BXBX NOVEL Chapter 262 Cyclops Village
Day 71
Instead of sleeping like the others last night, I had my shadows scour the entire mountain from head to toe in an attempt to find the tyrant of the North, or any place filled to the brim with griffins. They ended up doing so at a the very top of the mountain.
Once I found out, I planned on going alone since the others’ [Cold Resistance] wasn’t as high as my own. I however had a second thought and realised I could use this as an opportunity to force their resistances up greatly.
Grimm on the other hand didn’t seem too interested. I then gave both him and Arisu the task of locating possible orichalum and adamantite mines. Maybe we’d find other useful ores like iron and bauxite. If possible, some mana crystals too. You could never have too much of that.
With that, Maou, Ulva and I set off towards the top of the mountain. With my shadows monitoring the humans, we made sure to avoid running into them. In no time, we got to the peak of the mountain where we met two griffins.
The griffins glared at us like we were some sort of intruders. I guess we were, but to avoid any unnecessary conflict, I tried communicating with them. At first, they were acting all cocky till I used [Dominating Gaze] on them, making them shut up and take me more seriously.
Apparently, the tyrant of the North wasn’t around at the moment. He had taken a trip to the Demise Mountains for some reason. No one was sure, but he’d return in a couple of days. Which meant, we came at a very bad time.
Fortunately, Karon also wouldn’t end up running into the tyrant of the North. The two griffins then took us to their cave, acting all subservient. I asked them to explain to me how things worked in the North. As in the sort of social hierarchy there is.
It went something like this: At the very bottom we had weak creatures like Highlander Goblins, harpies, satyrs and Mud golems. There was a large number of them, but they couldn’t really affect the other monsters much, though the weakest should be able to handle a hob-goblin back in the West. In the middle you have creatures like griffins and manticores.
I was surprised the griffins were in the middle section since the tyrant was a griffin himself. But apparently, things get really messy with those at the very top. Cyclops, Cloud Spirits, wyverns, a few renegade ogres, a number of evolved wyverns and one elusive Mountain God who could only be seen once a year.
Most members of the races at the top were easily B+ in rank and their leaders were all A – in rank. With these numbers, it was surprising someone like Krull could become a tyrant at all. But I guess his fame as a War monger helped out with that greatly.
All of a sudden, using Amethyst as a figure head didn’t seem so bad anymore.
Anyway, there was currently a battle for lord of the mountains. Since Goliath’s death, the tyrant of the North lost whatever it was Goliath blessed him with and was most likely searching for a new means to attain strength in the Demise Mountains.
Wyvern Lords, cyclops leaders and the cloud spirits were trying to control everything. Normally, I’d be quick to rush to the aide of the tyrant, but I also had to consider the fact that he could possibly be meeting with Karon in the Demise Mountains to talk about disrupting the union I was trying to make.
In that case, it was better to gather all the strong creatures of the North and bring them over to my side before the Tyrant of the North figured it out.
The current issue was what angle to tackle this from. There were many possible paths, but choosing the best one was a bit hard. However, in 5 seconds which was the equivalent of 5 hours for my brain, I had acquired my solution.
I was about to act when Grimm sent me a message. They were both in trouble, so I had to go intervene. I left Ulva and Maou with both griffins then went off.
What I found was that Grimm and Arisu ended up stumbling on an actual mine. When I say actual mine, I meant a place filled with people taking out minerals and actively digging. The main issue was that this mine belonged to cyclops.
The one in charge of cyclops, evidently their leader, had captured both of them with relative ease and was questioning them. They had no real response to give to him, so I had to act.
The cyclops leader, upon seeing me, threw his pick-axe at me, which I avoided easily. I was a bit shocked that he resorted to violence almost instinctively, but then again, if a giant bird showed up before you, you would probably do the same.
I tried to introduce myself to him, but the cyclops only got angry. All of them turned to glare at me. The average level here was B- and they were all raring to have a go at me. I on the other hand had no interest in fighting them so I transformed into my human form and tried to properly introduce myself.
