Soon, we arrived at the tall tower with the massive serpent carving hanging on the exterior. It was extremely tall and wide as expected, but the insides were cleaner than what we initially had thought. We thought it would've had tons of dust inside and filled with cobwebs, but surprisingly enough, it was pristine.

Within was an entire library of books, recording the history of the riversnakes and how they eventually evolved and developed human forms. It also recorded the invasion—or at least, what happened up until the final battle that decided the fate of their race. They had mustered up all of their forces for one decisive battle with the Hex, and… well, were promptly wiped out.

Other than that, the books just registered ancient folklore and fables of the riversnakes. They, just like humans and any other race on Xenith, had a culture and history of their own. It was respectable, really—a shame they are pretty much extinct now, with the exception of that one shrine maiden who told us to come here.

Speaking of… the lever she told us about was right in the very center of the tower on the bottommost floor. In other words, it was right in front of us as soon as we walked in, not guarded or encrypted or anything like that. Considering how grandly she spoke of this—how it would 'lift her burdens' and whatnot—I had expected it to be more… secretive? But I suppose not.

"Hey, Big Brother Xuan Kai,

" Qing Yue suddenly said as I was inspecting the books surrounding us.

"Take a look at this.

"

Raising an eyebrow, I walked over to where she was, and widened my eyes.

"This is…

"

The book she held in her hands was called 'The Invaders'. And as for its contents… it was descriptions of the Hex. Appearances, powers, personalities, strategies, everything. It was detailed to the core, like what a doctor would write about a research subject. Not only that, but it was for some reason written in human tongue, meaning I could read it perfectly. It was odd, but I wasn't going to question it.

After all, needless to say, the information stored within this book was going to be a great boon to me in the future, should the need arise to engage in direct conflict with the Hex. On the off-chance that destroying the obelisks fails to stop the Hex's impeding invasion, a manual like this lined with past experiences and possible counters to kill them would be amazing to have.

Since we had some time right now, I decided to take some to just read over the contents of the book. According to it, the Hex were an alien race of robots. They possessed superior intelligence to us, but at the same time, lacked creativity. As a result, while their weapons and the like were all super-engineered and built very powerfully, their actual attacking methods were blunt and straight-forward: just a full-on frontal assault.

That being said, it was a powerful frontal assault. Being a race of robots, they were constantly repopulating on wherever their home planet was. As such, they had the power to send in waves upon waves of soldiers endlessly, even if all of them were walking straight to their deaths. In other wards, if there was a hole in front of their way that led to lava, they would fill up the hole with their comrades' dead bodies before stepping over it and carrying on with their invasion. That was how ruthless and quite frankly—stupid—they were.

In the manual, it was stated that there were three main classes of Hex soldiers: Troopers, Exorcists, and Praetors. Troopers were your average footsoldiers that wielded cybernetic guns and weren't very strong compared to the others, but came en masse. Exorcists were like mages, in a sense, except they much preferred grenades over spells. Lastly, Praetors were the tanks, and the strongest type of soldier of them all—they had loads of artillery equipped with them, and were extremely tall and big as well.

According to the author's notes, just one Trooper took two riversnakes to take down. And as for Praetors… the total number of them that the riversnakes managed to defeat in the battle was… an astounding zero.

"They had incredible durability,

" the journal wrote.

"Their armor was like a thousand layers of steel, and their energy barriers reflected anything we threw at them.

"

Right. Energy barriers. Apparently, that was the most powerful weapon of the Praetors. They were described to wield some kind of weapon in their right hand and hold nothing in their left, but could spin their left wrist to generate some kind of energy barrier. No matter what the riversnakes tried, they could not break past that barrier—which was the main reason why they failed to take down even one Praetor.

Not only that, there appeared to be multiple subclasses amongst each main class of soldiers as well. For example, amongst the Troopers, there were the rifle-class, sniper-class, shotgun-class, and engineer-class. Each of them wielded different weapons—the first three were self-explanatory, but engineer-class Troopers actually drove powerful machines into battle—for example, their own version of tanks or planes.

As for Exorcists, they had Healers and Bombers. Once again, self-explanatory.

But perhaps the most interesting and difficult one of them all was the Praetor. This class had a total of seven different subclasses, namely: Razor, Plasma, Renegade, Artillery, Gunneer, Marksman, and Streak. Razor wielded double-swords and was the melee combat type, Plasma featured twin-shot plasma cannon that fired slow but did high AOE damage, Renegade was a berserk type that brawled with their fists and was a true tank, Artillery used homing missiles and grenades, Gunneer wielded a powerful minigun, Marksman held a high-power accurate rail-gun that could pass through and vaporize anything instantly, and Streak used laser powers to fight.

This book… I wonder who wrote it. It couldn't have been the riversnakes—they don't know human tongue.

So then… who was it?