The Life-Saving Vortex

**Sploooooosh—**

The mud lake erupted in wave after wave, black viscous surges crashing down from above and instantly coating both Zhang Xiaohou and Mo Fan from head to toe.

Zhang Xiaohou had barely managed to scrub himself halfway clean — now he was back to being a walking mud-caked mess.

Mo Fan was "fine," though "fine" wasn't quite the right word. He hadn't avoided the deluge; he simply had so much filth on him already that one more coating made no difference either way.

"Bro... Brother Fan... what do we do??" Zhang Xiaohou had reunited with Mo Fan, and after barely managing to put some distance between themselves and the giant poison centipede, they were being closed in on again from both directions.

Watching the two enormous creatures bear down on them with earth-shaking force, Zhang Xiaohou felt his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably.

He'd always told himself that as an intermediate-tier mage, taking down a few Demon-Beasts was well within his abilities — yet standing before Commander-class creatures like these, he felt hopelessly small.

"There's no way out!" Mo Fan swept his gaze across the muddy expanse. Nothing but black waves rolling in one after another — no sign of any vortex anywhere.

He gritted his teeth. His fangs were just barely beginning to elongate into saber-like points, and even his pupils had started to shift color.

Truthfully, Mo Fan had no desire to invoke Demonization again. Every time he used it, he sold a little more of his soul — and after this activation, there was genuinely no telling whether he'd survive the next one.

On top of that, each use meant enduring four rounds of soul backlash, which would undo every last bit of soul-strengthening he'd managed to build up before.

**"RAAAAARGH—!!"**

The giant centipede's body was fully surfaced above the mud, gliding in rapid S-curves like a water snake. Every roar it unleashed sent mud raining down from all directions, carried on a gust of wind that turned the stomach.

If not for the loss of all its hind legs — leaving it too unbalanced to coordinate fully — it would have closed the gap with a few powerful thrashes of its body alone.

Flanking its mouth were massive pincers that looked like twin steel blades driven in reverse. As it glided through the mud, the pincers snapped and clacked with a hungry, rhythmic clacking — eager to shear apart the ones who had provoked it.

It roared without cease. Clearly, the approaching Armored-Shell Giant Lizard — its old nemesis — posed enough of a threat to give it pause, preventing it from simply charging straight in.

For its part, the Armored-Shell Giant Lizard hadn't expected to find its old rival here either. Its lantern-sized eyes locked onto the enormous arthropod, and it opened its cavern-like maw to bellow a warning roar right back.

The two roars collided — deafening.

And it was precisely that mutual wariness that bought the two humans caught between them, Mo Fan and Zhang Xiaohou, a precious sliver of time.

The two Commander-class beasts were no fools, however. Almost immediately, they seemed to reach a silent agreement: to prove which of them was truly the more fearsome, they would start by grinding the two suicidal humans in front of them into paste.

"A vortex — Brother Fan, a vortex!!" In the nick of time, the life-saving vortex finally materialized within the mud, and Zhang Xiaohou's voice rang out.

Mo Fan spotted it too and hastily reined in the Demonization that had been dragging him toward the point of no return.

He snatched up Zhang Xiaohou and, using the mountain's shadow cast by the setting sun, unleashed Shadow Fade!

A massive claw came crashing down — the Armored-Shell Giant Lizard had made its move. The force behind that single blow could have leveled a small mountain, let alone two mages.

Mo Fan and Zhang Xiaohou threw themselves sideways through Shadow Fade, but the shockwave from that strike was devastating in its own right. It blasted them clean out of the shadow while they were still moving through it.

Both were hurled through the air, every bone feeling like it was about to shake loose...

Fortunately, the direction they were thrown was toward the vortex. Had they been knocked anywhere else, a single follow-up strike from either the Armored-Shell Giant Lizard or the giant centipede would have finished them on the spot.

Plunging out of the air and into the churning mud below, Mo Fan clamped his grip on Zhang Xiaohou and drove them both hard toward the swirling pull of the vortex.

The rocky layer at the lake's bottom had already collapsed, and the thick silt beneath it was pouring down into the underground river below.

With the sediment stripped from the bottom, the muddy water began draining at a frantic rate. What had started as a small vortex only a few meters across grew wider and more ferocious as water pressure forced the opening apart, bit by bit...

The marsh lake had once been a stretch of black stillness, calm enough to mirror the evening glow — now it was all heaving swells of mud, and the air was thick with a fine spray of filth raining in every direction.

The two colossal beasts stood tall in the vast lake — the mud too shallow to fully submerge their enormous frames — roaring at each other amid erupting fountains of muck, completely oblivious to the vortex growing beneath them.

Slowly, the vortex expanded — its diameter reaching twenty meters.

From their height, looking down, it was no longer something to dismiss. Mud from every direction was rushing toward it in a frenzy, pouring down into the fathomless void that gaped below.

Mo Fan and Zhang Xiaohou had already plunged into the vortex. Spinning layer after layer drew them in; they had already reached the midway point, and the powerful suction dragged them steadily deeper — before long, they had been pulled all the way to the innermost core.

When the two massive creatures saw the humans about to be swallowed by the vortex, both surged toward it in rage.

Given their enormous size, lunging toward the same spot made each look, from the other's perspective, like a direct attack. The giant centipede's armored skull slammed straight into the Armored-Shell Giant Lizard — and the lizard refused to be outdone, rearing up and crashing its full body weight down onto the centipede.

The Armored-Shell Giant Lizard reared halfway up, then drove itself back down with brutal force. The impact of that stomp sent a roiling surge of mud radiating outward from the lake's center all the way to every shore — a tidal wave of muck.

Along the shore, Lizard-Skull Giant Demons had been resting at their leisure — the mud tsunami swept who knew how many of them tumbling far into the distance, leaving a trail of toppled trees, churned earth, and ruin spreading all the way to the mountainside.

Beneath the mud lake, a savage burst of force hammered down from above, shattering the entire vortex.

Fortunately, Mo Fan and Zhang Xiaohou had already reached the hollow chamber below. The silt, water, and stone absorbed the brunt of the Armored-Shell Giant Lizard's devastating stomp. Otherwise, the fragile rock layer might have been driven open into an even larger cavity — and with the lakebed collapsing and the whole mud lake caving in, survival would have been impossible.

In the underground river, Ah Li Man had already retreated to a safe distance. She watched as the mud poured down from above in a massive torrent, the thunderous roar of it echoing through the entire underground cavern.

The black column of cascading mud crashed down with such force that the splatter alone shattered the surrounding rock.

The hole had been punched through, and the vortex had appeared — but the two people swept down through it had clearly taken quite a beating along the way. She doubted they were in any great shape.