Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 174. Encircled.
“So amazing,” Laien uttered quietly during the brief pause in the battle and right afterward, he exchanged a glance with Yin and smiled at him. The usual Yin would have probably scolded him for acting in this way, but this time around, he saw Yin suppress a chuckle. It only made sense, though, as he could tell that Yin was no less excited than he was.
On their own, unless the situation was very favorable, they would need to expend a considerable amount of effort to kill one martial of the fifth rank. Yet, together and in the chaos of a battle, they could take down multiple experts in a matter of seconds without expending all that much of their energy. Even they, as the ones most familiar with their own abilities and with the wonders the Spiritual Bond brought them, hadn’t quite expected their prowess to rise to this degree under favorable circumstances. Thus, as two youngsters aiming for the peak of the cultivation world, how could they not be excited by this ecstatic experience?
“Where next?” Yin asked even though he didn’t need to. Somehow, he found it nice to still exchange words normally even though at this point in time, his connection to Laien was extremely clear. If at all possible he too would have liked to indulge in this feeling, but they weren’t exactly in the best position to sit down and take it easy.
“The middle, then the front?” Laien suggested while taking a good look at the layout of their enemies and allies. Taking into consideration that apparently they had made quite a big impact with their performance, given how the entire westernmost battlefield was silent and all, he thought that bringing some more chaos into the enemy lines would be a good idea. They would also be able to use the assistance of the White Sword unit once they moved closer to the front, so it should be fine.
Seeing as Yin wasn’t in disagreement, Laien started running first and had Yin follow him just a step or two behind. To his quiet satisfaction, this action of theirs alone caused the atmosphere of the entire battlefield to change from a shocked one into a fearful one. To a degree, he was aware that what contributed to this apprehensive atmosphere was the mixed attitude of their northern allies, but he wasn’t all that bothered by it. He was grateful to Casimir and Anna for helping them when they needed it, so he had no plans to become enemies with the Holy Union. Because of that, those northern experts would sooner or later recognize him and Yin as reliable allies, he was sure of it.
“Oh?” he raised his eyebrows a little once he both saw and sensed how nearly three dozen of their enemies began preparing to release their martial techniques. It looked like they had decided to switch their tactics after the melee attacks failed so miserably and in theory, they were right to do so. Yin was one thing, but a water-element practitioner like him generally wouldn’t be all that mobile.
Of course, however, he would have never opted to charge into the middle of enemy formation unless he knew that he would be safe from a concentrated barrage of attacks. It would have been dangerous had he been on his own, but he had been waiting for this moment. He had half-expected some martial techniques to be launched their way and because of that, he had requested of Yin to stay close instead of spearheading the attack. And, he was soon rewarded for his caution.
Once the multiple martial techniques of wind and fire elements were launched their way from all directions, everyone’s view of them was soon obstructed. The standard combination of waves of flames and multiple kinds of wind blades made their way towards the central point where the two of them were, many of them merging and increasing in strength along the way. In terms of pure destructive potential, this joint attack by over thirty elite experts was enough to heavily wound a martial master of the sixth rank if taken directly, so it could by no means be underestimated.
When the mass of wind and flames finally converged in the middle point, all of those who had taken part in launching the attack subconsciously held their breaths. The mass of Qi quickly reached the boiling and just a split-second later, exploded in a spectacular fashion. A visible shockwave moved past nearly two hundred meters of ground, bringing with itself a mass of smoke and dust. This, in turn, caused quite a few of those who had launched this attack to be pushed back and nearly thrown off their feet as they attempted to keep their balance.
This small aftereffect, however, didn’t matter to them nearly as much as the result of their combined assault. Did they do it? Were those two monsters dead? They couldn’t tell with their eyes, but now that the storm of Qi was quickly dispersing in the area, they began extending their auras. Even if they had failed to kill those two, they would be able to tell if they were at least wounded through the strength of their auras, so for the sake of this battle, they needed to confirm it as soon as possible.
Yet, at this exact moment, two things happened almost simultaneously, not even a full second separating one from the other.
