Once upon a time, when he’d been just a simple officer in Lidus’ Moon army, Hadjar had used to fantasize about what a battle between cultivators would look like. The reality of it wasn’t inspiring, but horrifying. He was afraid to even imagine what would’ve happened if such a battle had broken out in Lidus.
“When do you think it ended?” Einen handed the telescope back to Hadjar. He’d counted more than four hundred corpses. Four hundred dead cultivators!
“No more than half an hour ago.” Hadjar put the telescope back into his spatial ring.
“I agree.” The islander nodded. “If more time had passed, the remnants of the Techniques would’ve already disappeared into the World River.”
Everything that the friends were looking at was going to disappear soon. Energy shaped into Techniques couldn’t exist for too long on its own. The only exception, as far as Hadjar knew, was the invisible bridge leading from the Arva’Lon Tree to Greven’Dor.
“Where to next, my friend?” Einen asked.
Hadjar thought about it for a moment.
“We need to get closer. I can’t see any tracks from here,” he said reluctantly.
Einen knew that Hadjar was an experienced tracker, which is why he didn’t argue, even though neither of them felt like going down there. However, they had no other choice.
Hadjar drew Azrea’s attention with a sharp whistle and gestured for her to guard the horse. The tigress replied with a displeased snort and went back to licking her wounds. Hadjar had no idea why she didn’t speak when her intelligence was comparable to that of a human. He’d always suspected that she knew and understood more than he did, but chose to remain silent.
Hadjar and Einen went down the hill, crawling on all fours as silently as they could. Sometimes, they had to stay still and cover themselves with their Calls. Groups of disciples were constantly approaching the plain. After a couple of minutes observing the battlefield, they’d turn around and head in a different direction, wanting to catch up with the new holders of the key as soon as possible. They also didn’t want to run into other disciples and potentially have to fight them.
Hadjar and Einen didn’t have enough power to hide perfectly, but-
“Help…”
Hadjar froze. He was crawling over a corpse. It wasn’t pleasant, but after fighting in several wars, he had ceased to perceive corpses as human remains. He treated them as if they were nothing more than rocks or trees.
A young man of about seventeen looked at the sky with empty eye sockets. A hole with jagged edges gaped in his stomach. A sword wouldn’t have left that kind of wound behind. He’d probably been hit with a battle axe. Various larvae and bugs had already made their home in his entrails, which had spilled out. Despite that, he was still breathing. Just barely, but he was definitely breathing and clinging to life. He didn’t want to go to his forefathers without having attained power and glory first. In all honesty, the vast majority of cultivators only needed glory. They wanted legends and songs to be written about them and passed down for centuries, so that even after their deaths, they wouldn’t just disappear amongst the other cultivators of the past...
Hadjar turned to Einen, but the islander looked away. He was a pirate, not a soldier…
“What’s your mother’s name, warrior?” Hadjar whispered.
“Theseus,” the boy croaked through a mouthful of blood.
“Tell me about her.” Hadjar pulled his carving dagger from his boot.
Trying to make as few unnecessary movements as possible, he crawled over to the young man and lay down next to him. Together, they watched the sunrise. The eyes of a true cultivator could withstand the bright light of the dawn.
“She has... brown... hair.”
Hadjar said a prayer to Derger, asking him to accompany this warrior to the house of his forefathers, ensuring they would receive him with honor.
“She makes... delicious... pies... and… cakes. And she smells... smells…”
“What does she smell like, warrior?”
“Like... a spring... field.”
With a swift jerk of his hand, he cut the young man’s throat. He didn’t try to close his eyes. Only in songs did heroes do this to the dead. In reality, the corpse would become so rigid that it was impossible to move anything.
After wiping his dagger clean on the dead cultivator’s armor, Hadjar returned to Einen. They crept on in silence. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, Hadjar had to finish off four more unfortunate souls. All of them asked for help. They didn’t ask to be spared, they just begged to be put out of their misery, because, at best, they would’ve ended up crippled, and worse still, lost their ability to cultivate. All they asked for was a dignified death — a weapon in their hands and honor in their hearts, so they could look their forefathers in the eye with pride.
