The knight commander was right, they did have no shortage of food. The desert is full of edible cacti, thorny roots, and fat gerbils who don't know where to dig their food. If they were lucky, they might catch a few chubby quadrupeds. Even the Fuller goat is not short of food, and its aura of gnawing on cactus is fiercer than anyone else.
Biggest problem, heat.
Speaking of heat earlier, Nemo can at best think of summer sun exposure and scalding boot soles. The summer in Roadmark Town was not too hot, but even then, he didn't want to go out on a sunny day at all. Usually he would nest in the deepest part of the library, just below the cool wind formation, and then stick to the stone wall with novels containing winter scenes.
But now it's different. Everything was hot—even though Nemo covered the top of his head with a shadow, the heat squeezed him from all sides. His whole body was like being stuffed into a red-hot metal tube, and every time he took a breath, he lost the little bit of cool air left in his body.
So he lay flat.
"... Nemo, you're reneging on your bill." An said hoarsely, raising his hand and throwing a small piece of cactus into the sand at will. "Being a man must be willing to admit defeat and chat with Dylan."
"But I'm dying," Nemo responded sadly, crossing his fingers across his chest. He was lying flat in the shadows, with some cover over his head, as if he were imitating an oyster half-shelled. The shadow stretched out countless tentacles and dragged this large oyster with difficulty, with a speed not much different from that of a Fuller goat. "Ann, if I do die, please leave my debt to Oliver."
"Oliver is still standing, at least," Ann said grimly. "Even the sheep are still standing—even if someone here is going to be killed by the heat, that person will definitely not be you. The body of a demon warlock is not that fragile."
"Really?" Nemo stretched out his hand from the shadows, and shook the thing in his hand - the gray parrot was slumped into a ball, his unnaturally long tongue hanging out, and it tended to become longer and longer. "The superior demons are like this."
"The bird's body is still too fragile," Adrian explained. "Its strength is not very strong now, so it's not abnormal... Don't worry, it will get better at night. The night here will probably drop below zero."
"…" Nemo didn't think it was "getting better."
A few steps away, Oliver was indeed still standing, but he looked half-breathed. There was pitifully little moisture in the air as they went deeper into the desert. Adrian's guess was right, and the climate really restrained them both - Oliver tried to get some ice cubes to cool down at first, but now he can't even get a piece of ice.
Nemo could only barely help him out of the shadows.
"Don't block him." The knight commander instructed calmly, and even poked Oliver's back slightly bent in the heat with his bow. "Stand straight, Mr. Ramon, that's the basics... if you want to keep practicing."
Oliver wiped the sweat from his face and walked forward with gritted teeth. Although the posture looks a lot like the feet are forcibly pulling the body forward. In this atmosphere, Nemo was too embarrassed to continue lying down—he sat up properly.
Jesse Dillon did nothing special, he didn't even sweat a few drops, as if the endless desert scenes were all stage sets. Seeing Nemo sitting up, he opened his mouth with interest—
"Help me!" Jesse was about to speak when he was interrupted by a hoarse cry for help from afar. Nemo really sat up straight now, and he looked at the source of the voice.
In the hot, twisted air, a somewhat vague figure was waving desperately towards them. "Help-"
But the team didn't stop.
Nemo, who was distracted, was suddenly a long way behind. He quickly put away the shadow, and was almost knocked down by the hot air blowing on his face, but after he stood firm, he realized that he was not the only one who stopped - Oliver was standing beside him, also looking at the figure calling for help, his face full of doubts.
"Someone's calling for help over there!" Nemo yelled at the advancing team. Ann's style has always been free, but even the knight commander is unmoved, which is a bit strange.
"That's not a person!" An turned around and shouted, and then coughed a few times because of the dust in the wind.
Nemo turned his head to look at the wobbly figure who was still trying to call for help, and goosebumps suddenly appeared.
"He didn't come," Oliver murmured. "…he didn't come near."
Nemo suddenly felt that the air was not so hot: "Then we..."
"The first two, please save me! I'm really not a monster - my feet are entangled!" The figure became clearer and clearer, with a decent appearance and typical businessman attire. "Please!"
"...he looks quite human," Oliver whispered. After thinking for a moment, he picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at the opponent's leg - looking at the speed at which the stone flew, it probably didn't take much effort.
The stone fell silently four or five steps in front of the man, as if hitting an invisible barrier.
The clear figure was twisted, and the whole body was spread out like butter melted in hot water, and the facial features were tangled into an indistinct mass. It stretched forward what had been its arms and reached out to them.
The two looked at each other, but they couldn't keep up with the disgust, and they ran away.
"What is that?" Nemo asked in shock after catching up with the group's tail.
"That figure just now? That's a tongue." Jesse finally seized the opportunity to speak. "The desert mirage's tongue. By the way, Mr. Ramon's stone may have hit its jaw."
