana—it’s not recovering. Still stuck at Seventh Stage..."

The others didn’t hear him. Or didn’t care.

"Let it stay there!" one barked. "They die all the same."

"This place is ours now!"

"Yeah, and their screams are music!"

"Cowards like Caven should go back to mother’s skirt!"

The town was now almost empty of the usual crawling creatures. Their bodies littered the roads. Limbs piled in corners. Blood painted store walls. Dismembered heads rolled toward rusted gutters.

The smell was unbearable. A mix of burnt rubber, sulfur, and spoiled meat. Still, the knights kept going. Their armor shone with blood, faces alight with twisted joy.

But finally, as another group was slaughtered and silence fell, one of them yawned under his helm.

"This is starting to get boring," he said. "Weaklings. No challenge."

"I was hoping for a boss," another muttered. "Something with real teeth."

And just as he said that—

They heard it.

A wet, squelching sound echoed from the far end of the town. It wasn’t the pitter-patter of running feet, nor the screech of pain.

It was... something else. Heavier. Slower. Measured.

They turned.

Emerging from the mouth of an old tunnel—the type built in centuries past, a gaping stone maw blackened with age and lichen—something walked out.

It had the same glistening, ink-like flesh as the others. Long arms that ended in thick, coiling tentacles.

But there was something different.

Its back was hunched, massive. .

An abnormal bulk swelled there, and from it... grew a head.

Not one facing forward.

But a bulbous, octopus-like mass, fused onto its back, like a second entity grafted onto the same body. The back-head pulsed rhythmically, its tentacles, impossibly slow, drifting in the air like underwater feelers.

It stood crooked.

Its legs were too short.

Its arms were too long.

And its presence...

It made the air colder.

The Mana Knights fell silent. Even the arrogant ones.

"That... doesn’t look like the others," one of them muttered, sword lowering slightly.

"What... is that?"

No one answered.

It opened its mouth—not the face-mouth, but the one on its back. And from it came not a scream.

But a low, vibrating hum.

A song of the deep.

And all of them felt it in their bones. Something ancient. Something utterly wrong.

Caven gripped his sword.

"...We need to report this."