At times, Hadjar missed the simple life of a soldier, one devoid of schemes and plots. He missed having to only worry about his own life and the lives of those who stood next to him. But this didn’t happen very often.
After all, Hadjar hated war.
Chapter 701
W rapped in his black cloak, Hadjar sat on his haunches. He ran his hand over the seemingly lifeless earth. Where even a true cultivator wouldn’t be able to see anything but traces of other people’s Techniques, he saw a lot more.
A small footprint. It looked like it had been left behind by a girl, but it actually belonged to a man who was more than six feet tall and weighed about 330 pounds. This giant wielded the war axe that had killed over fifty warriors.
But why was his footprint so small? Despite his size, he seemed to be rather quick. Perhaps as quick as Hadjar himself. He’d used a lot of Techniques at the Heaven level, so he had to have an abnormally large reserve of energy in his Core. He’d heard of these monsters before. All of them belonged to the Eternal Mountain clan, famous for its forges and armor. Each of their Heaven Soldiers had a reserve of energy comparable to that of a Spirit Knight’s. And on the Spirit Knight level, they had about as much as a Lord. The secret behind their meditation Technique, which allowed them to expand their Cores’ capacity, was guarded zealously.
“It’s the ‘Quick Dream’ School,” Hadjar said.
“The Eternal Mountain clan?” Einen asked.
“Yeah.” Hadjar continued to stare at the footprints left behind on the battlefield. “There were nine of them, maybe eleven. Three of them are from the Eternal Mountain clan. The others are all slightly weaker.”
“Not servants, then. Allies, maybe?”
“Or mercenaries,” Hadjar suggested. They were more likely to be allies, but he wasn’t ruling anything out just yet. “They don’t work very well together.” He pointed a little farther away. “They almost hit each other with their Techniques there.”
“So, not mercenaries.”
“That’s bad. Mercenaries can be bought.”
Unless they were from the Dead Moon clan. But neither of them wanted to think about those particular mercenaries, fearing that the thought alone could summon the assassins. They could feel someone’s gaze on them at all times. Maybe it was just paranoia, or maybe Gurth and his men were lying in wait. Hadjar had already lived like that before, always expecting the next attempt on his life. But that had been in distant Lidus, and he hadn’t taken it seriously enough back then. Now such an attitude could end up costing him his life.
“What else do you see?”
“Two archers,” Hadjar continued. “Very skillful. Maybe hunters, but it’s more likely that they’re from the military.”
“The Military Academy… Then the Eternal Mountain clan was surely here.”
The Eternal Mountain clan supplied the army with their equipment, so the military stuck close to them. It wasn’t surprising that they’d been able to acquire the army’s support in this ‘expedition’.
“Several swordsmen. At least one of them uses a fighting style similar to Anise’s, so he might be trouble.”
“What else?”
“That’s all. I’m not the god of tracking, my bald friend. I can’t tell everything from just their footprints.”
“I’ve heard legends about old women who could read one’s past and future by the lines on their palms.”
“If you become an old woman, make sure to give it a go and tell me how that worked out for you,” Hadjar retorted.
Einen smiled.
“We need a plan.”
Hadjar grinned back.
“I have one.”
Einen raised an eyebrow.
***
“Your ‘plan’ sounds more like a suicide pact.”
“You already said that.”
“I’ll do it again to make sure it gets through to you: you’re mad, Hadjar.”
“Oh, if only I had a coin for each time I’ve heard that one...”
“Stop talking in your native language!” A spearhead was moved dangerously close to Hadjar’s throat. “One more word and you’ll have a new hole to match the one in your head!”
Another spear was suddenly near Einen’s Adam’s apple.
