The Emperor’s Daily Nitpicking - CH 49

“These ……” Kevin’s face gradually turned grim as he looked at the few bodies in front of him. “Someone attacked them from the other end?”

However, he shook his head again, dismissing this suspicion.

The chances of someone discovering the other side of the tunnel were too slim to be a problem, but even if they did, with two armies in the tunnel, it would not be a problem for them to take advantage of the terrain to attack the other side. And if there were casualties, they would be concentrated in the front, not scattered in the rear.

If it were the Sand Ghosts who could kill from the front to the back like a gale, this would not happen either. They wouldn’t leave even a single corpse behind.

Oswald stopped in his tracks, and Kevin rolled off his back, walking over to some of the bodies.

Some corpses were on their sides, but more were on their knees; in any case, their faces were not very visible.

Oswald took a couple of steps forward and raised his front paws to turn one of the bodies at his feet onto its back, but he could not do so after two attempts.

“Dog paws should quit messing around here.” Kevin slapped him aside nonchalantly, frowning as he carefully flipped the corpse over, muttering, “That’s a pretty odd position……”

Oswald wanted to kick him in the face for forcefully referring to a nice wolf as a dog, but it was Kevin who spoke, so he could only snort out of his nose and defend himself angrily, “Try having two extra legs all of a sudden and see if you can control it.”

Kevin didn’t even think to reply, “Don’t make excuses for being clumsy. You crawled on four legs until you were a year old, so pretend you’re doing it again.”

“……” Oswald felt that he would be mocked and ridiculed by him every day, but when he thought about it, it made sense, and he didn’t even know how to refute it.

“Look at the way these people are positioned.” Kevin flipped the body in front of his feet and lifted his chin at the corpses as far as the eye could see. “Don’t you think they’re all reversed?”

Oswald didn’t respond for a moment. “What’s reversed?”

Kevin turned and smacked him on the neck, saying, “If the attack had come from the front, as I did to you, how would you have fallen?”

“Backwards,” Oswald replied soberly.

He obviously understood what Kevin meant: if the attack or collision had come from directly in front of him, then most people would have fallen backwards from such an attack, and their corpses would have been mostly on their backs, the opposite of what was happening in front of them.

“It’s not like the attack came from behind, right?” Oswald added, “Don’t forget we were behind them the whole time. If something attacked them from behind, how come we never met it?”

“That’s why it’s weird ……” Kevin withdrew his gaze and carefully looked down at the corpse he had turned over. He soon noticed another problem.

This time he didn’t need to remind Oswald to notice – the corpse being turned over had a bizarre expression, his eyes were wide open, and his pupils were dilated. You could tell he had seen something that had shocked him greatly. But again, it wasn’t horror because the corners of his mouth were slightly curved.

This was the weirdest thing of all. Looking at the upper half of his face alone, the man should have been shocked to the core at the moment of his death, but the lower half looked peaceful and content. The combination of these two emotions on the same face appeared highly contradictory.

If you looked at it for too long, it would give you a creepy feeling.

They looked at all the corpses in the area and found that their expressions were almost identical, with no fatal wounds on their bodies; some even had no wounds.

They both fell into silence at once ……

What would cause such expressions on the faces of those who saw them?

And more importantly, what could cause someone to die while showing such an expression?

For a moment, they couldn’t get any clue. Kevin shook his head and said, “Look further ahead.”

He rolled onto Oswald’s back, and the emperor, who had turned into a wolf, whispered, “Hold on tight,” before he took off again.

It wasn’t a long journey, but it took longer than any previous ones, as the corpses grew so large that it was almost impossible for them to stop after a short distance.

“Is there anyone left alive……” Kevin frowned at the mess at his feet, his expression very ugly.

“There is.” Oswald replied firmly, “Half of them. I’ve just done a head count.”

Despite his certainty that there were survivors, his tone suggested that he was in a very sombre mood, clearly not expecting such a situation in the secret passage.

The secret passage soon ended. A stone staircase ran diagonally upwards at the end of the winding path.

Kevin sat on the beast’s back and bent down to stare at the surface of the staircase for a while, not missing a single mark. “There are a lot of footprints here, many but not too messy, so they must still be stable. If we count the time, it’s only been a few hours since the survivors re-formed and left the place.”

Without further delay, the man and the beast followed the stone staircase to the exit.

