“I don’t know,” Einen sighed and gripped his spear-staff tighter. “Maybe they want to use us as sacrifices or something else disgusting. I don’t trust them.”
Hadjar looked at the backs of the other squad members in front of them. On the one hand, the islander didn’t even trust his own reflection sometimes. On the other hand, there was always a grain of truth in his words. Einen’s suspicions had been proven true in one way or another every time.
“What are you suggesting?” Hadjar asked.
Einen made sure no one was looking at them and then held out his right hand. At first, Hadjar didn’t understand why he did so, but when he did, he lamented the fact that he couldn’t curse and mention the demons and gods. There was no scar on the islander’s skin.
“But I saw you take the oath with my own eyes!”
“It’s an old smugglers’ trick,” Einen said. Hadjar could’ve sworn he saw a smirk on his friend’s face, even though the islander’s face was always stony and expressionless. “You just need a little glue and a special combustible mixture.”
Hadjar remembered Einen mixing something up and going into the jungle to gather ingredients.
“Does the Stone Trees oasis look like your homeland?”
Einen said nothing, and Hadjar felt the urge to slap himself. Now it was clear why Einen had seemed so at ease in the oasis. It was as if he’d gone home.
“If I have to, I’ll be able to neutralize Glen,” the islander said. “Dealing with the rest of them will prove more difficult.”
They both looked at the shimmering blue bracelets on their arms. They’d had plenty of chances to see how quickly and effectively these amulets could stop any attempts to harm the citizens.
“Let’s deal with the problems as they come up,” Hadjar said. “Even if Glen isn’t a problem, we’re still in a two-against-three situation. The advantage is clearly not on our side.”
“The people who choose to only follow the true path of cultivation have strong Techniques but weak bodies,” Einen said, “so we’ll take advantage of that.”
He gave Hadjar a small bottle. Hadjar didn’t need an explanation.
“It’s an antidote to the poison.”
Well, okay, he did need an explanation.
“The effects of it have already worn off.”
“The effects of what I added haven’t.” He seemed to grin again. “I spent a lot of time around pirates, slave traders, smugglers, and thieves and I learned a couple of their tricks. The bowl from which everyone drank Karissa’s poison was coated in a special medicine.”
“Medicine?” Hadjar asked.
“Yes,” Einen nodded and pointed at his blue amulet. “It didn’t let me use anything poisonous. But medications are a different matter. The farther we walk, the more our companions will become thirsty, until their throats are so dry that they won’t be able to speak.”
Hadjar mentally twitched. What kind of medicine was this that made a person so thirsty?
“It’s a medicine meant for gastric cleansing,” Einen explained like he’d read his friend’s thoughts.
Barely stopping himself from laughing, Hadjar looked at his friend in a new light. This bald monk, prone to philosophizing and serene contemplation, was actually a rogue.
“Tell me what happened, Hadjar.”
“What do you mean?”
Einen turned to his interlocutor and made an incomprehensible hand gesture toward the sky.
“After you woke up, you stopped saying ‘gods and demons’. As far as I could tell, that used to be your favorite curse. So, tell me, what happened?”
Until recently, Hadjar would’ve been shocked to hear the usually silent Einen talking so much, but now he’d gotten used to it. In fact, the bald man was rather talkative if he was discussing an interesting topic.
“I recently found out that mentioning... those creatures makes them strong-”
Hadjar didn’t get to finish his explanation because a powerful explosion of energy and Glen’s cry interrupted him.
“Protection!” The Baliumian roared, unsheathing his saber that was glowing with golden light.
The waves of light radiating out from the blade created a dome of light in front of Glen. However, that didn’t help him. A pillar of sand struck his golden shield, shredding his protection like simple cloth. Glen was flung a dozen yards through the air and struck the ground hard. A trickle of blood ran down the Baliumian’s lips as he wheezed.
“Damn,” Hadjar muttered.
Glen was apparently out of the fight for the foreseeable future. With the internal injuries he’d received, he wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.
“Karissa!” Ramukhan shouted, brandishing his glowing staff in front of him.