“Attack!” the leader of the White Sword unit shouted. His yell brought those few of his companions who had become absent-minded back to their senses, but the very majority of them didn’t need to be reminded to act. With their enemies in complete disarray, how could they pass up on this perfect opportunity to draw some blood from them in payment for their reckless attacks? They assaulted their closest foes aggressively and in the mere first clash, they killed twelve of them and forced another two dozen to retreat in haste.
However, what truly caused any remaining semblance of order to collapse amongst Abdain’s men were two young figures rushing out of the smoke and straight into the heart of the battle. Undetected by the aura probing of their enemies, Laien and Yin attacked the men retreating from the White Sword unit and slaughtered seven of them with surprising ease. Yin even went ahead and chased three more men with his Lightning Steps before cutting them down from behind. As it seemed, no matter how strong your enemies were, once they routed cutting them down became worryingly easy.
“Forsaken Djinn spawns!”
“Devils…!
“How come they are perfectly fine?!”
As Abdain’s men were trying to regroup, they couldn’t get the matter of those two Devils out of their minds. Were those two who appeared like young boys only pretending to be human? They needed to be, as no human children could possibly be this unimaginably powerful! To have survived that massive joint attack without a scratch, what else but Devils from the scriptures could they be?
Similarly, the members of the White Sword unit were wondering about the same thing. How did Laien and Yin escape any wounds while still preserving the majority of their fighting strength? In the end, they couldn’t figure it out no matter how hard they wracked their brains, so most of them abandoned those thoughts and focused their whole attention on the ongoing battle.
Neither the allies nor enemies of Laien and Yin’s in the area could figure out what could have happened. Yet, the truth, as it often happened, was just as simple as it was unbelievable. In fact, had the members of the White Sword recalled the first clash between those two youngsters and Abdain, they would have been able to figure everything out. The thing was, the simple truth of what had happened went beyond any practitioner’s common sense, so none of them connected the dots.
“So far so good,” Laien mused contentedly. He had just entangled another small group of martial masters of third and fourth ranks with his ice, then forced them into a brief exchange. The same thing had already happened twice in the last ten seconds and just like before, Yin came in while their foes’ attention was focused on him. Given how the main goal of those people was still to escape and try to regain their footing, they were in no state to resist a combined assault from the two of them, so the four fell without putting up any considerable resistance.
“Do we keep pushing?” Yin asked silently. They had killed quite a few experts in the past moment, but the order was already returning to Abdain’s men. The frontline would soon form again, so if they kept going in recklessly, they would once again find themselves surrounded by enemies. Still, he was only asking this question in order not to get too complacent. This time around, as they couldn’t afford to waste too much time, he was in full support of taking a degree of risk in exchange for gaining a large advantage in the overall battle.
“Yeah,” Laien replied in his mind and laughed inwardly. Even if they were again assaulted with multiple martial techniques, they would be fine. Since it seemed like their enemies didn’t figure out what they had done, they could do the exact same thing if needed. Yin would grab him and at the last second and he would carry the two of them out of the epicenter of explosion with his Lightning Steps. Then, the two of them would lower themselves to the ground for a second while he set up a barrier of ice along the ground and on top of their backs. In this way, they would once again avoid the very majority of the explosion’s strength and launch an attack right afterward.
“Mm.” Yin’s smile trembled slightly as he was starting to think that he shouldn’t be having so much fun. “Let’s go,” he urged, having noticed a good entry point. If they wanted to keep sowing chaos in the enemy ranks, they needed to hurry up and get deeper in before the situation stabilized. Thus, quickly breaking through their lines without fighting too much was pivotal to their success.
A breath’s worth of time later, the White Sword captain noticed that Laien and Yin were pushing deeper and deeper into enemy lines without showing any signs of slowing down. It wasn’t apparent yet to an untrained eye, but he could tell that they weren’t planning to pull back from how they were keeping their clashes brief in order to not get entangled for longer than necessary. He spotted them not chasing after one or two easy kills, too, so he became quite certain of his own assertion… and to be fair, even with all the uncertainty he felt about the existence of two young beasts like Laien and Yin, he couldn’t help but feel thrilled by their methods.
