The lizardmen, now essentially turned into beasts filled with intense poison magic, came running at Ashton. They were clearly acting a lot closer to zombies all of a sudden, and judging from their dried-up skin, they would be immune to pain like zombies, too.

  But well, he couldn't really focus on them right now.

  "Stupid of you to come out and show yourself to me like this." A grin appeared on Ashton's face, as he pulled his arm back and threw the aerial wisp at the poison lizardmen.

  But this time, to push them away as far as possible, Ashton activated the 'force' spell within the wisp. A powerful gust of wind was forced out, literally tossing the monsters backward like they were dolls made of straw. In the meantime, Ashton spun around and ran straight at the poison mage.

  It seemed startled that Ashton would run straight at him, and stretched its bone staff out toward him. From the roots keeping it together, small berries started to grow. They were different shades of purple and green, and were barely hanging on the roots once they became too big. With a swing of the staff, the berries were tossed straight at Ashton, bursting in the air.

  They sprayed out their liquids like they were water-balloons, covering Ashton. He wasn't able to dodge from this close up, and as the poison splattered on his face, he could feel it sting like a rusty knife was scraping against his skin. His eyes went blurry almost immediately, but Ashton pushed through.

  Ashton felt nauseous and sluggish at just a touch. The poison mage started cackling like the fight was already over, just to feel a bit of steel slamming into the centre of its face.

  "Not the first time I've fought while poisoned, and it won't be the last," Ashton pulled his staff back and pushed it onto the ground right behind him. He used it to hold himself while kicking up and pulling his legs around the lizardman's neck, squeezing tightly. Of course, the lizardman gnarled and showed its fangs, but the way Ashton positioned himself, its head was basically locked in place. "Don't bite me, now, I'd like to keep that."

  While essentially sitting on its shoulders, his stomach facing the monster's face, while the poison mage tried to claw at Ashton to tear him down, Ashton pushed his staff into the shelf next to him. He pushed it against the brackets and tried to find a place he could use to create some leverage. And the moment he found it, Ashton twisted himself around, using all the strength and flexibility in his body to snap the monster's neck.

  It dropped down immediately.

  ***

  [You have killed a [Komodian*] and offered its life to the [Daughter of the Scarlet Heart]]

  ***

  Not every elite monster was particularly sturdier than the regular kind. They were just overall more powerful. At this point in time, just having the ability to use strong magic was enough for them to count as an 'elite'.

  At the end of the day, this was still just the second quest, and Ashton was getting back into a groove. Now that his stats were high enough to let him move more freely, there was almost no singular enemy that could take him down.

  'Well, beside that fuckass wyvern, I guess,' Ashton thought to himself, wiping away the mess of poison on his face. He pulled the cigarette-box out of his pocket and quickly picked one that he marked as having antidotal detox qualities. He lit it up with the lighter stuffed into the box, and took a long drag, before looking back at those poison zombies. They were still standing there, eagerly and maniacally waiting to tear Ashton apart.

  "What are you waiting for? Come at me already," he said, stretching his staff out toward them. As they started rushing at him, the wisp shot at them from behind, using the force spell again. The lizardmen were thrown at Ashton, and he took their momentum to help him take them all down.

  Beating a skull in was actually pretty easy when you knew what to do. A well-aimed strike to cave in the eye-socket, followed by a hit to the jaw that made them lose a couple teeth, before finishing them off with a powerful last strike to the side of the head once the cracks from the other attacks weakened it enough, was plenty to be lethal. Especially for Ashton, who was now twice as strong and about three times as fast as this body was just a week ago.

  The poison lizardmen were able to spew some of their deadly breath at him, but the smoke of his cigarettes was already taking up all that space and happily pushed anything else out of the way.

  As Ashton walked over the puddles of blood, hearing the slight cracks of ice right above the frost enchantment, he made his way down this aisle happily. He was able to take down two of the monsters he was worried about the most already. By the time he reached the next hot spot, Ashton would hopefully have counteracted the poison that he had absorbed through his skin.

  "That chocolate's surprisingly pulling its weight," he said to himself, before stopping. He closed his eyes for a second, and then pulled the cigarette out of his mouth. Keeping himself up right by holding onto a palette of canned peaches, Ashton vomited onto the floor. It was a mixture of the instant ramen he made himself before heading out earlier today, water, since he tried to stay hydrated as much as he could, and a solid dose of blood.

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  "Urgh..." Ashton pulled the tab on one of the cans of peaches and fished one out to get the taste out of his mouth. These were great. "Backpacker, could you grab a few? Just two or three dozen will be enough for now."

  The spirit appeared and quickly did as asked, though they were looking at Ashton for a few moments. He was trying not to show it, but this was actually pretty painful, so he was taking a short breather. Before disappearing again, they pulled out a bottle with a healing potion, holding it toward him.

  "Hm? Oh, I'm fine, thanks. It looks scarier than it actually is. From the feel of it, the poison is messing with my stomach lining a bit, but it's not that bad. It's a poison meant more to incapacitate than to kill," Ashton explained with a smile, patting the Backpacker's head. They slowly nodded and put the potion away again, looking at Ashton one more time before disappearing in his vessel.

