Colour returned to his face in less than a minute and he suddenly felt very warm, though his injuries hadn’t healed in any way and the pain hadn’t lessened. These blood breeding pellets are amazing.
A warm gust of wind caused the acrid smoke to swirl and churn, which created a momentary shift in the smoky veil that blotted out the backdrop. It was during that instant that Nolan’s dizzy gaze snapped to attention and he was abruptly seized by a strong pang of fear. With the smoke cleared, he didn’t have to rely on his pitifully weakened spiritual sense to notice the tattered silhouette that had materialized before him like the ghost of a ravaged soldier.
Why him?
The man’s crimson-on-black robes were shorn and peppered in soot, the stumped remains of his left arm now dripping blood like a broken sprinkler where a tight seal of inner essence had previously contained the wound. Much of his long blond hair had been burned away, the skin of his face red as if it had been overly steamed, though at the same time pale like the underside of a gloomy cloud.
His once handsome smile now pink from swelling, the lead disciple held his bone-white sword in a weak grip as he gave Nolan a death stare. “If you tell me how you brought about that explosion, I might let you live.”
“Might, or will?”
The young man let out a tired laugh. “Read the situation, boy. It’s your choice whether to tell me or not.”
Another breeze rolled past, bringing with it the sound of distant flowers swaying in the night.
“There’re a few big barrels in my spatial bag.” Nolan panted as he fought to quell his cries. “They’re explosive treasures that I got my hands on a while back.”
“Oh? And how do these ‘explosive treasures’ work?”
“Each one has a snapfire bean inside. Just activate the bean with a bit of inner essence and then they’ll explode after ten seconds.”
“I suppose that was your carriage then. You left a few of those barrels inside right after I arrived and then sprang the trap on us once you were cornered.” His eyes narrowed and he took three steps forward, staring down at Nolan as he slowly lifted his blade and touched its tip to Nolan’s neck, just beneath his chin.
“As if you’d let me live.”
“Snapfire beans create a tiny spark that flares for an instant. If what you say is true, then that flaming branch instigated the explosion, also in an instant. If direct contact with even small flames can activate your so-called treasures, then I wonder why you would tell me to wait ten seconds after triggering the bean when they only take three seconds to combust.”
Nolan bit down on his lip in an effort not to cry out. Next, he spoke in English. “Can’t blame a guy for trying to get a ‘from the grave’ in, hah…”
Staring up into those cold blue eyes, he was reminded of his first day on Venara, back when he’d been chased by several giant foxes right before he’d met Nyla and Quin. If the latter hadn’t saved him, then he’d have gone down trying to stick a fox in the eye with a jagged branch. He gulped audibly. Since when was he the type of guy to just sit there and die quietly?
Nolan literally stared death in the face as he prepared to take the essence fusion dagger out of his spatial bag, fully aware that he’d likely suffer a slit throat or a fatal impalement before he could equip it.
The young man’s eye flashed dangerously. “That language, I’ve heard it before. You, where are you from?”
Nolan made a bid for his dagger, but the disciple slapped his arm aside and then kicked him to the ground. A bare, scorched foot pressed down on his chest as the grievously wounded young man kept him pinned in place with an interrogative air. Despite being in terrible shape, he was still someone at the first level of the Integration stage whose body and life force were unimaginably tough. He marvelled at how the young man had survived such a tremendous blast at point-blank range and could still exert such force upon him.
Just as Nolan was raking his mind for a way out of this mess, a black shadow plunged into the disciple’s exposed chest with a squishy thud, its barbed tip protruding out beside his right shoulder blade as fresh streams of blood began trickling down his front and back. Almost invisible in the current environment, the ebony shaft glowed with a concentrated layer of golden inner essence.
Small black veins began to bulge along the disciple’s head and neck as he took a step back in alarm, but his eyes immediately went cold and he lunged for Nolan, who’d taken out his essence fusion weapon and put all of his remaining strength into a simple slash that deflected the disciple’s blade with a light rebound.
