Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Chapter 81 On the wrong side of the gate

Passing through the ancient gate of the civilization was... a weird experience.

On one hand, it was just a simple stroll through a dark, shadowy tunnel, one only made slightly weird by the knowledge that above everyone's heads, there was pretty much as much stone, as much weight, as the modern people used to construct the kingdom's capital in its entirety!

Then, every few steps or so, Callane couldn't help but tense up when a cold shiver would move up her spine, with an overwhelming sense of foreignness, alienness filling her up to the brim.

Finally, there was the aspect of insignificance.

Who was she, even with her group of ten elite mercenaries, each a master of their craft, to challenge the lands that the ancients blocked so thoroughly with such a massive gate?

And finally, when the shadows of the tunnel finally started to dissipate under the light coming from the tunnel's other end...

Darkness.

As soon as Callane stepped out into the light, contrary to what would normally happen, all the light disappeared from before her eyes, leaving her stranded in pitch-black darkness.

'Keep calm, you already knew to expect it...'

This wasn't her eyes failing or her going blind.

It was merely the clash of her mana, sourced in the lands of the civilization, with the mana of the lands beyond the gate, too far removed from what she was used to for it to mix together well.

This discrepancy, difference, change...

Her body needed a few moments to compensate for it. A process that left Callane unnaturally tired for a few moments, making her feel like just falling down to her knees and focusing on nothing but breathing, all in a bid to weather through the torture.

"What are you doing?" one of the mercenaries asked. "If you don't have your shield, then..." he started, ready to chastise the only man that didn't come directly from the mercenary guild, only to then look up to the forest the abyss guide had looked at just before... and then cut his lecture short while dropping his own shield and arming his hand with a short hatchet instead.

But the abyss guide didn't really seem to mind.

"In that forest ahead, there will be no use for shields, big swords, hammers, or pikes," he spoke, his eyes still locked on the woods ahead. "What worries me is not that forest, though," he then stated, only to reach out with his arm and point in a seemingly random direction. "But those ditches over there."

Stepping up to the front of the formation of her men, Callane squinted her eyes as she looked in the direction the man was pointing.

And indeed, while the distance made it slightly hard to see... there appeared to be some massive holes dug directly into the ground.

On one hand, those holes would normally be a natural feature of the wilderness untouched by a human hand, making this otherwise perfectly flat, open plain the weird anomaly...

But on the other hand, those holes didn't appear normal at all.

After all, rarely would nature create something so geometrically perfect!

'Is that Theo's work?' Callane thought, a small spark of hope flaring up in her heart. 'Because who else would be able to create something like this?' she thought, gritting her teeth as she ran down the list of all the people sentenced to exile in the relatively recent past.

Yet, as the group approached the spotted anomaly of the terrain, even those elite mercenaries started to shift uncomfortably.

And it wasn't even because of just how massive this hole turned out to be, stretching for fifteen meters in every direction, making up a seemingly perfect square of hollowed-out terrain—with no dumping spot for all the dug-out dirt in sight.

The mercenaries stopped and then retreated a few steps away from the hole because of the intense mana radiation that came out from its bottom, where a small, dark-brown spot marked a place where something powerful died.

'Judging by the radiation of the mana, it couldn't be more than just a few days before it died,' Callane quickly judged, using whatever little expertise in magic she had. 'But that thing...' she then gritted her teeth as she peeked over the hole's edge and locked her eyes on the source of this weird, unnatural mana radiation.

'Isn't it already on the level of the lesser dragons?!'