The light inside the church was dim, barely illuminated by a few beams squeezing arduously through the tall, slender windows on either side.
The stained glass windows that once depicted holy relics had long been shattered, leaving behind hollow gaps.
Cold wind poured in, swirling the floating dust and mouse fur, and even the beams of light that should have been as clear as water were tarnished with filth.
In this nest of Ratmen, even sunlight was dirty.
Gauss stepped on the sticky, hard-shell ground beneath his feet and couldn’t help but feel a bit disgusted.
However, he didn’t show it.
These are all part of the adventurer’s life.
Exploring demon nests, whether in abandoned buildings, deep caverns, or other dark corners, never aligns with cleanliness.
So, a person with severe cleanliness OCD is destined not to be an adventurer.
His gaze swiftly scanned the filthy hall and quickly locked onto a stone stairway entrance on one side, seemingly leading to the underground depths.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak!"
Only a few startled little mice scurried away in panic at the entrance.
The two arrived in front of the heavy wooden door.
At this moment, the door was tightly locked and didn’t respond when pushed.
If this were a properly equipped adventurer team, this would be the time for an experienced wanderer to step forward and display their unlocking skills.
However, neither of them were wanderers.
So, they could only...
"Please step aside for a moment."
Gauss gestured to Aaliyah.
Then he took out the heavy and sturdy Unbreakable Staff from the storage pouch.
Under Aaliyah’s slightly surprised gaze, he took a deep breath, mustered all his strength, swung the metallic staff, and smashed it hard onto the center of the door panel.
"Boom!!!"
The deafening roar echoed within the empty church.
Wood fragments flew!
The door panel, already in disrepair, groaned painfully at the frame connection under this thunderous blow.
The entire door shook violently, as if it were about to fall apart in the next moment.
Gauss kicked the edge of the door panel again.
"Thud!"
The wooden door, overwhelmed, collapsed inward with a puff of choking dust.
"Done." Gauss indicated to Aaliyah from a distance that she could come over.
"You... have quite some strength?"
"It’s okay, I usually pay attention to exercising," Gauss casually replied.
Aaliyah looked at the twisted and deformed, completely ruined door panel, then turned to look at the staff in Gauss’s hand, which seemingly should be a casting medium, and was momentarily at a loss for words.
So, is this power just mastered through exercise?
The longer she spent with Gauss, the more she felt he was unlike a traditional mage.
Gauss looked towards the passage, thought for a moment, and kicked a panicked little mouse into the dark staircase depths.
He listened closely, confirmed there was no movement below except for the rustling of fleeing mice, and then stepped into the deeper darkness with Aaliyah, one ahead of the other.
"Light Spell!"
The tip of the staff instantly lit up with a soft white light, dispelling the dense darkness before them.
The cold, solid stone walls revealed their contours under the glow.
Gauss and Aaliyah cautiously moved forward.
To prevent triggering traps, he specially activated Insight Skill and Mage’s Hand, carefully inspecting all the way.
However, they were never attacked.
It was just that the air seemed to become more turbid, and a bloody smell drifted into their nostrils.
"Be careful."
After descending the last stair, the cellar appeared before Gauss’s eyes.
This underground space was wider than expected, evidently large enough to accommodate a multitude of Ratmen, yet...
At this moment, the cellar seemed extraordinarily spacious.
Other than dead mice on the ground, there were no other living creatures.
Have they hidden away? Or have they fled?
Gauss stepped on the mouse corpses, making an unpleasant "splat" sound, continuing to advance cautiously.
Suddenly, his heart was filled with alarm.
Following his intuition, he looked up swiftly.
Several Ratmen with relatively small builds, whose claws flickered with eerie green light, were clinging to a giant, long-abandoned metallic chandelier frame overhead like bats.
And the green light in their claws had already formed.
"Sizzle!"
Several large blobs of pungent acid-smelling dark green viscous liquid poured down from above!
"Hiss!"
Gauss reacted extremely fast, dodging sideways in an instant. Aaliyah also simultaneously retreated.
However, the cellar space was already narrow and cramped, inevitably splashing quite a bit of corrosive acid onto them.
