Chapter 143

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The first Blood Ascendants charged Grud with weapons raised and got a spear tip to the faces for their troubles, but when more men started charging Grud in earnest, Grud found himself in quite a pickle.

That pickle being himself. He was a big man, with a big spear, in a not so big mine entrance. So when he performed a horizontal swing aiming to bisect the enemy's front line at the waist, he felt his spear hit something hard, and the swing's momentum carried it further into the hard object. That hard object just so happened to be the wall beside him in which he had accidentally embedded his spear.

But Grud did not have time to address the problem of his stuck spear because he had four spears coming at him.

Without hesitation, Grud abandoned his spear and grabbed the enemy's spear aimed at his face while ignoring the others. Besides the man who had his spear caught, the other three men were pleasantly surprised at how easy they were about to kill the mighty chieftain of rumor and myth, but their pleasant surprise was quickly quashed when their spear tips hit Grud's body only to hear the sound of striking something hard, and from the rips their spears made in Grud's fur coat, they could only see a dark and smooth maroon.

Grud looked at them with contempt as he swung his free hand down in front of his body, snapping all four spears like twigs, and in the process, getting his fur coat ripped off by the spearheads still imbedded in the fur coat to reveal his monster centipede chitin armor.

Before the men could react, Grud threw out a flurry of punches and kicks, sending the broken bodies of the four men into the men behind them.

When the sound of fighting started, Grud's men, who were hiding at the sides of the entrance, started to flood in, weapons and shields raised to assist Grud. They had to go around Grud's awkwardly jammed spear, but they managed to reach Grud's side as they defended themselves from a hail of stones, spears, and arrows hitting their shields.

While his men formed around him, Grud was holding an impaled man up by a spear shaft like an umbrella to block all the projectiles aimed at him over the heads of his enemies while using his oversized knife to chop into the enemy line.

When his men finally formed a wall beside him and surged forward around him, Grud decided to take it down a notch and let his men do the fighting because a lot of the men who joined this campaign were only recently blooded from all the ambushes they did on the Blood Ascendant's war parties, what they needed was experience in straight-up fights.

The battle in the tunnel was slow and grueling as one force pushed against another. After the first initial clash, where Grud performed the opening blow, things did not play out as smoothly as Grud had planned. It was only now that he noticed the difficulties that his men were facing, difficulties that he had not noticed before due to the powerful and robust body he was blessed with.

His men were rested and fed, yes, but weeks out in the cold without a proper warm place to sleep had worn them down. Compared to what he remembered, his men were slower, weaker, and more sluggish in reaction, and with this enemy that was throwing their bodies at his men with little regard for their lives, it was a recipe for disaster.

The only thing keeping Grud's men alive at the moment was their well-drilled coordination and Grud stepping in at key moments to plug breached gaps and push the enemy out of their line. Things only got worse when they reached the first branch of the mine. Grud's forces were forced to split and tackle another front in the branching tunnel, and that front would be on its own.

By the fifth branch, Grud had to send a runner to bring in the backup waiting outside the mine. He had to trust that the men who split off to those branches would survive and win while Grud followed the main body of his force down the main shaft of the mine.

Grud and his men eventually reached a wider area in the mine that looked like a naturally formed cave. The cave split into different tunnels, all but one of which were decorated with skulls and painted with blood, so it was obvious to Grud where he was going to find the leader of the Blood Ascendants.

But before he could do that, he had to deal with the close to a hundred men standing between him and the decorated tunnel entrance. Compared to the barely armored men that Grud had killed on his way here, these men were covered head to toe in armor, especially three of them in front of the heavily armored group.

"Chieften Grud! Stop hiding behind your men like a coward and face us! We Blood Elites challenge you!" one of the three especially armored men shouted as Grud's men poured into the cave and formed a line to face the group of heavily armored men.

Seeing this as a personal call-out, Grud's men looked at Grud to see if he would acknowledge the challenge. At first, Grud did not want to dignify it, but he knew that not all of his men were as armored up as this group. As prosperous as his chiefdom was, men were responsible for their own arms and armor, and good ones were expensive, especially the metal ones the enemy was wearing. 