Hadjar gripped the hilt of his blade as he witnessed something that he’d only heard about in the tales of the passengers back at Rahaim’s caravan. Right in front of their squad, a dune came to life. It rose as the sand moved as if it were alive. In some places, it condensed and absorbed the light from the sun and sky, turning blue, looking almost like silk and brocade, not sand.
Ten seconds later, a sand spirit stood in front of the squad on cloven feet, with its arms, which were clad in blue silk sleeves, spread out. It was something that couldn’t be described as a beast or a human. The first of its kind Hadjar had ever seen.
It wore a blue caftan and golden greaves. Beneath its hood, however, it had no face, nor even a body. Or rather, it didn’t have the usual kind of face and body. Instead, its flesh consisted of relentlessly shifting sand.
“Tar li’sah’oni burags baram!” Its voice, which was like the roar of a sandstorm, boomed out.
“What did it say?” Einen asked.
“I don’t know.” Hadjar shrugged and charged it.
Chapter 383
It was unlikely that a creature with friendly intentions had just tried to send one of them to his forefathers. Glen’s current condition clearly demonstrated the spirit’s hostility. Hadjar wasn’t going to try and negotiate with a creature that had almost killed a strong practitioner.
Blurring into the shadow of the Seven Ravens, Hadjar appeared behind the creature. During this time, starting from an indistinct, sandy shape, it condensed into a huge, 6’6 monster. However, that didn’t make the spirit any weaker. Rather, this had the opposite effect. The power emanating from it before had been equal to the power of a cultivator on the verge of becoming a Spirit Knight. And now its aura was as mighty as a real Spirit Knight’s.
Rushing forward, Hadjar used the fifth stance of the ‘Light Breeze’ Technique.
“Rustle in the Treetops!” He said, using up nearly a quarter of his energy supply.
Stopping behind the creature, Hadjar slashed down with his sword. His blade left a trail of black fog behind. The blow, which had absorbed his energy and his knowledge of the Sword Spirit, was so strong that a blue crescent was launched from the edge of his blade. Merging with his real blade, it intensified the attack. The attack, which forced even the ones who weren’t its target to hold their breath, still couldn’t hurt the spirit. Moreover, the creature didn’t even turn around. Hadjar’s sword got stuck in a wall of sand that rose up from the ground. It was like the one Shakh had used. Except the spirit’s sand wall was so dense and strong that Hadjar’s attack not only got stuck in it, but was even partially reflected back at him.
Sensing that something was wrong, Hadjar dodged to the side. During the maneuver, he saw a crescent of sand fly out of the wall and, after cutting off some of his hair, strike a 30ft dune behind him and... cut it in half. Well, Hadjar had really gotten stronger.
The lull in the fight didn’t last long. The wall began to tremble and turned into a scorpion stinger, which tried to strike Hadjar directly in the chest. Its speed was so great that it turned into a brown lightning bolt. If not for the ‘Rustle in the Treetops’ stance, an extra hole would’ve appeared in Hadjar’s body.
A dragon-sword formed in the air, blocking the stinger.
It hit the stinger, but couldn’t slow it down, and instead just deflected it to the side, changing the stinger’s trajectory so it struck the same dune from before. The stinger drilled a hole three feet in diameter through the dune without any difficulty and kept going for another two hundred feet.
“Retreat!” Karissa cried.
She didn’t have to tell him twice. Turning into the shadow of the Seven Ravens, he hurried back, launching blue crescents at the spirit to delay it as he did so. The spirit simply ignored all his attacks. They dug into its ‘clothes’ but didn’t harm its sand flesh. Hadjar’s strikes were able to leave small cuts on the strange spirit’s clothes, but then they would simply disappear inside the sand body.
Karissa, uttering something in a language unknown to Hadjar, swung her hands over her flying book several times. The pair of shadows that wore fiery robes flew out of its pages. Flying over the sand, they left behind strips of glass due to how hot they were. They began to circle around the spirit, which obviously didn’t like this new development. Sand sabers appeared in the creature’s hands, which it used to carefully fight off the figures. Karissa grew paler with every blow that nearly struck her shadows. At some point, her nose started bleeding.
“Tilis, ice cage!” Ramukhan shouted.
