‘I need to reach him.’
Red had no plan, and neither did he know what would happen if he reached Rickard. However, his fluctuation was the only beacon of light in this darkness of the void, so the boy had to grasp onto it with all his strength.
Red continued to command his body to move.
To his surprise, the bandit leader’s fluctuation got ever so close to him.
‘I was right.’
With his crimson sense, Red regained some sense of space. His body was still there and responding to his will. The only caveat was that the boy couldn’t feel anything through his senses, so he wasn’t able to tell whether he was moving or not.
With the fluctuation as reference, though, Red felt like he could still make progress.
In this manner, he continued to approach the fluctuation. The progress was slow - so slow that Red felt as if he had only covered a few meters even after concentrating on the task for over ten minutes.
He couldn’t tell whether this was because Rickard was also moving away from him, or because of his lack of feeling. The boy was unable to measure his movements, and he couldn’t even feel the kind of position his body was in, so even if he could still move, it was evidently slow.
Still, he made progress. After what felt like hours had passed, Red sensed the distance between him and Rickard had lessened to within one hundred meters. It was then that he felt something.
‘This is…’
That’s right. He felt something.
A pressure against his skin. It was so slight and small that Red could have missed it, but in the endless nothing, he could feel it as clearly as day. The feeling didn’t stop there either.
This same pressure continued to splatter and retract against multiple points in his body. Red had a hard time telling what he was feeling and where he was feeling it. However, just this amount of progress was more than enough to increase his hope.
As he moved forward, this sensation intensified. Coldness, pressure, and even the slightest bit of pain returned to him, and Red welcomed them all with open arms.
Finally, he regained some awareness of his body. What the boy felt, though, left him baffled.
‘I’m still standing?’
Red expected to be on the ground, crawling around as he tried to take a step forward. To his surprise, though, he was still steady on his own two feet.
He felt that something wasn’t right, but just as he was contemplating on it, Rickard’s fluctuation began to distance itself. The bandit leader was indeed moving just like him.
‘I need to hurry.’
Now that he recovered some feeling over his body, Red increased his pace. The distance between both of them decreased, but the boy had a hard time speeding up further. His body was still unstable, and the relentless storm was still striking at him.
Thankfully for the boy, it didn’t seem as if Rickard was moving any faster.
This chase continued for another hundred meters until Red felt even more of his senses return. The noise of the water droplets striking against his body, the smell of the rain, the foggy vision. They weren’t fully functioning yet, but feeling control return over his own body gave Red a sense of confidence and relief he had never felt before.
As his vision returned to him, he saw something through the fog - a bright blue light that seemed to pierce even through the rain and mist. Without his knowledge, Red had been heading in that direction the entire time as he pursued Rickard.
‘How did he know that was there?’
Was he not affected by the loss of his senses? Had the imperials given him another item to help him through this last trial? Only that made sense.
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Red felt a sense of unfairness over the situation.
Still, to his surprise, he felt the distance between them lessen even more as his senses recovered. This wasn’t because Red was moving fast, but rather because Rickard was being too slow.
In any normal situation, a Lesser Ring Realm cultivator could outpace the boy with no issues. Yet, right now, Red was catching up to Rickard very quickly. Something was off about this situation.
As Red’s sense recovered, he discovered why. A strong metallic smell rose to his nose even through the rain, and the boy immediately knew what it was.
Blood.
Rickard was bleeding. He was bleeding a lot too, judging by the smell.
What could have caused the man to suffer such an injury? Did he fight someone inside this storm? Red didn’t know, but he wasn’t about to let this opportunity go.
The light they were walking towards got even stronger, and Red felt the storm and fog abate as he approached it. Through the fading mist, the boy saw the shadow of Rickard, less than 50 meters away.
The storm continued to dissipate as Red felt the pressure over his body diminish. His vision cleared up as the boy identified the source of the blue light.