They were facing a group that had raided multiple tribes and pillaged them of their equipment, which seemed to land up in the hands of the group before Grud. So, Grud decided to accept the challenge to not only kill people who seemed to be in a leadership role but also to boost the morale of his men while damaging the enemy's morale.

The moment Grud took his first step forward, his men opened a path for him. When Grud got to the front, he spoke calmly, yet his words echoed powerfully through the cavern, "Do not waste my time fighting you one by one. Come at me together."

The three Blood Elites looked at each other, and it was clear to Grud that out of the three, one of them was reluctant, but even then, with all the bluster of the two willing Blood Elites, they knew that they stood no chance alone. So, with a nod, the three Blood Elites advanced while Grud's forces and the Blood Ascendants made space.

As they carefully advanced on Grud, they spread out to surround him like he was a dangerous beast they were hunting, but all Grud did was stand with his knife in hand by his side. The fight started with one of the Blood Elites, who was out of sight, dashing forward with his spear aimed at the back of Grud's head.

What he did not know was that even if he was out of sight, he was not out of earshot for Grud. With a slight tilt of his head, Grud saw the spear tip coming at him but was forced to first react to the other two Blood Elites who charged at the same time with their own weapons.

Grud grabbed the haft of the two-handed axe that would hit him first and tugged him upward, lifting the axe wielder off the ground so that they were both at the same eye level. While the axe wielder was experiencing hangtime in the air, Grud ducked his head out of the way of the spearhead, which was going for his head. He let the spearhead plunge into the axe wielder's face, killing him instantly.

But before he could deal with the spear wielder, Grud used his knife to parry the incoming sword slash from the last Blood Elite, and with his now free hand, he poured mana into his fist and punched the sword wielder in the chest, sending him flying and bowling over a few Blood Ascendants in the audience.

With two Blood Elites out of the way, Grud turned his attention to the spear-wielding Blood Elite to see a knife on its way to poke out his eye, but Grud stopped it just in time by grabbing the hand that held the knife and squeezing, causing the sound of hand bones breaking and fingers dislocating, but despite the broken hand, the Blood Elite was too hopped-up on Spirit's Blood to feel any pain as he threw a punch at Grud's face.

The first hit Grud's face was square on the nose, but Grud did not make a sound, nor did his head jerk back in the slightest.

When the Blood Elite withdrew his fist to strike again, Grud tugged the hand he was holding to the side, dislocating the man's shoulder and flinging him sideways like he was just a wet rag. When he was at the apex of the sideway's fling, Grud tugged him back, slamming him on the ground, and even though the Blood Elite was still disorientated, he managed to look up at the face of his death and saw that Grud was bleeding from a nostril.

This Blood Elite was the cautious one who had seen and known of Grud's might and power before he was dragged into this mess, and the thought that he had made such a great man bleed brought a smile to his face just before a large foot stomped down on his head, squashing it like a ripe fruit.

Just as Grud thought he was done with this 3v1 dual, he heard gasps and scuffling from the side and looked to where he had sent the sword wielder flying. There, he saw the last living Blood Elite gasping for air as he hurried to undo the straps on his caved-in armor.

By the time the man loosened the straps on his breastplate and took deep and painful breaths from what must be a broken ribcage, Grud was before him. Without any fanfare, Grud grabbed the top of the man's head and squeezed. Within a second, there was the sound of crunching bones and fleshy squishing as the last Blood Elite's head got mangled.

As Grud flicked his hand to get rid of the brain matter, his men broke out in cheers as the Blood Ascendants looked on in terror at the monster before them. But before the spell of terror could be broken, Grud dashed forward into the crowd of armored enemies and started killing.

This kicked off the fighting between both sides again, but this time, the Blood Ascendants were fighting on two fronts, one from the main bulk of Grud's forces and another from within their ranks as Grud was a whirlwind of destruction.