The corrosive acid contacted the defensive protective field Gauss had preemptively invoked, releasing wisps of acrid white smoke.
Luckily, under the defensive protection, both were unharmed.
"Magic Missile!" Gauss pointed the tip of his staff.
A missile precisely hit the fragile, rusted part connecting the chandelier to the stone wall.
The metal chandelier, along with the Ratman caster hanging on it, crashed heavily to the ground.
Several Ratmen were thrown into complete disarray.
Before they could regain their senses, Gauss drew his rapier and killed the Ratmen on the ground one by one.
"Total monsters killed: 411"
An Apprentice-level Ratman caster?
Gauss felt a bit surprised.
A small Ratman clan, having both cavalry and apprentice-level casters, so well-established?
Moreover, how did these Ratmen master tricks?
Did they rely on the spellbook to explore and learn on their own, or was it an instinctual awakening from deep within their bloodline?
On both sides of the cellar passage, there were rows of dark, silent rooms.
Gauss’s Light Spell shone into them, finally revealing his targets in the room, those short, common Ratmen with crimson eyes lighting up densely in the darkness.
"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!"
Dense arrows shot out from the shadows of the room like a sudden rainstorm.
They clattered against the bodies of Gauss and Aaliyah.
"You step back first, use the Entanglement Technique if needed."
Gauss instructed Aaliyah.
Then, he took out a large bag of oil from his storage pouch.
His arm exerted force suddenly, tossing it accurately into the room packed with Ratmen.
"Flaming Arrow!"
A Flaming Arrow streaking with orange light shot in, igniting the oil with a roar.
"Boom, boom, boom!"
The flames exploded instantaneously.
Orange-red tongues of fire rose, turning the entire room into a churning sea of fire.
Many Rat shadows twisted, rolled, and screamed in the flames.
Several Ratmen engulfed in flames tried to escape from the room, but Gauss kicked them back in.
At the same time, his magic wand surged with light again.
"Magic Missile!"
Several missiles howled into the sea of fire, triggering even larger explosions in the boom.
"Rat Slayer*1"
"Rat Slayer*1"
"Rat Slayer*1"
...
Text prompts continuously flashed before Gauss’s eyes.
These few spells were the most efficient killing spells Gauss had ever used.
After the dust settled.
"Total monsters killed: 432"
Only 21? Gauss quickly calculated.
Although such a simple strike killed 21 Ratmen, he was very satisfied with the result.
But 15 Ratman cavalry, 4 Caster Apprentice Ratmen, and 21 common Ratmen only amounted to 40.
Where were the other Ratmen in the cellar nest?
He continued deeper along the passage, checking each empty or charred room on both sides one by one, still finding nothing.
Only dead silence and an increasingly thick stench of blood and sourness.
Finally, he reached the end of the passage.
Gauss’s gaze swept over the last extraordinarily large room, which seemed to be a sunken, long-abandoned altar area.
Upon seeing the scene in the room, a visceral sense of discomfort surged in his heart.
Corpses of Ratmen, giant rats, and other indescribable human or animal bodies, shattered entrails, and decaying plant roots soaked like desecrated offerings in a bubbling, pungent dark green viscous pus.
The pus emitted an aura of death and ominousness.
And at the edge of this filthy altar, an exceptionally old Ratman elder stood there silently.
Turbid rat eyes pierced through the darkness, emotionlessly fixating on Gauss.
The next moment, the Ratman elder’s shriveled lips moved, unexpectedly uttering words in a clear common language.
"Lord Vesperilia... will be watching you."
As the words fell, it leaned back without hesitation, with almost frenzied devotion, its entire body sinking into that pool of bubbling dark green pus.
Immediately, all that filthy pus, along with all the corpses and debris within it, vanished without a trace in front of the two, as if swallowed by some enormous invisible mouth.
In the center of the dried-up pool, only a scale rapidly fading to pale remained.
Gauss and Aaliyah looked at each other.
What just happened?
However...
Looking at the completely silent, now only scorched with rat corpses and stench of the cellar, doubt rose in their hearts.
Shouldn’t this commission be considered complete?