The exit was technically one heavy stone panel that hung right over the head of the top step of the stone staircase. With two tall men making a human ladder, they could reach the board, but it would take quite a bit of effort to push it away.

Kevin was already tall himself. Oswald, who had turned into a giant wolf, was also a natural helper.

The bastard never spoke properly when he asked for help but wiggled his finger in front of Oswald’s nose to draw his attention away and said, “It’s time to use your paw pads.”

Oswald: “……”

Without thinking, he opened his mouth and took Kevin’s obnoxiously inviting fingers, rubbing them twice with the sharp tips of his wolf teeth unceremoniously.

Kevin: “……”

He slapped Oswald across his dog’s head and stroked it twice with a sneer. “Are you going to let go? If you don’t let go, I’ll crack your mouth full of dog teeth.”

Oswald loosened his teeth disdainfully and released Kevin’s teasing finger.

Without thinking, Kevin rubbed his finger on Oswald’s fur, and after a closer look, he found no broken skin before saying, “If you break my skin, I’ll have to catch up with the army and get the physician to give me some medicine.” The implication was that he was close to being a rabid dog.

Oswald grunted and arched his back, signalling for the bastard to hurry up and remove the slabs.

Kevin climbed on his thick back, stepping on his fluffy fur, and asked, “I’m not a lightweight. Will your spine hold up to the bigger effort of unloading the slab later?”

Oswald looked at him with a handsome, cold snow wolf face and said, “You’ve been sitting on my back for a day. Isn’t it too late for you to ask if I can hold up? Do you think the bones of such a big beast are made of glass?”

In a rare moment of conscience and concern for the young man, Kevin snorted and lifted his hand to punch the edge of the slab with no further comment.

Unfortunately, Oswald was now in beast form and could do nothing more than act as a cushion. He wouldn’t have let Kevin do it if he were in human form. With his strength, three punches would have cracked the stone slab blocking the exit and brought it down.

Kevin’s punches were not as hard as his, but they were strong enough, and with a bit of force in them, he quickly smashed a corner of the slab.

With two hands, he pulled the slab out of the way and slowly lifted it to one side.

The exit was about a metre square, and Kevin could flip out of it in a matter of minutes, lying next to the opening and waiting for Oswald below. The latter, however, was slightly more miserable.

Because he got stuck ……

The celestial wolf was already much larger than the ordinary beast, and although its proportions were beautiful, it was very robust and sturdy on both legs and waist alone. His Majesty leapt vigorously, poking out his head, his two front paws, and the front half of his waist …… eventually getting stuck in the retracted wings section.

Oswald: “……”

Kevin, who was lying next to him and intending to give him a hand, laughed at him unrestrainedly before holding his huge wolf head and saying with a straight face, “To be honest, that celestial wolf I used to keep was quite a bit thinner than you. Look at your robustness. Hey…… be a good boy and lose weight later. ”

Oswald no longer wanted to talk to him at all. It took him half a day to leap out of the cave door after Kevin’s tug-of-war rescue, shaking the white fur off his body with a sad face.

They were at the bottom of a dry, dry well. Kevin resealed the slab and felt around to look at the stone wall. The knife-chiselled climbing marks on it were still fresh, and it was clear that the army wasn’t too far away.

“Carmen, where is it outside the well?” Kevin asked casually as he patted the dust and mud from his hands.

Oswald: “……”

One accidental stuck back in the hole, and he gave the nickname Carmen in the blink of an eye. What kind of person is that, if not lacking, beating?

Oswald stared dreadfully at him for a long moment before replying coldly, “Mirage.”

Then, regardless of whether Kevin was ready, he grabbed Kevin’s clothes on the back and carried the delinquent ancestor out of the deep well with a flap of his wings. Kevin was hanged by his neck……

Despite the word “sea” in its name, the Mirage Sea had nothing to do with water. Here, everywhere you looked, there was a greyish-yellow sky above your head and sand beneath your feet, with wind and smoke rising and falling, boundless.

The place they stood was a small, insignificant ruin in the desert, with a few broken walls and a few ancient carved foundations.

The two had settled at the wellhead before Kevin tapped the wolf’s head. “Look over there.”

The direction he pointed was a rolling dune that looked as if it was just a hundred metres or so away, and there was no telling how far it would actually be to walk. At the foot of the hill, a long, thin line could be seen winding forward, like a line of black ants.

Unsurprisingly, that was the advanced troops.