Another arrow hissed through the darkness, but this time the young man was ready. He leapt out of harm’s way, grinding his pearly teeth in anger. "Do you think some minor poison can harm me?” He avoided another arrow that exploded forth from the smoke, produced a small knife and then hurled it toward Nolan.
A blurry shadow materialized in front of Nolan and the knife was smacked aside with a clang. “Stay put.” It was Nyla’s voice that entered his ear.
But I told her to…
He wanted to snap at her for staying in the area, but he wasn’t so narrow-minded as to be blind to the fact that he’d be dead if she’d listened to him. “Stop wasting time,” Nolan cried at her shadow. “That guy’s still got a decent amount of strength left. Don’t underestimate him!”
“I’m the one being underestimated here.”
She darted forward and was swallowed up by the smoke, a confident gleam in her dark eyes despite the solemn expression on her beautiful face. With her black hair and grey robes, she was almost impossible to see.
Nyla bided her time out in the fields as Nolan single-handedly confronted the remaining disciples. She figured that he planned on luring them to the carriage that he’d filled with his deadly black powder, and he’d done just that after a heart rattling series of near-death evasions that had the evernight bow shaking in her hands from unprecedented anxiety. Just as he couldn’t bear to watch her die, she also couldn’t stand the thought of losing him. That foolish boy, did he really think she was the type of person to abandon those close to her?
She’d recovered a large portion of inner essence in the short amount of time that Nolan had been engaging the murderous disciples, most of which had been killed in the explosion. Three still lived, though only one of them was still in walking condition.
Memories of the destruction of her hometown left a sickening feeling in her stomach. To her knowledge, she and Quin had been the only survivors of that nightmarish genocide, when she had left her family and friends to a dismal fate so that she could live on to be haunted by that night for the rest of her days.
I’m no longer that girl!
She took aim with the evernight bow and activated its essence fusion effect, the dark arrow flying off into the darkness like a raven in the night. She aimed for the disciple’s chest, for she wasn’t confident in marking his head despite his excessive injuries.
The poison won’t kill him, but it definitely won’t help his situation.
She followed Nolan’s movements with her spiritual sense as he slashed at the disciple’s pale blade from where he sat. She took aim and loosed a second arrow, not intending to waste the opportunity that her friend was trying to create.
Despite being distracted, the disciple avoided her arrow and jumped backward on unsteady legs. "Do you think some minor poison could harm me?”
Nyla fired off another shot and then stowed the evernight bow away in her spatial bag, withdrawing another weapon and then darting forward like a hungry predator that had just discovered some hapless prey. She’d pried the dazzling longsword from a dead man’s hand a few minutes back, reluctant to leave behind such a spectacular sword after catching a glimpse of it at the bottom of a cabin-sized hole in the ground. Both of its edges were remarkably sharp, the body and the hilt made of a minty green, jade-like mineral.
Circulating her inner essence in a fluid and flawless manner, her speed reached its m
aximum as she activated the movement skill that Uncle Grey had taught her. He’d refused to give her its name on account of its ‘disgracefully poor quality,’ though he’d promised to teach her a ‘decent’ movement skill sometime in the future, one with a name worth knowing.
Despite the apparent low quality of the skill, she felt as if she’d grown wings as she soared through the swaying wildflowers on light legs. She appeared in front of Nolan after a few short seconds, just in time to block a knife that the disciple had thrown through the shroud of smoke in an attempt to catch him off-guard, and also to divert her attention so that he could open up some distance between them.
A pang of pity hit Nyla’s gut as she saw the state that Nolan was in. She wanted to apologize that she’d left him to deal with such a bleak situation on his own, but if she’d interfered before the explosion then it might have cost them both their lives. “Stay put.”
“Stop wasting time,” Nolan cried. “That guy’s still got a decent amount of strength left. Don’t underestimate him!”