He plunged his staff into the sand and began to chant something. Tilis moved her own staff through the air. The stone at the top of the magical weapon shone with energy. She used the same spell she’d employed when creating talismans. A streak of energy followed her every movement. Gradually, these streaks merged into certain hieroglyphs, which, in turn, formed a long series of inscriptions in the air. Suddenly, Tilis cried out loudly, and Hadjar felt a wave of energy emanating from her. It felt wrong and alien to him.
The hieroglyphs flashed, a white cloud appeared over the spirit’s head, and a huge cage made of white, dense ice materialized out of the cloud, falling on the creature. Once locked up, however, the creature was safe from Karissa’s spell. The fiery shadows recoiled from the ice cage and began to circle around it.
“Agnis’ Storm!” Ramukhan shouted in the desert language.
A yellow lightning bolt surged out from the top of his staff and struck the sky. It arced as it did so, branching out and becoming multiple smaller bolts, then fell upon the spirit. Hadjar felt like he could hear the creature scream as the yellow lightning bolts pierced it. They fused the sand, leaving behind glass scars on the spirit’s body.
“Dispel your cage, Tilis!” Karissa cried out. “I can’t use my Flame Shadows!”
“We can handle this thing without-”
However, Tilis was wrong. She and Ramukhan couldn’t deal with the spirit. The giant, throwing its head back, cried out, and the noise seemed to linger. The sand began to swell like the waves of the sea, and then a huge, wide pillar struck the sky. It became a tornado, crushing the ice cage. Tilis screamed and fell to her knees. Blood trickled down her lips. Ramukhan managed to stop his spell-Technique, and the sand tornado didn’t hurt him.
“It disappeared!” Einen cried out, holding his hand over his shadow.
Hadjar peered into the sand tornado, still whirling where the creature had once stood.
“Damn it all...”
Blurring into the shadow of the Seven Ravens once again, Hadjar managed to use his sword to block multiple sand sabers at the last second. The force of the impact was so immense that waves of sand surged out in all directions. Tilis sat behind Hadjar, cowering. She’d managed to feel the spirit’s approach as it formed right in the air, but there hadn’t been enough time for her to erect any defenses.
“Why-”
“Shut up!” Hadjar roared.
Not because he was angry at her, but simply because contending with the creature required his maximum concentration. The spirit loomed over him, bringing its sabers down with all its might. Hadjar peered into the space beneath the hood. There was no face there, but he did see something flickering inside. Hadjar guessed that this flicker was the spirit’s weak spot.
With a loud, inhuman growl, Hadjar maneuvered his body around and rammed the creature in the chest with his shoulder. He put his energy and his knowledge of the Sword Spirit into it. The attack looked as if a long, sharp blade had been fired out from Hadjar’s shoulder. It broke through the screaming spirit’s defenses and threw it a couple of yards back.
Grabbing Tilis by the hand, Hadjar dashed away. A moment later, a huge sand tornado appeared again, right where the witch had been sitting. Even a Heaven Soldier would’ve been killed by it. Stopping next to Einen, Hadjar lowered Tilis to the sand. Karissa and Ramukhan quickly got to them. Now all five of them stood nearby, shielding Glen, who was writhing in the sand.
“Great Turtle!” Hadjar shouted. “We’re only getting in each other’s way!”
“We must work together,” Einen nodded, “or we’ll die.”
Suddenly, the spirit’s arm began to grow. Despite standing thirty yards away, it was nevertheless able to bring down a hail of blows on them. It was so unexpected that almost no one managed to react to it. Apart from Einen. He twirled his staff-spear over his head.
“Stone Ape!” He cried out.
Shadows shot out from beneath the islanders’ feet. They touched his staff and scattered in a black mist, which immediately formed two ape paws that blocked the sabers.
“I can’t... hold it... for long,” Einen said through gritted teeth.
“Listen to me!” Hadjar growled. He used his General’s tone, so even Ramukhan obeyed. “Fire and lightning bolts can harm this creature, but my sword can’t. That’s why-”
As Hadjar was about to voice his plan, the spirit suddenly stopped its attacks. It froze, and then touched the neighboring dune.
“High Heavens,” Hadjar breathed.
There were two sand creatures in front of them now.