"That is to say..."
"It's asking you to step into its mouth." Jesse sounded good.
"…But you all saw it at a glance?" Oliver sounded a little distressed.
"I heard it." Jesse shrugged, "that thing can't speak human words by itself. Although those few calls for help sounded similar, but they were different people's voices - you are really the most tender snake I have ever seen. Well, it's amazing to be alive so far."
A somewhat familiar voice faintly came from behind, from slow to fast, from jerky to smooth.
"Someone's calling for help over there!" Nemo heard his own voice from afar, then Oliver's. "...He didn't come."
Finally, Ann's voice.
"That's not a man."
"That's not a man."
"That's not a man."
It was repeated over and over again, and a slightly low female voice echoed in the wind. Nemo shuddered, and hurried forward a few more steps. Although the wind was quite loud, he could still hear Qing An and Adrian chatting at this distance.
"Have those two been bitten?" An asked leisurely.
"It doesn't sound like it," Adrian replied calmly, bow still in his hand.
"It doesn't look stupid." The female soldier said with relief.
Unlike Jesse Dillon, the two veteran fighters didn't even bother to look back, and Nemo was suddenly a little tired. He and Oliver walked with their heads down, and started making a fuss about all the seemingly normal things on the road. In a sense it was a good thing, at least their attention was taken away from the heat.
It's a pity that the next cactus is just a cactus, and the stone is just a stone. No outlandish monsters reappeared. The scene in front of me kept repeating, and the annoying high fever once again became impossible to ignore.
Until that pile of strange things appeared in their field of vision.
Originally, the scene in front of me was cut into two flat pieces by the desert and the sky, but now there are impurities mixed in between the two relatively pure color pieces—a few pale white towers stand in the distance, with strange shapes, not like man-made objects.
"Go over there to rest tonight." Adrian pointed to the towers that seemed to be fixed on the horizon.
Now that the sun is starting to set westward, the temperature is not so unbearable. Nemo's steps suddenly became a lot lighter, and even the grey parrot could take two steps with fluttering wings. Oliver did his best to freeze a few pucks—though they all knew that as the temperature dropped, the usefulness of the thing would be drastically reduced.
After walking through the desert for most of the day, Nemo's moccasins got at least half a boot of sand. And now that everything was finally on the right track, he grabbed Oliver, intending to use him to empty the sand out of his boots.
A huge spine passed by the two of them.
Oh, the spine. Nemo thought lightly, and the boot in his hand almost fell to the ground in the next second.
He stared in horror at what looked like a giant's spine, and Oliver didn't look much better—he stared blankly at the monster beside him, subconsciously trying to draw his sword, only to grab Nemo's moccasin boots .
So the two of them were frozen in place, subconsciously motionless.
The spine drifted away leisurely, snake-like swimming in the sand, making a pleasant rustling. Seeing it finally climbed away, the two of them breathed a sigh of relief at the same time. Nemo numbly snatched the moccasin boots from Oliver's hands, and after shaking off the sand, took off the boots with another foot.
"You see your whole body is frozen." Nemo continued to support Oliver, his eyes fixed on the sand under his feet, and he focused on tossing his boots. "No way, Ollie."
"...I think that's probably because..." Oliver's voice was dry and cautious, "...the one you're supporting isn't me?"
Nemo stopped for a few seconds. He solemnly put down the moccasin boots that had shaken the sand, put them on carefully, and then took a few steps back—
At the end of the spine, a small joint more than half a person's height fell out of line, and it was stunned beside them, with four black bean-like eyes staring directly at the two of them.
Looking closely, the gap between it and the vertebrae is quite large, but the slightly yellowish white shell is similar in shape. What should have been a cross-section of a bone revealed a face that belonged to a reptile, but it was surprisingly flat, like a lizard that had smashed its face flat against the wall and survived. A thin tail trailed behind the carapace, covered with scales like powdered silver.
No wonder he just felt that something was wrong, Oliver shouldn't make a half-circle for him to lean on. Nemo controlled the dark shadow between his fingers, and he couldn't even raise his strength to defend—the little thing that was not so small looked at them pitifully, and rolled stiffly on the spot.
"...Forget it." Oliver put away his sword, his expression twitching. "Even if there is an emergency, you should be able to guard against it alone."
And Nemo nodded sullenly.
But it turns out that their troubles are just beginning—they have just taken a few steps forward when the thing swoops after them. And as soon as they stopped, the monster stopped immediately. Nemo sighed and turned his head, and the bone-like creature immediately began to perform on all fours again.
"Get into trouble again?" The chatter of the team ahead came again.
"Looks like it." Adrian answered the female warrior's question.
"Cross... let's throw them both away."
"… "
,Wonderful!
(m.. = )