“I’m the one being underestimated here.”
Nyla plunged into the darkness so quickly that she left a trail of swirling smoke in her wake. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see more than a pace or two in front of her, for her spiritual sense made her aware of everything within a radius of nearly half a league. In order to increase the clarity of her mental visualizations, she retracted the scope of her awareness to just a few hundred steps in all directions so that she was fully conscious of the retreating disciple’s every movement.
He’s more disoriented than Nolan. She pulled a leather sack from her spatial bag and immediately activated the snapfire bean inside, before she did a three second count and tossed it toward the place where the fleeing disciple was about to land. The bag exploded with a distinct crack, a mockery to the previous blast. The light echo of danger was enough to startle the injured disciple, who abruptly dove to the side as if he’d mistaken the small detonation as a precursor to a larger blast like the one from before.
She closed in on him in that moment of bewilderment and slashed at his neck with the sword she’d recently claimed. Her strike wasn’t meant to kill, but rather to judge his current strength based on the weight behind his expected deflection. Worry subdued the awe that she felt as their blades met, for even in a perilously wounded and mind-rattled state, the young man still displayed a raw strength that was able to push her back a dozen paces.
Her enemy had the appearance of a damned soul that had crawled out of some hellish inferno, his clothes tattered, his body mutilated and burned in the same manner as the skin of his scalp and the remainder of his singed hair.
He took the initiative and lashed out at her like a crazed beast, his sword descending with a deathly whisper as his swollen mouth formed into a mad smile. She jumped back just in time to avoid the strike, and his blade met another leather sack that she’d lightly tossed at his face. She hadn’t activated the snapfire bean, so as soon as the bag was sliced in half, the exposed powder covered the enraged disciple.
Her jade-green sword punched through the resulting cloud of powder and nicked his shoulder as he barely twisted out of the way. Instead of following up on her attack, she jumped backwards in a feigned retreat and did her best to rid her mind of any distractions.
Her eyes lit up. He’d taken the bait and chased after her with an angry yell.
She found it interesting how clear she could focus when her life was on the line, her mind in tune with the flow of the Origin Energy within the immediate vicinity. Calling upon her sixth sense in a way that she’d only ever experimented with, she strained her mind to give form and substance to the spiritual energy that filled her soul fragment.
For a brief moment, Nyla immersed herself in every detail of the small patch of earth where the disciple’s foot was about to land. With precise timing, she gave life to the most complicated manifestation of spiritual energy that she was currently capable of producing, an extremely simple line of iridescent energy no longer than a hand. It could only maintain its form for a split second, but that was more than enough time for her to make use of it.
The young man’s charred foot caught on the multi-coloured stick of energy exactly as she’d planned, and he tripped forward with a look of worry and delayed astonishment.
The off-balance was as good of an opportunity to attack as Nyla could hope for. She didn’t hold back as she launched herself forward in a desperate, all-out attack, her black hair melding with the night as it trailed behind her on the whims of the wind.
Her first slash opened a lengthy laceration down the young man’s exposed abdomen, a large amount of blood spewing forth from the wound as her second attack was blocked by an unsteady swipe of his bone-like blade.
She stepped past a sloppy counterattack that nearly pierced her right kneecap, avoiding it by a hairsbreadth. Imitating his strike with brutal accuracy, she tore her blade free from his kneecap and then retreated backwards about a dozen paces.
As if impervious to the pain, the disciple lunged forward with his good leg and stabbed at her mouth. In the face of such impressive tenacity, time seemed to stand still for Nyla and she experienced a peculiar moment of clarity. She studied the young man in the brief second that he was airborne and realized his intentions.
Another small amount of spiritual energy manifested itself in the shape of a nail-sized ball that looked like a tiny bubble, which she made appear beside her opponent’s wrist just as he began extending his arm for the deadly stab. Matching the speed of his fist, she willed the tiny bubble of spiritual energy to give his hand a sudden leftward nudge with impeccable timing, which offset the trajectory by a slight degree. Just that much was enough.