Chapter 384
Before both spirits managed to attack, Hadjar swung his blade. He imagined the black sword within his soul merging with the real one. Wisps of black fog began to emanate from Mountain Wind. Using a quarter of his energy, Hadjar imagined two autumn leaves landing on the chest of one of the sandy creatures wrapped in blue silk.
“Falling Leaf!”
Hadjar’s attacks were so fast that his hand and sword seemed to blur. Two ghostly, blue-black dragons surged out of his blade. A blade shone inside each of them — a copy of Mountain Wind.
“Tilis!” Hadjar shouted.
The witch was already moving before he’d even spoken. After their previous failure, everyone had let go of their pride. In the face of death, they only cared about survival, even if it meant not being the center of the universe.
Tilis swung her staff through the air, depicting a small, bright pattern. She shouted something in an unknown language and a blizzard flew out of the hieroglyph. Not like the one Olgerd had used, but more... cruel and cold. It enveloped the two dragon-swords, covering them in ice armor.
Before the blizzard solidified into the ice armor, Karissa and Ramukhan joined Tilis. The witch called forth her fire shadows once again. Only this time, there were six of them, and, instead of robes, they wore light leather armor. The shadows now looked like blurry human silhouettes.
Ramukhan, pointing his staff toward the sky, fell into a trance. His eyes rolled back and sparks shot out from the whites of his eyes. He summoned the ‘Agnis’ Storm’ once more. A normal cloud was turned into a thundercloud, and the lightning bolts that it let loose entwined into a huge spear.
“Ape’s Dance!”
Hadjar had never seen Einen use this Technique before. His ranged attack was normally the ‘Boulder Storm’, so what happened next was very surprising for Hadjar. A shadow slipped out from underneath the islander’s feet. It grew and then condensed, looking like the outline of an ape. In its paws, it held a copy of the islander’s staff.
Einen’s Technique moved with frightening speed. It managed to catch up to Ramukhan’s Technique. The shadow stopped right under the lightning b
olt and... Caught it, attaching it to the staff and creating the tip of a spear. Einen turned pale, and Ramukhan’s nose began to bleed.
“Work together!” Hadjar snapped.
He twisted his wrist, and the dragons, opening their maws, charged in. They glared at one of the spirits. The ice armor slid into their fangs, and they fired ghostly blades from their gullets. The spirit screamed, making the sound of sand escaping a broken hourglass. At that moment, Einen’s ape came up. It jumped onto the dragons and drove the spear of lightning into the creature’s head.
With a roar, the shadow struck with all its might, splitting the spirit’s ‘skull’ in half. The melted sand, now enveloped in glass, tried to merge back together, but couldn’t. Karissa’s flame warriors flew in through the gap in the spirit’s defenses that had been left behind by the attack. They fused with the spirit. It screamed, trying to tear its silk clothes and sandy body to pieces. But instead, it only managed to remove some pieces of glass, and Karissa’s spell was already creeping close to its stone of consciousness. The flame warriors rained powerful blows down on the spirit, spreading a fiery echo across the sands. The sandy armor around the spirit’s heart melted, turning into glass.
“Now,” Hadjar whispered and, breaking the connection with his Technique, blurred into the shadow of the Seven Ravens. Finding himself above the luminous stone, he struck.
“Spring Wind!”
The attack turned into a steel beam that pierced through the glass barrier. It burrowed into the ground, leaving behind a hole several yards deep. An instant later, the spirit crumpled.
Catching the small stone that fell out of the sand on the fly, Hadjar pushed off the ground and, once again using the Seven Ravens Technique, retreated. He did so just in time. The second spirit, roaring furiously, launched a powerful attack with its sand sabers. It split the dune in half, despite standing several yards away.
Damn it. If Hadjar hadn’t avoided that strike, he wouldn’t have returned to Underworld City, but gone to his forefathers’ house instead.
Pocketing the stone, which was warm and emitting a raging energy, Hadjar looked at the rest of the squad. Karissa looked like she was on her last legs. She’d used up most of her power and was now staying upright only due to leaning on Einen’s shoulder. The islander, wiping away his sweat, was breathing heavily and leaning on his staff. Glen was wheezing slightly, still coughing up blood.
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