The Rise Of A Porter

An hour later in the swamps...

The trees which had been sheltering the swamp with their thick canopy of greenery and provided a perfect environment forest-dwelling monsters for so long were now turned into lifeless sticks of charcoal, no more vibrant than the old wooden lamp-posts of an old city.

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The unfettered light of the burning trees illuminated the scorched ground while the smell of burning wood and flesh lingered in the air. Fire tainted the earth with grey ash, stripping the trees of the virescent beauty, leaving their gaunt, skeletal remains rooted to the now barren, lifeless soil. They seemed to reach out to the sky like gnarled hands as if desperately begging the cloudless sky to rain so that they could be whole again, but even the sky refused to aid them and the ground was cursed to remain barren and dead.

The toll on both nature and the human who was responsible for all this destruction was heavy, very heavy. The part of swamps the man was standing in looked as if it had been torched with lava or something similar. Parts of trees and ground were still aflame as if trying to mimic the burning rage inside the human\'s heart.

Hundreds of burnt bodies of humanoid lizards of all shapes and sizes were scattered throughout the area, some were torn into pieces while some only had their bones left behind as the fire melted their bodies away and the man was limply walking around scanning the area for surviving monsters but there were none, all of their souls had been consumed by the fire. All of the 254 lizardmen who attacked the man now looked like roasted alligators, laying on the ground.

But it wasn\'t like the man was unscathed either. Blood trickled down from everywhere on his body, his head, thighs, chest, forearms everywhere. His clothes and gears were soaked with a mixture of his blood and sweat along with the blood of the monsters that he brutally killed. There were at least a dozen broken bones in his body, but the wounds as well as the broken bones were rapidly recovering and sealing themselves up without any outside interference.

The man was Arnold, standing in the middle of the scorched swamp with no one left to challenge him. The system was continuously buzzing with notifications but he couldn\'t even focus on the texts that kept popping up in front of his eyes, his body was on the verge of collapsing still he couldn\'t feel anything maybe it was the effect of adrenaline that was still coursing through his blood.

\'It\'s finally over...\' He thought after checking the last lizardman corpse that was in his sights, \'No more monsters...\'

One of his legs gave out and he slumped down to the burnt ground. His body was finally taking a hit from all the continuous fights he fought within the last hour. He wanted to store the bodies of the dead lizardmen in his domain but he barely had enough strength left to lift a finger, forget about opening a large enough void to do anything else.

His eyes were also getting heavier and heavier as every moment passed. He was tired but he still had work to do. The smell of burning flesh would certainly attract other monsters and he wasn\'t in a state to fight anymore... for another hour or so at the very least, so he needed to do something about it as soon as he had regained enough strength to do so.

He tried to get up but it was of no use, he felt like his legs had a mind of their own. He tried once again but the result remained unchanged.

In the end, he gave up on it and laid back, looking at the night sky which was now clearly visible as all of the trees around him had been burnt down by the flames he generated both through his abilities as well as his weapons.

"Not bad... not bad at all..." He mumbled, but even talking seemed like a herculean task right now and took tremendous efforts to do so.

By now, nearly all of his external wounds were completely sealed and the bleeding was stopped, but the internal damage he incurred during the fight, including the broken bones, still needed to be fixed.

\'Looks like I\'ll have to stay here for another hour or so...\' he smirked but even doing that was painful, \'I greatly underestimated them, especially those goofballs. Just one hit at the right place and I could\'ve die fighting those sneaky little bastards...\'

Among the army of the lizardmen, the lizardmen that Arnold had encountered earlier weren\'t the only ones he had to fight against, as soon after the fight began, the fourth type of lizardmen also showed up.

These monsters could barely qualify as lizardmen if someone looked at them as they were exceptionally small and had toad-like features rather than those of a lizard or an alligator, also they were only a couple of feet tall. Arnold underestimated them because of their small size and he realised it soon, as within their bloated sluggish bodies they contained an over half a meter long tongue, having a razor-sharp poison tip at the end which was their only yet effective source of offence. What made it scarier was the speed at which they could launch the attack using their tongue.

These unearthly creatures were quite unlike anything else Arnold had seen within the world. Their heads were bigger than a volleyball, most probably to allow their gigantic tongue to be stored inside, and their eyes were like a pair of golf balls. This helped them to focus on their target as well as to see better in the dark. Even though they had all these abilities, they lacked in one department... the brain.

They weren\'t the smartest creatures among the lot as at times they didn\'t have complete control over their tongues and often ended up hitting their kin instead.

Still, their small size and the range of their attacks made it very difficult for their target to dodge their attack and once their target was hit by the poisoned tip of their tongue, that part was numbed for a couple of seconds while the wound caused by the attack took more time to clot and get sealed. Most of the external wounds that Arnold had were thanks to those little bastards, and in frustration, Arnold ended up giving them the nickname, \'Little bastards\' while their name according to the system was - Stinging Toadzards.

The combined attacks of all of the lizardmen were too much for Arnold to handle and in the end, Arnold decided to put his guns aside and deal with them using skills and weapons and deal AOE damage. Which was the best thing he could do.