The young man’s blade grazed her cheek ever-so-slightly, and bisected a few strands of her windblown hair. At the same time, she plunged her weapon into his heart, quick and decisive. She pulled it free of his chest and retreated immediately, a large spurt of blood staining the man’s torso as he stared down at his fresh wound. After watching him stumble like an oblivious drunk for a handful of seconds, she dashed back to his side and then beheaded him with a simple slash that contained all her strength.
The young man fell to her feet, defeated at last, his ghastly head rolling within arm’s reach of his body. The corpse told a tale of dread, but she paid no attention to it. She only had eyes for the bone-white blade, and the scarlet spatial bag that was visible through the tattered remains of soot-covered clothing. Wasting no time, she snatched up his belongings and then rushed over to the other life signals that lingered within the camp, all of them weak.
Two disciples had been rendered unconscious by the frightening blast that Nolan’s powder had created. All of the others were scattered throughout the area in different states of mutilation. She only hesitated for a moment before she slit the throats of the surviving disciples, with a bitter sense of gratification. As soon as she finished, she hurried back to Nolan’s side to find him curled in on himself and clutching a radiant spirit stone. Small whimpers escaped his mouth as he took one shaky breath after another.
“Nolan,” she said softly. She brought him out of the thinning smokescreen and into the lightless fields, carefully setting him down and kneeling beside him with a worried frown.
He ducked his head and wiped at his tear-slicked face with a sluggish hand, refusing to look up at her. “All this damn smoke,” he grunted. “Can’t even open my eyes.”
He went to say something else, but Nyla placed her right index finger atop his lips and hushed him into silence. Was this really the time for embarrassment? She quickly set about wetting his wounds with a steady stream of water from the Divine Spirit Fountain.
After a few minutes of careful attention, Nolan looked up at her with a weak smile. “What a day, huh?”
She gently held a wad of wet cloth against his ribcage, the lower right side of which now sported a large, blackening bruise. “It’s just one of many,” she sighed. “I doubt th
is will be our last run-in with this lot.” As a strong wind began to pick up, a distant flash and a muffled peel of thunder drew her gaze to the lurking horizon. “We need to leave. There might be more of them in the area.”
“I’m not exactly trying to run a marathon right now.”
“How long before you can move?”
He glanced down at his injured leg and then took a deep breath. “Give me half an hour. At the pace we’ll be moving, if there are any more of them lingering out there then it won’t make a difference whether we leave now or in two hours. Either way, it’d only take them a few minutes catch up to us.”
She took out two spatial bags and placed them beside Nolan. “These belonged to the blond men.”
“Looks like I’m rubbing off on you.”
She gave him an odd stare, which caused a rare look of panic to spread across his exhausted face.
“No, I meant—ah, forget it,” he winced. “That expression didn’t translate right.”
Despite the morbid situation, an unexpected laugh escaped her rosy lips. Nolan was the type of person to stare death in the face with a calm expression, as he tried to come up with some method or other to overcome whatever situation he found himself in. He didn’t hesitate to confront the person who’d just single-handedly killed the man who had likely been the City Lord of Greenwall himself, not to mention a powerful lineup of inner court disciples from the Bloodhand Sect that would have cast a shadow of fear over even the most seasoned warriors. In such a situation, he didn’t so much as flinch, yet a simple miscommunication left him flustered in a way that she hadn’t seen in months.
He was truly a strange person.
She grabbed his left hand and carefully placed it atop the wet cloth on his chest. “Focus on recuperating.” Her heart warmed at the sight of appreciation that glimmered in his intelligent brown eyes.
“Nyla, wait.” He sat up with a wince, inhaling deeply as he fixed her with an intimate stare. “When I told you to leave earlier, I was being selfish. I’m sorry.”
The Grey Ghost: Book Two of the Archaic Ring Series Page 35