There were three, not two archers as Hadjar had guessed, in the squad that had managed to take the key from the cultivators who had originally found it. Arrows nocked and bowstrings pulled back, they were ready to shoot them if they so much as twitched. Two spearmen stood guard over Einen and Hadjar, who were on their knees.
Finding them hadn’t been difficult. Cultivators raised in the capital were never able to hide their tracks. They moved across the Wastelands like they were walking down a busy street in the center of a city. If he’d wanted to, Hadjar could’ve tracked every group that had left the plain.
“We’re just discussing our plan.” He shrugged.
“What plan?”
Simultaneously with the spear drawing closer, a wave of some odd, acidic stench struck Hadjar in the face. Whatever Technique the lanky spearman practiced, it clearly left its mark on him. He smelled like a killer.
“How to kill you and take the key.”
“What? You-”
A roar of laughter drowned out the rest of his sentence. A tall man came out of the tent the two friends were kneeling next to. He had a thick, black beard adorned with braids and bronzed, powerful arms bound with leather. His fists looked like sledgehammers, and the axe strapped to his back was even bigger than the weapon Sunshine Sankesh had wielded. Hadjar wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the Eternal Mountain clan were descendants of the northern tribes where Sankesh had spent his youth.
The man was over six feet tall and broad-shouldered. His legs were so wide and muscular that it was difficult for him to fit them into pants, so he wore a kilt made of steel and fabric. The armor, with its breastplate stripped of its sleeves, looked like a dress. But Hadjar knew better than to make fun of a giant who could pop his head like a ripe grape.
“Who are you?” He thundered.
His aura marked him as a mid-stage Spirit Knight. However, given the blue tattoos on his face — the trademark of the Eternal Mountain clan — it was likely that his power reserves were beyond that of a Lord at the initial stage. And if Hadjar wasn’t mistaken, he was also an heir of his clan, a true aristocrat.
Fighting him would earn you a one-way ticket to the afterlife.
“Hadjar Darkhan,” he introduced himself. “And this is my friend, Einen of the Islands.”
“Why is your friend silent? Unless I’ve gone mad, I distinctly recall hearing him talk a moment ago. What’s the matter, has he gone mute from fear?”
The warriors laughed and the giant laughed the loudest of all of them.
“The culture of his people is too complicated to explain. Not that you’d find it interesting, anyway.”
The giant shrugged.
“Then our conversation is over.” He turned back toward his tent. “Kill them.”
“Wait! Wait!” Hadjar shouted. “You don’t even know what we can offer!”
The giant paused midstep and arched his right eyebrow.
“I’m listening,” he said, a little interested.
“We know,” Hadjar began, smiling, “that you have the key to Decater’s tomb.”
The warriors glanced at each other. The lanky spearman turned to the giant.
“Galkhad, let me send them to-”
“And what do you have to offer, kid?” Galkhad interrupted.
Hadjar ignored the insult.
“You have the key, and we have,” he carefully pulled a papyrus scroll from his sleeve using just two fingers so as not to unnerve the archers, “the map… We should join forces!”
“We’re dead,” Einen mouthed.
Hadjar continued to smile, but in the depths of his eyes, an animalistic madness glittered.
Chapter 702
“N ice try, kiddo!” Galkhad grinned, revealing his pearly white teeth. “But the map hasn’t even been discovered yet. You aren’t worth my time. Kill-”
“Wait!” Hadjar interrupted him. “I know the original map hasn’t been found yet, but…” He drew his carving dagger and cut his palm before the spearman could react. “I swear by my Name that this is a real copy of the map that leads to Decater’s tomb.”
Eleven warriors watched the wound on Hadjar’s palm heal in a flash of golden light. A couple of long seconds passed, but the man didn’t turn into a pillar of raging fire.
“Well, you aren’t lying.” The smile disappeared from Galkhad’s face. “How did you get it?”
“When the map was delivered to our School,” Hadjar held up his medallion of ‘The Holy Sky’ School, “I was able to use a copy artifact on it.”