The cyclops leader came forward and introduced himself as Lagerd. He was in charge of the mining done on this part of the mountain. I asked if all cyclops had names and it was the same as every other race. Just the top had a name whilst average guys remained unnamed.
Anyhow, I told him I wanted to speak to the leader of cyclops. According to him, the cyclopes had 5 different tribes, all of which were united under the strongest cyclops. Their main village was at the bottom of the mountain. He offered to take me there once they were done with today’s query.
I accepted, then explained that both Grimm and Arisu were with me. I hadn’t seen Arisu so agitated in quite a while. The fact that so many people could easily beat her was almost enough to make her cry. I felt kind of bad for her as I could sort of understand that feeling of weakness she was having.
In the end, we waited for 6 more hours before they were done. I was about to go fetch Ulva and Maou when both of them came charging down the mountain. It was a surprising sight, especially seeing Ulva riding on the back of a wyvern with Maou.
Turns out, once I left the two griffins were attacked by a flock of wyverns that had been targeting them for quite some time. They would have struck earlier if it wasn’t for my presence warding them off. The moment I left, they struck.
She teamed up with the griffins to fight the wyverns. Even with the griffins, I simply couldn’t understand how Ulva managed to beat the wyverns. She says Maou was there too, but Maou’s stats and skills didn’t allow it to even kill a horse easily. S
No matter how hard I thought, I couldn’t understand how Ulva killed 4 wyverns and even tamed one. Sure, she had levelled up greatly from that, and that was proof that she did kill them, but a fight with 5 wyverns was a death sentence for someone of her stats.
Sure, you could say the griffins did all the fighting, but she ended up levelling up.
In the end, I couldn’t come up with any proper solutions.
I asked Ulva why she didn’t call me, but she said she simply wanted to prove that she was useful in her own way so she could walk about once more. It would seem she had the wrong idea for why I was keeping her in the dungeon.
Somehow, I felt guilty for Ulva’s misunderstanding. She asked if she could keep the wyvern as a pet. I looked at it and it cowered before my gaze. It was simply a year old. A child that had been forced to participate in a wyvern killing mission.
I agreed so long as the wyvern wouldn’t prove to be a problem. Once we sorted that out, Lagerd led us down the mountain towards their village.
When we got there, I was seriously impressed. There was massive wall surrounding their village with several watch towers at the top posted above. The cyclops themselves were 3 times the size of the average human adult and these gates were at least 4 times as tall as the cyclops.
The gate was opened for us and inside, we saw a well organised city structure in there. Closer to the gate were the barracks, were the warriors lived. Towards the inner part were houses meant for cyclops with occupations other than fighting.
The leader of the cyclops stayed at the barracks permanently. Normally, the cyclops performed a barracks rotation, allowing some members to live with their families from time to time.
The state of living was honestly too advanced for simple monsters in my opinion. I was starting to get a feeling that the cyclops leader was a reincarnator just like Unmei, Yokino and I were. I would honestly be happy if that were the case.
We finally got the audience with the cyclops leader late at night. Ulva, Maou and Arisu were fast asleep, leaving the talking to Grimm and I.
The cyclops leader was a bit hostile towards us at the beginning, but only got friendlier as we discussed more.
During the meeting, I found out that he wasn’t a reincarnator. He simply liked to travel a lot when he was younger and had learned a lot from his visits to the demon country. He liked how well developed they were so tried his best to learn from them and brough those methods back to the North.
Afterwards, it was 2 long years of fighting the leaders of each clan just to become their leader and forcefully unite all the cyclopes into one. They began building a large village and no one complained since Larm’s resources weren’t being used to better places outside of Larm.
He still had major plans for the future, which made me excited. I told him that I had a similar idea, however the main focus was protecting Larm from humans. He sounded like he had a vendetta against humans, so he was also very interested in my idea.
We ended up spending the night talking about it and before dawn came, I had successfully gotten the cyclopes on my side. One of the heavy hitters would back me up should Sora agree to Karon’s plans.
DAILY ACHIEVEMENTS
DUNGEON
[Mana Limit exceeded. The Dungeon Core has awakened]