It was a large floating orb of water. It wasn’t just any water, though. Inside this translucent sphere, Red saw sparkling blue dots that the light was emanating from. The boy thought these were glowing gems at first, but the more he stared at the orb, the more perplexed he became.
These dots dissipated as the currents inside this orb of water floated by them, only to reform into small crystals moments later in a different section of the sphere. It was a mesmerizing sight, and Red felt his skin tingle from the Spiritual Energy even over a hundred meters away from the orb.
He wasn’t the only one staring at it, though. Ahead of him, Rickard had stopped moving too, and similarly mesmerized with the sphere.
Red examined his figure for a moment. Blood was still dripping down the man’s armor, creating a large trail on the stone ground.
Rickard didn’t seem to have noticed him.
Red took a deep but silent breath.
‘This is it, then.’
His hand went to his pouch as he took out the empowerment pill bottles and the only handful of weapons that remained in his possession.
“You made it here?” Rickard asked without turning to look at the boy.
Red wasn’t surprised the man could see him, considering what had happened earlier. He ignored his question and swallowed all the remaining empowerment pills in his possession - three of them in total.
“How did you do it?” the bandit asked again. “I had to use the method those imperials gave me, but what did you have to fight through that? If I hadn’t known what this trial was going to be about, I would have lost to despair.”
Red ignored the man, feeling the power of the pills coursing through his veins. How could he answer that question? He still wasn’t too sure what this trial had been about. All he did was to experiment with everything that he could, and it eventually paid out for him.
Rickard turned around to look at the boy. “Unfortunately, you made a mistake in challenging me. Even in my state, you don’t really stand a chance.”
The man’s mask had fallen down, and Red could see a seasoned and scarred face beneath his hood. The boy didn’t spend much time looking at it, though.
He crouched down, as if preparing to sprint forward.
Rickard observed this with interest. He took out his spear, preparing for the boy’s charge.
‘He didn’t take the initiative.’
This already told a lot to Red. His wounds were definitely even more serious than they looked at first glance. Perhaps that was how he had escaped that void in the first place. Still, it didn’t mean Rickard was wrong about the boy’s chances of winning.
Which was why Red smeared his hand on the man’s trail of blood as he crouched down. The burning hit him, not as strong as the boy had expected, but still filling his body with energy in a matter of moments.
This blood energy, coupled with the effects of the empowerment pill, made Red feel as if he was about to explode from so much power circulating through his veins. He didn’t flinch, though, as his hands wandered to his pouch and grabbed onto his two remaining weapons.
In the next second, Red charged forward.
First, he threw his knife at the man, trying to imitate Rimold’s movements. The blade flew straight at Rickard, but he parried it with his spear with a short and fluid motion, snapping the knife in half in the process.
Then, following the first projectile, Red threw out his next weapon. A dark purple arrow-head flew at Rickard, who didn’t hesitate to swat it away as he had done to the knife. When his spear hit the purple projectile, though, it exploded in a blinding purple light.
The man covered his eyes and jumped back, just in time to avoid a mist of poison from eating away at his body. His weapon wasn’t so lucky, though, as the corrosion ate away at it and expanded throughout the spear.
Rickard didn’t hesitate to throw the spear away as he prepared for Red’s next attack. While the bandit was distracted by the purple light, though, the boy had changed directions and circled around him.
Red was heading straight at the orb of crystalline water.
The boy heard a curse from behind him, but he didn’t stop to look back. He expected the man to chase behind him, yet that didn’t happen. Instead, at the next moment, there was a shrill sound, and Red felt something pierce into his back and straight through the other side.
His blood energy sought to close the wound as the boy continued running ahead, trying to ignore the pain. Yet, a moment later, even more of these piercing shots drilled into his back, puncturing straight through his organs in quick succession, and destroying his body from the inside.
Red felt his strength quickly leaving him, despite all the pills and the blood he had consumed. However, by this point, he was already within ten meters of the orb of water.
‘I won.’
These were the last words Red thought about as he dove towards the sphere. As soon as the boy touched the water, everything went dark.