Fighting a battle between multiple experts was always a stern and bloody business, but having someone capable and willing to spearhead the attack and take the risk upon himself made those battles far easier. As long as there was someone who disrupted the unison of enemy formations and kept getting in their way, the entire balance in the battlefield would flip over on its head. Instead of the gruesome experience of slowly picking each other off and exhausting the energy of the opposing party to hopefully win at a painful cost of lives, those with the support of a highly-skilled expert would be able to move freely and attack aggressively without worrying about enemy counterattacks.
On paper, this seemed like a normal and obvious thing, but to warriors as experienced as those of the White Sword unit, the difference it made on the field of battle was enormous. And, as Laien and Yin got deeper into the enemy lines and started repeating the process of slaughtering everyone close to them group by group, it no longer was only the White Sword captain who felt the thrill of excitement. As the members of the White Sword kept pushing, noticing opportunities to attack and then, killing those tough foes batch after batch, their excitement grew exponentially.
With those two small beasts as the lead, they felt how free their movements and maneuvers had been allowed to become. The great pressure those elites had been putting on them at the beginning of this clash was gone, too. They had been training their whole lives and as members of the elite hundred-man-strong White Sword unit, they had been learning how to cooperate on exactly this kind of a medium-sized battlefield. Now, they were able to put to all those tactics, all those years spent honing their abilities, to their fullest use! And the more enemies they cut down, the hotter their blood boiled! This experience, they felt as if they were being led in this battle by a true Great-General-level figure of their Kingdom!
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On the field of battle, it rarely was the words which truly stirred the hears of soldiers. This time, the daring and lethally effective actions of Laien and Yin’s resonated with the hearts of the White Sword elites and caused the atmosphere of the battle to change yet again. The hundred members of the White Sword attacked with great ferocity, many of them roaring and yelling loudly as they did so. Moreover, they no longer treated this clash as a battle between them and Abdain’s subordinates with an addition of two random factors. With their captain taking the lead, they didn’t notice when, but they started treating Laien and Yin as central figures of their battlefield and acted around them.
One would think that this difference was a small one, but in reality, Laien and Yin had suddenly found themselves under far less pressure. Counterintuitively, perhaps, it by no means meant that the White Sword unit ended up being the one bearing the brunt of the pressure instead of them. Since seemingly out of the blue, Laien and Yin had been presented with many easy opportunities to attack, they naturally made good use of them and went on a rampage. As a result, the ranks of Abdain’s men once again showed signs of crumbling, thus allowing the White Sword to keep pushing forward.
Amazingly enough, unlike the situation on the easternmost battlefield where Reian and Casimir took the central roles and used Casimir’s Royal Guard as support, the slaughter here turned out to be far more intense. Not only was Laien and Yin’s combined might no less influential than Reian’s presence, but the White Sword unit had also revealed all of its bloodthirst and unleashed all of their combat potential under Laien and Yin’s lead. Thus, even though they had gained their advantage later than the eastern battlefield, they were on the course to obliterate their respective enemies at roughly the same time.
“Just how?” Anna muttered in a daze while the eastern and western parts of the central battlefield were being dominated by their allies. “Do they have no fear?”’ she asked aloud, but she didn’t expect to hear an answer. It was somewhat annoying for her to see Arslan’s satisfied smile, but the stunned expressions on the faces of her Royal Guards comforted her to a degree. “How do they fight like that?” she asked again, her gaze glued to the western part of the battlefield. How did those two youths who had never properly interacted with the White Sword unit or at the matter, with any experts from the Holy Union, manage to rouse the spirits of the White Sword to this degree?
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Sirius’s unexpected interjection startled Anna. The voice of this millennium-old-man sounded so calm and composed that unwittingly, everyone started listening to him. “The more you interact with those two, the more you are forced to accept it whether you like it or not. They aren’t like normal people, they can’t even be compared to those many youths destined for greatness. They are more than that,” he said, his dry lips curving into a slight smile as his eyes observed the development of the ongoing battle.
“They are special,” he added after a few seconds of silence, his words for some reason causing many of those around him to feel chills run down their spines. “Especially Laien,” he added silently, without giving voice to this last thought of his. He had been looking at those two closely and he came to understand that they were indispensable to each other both in terms of mental growth and the growth of their cultivation. However, he didn’t feel that desire to follow when he watched Yin. The boy was a great youth and could capture one’s heart, but for some reason, it was Laien’s attitude, his words and his behavior that were inspiring to this old man’s heart.