  Ashton groaned in discomfort and continued smoking his cigarette. He could feel the pain, nausea, and dizziness fade as he continued on, taking out lizardman after lizardman that he encountered in these aisles.

  Whenever he found any particularly useful items left on the shelves, Ashton would take them and stash them away in the Backpacker's bag, but for the most part, he tried to keep at it and clear this place. After a while, he had taken out around 70 of the lizardmen in here, and those were just the ones roaming around freely.

  He even took out another elite, though it was really just slightly bigger than the others and had a toxic bite, which was easily avoided by precisely removing its teeth with a few well-timed bashes.

  Soon, Ashton reached the produce section. Most of the fresh food had already been devoured or had started to rot. It was a pretty warm summer, and the store's cooling obviously didn't work. Before Ashton activated the frost enchantments, this place was humid, hot, and stank like hell. Now the only thing that was really of notice was how rancid it smelled, so an overall pretty decent improvement.

  The produce section was one of the places that were separated more from the rest of the store through shelves. It was essentially turned into the main place the monsters to eat and keep their food, probably because this was where they started devouring things. All the immediately-edible food was around here. The meat and cheese counter was nearby, too.

  The biggest thing that Ashton could only keep his eyes on were the leftover corpses of people, already gnawed on and torn apart. They had been left to rot, and maggots, beetles, and monstrous rats were crawling all over the pile. It was a sickening sight, but Ashton expected this. And the monsters here, the few that remained lazing around here despite all the cold, were still just stuffing their maws with whatever they could.

  Ashton got rid of them promptly and gladly. If he hadn't already hurled earlier and got that need out of his system, he definitely would have done it here. Even if Ashton had seen it a few times, that wasn't a sight you could get easily used to. Nor was that smell. That disgusting, rotten smell of death that had begun permeating the entire city. No, the entire world would reek of it at this point in time.

  With an annoyed snarl, Ashton stepped out of the section and moved on. Maybe he spent a bit too long in there, but by the time he got a distance away, some of the lizardmen were actually wearing jackets and were draped in blankets. There was plenty of both in here, after all, though the super thick jackets made for these temperatures weren't actually in stock right around now.

  Even so, this of course worked to some degree, and they weren't quite as sluggish as some of the other lizardmen Ashton encountered. They cackled at Ashton as if they had the upper hand, but almost fell over themselves because they stepped on each other's, or their own, blankets. Any improvements in mobility from counteracting the cold were also cut quite a bit because the jackets simply weren't made for lizardmen bodies. They were either too big, and got in the way as the monsters tried to swing at Ashton, or were too small, and stopped them from doing what they wanted.

  Another reason why Ashton was so picky with his clothes, now. Bad choices could mean death. As long as all his bits were contained, he wouldn't mind fighting almost naked, though that did, of course, make him more vulnerable to certain types of attacks. If he had any more exposed skin than just his face, that poison from the mage earlier would have been far more dangerous.

  Like that, reaching more than a hundred lizardmen killed was shockingly easy.

  Ashton turned around the corner, getting close to one of the hot-spots of monsters that he saw earlier. It was where most of the nests had been set up, and where the lizardmen seemed to be spending their time.

  Sure, they might have extreme instincts to kill people, but that was only when they were actually faced with people. This tribe in particular had that drive less because they were focused on sacrifices instead. The portion of monsters that were lazing around was shocking, but Ashton couldn't underestimate them because of that.

  As these lizardmen huddled together and stayed in their nests, they were able to share their body-heat, and stayed under blankets. And because of how many monsters there were around here, Ashton wasn't able to place an enchantment too close. The risk of being caught was too high. They were far less affected by the freezing temperatures here.

  But hey, that just made this a little more challenging. Ashton rushed in and started to fight the monsters. There weren't any particularly special lizardmen here in particular, though they were varied. Spears, swords, knives, slingshots, bows, they were using basically any sort of weapon in the lizardman repertoire. Hell, with the sheer amount of monsters, Ashton even got hurt a little bit, and his clothes were a little torn up.

  Poison that had coated their weapons was spreading through Ashton, and he was feeling sluggish and slow, but the effect of the chocolate and the cigarette he was smoking right now were doing enough to keep him going. He would take a break and pour a detox potion over his injuries later to pull the poison out, but right now, he had to keep going. Slow and steady.

  Attack after attack, the wisp's storming force magic, and the fact that the lizardmen did start to slow down once they stopped huddling together so much was enough for Ashton to push through and make it out on the other side. At some point, steam rose from the ground from the sheer amount of warm blood that had gathered around him.

  Just a little more, and Ashton would have taken down more than half the lizardmen in this place, and could prepare to face one of the bigger threats that he was able to spot.

  However, almost as if he had called on it by thinking about it, that threat came and threw a microwave at him. Ashton was able to dodge in time, instead letting the microwave slam into the head of the scincidian trying to get him from behind, but that wasn't the last attack from that thing.

  A massive, hulking crocodilian, standing at three or four metres tall, approached Ashton while bearing not just its fangs, but a massive cleaver made of bone.