Chapter 31

Adrian twisted in the air while falling. Casting his Buff of Growth while doing so. Just in case it was needed.

Searching for the others.

Relief flooded through him as he saw Jules. She had bounced off the wall caught by one of his wind gusts at an awkward angle. Murphy was alive, plus the two he had carried. In fact, from the numbers falling it looked like the majority of the elites had made it. Adrian was spinning to assess the situation and saw the tail end of the earth wall as it swept the top of the hole above them. High above him, the wall caught someone. Adrian winced.

Was the mage going to follow them?

He rotated further. His eyes pierced the distance to the ground below him. Five shells were waiting and while not as large a shell as the mage above him, they were almost as powerful. Five class three monsters!

How could they fight that sort of power? He glanced at Jules and knew that she was going to be critical. Last time, the fall had taken over twenty seconds. “Five class threes, one guard and four mages focused on fire, fire, earth and dark,” he spat out based purely on visual observation. They would have additional powers, but hopefully not nature. He would have to check once he was down.

The seconds were ticking by and Adrian was falling straight at a fire one. With a slight thought, the spear redirected everyone near him away from the danger. The fire mage would almost certainly blanket the surrounding area with an inferno before the tiny enemies started landing. No one wanted to be burnt alive if they could avoid it.

While everyone else was pushed away, Adrian kept himself on the collision course. He knew that the spear could have moved him away just as easily as it had the others, but they needed to fight these monsters and there was no time like the present to hurt them.

The zxeatra was not stupid. Flames exploded before anyone touched the ground. They began landing in a half sphere that stretched out over thirty metres. His ring shielded him and he plunged through the orange flame untouched in what he instinctively recognised as an expert-level spell. Heat intense enough that it should have left nothing but scraps of metal when it went over a normal person did not touch his skin.

Adrian’s spear pointed down, and he slammed into the appendage, right near the top. The weapon ripping through it like a knife through butter. The limb was the size of a medium-thickness tree. Adrian’s arms would only just have encircled it and it was probably as hard as wood but that did not help it.

The force of the collision was immense. Adrian’s extra strength, size and air power all supported him and prevented the weapon jolting loose. The spear ripped into the limb right at the top, six metres above the shell. Adrian was almost jerked to a halt but the momentum of his fall was too much and courtesy of the spear it was like a giant hand was pressing down on him as it flexed its air power.

The skin split and he plunged downwards, opening a gash that was wide enough for Adrian to put his head into. He kept sliding bleeding speed away.

Triple blade.

His feet touched the top of the shell and he yanked the spear free. Adrian suspected the pain of his attack had paralysed it briefly.

Triple blade.

Step

Triple blade.

Step

Triple blade.

Adrian circled the limb, launching the attacks carving into the flesh of the arms. The shell launched itself away and Adrian was standing on air before gravity claimed him once more. He didn’t care. While he carried the spear, there was no reason to fear falling.

The damage was already done. He had stepped around the trunk, delivering full-powered triple blades at point blank range. If it was a tree, then a three-inch ring had been cut in it, carving a third of the way through the trunk from all angles and that was beside the spilt his landing had delivered.

Adrian had seen it before when it first attempted to use its arm. It would lose it.

He landed lightly on the ground, smiling grimly. The mage tried to hit someone only to have its limb tear further and be reduced to a useless dragging tail.

He lacked the power to fight these directly, but with the element of surprise, he could damage them. Unfortunately, his chest was heaving. Multiple steps carrying two people even in battle wraith form were enough to deplete him. Adrenaline had taken him this far, but he needed to recover.

Looking around, Adrian oriented himself till he was staring straight at the tunnel. The rest of the elite teams were acting exactly how they had been trained. See enemy, kill enemy.

Adrian knew that was not their purpose.

He set off sprinting at the gaping tunnel that led to their real objective.

The elites might not win their battle, but they only had to buy time for Jules. Thankfully, the three shells he had identified did not have nature magic. Once she infected them, they would be doomed.

The real question was if there was anything else they needed to fight.

He ran, feeling the lack of steps, and ignored the fire mage zxeatra. Flames washed over him and once more without his fire-resistant ring he would be dead. His sensing domain watched for physical threats. The next step was permanently queued and ready to be triggered if there was even a flicker of unexpected movement.

Adrian dropped into stealth as he got close to the tunnel. Magic was blazing around and even though these class three monsters could normally sense him with all that ambient magic in the air they were blind. Adrian stepped into the tunnel to examine the next challenge.

It was not a zxeatra like he was expecting, but weird plants or maybe animals.

Whisperer Anemone (Class three)

This is a plant and animal hybrid that uses immense Mind power to trap and enslave prey. It will control strong fauna in its vicinity to protect itself.

Adrian looked at it and then up at the sky.

Is there a god?

There was, of course, no answer from the interface. It was locked away unable to communicate, but he knew how Jaracol thought. This later layer of defence would stump most opponents. If something had got this far, then they had got past the physically strong and almost magically immune zxeatra italraca. Therefore, physically you would have to be powerful, so rather than throwing the same challenge why wouldn’t you throw something out of left field. He could just imagine impressive battle heroes getting past the zxeatra and then coming into this corridor and this thing would have overwhelmed their mental defences and taken control of their minds.