If after helping Arslan stabilize his position in Makarash he could lend his experience and advice to Laien as one of the boy’s subordinates, then he would be satisfied with the autumn of his life. He was more or less aware of the situation in the Sarkcente Kingdom after all this time, so he knew that Laien wasn’t destined for a calm and peaceful life. Moreover, even if he was, then Laien himself would surely find new problems to involve himself in, just like he had done during their journey.
“Perhaps,” Anna said just as both left and right wings of Abdain’s forces were routed. “Perhaps they really are special,” she admitted, thus shattering a certain conviction she had held in her heart for as long as she could remember. She wasn’t special and unique, she wasn’t destined to rule her Kingdom, much less lead the Holy Union at Casimir’s side. If she wanted to achieve those things, if she truly wanted to go down in history with the one she fell in love with, then she needed to try harder. She needed to put more effort than anyone else and only then, only then would her dreams of happiness and great achievements have a realistic chance of coming true.
“We should get ready,” Sirius reminded with a smile. His musings were one thing, but he noticed that everybody seemed to be in a daze. They had to be ready to ride out once the rest of Abdain’s men was suppressed, so they couldn’t afford to stand in this half-baked defensive formation that was more of a viewing-party formation than anything else. If Anna and the rest didn’t yet forget, Yimar Maar’s army could show up on the horizon and threaten their rear at any moment.
“Yeah,” Anna nodded strongly. Sirius’s reminder was all she needed to stop thinking about irrelevant things, though admittedly, she did sense a change occurring in her soul just a few seconds ago. The taste of this step ahead was rather bitter-sweet, however, so she didn’t want to think about it. “We will be passing right to Abdain, so take young master Arslan to the right of us. You nobles stick with them, I and my Royal Guard shall provide protection from the left as we pass by,” she instructed in a loud and clear voice, using some Qi to make sure that everybody could hear well.
Although there was no verbal response to her orders, everybody listened promptly. Sirius and Kasha took Arslan away to the side, while the Euleanian nobles started organizing themselves on their own. They hadn’t been issued any specific orders, but as the ones who had chosen to stay here with their personal guards, they had agreed upon some rudimentary tactics in advance. Thus, with Duke Diego taking the role of the leader amongst them, the nobles quickly assumed tidy and well-balanced defensive formations around the horse Arslan and Sirius were riding on.
As for the formation itself, Duke Diego took command of the hundred-plus nobles and elite guards of theirs at the head of their three-hundred-man unit. The young and proud Prince Ludwig from the Guode Federation, who had unexpectedly voiced his desire to stay behind and help to guard Arslan to the very end, took control of the left wing. As for the right wing, one of the young and relatively unknown nobles who had shown his bravery and tactical skill during the previous battles was entrusted with it. Originally, the left wing would have been entrusted either to Duke Ayer or Chancellor Meinhard out of the original four of the Great Nobles who had come into an agreement with Arslan, but the two old men had left the group claiming to have had overexerted their old bodies in the original series of clashes with Abdain and his elites.
Around the time Anna’s forces started reorganizing alongside the Euleanian nobles, the central battlefield was finally experiencing a series of changes.
“What a load of bull,” Abdain cursed, the expression on his face growing quite ugly to behold indeed. He had been confident he had taken the best possible course of action given what Yimar Maar wanted to do and he still was sure of that, but he hadn’t thought the price he would need to pay would be so huge. Reian’s improvements had honestly caught him off-guard and the strength that northern Prince displayed in battle wasn’t to be underestimated either. However, the worst part was that not only did his eastern wing collapse extremely early, but the western one did, too!
With up to forty of his elites fleeing desperately from each of the wings, his six hundred best warriors had been reduced to just about two hundred and fifty. He had thought he would lose about this many men in the end, but what frustrated him to no end was that the battle still wasn’t yet done! At this rate, if that fool he called master exaggerated the time he needed, then on top of losing the majority of his best men, his own life could very well be threatened were he to be surrounded here!
