A few hours ago...

Fire doesn't care if it burns wood, pig fat or the flesh from a human body, just like bullets that didn't care whether they were going to hit a concrete wall, a human or a monster. It had no preference at all, it was just a messenger of death for its target, a perfect instrument to kill someone whom it's owner didn't like and this time the owner of the bullet was Arnold, and his target was a regular lizardman.

His aim was as good as ever as the bullet hit the fleeing lizardman at the back of its head and the monster collapsed on the marshy floor. Thick black blood flowed out of the limp body of the monster and got splattered onto the ground. A bullet was all it took to slay the proud beast, but something was bothering Arnold a lot.

'Something's wrong here...' He thought, 'In the past whenever I've been here, I've always found a swarm of monsters ready to butcher anything that moved but now, although I've been here for over an hour this was only the fourth lizardman that I encountered and killed here.'

This wasn't the only peculiarity that he had observed either. During his previous trips to the swamps, lizardmen never moved around alone but in groups just like the goblins even though they had individualistic mindset, but this time around, Arnold had only encountered one lizardman at a time, not more. Also, instead of running towards him to attack, strangely enough, whenever a lizardman saw him it started running away immediately. He had decided to visit the swamps to gain some progress for his Headhunter sub quest, but if the monsters kept running away from him then it wouldn't have been possible for him to do it.

At first, Arnold thought it was just a coincidence that he encountered a single lizardman, but he was proved wrong when he met another lizardman who was hiding behind a tall bush and appeared in front of him as soon as he killed the who appeared first.

The second lizardman did the same thing and started running towards the direction in which the first lizardman was and Arnold killed it too. But the hunch he had, had turned out to be true when a third lizardman appeared in front of him the moment he killed the second lizardman. This cycle repeated itself once again and the result was the same.

'They are certainly trying to lead me somewhere... maybe another ambush?' Arnold thought and tried to find an answer behind the sudden change in the behaviour of the lizardmen.

It was highly unlikely that the once aggressive and ruthless species turn into a cowardly one, in a matter of a few hours. It didn't make any sense at all.

'Let's just wait and see what happens next,' He thought as he stored the body of the monster in his void, 'I'm sure the next lizardman would pop up soon and this time, I'll not kill it, but rather follow it and see where the hell these lizardmen are trying to run to.'

However this time Arnold waited and waited, but not a single lizardman 'suddenly' appeared in front of him like before and Arnold began cursing himself for being a fool for wasting all of his daily quota of foresight for a stupid little box. If he had the left even a single chance to use his foresight then he wouldn't need to stand like a fool in the middle of the dusky swamp.

Seeing no other way, he decided to call forth his newly made strike force of ultralight automatons to help him out. Once every single one of them was out of his domain, he gave them a single command.

"Look for any peculiarities in the region and immediately report in if you find something." Arnold was murmuring, yet his voice was loud and clear, "Also do not kill any monster, regardless of the situation. You're free to disable them in any way y'all seem fit but aim to injure, not to kill. I want them alive."

The automatons nodded simultaneously and without saying a word, immediately disappeared throughout the swamps to look for anything peculiar in the land of monsters.

Arnold didn't want his automatons to kill any monster for a single reason: The Headhunter sub-quest. He wanted to complete that particular sub quest as soon as possible so that he would be able to focus on making a relic afterwards to complete the ascension quest altogether. If his summons killed a monster then the counter of the Headhunter quest might not increase, just like what happened when thousands of monsters attacked the alpha base and Arnold didn't get the credit for killing a single one of those.

While Arnold was plotting his next move, It didn't take very long for the automatons to find something 'peculiar', as Arnold was almost immediately notified by the group of automatons who went in the same direction as the one the lizardmen were running towards. The automatons had informed him that they found a few lizardmen, so Arnold immediately darted towards in that direction, going to get some clues from them, but when he arrived at the location, he saw half a dozen dead lizardmen, piled up together. He was furious as he thought the automatons had killed them, but when he asked them about it they said the lizardmen were already like this when they arrived there. Although Arnold didn't want to believe them, he knew they were telling the truth as they couldn't lie to him.

Arnold squatted down next to the bodies and turned their bodies around, after seeing the condition their bodies were in, all of his doubts were clarified.

The throats of the monsters had been cut cleanly in one swipe of some kind of blade and Arnold knew that although the swords of his automatons were sharper than a normal sword, it still wasn't possible for them to penetrate their swords so deep into the thick hide on the lizardmen in one go, which was a clear indication that someone else was present inside the swamp apart from him.

The monsters laid there like butchered animals in a pool of thick blood. While Arnold was carefully analysing the situation, one of the corpses slipped from the top of the pile and lay staring up at him, it's mouth was open, the head almost cleft from the body. He saw again the severed vessels, sticking like corrugated pipes through the clotted blood.

Another body was propped as a rag doll against the tree in front of him. The monster's head had drooped forward and over his chest, a great mat of blood had spread like a bib. As Arnold moved closer to him, the monster's big yet lifeless eyes reflected his image and through those eyes, Arnold saw something move behind his back. Without waiting for a fraction of a second, Arnold jumped sideways like a cheetah to dodge the attack from the unknown enemy.

He looked at the place he was standing a second before and saw a battleaxe had split the head of the dead lizardman into two parts. The axe had almost managed to sever the tree in its entirety.

"Such destructive force..." Arnold mumbled in admiration and looked at the owner of the battleaxe... a red lizardman he had never seen before.