“A copy artifact-”
“Galkhad, do you actually believe this bastard?” the spearman holding the tip of his weapon to Hadjar’s throat protested. “He’s just a fully-fledged disciple! How could he have gained access to the map?”
“You’re right.” Galkhad nodded. “But he swore an oath and lived.”
While they bickered, Hadjar looked around. They were surrounded by Galkhad, two spearmen, three archers, and six swordsmen. Two people stood out due to their size and were easily identifiable as part of the Eternal Mountain clan. One of them held a battle axe, and the other a warhammer. It looked even bigger and bulkier than Dora’s.
Hadjar gazed at a tall swordswoman. Clad in armor that revealed more of her magnificent, slender body than it covered, she leaned on a heavy sword. Judging by how deep the blade had sunk into the ground, it had to weigh at least a ton. It was amazing how a fragile-looking girl like her could wield such a mighty weapon. Then again, if the medallion on her belt really belonged to her, it was no surprise. She was part of the Geran family.
“Then take the map and be done with it!” The spearman exclaimed.
Seeing the hesitation in Galkhad’s eyes, Hadjar moved to the next phase of his plan. He touched the scroll with his willpower, in a manner so subtle that even the most observant of cultivators would’ve missed it. It burst into a blaze of black energy, leaving only ash behind in his hand.
“What is the meaning of this, commoner?” Galkhad growled.
“If you kill us, you’ll lose the advantage, and the chance to be the first ones to find Decater’s tomb.”
“You little-”
“And what’s stopping us from simply killing your bald friend, kid?” Galkhad interrupted.
Einen and Hadjar exchanged a look. They hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Or even better,” Galkhad continued, “I’ll torture him in front of you until you agree to draw us another copy. And then I’ll kill you. How do you like that idea, peasant?”
“In all fairness, it’s a good idea.” Hadjar said. “However, it’s also flawed.”
“By the forge, I’ll kill you both if you don’t start talking! I don’t enjoy feeling like an idiot.”
“I doubt that that’s a new feeling for him,” Einen said in his mother tongue.
“What did baldy just say?” the spearman screamed.
“Nothing important,” Hadjar hastened to assure him. “He just reminded me that he was the one who did the copying. He encrypted the map. And I only know the encrypted version. So, you need both of us. Just like we need you. Fighting you for the key wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“It certainly wouldn’t,” Galkhad muttered. “Your friend is a Spirit Knight, at least, but you’re just a pathetic Heaven Soldier... By the hammer and steel, if you try to pull any tricks on us, I’ll send you to your forefathers!”
The spearman, who had eagerly been waiting for a chance to slice Hadjar’s head clean off his shoulders, looked at his leader in surprise.
“Galkhad-”
“Give them water, food, and a tent. In the evening, after meditation, we’ll discuss our plan.”
His orders given, he turned and went back to his tent.
“By the demons and gods,” the spearman swore. “Mark my words, bastard, I’ll be the one to kill you.”
Hadjar didn’t know what he’d done to annoy the man so much. Perhaps he disliked anyone who was more handsome than he was. Then again, he would need to hate a lot of people if that was the case...
“I don’t doubt it.” Hadjar nodded, getting to his feet and brushing himself off. “Just get in line first.”
“What did you just say, commoner?”
The spearman, who had already moved a few steps away, rushed back to Hadjar and grabbed him by the shirt. He’d stuck his spear in the ground beside him, wanting to demonstrate that he didn’t need a weapon to defeat a lowlife like this pathetic beggar. Hadjar had a Heaven level sword sheathed at his hip. He’d found it on the battlefield.
Galkhad’s entire group, save for the girl with the giant sword, who was standing by the fire, had already retreated to their tents.
“Leave him alone, Proximo.” She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.
By the High Heavens, she’s insanely strong!
Hadjar didn’t need the neural network to tell him that she was a mid-stage Spirit Knight. Given that her specialty were heavy swords, her body was much stronger than it looked.
Dragon Heart: Land of The Enemy. LitRPG Wuxia Series: Book 8 Page 27