Even with his ridiculous Mind levels, Adrian felt a desire to run away and leave this gentle, amazing, significant, friendly creature alone. This early in an event, there would not be that many creatures with his near immunity to Mind magic. The attacker’s victory should have been snatched from their grasping fingers in moments, and if Adrian had not made it this far, it would have worked.

Identification finished processing the rest of the information. They were not physically dangerous and were susceptible to flames. There was a physical barrier and a magic barrier protecting the whisperer anemone.

Adrian could bust those barriers in time… but he studied it further. It was formed through two different enchantments and they were not perfectly aligned. Above his head, just right of centre there was a misalignment.

Idiots.

Step, step.

He landed and held his hand high up, tracing the unyielding curve of the physical barrier. At head height, the magic and physical barriers aligned, but where his hand was, there was a gap. Only centimetres separated the two shields, but that was enough. His hand was through the magic barrier.

Flame sprout burst from him. Spears of energy crashed into the lines of plants. Power assaulted his mind, a massive presence that told him to turn back, obey and stand guard as the collection of plants tried futility to protect themselves. His incredible Mind strength held out against the assault.

Barely. He could feel the assault wearing down on his defences.

Flaming spears kept falling even as he reconsider his approach. Maybe they were saving Earth, maybe they would stop the world destroyer if he just let them be? Then the pressure against his mind lessened as the plants started dying. The force of the projections weakened as he felt the consciousness attached to the attacks fail one after the other.

Their Mind powers had been overwhelming. Whatever was coming out of the portal had put these anemones here as a guard. They were the world destroyer’s creatures and needed to die. Adrian extended the range of Flame Sprouts. More enemies blinked out of existence and Adrian opened his eyes.

Three ranks of the creatures were torn apart by the spears of flames and were now burning vigorously.

A lot of his mana was gone, and he hurriedly targeted the next line, sending single spear slamming into the centre of each of the groups. They all blazed and burnt. Adrian checked. He still had fifty mana, so he sent four more spears, targeting the four in the back which looked the least damaged.

The world destroyer would know its psychic guardian was dead. Adrian was sure it would send something else, and with his mana depleted he did not want to meet it.

Step, step.

There was a roar coming from down the tunnel.

Step.

A wave of energy was following him. He sped up.

Step.

The residual touches on his mind from the anemones blanked out. All seventeen surviving minds were silenced at the same time.

Step.

He was at the mouth of the tunnel. If he ran forward, he would be easy prey, but if he went along the wall, he might be able to hide in some shadows.

Step, step, Ambusher’s Fade.

He was on the wall looking back, held upright by Fade or else he would have been on his hands and knees, heaving helplessly. Adrian swallowed a mana potion while focusing back at the tunnel mouth.

What was going to come?

A dark cloud swept out of the tunnel propelled like something was behind it. It took Adrian a moment to comprehend what he was seeing. A dark magic similar to his missiles but denser and more concentrated than Adrian had imagined possible. He saw it catch one of the elites that he didn’t know. He was encompassed by the magic attack which had blasted a full fifty metres out from the tunnel, his magic shield blazed futility into action and then vanish in a crack of white light. A moment later, the force behind the dark cloud vanished and dissipated almost instantly. In its wake, it left just dried husks. The poor man who had been caught by surprise was no more than a vaguely human shape holding a decayed piece of wood.

Fuck.

Adrian assessed the rest of the cave.

The fire shell he had crippled was dead and the other four were moving erratically, which told him that Jules had done her bit for the fight and the end was only a couple of minutes away. Two of the shells were cracked as well, but the last two were still whole. Not that it mattered. He doubted any would be burnt down and killed before the poison finished what it had started.

Another wave of dark magic came and went even further into the cave. It wrapped around the shell of the zxeatra guard that had just retreated from the annoying gnats that had been pestering it.

The entire bulk of the creature was swallowed by the cloud of blackness. The magic receded, leaving a crumpled mess that barely resembled the zxeatra that had been there moments before.

“Shit.”

There was no one to hear him.

A class three creature had been snuffed out. Alive one moment with a few scratches on the shell and then the next, dead. Two seconds in the cloud is all it had taken. A long time ago, when accessing the Bird’s memories, there had been giants everything ran from. He had not understood exactly what the creature had meant by that concept of giants. Then he had seen the wyrm, and its physical power, and that had been eye opening. Adrian could imagine worshipping like that.

His eyes dropped on the decaying shell. The dead zxeatra had not even been the target of the spell. Just collateral damage. The world destroyer was on a different level.

There was another roar from the tunnel and more flames exploded out, stretching across the cave and hitting the far wall to leaving a glowing spot. Closer to him, Adrian could see the stone of the tunnel itself dripping, it had been heated to the point of liquefaction. Near the flames but not in them, another shell died, a victim of Jules’s blood. He could see the red of Jules’s blood magic fading in the dead monster.

“Everyone not engaged in managing the zxeatra, please make your way to me,” Bec’s voice rang through the communication necklace. Adrian’s updated and, of course, he would have to cross the tunnel outlet to reach her.

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