However, it wasn’t like he could do anything about this anger of his. He had stuck himself here the moment he chose to assault Arslan’s guards in the way he did, so all he could do was to keep fighting. Regrettably, this awareness did nothing to alleviate his growing fury as he saw his subordinates fall in great numbers under the combined three-way assault of Arslan’s allies. The Black Sword unit and Julien’s elites entangled them from the front, the White Sword unit led by those two devilish brats attacked relentlessly from the left, and that northern Prince’s Royal Guard led by the man himself slaughtered his people to the right in tandem with Reian’s one-man-rampage.
“Looks like Reian is going wild,” Laien mused during the brief moment of calm after he and Yin had just gotten rid of a small group of Abdain’s men. “He seems to be making good use of that Supreme Profound Mystery,” he added a bit jealously. When would he be strong enough to gain any actual insights into the Profound Mystery of Maelstrom and use it in battle? He hoped it would be sooner rather than later, though he would likely need to advance to the Realm of Heroes for that first.
“You are so greedy,” Yin retorted with a laugh. Sure, he wanted to be able to learn and use his Profound Mystery of Lightning Rush, too, but Laien was so impatient! They clearly would be able to learn their respective Supreme Mysteries once their strength reached the necessary level, so getting so overzealous about it was unnecessary. After all, those insights weren’t something they could attain just because they really wanted to, the two of them knew this much instinctively.
“I’m not greedy,” Laien replied, continuing this conversation which despite its length, was taking place within a minuscule amount of time. “I’m just impatient. How amazing will it be once we don’t need to fear anyone or anything?” he mentioned in a half-serious manner. As a result, he unintentionally pushed himself and Yin into a calmer, more level-headed mood once they started thinking about things related to this statement of his. The two of them had spoken about growing stronger, about their goals and about the futures they wanted to pursue. It didn’t come from the arrogance that they could claim their strength and potential to be great, but when they thought about their desires and ambitions, their current prowess seemed almost negligible, too small, too little to change anything in any meaningful way.
“Should we try to kill Abdain?” Yin brought up, not willing to sink into a melancholic mood while they were still in the middle of an important battle.
“Probably not,” Laien said what Yin already knew to be the answer. As an earth-element martial master of the seventh rank, Abdain was far too hard to kill once he ignored offense and wholeheartedly focused on preserving his life. Even if all of those present surrounded him and persisted in trying to tire him out, it would take a long time for Abdain to fall. In Laien’s estimation, it would take them at least ten minutes to deplete Abdain’s Qi and it was time they didn’t have.
Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the battlefield, Reian and Casimir were having similar thoughts. Just like Laien and Yin they clearly understood that it would be far too hard to kill Abdain quickly, but the temptation Abdain’s life presented was too big for them not to at least consider the possibility. Without Abdain, Yimar Maar’s army would lose two-thirds of its potential. It would mean that even if Yimar Maar escaped Eulene, he wouldn’t be much of a threat in the future.
Still, as Reian and Casimir realized, it was merely wishful thinking on their part. They had noticed that Anna and Arslan had gotten into a formation in order to pass by Abdain and start riding north, so there wouldn’t be time for them to take Abdain down either way. As such, the two of them continued to kill as many of Abdain’s experts as possible, all to prevent Abdain from making any crazy attempts on Arslan’s life when the kid’s group would soon pass relatively close to him.
Least to be said, with the kind of advantage their side had, those originally hard to kill experts were now being slaughtered so fast it was almost worrying. Yet, neither Laien and Yin nor Reian and Casimir dared to hold back because of something as silly as feelings of pity. Had the situations been reversed, they wouldn’t have been shown any mercy either. Thus, they kept on killing their foes mercilessly and their unwavering attitude was transferred over to the warriors they led, causing the tempo of the massacre to only increase as the time went on instead of growing slower.
Seeing how the numbers of Abdain’s elites were being heavily whittled down, Anna was about to order their two groups to move out. However, in the corner of her eye, she noticed a figure wearing brown-green camouflaging clothes running towards them from the west, right across one of the great areas of open plains and fields which surrounded them from all sides. What caused her heart to skip a beat, however, was when she recognized that the man missed an entire arm and a good part of his shoulder. She couldn’t be sure due to the distance of over two kilometers and the wheat that was in the way, but all of his clothes appeared to be tattered and extremely bloodied, too.