Within the span of a single breath, both attacks bore down upon their targets. Kalvin and his bodyguards rushed to protect those behind them with a combined defensive arrayment that held for a single moment before countless holes were punched through it by the relentless rain of golden arrows. As the three men at his sides lashed out with powerful martial skills to deter the oncoming attacks, Merchant Lord Kalvin pulled out a silver talisman and activated it with wild eyes. He was a bit too slow, however, and one of his superior subordinates was pierced directly through the chest by a golden arrow, the skin around the fist-sized hole beginning to melt away as his flesh, blood, bones and organs were corroded by the chaotic energies of the technique.
The slim, astute-eyed man slowly fell out of the sky, occasionally floating upward for a moment before dipping back down as he struggled to deal with his dreadful, worsening wound. At the third level of Genesis, he wouldn’t die right away from such an attack, but he also wouldn’t be of much use for the rest of the fight. The ones he’d been attempting to protect, however, weren’t so lucky. The mercenaries couldn’t withstand the force of Nolan’s arrows and thus exploded into pieces upon contact as if someone had remotely detonated small explosives from within their stomachs.
Nolan felt nothing as he watched Kalvin’s soldiers die by the hundreds.
Meanwhile, May unleashed a massive flood of azure energy that stopped the oncoming attacks like twigs falling into the swirling current of a river’s rapids. As the enemy attacks had been launched in unison, the blades all made contact at roughly the same time, the threat dispersed within a matter of moments.
The instant May’s defence proved successful, she dismissed the mass of energy as Ian flew forward at his fastest speed, about three hundred kilometres per hour. Sword glowing with vibrant light, he was abruptly blocked by the merchant lord’s two remaining bodyguards, a tall man with blond hair and intelligent blue eyes along with a stocky man that was nearly as tall, with thick arms and a heavy, barreled chest. They underestimated his strength, however, and although they were both at the fourth level of Genesis and by rights should have been able to fight against someone at the fifth level without much trouble, Ian could surmount his cultivation base by nearly two levels and was thus able to push them back with the precious offensive martial skill that had been passed down within the Varai clan for generations.
As the two men were blown away by a condensed crescent of energy that was about four hundred metres long and about fifty wide, Nolan and May passed Ian and made straight for the flustered merchant lord.
Keeping an eye on the silver talisman that had just crumbled away in the man’s hands, Nolan raised his guard to the maximum as he waited for something to happen as a result of Kalvin’s actions. Sure enough, a few seconds later and ten auras broke away from the dizzying, landscape-changing battle that was taking place in the clearing—which had now grown to a radius of over four kilometres and no longer possessed its uniform measurements—and shot directly towards him and May like the flash of a shooting star across a clear night’s sky.
Sure enough, once the ten artificial fighters came within a certain distance of Kalvin, their bodies were abruptly enveloped by a layer of translucent white light that quickly subsided to reveal that their cultivations had all risen to the seventh level of Genesis.
The remnants of the mercenary army—only about sixty percent of their original number—shot off another volley of projectiles as Kalvin retreated into their midst, the seven golden fighters forming a protective line in front of the wary host as the merchant lord hurried past his subordinates and made straight for the Falling Rain Sect’s stationary force.
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Elsewhere, Nyla and the rest of his friends continued to unload volley after volley of deadly arrows upon those of the Nightshadow Sect, who were effectively trapped in place as their forward progress was limited to small, almost negligible gains as the bewildered sect members were forced to hunker down in the air amidst an endless rain of golden arrows. Such a relentless succession of attacks was only possible thanks to the divine fruits and heavenly dew that his friends were consuming in order to keep their energy reserves above a certain level, something that Nolan quickly mimicked as he prepared to face the threat ahead of him.
Only 209 lingering spirits are left, and he’s got a bit less than twice that. Knowing that he couldn’t afford to pull any of his summons away from the heated battle within the clearing, he summoned a small mouthful of heavenly dew from his spatial bag and subconsciously willed the ball of loose liquid to enter his mouth before swallowing it down with a hurried gulp.
Feeling his inner energies replenishing in real-time, Nolan activated the second arrayment diagram that he’d prepared and reproduced the same attack from earlier. This time, however, the artificial spirits incinerated nearly all of his projectiles with a combined attack of offensive martial skills that gave life to a tremendous aura that seemed to give the air the heaviness of water.
What the hell is that…?
A gigantic tiger’s head—or that of some sort of similar cat—appeared before the wall of spirits, expanding immensely in a matter of moments until it connected the decimated earth below with some of the lingering wisps of low-riding clouds that hadn’t already been dispersed by the main fight within the clearing. The animal’s fur was so realistic that it seemed to be a true golden-haired cat that had been recalled from some dimension of gigantic animals, its thin-slitted eyes focusing on him and May as if it were a living thing observing something in front of it. Opening its mouth wide, it simply swallowed all of the golden arrows as if they were a mouthful of seeds, after which it immediately let out a peculiar, world-shaking roar. In tandem with this ear-splitting sound was a blinding beam of light that left its mouth in a straight line, the radius of this vague pillar of energy measuring in at about half a kilometre.
What the…?
May didn’t hesitate to grab Nolan by the arm and hurl him several kilometres eastward towards the city, his vision blurred as he tumbled through the sky in an endless series of disorienting flips.
Since his flying sword hadn’t been thrown along with him, he had no choice but to pull out a backup the moment that his momentum slowed to permit the action. He was close enough to the city now to see the buildings shake with every tremor and to notice the clattering of their shingles as countless titanic explosions sounded off almost every other moment, the entire settlement rocked by hurricane-like winds as the distant battle continued to escalate. He drew thousands of eyes as he floated about five hundred metres above the ground just a few kilometres away from Tallgate, many people straining their eyes to get a look at one of the combatants that was taking part in the historic battle. Elsewhere, thousands of others hurried toward the eastern horizon, many without looking back.
Ignoring them, Nolan turned his attention toward May the moment that he steadied himself in the air only to see the halmite sword that she’d borrowed from Lyra flash with azure light a fraction of a second before she was hit by the oncoming beam. About a kilometre long, she seemed to have activated an interesting martial skill that stopped the attack in its tracks while simultaneously preserving its energies instead of dissipating or deflecting them. The moment that the flow of energy stopped emitting from the gigantic tiger’s mouth, she lashed out with her sword and an exact replica of the attack was returned to the artificial spirits within the blink of an eye.
The manifestation, the spirits that summoned it, and the mercenary army behind them were completely erased by the blinding torrent of superheated energies, not even a fragment of armour left behind as the beam went on to carve a gigantic canyon into the earth that stretched all the way to the desolate, barren landscape dozens of kilometres beyond.
Jesus Christ, thought Nolan, immediately turning his gaze toward May where she hovered above the incredibly long trench that she had just added to the map. At least fifty metres deep and nearly a kilometre wide, the nascent canyon was lined on either side with flaming, toppled trees, the fires growing amidst the fanning winds so that within moments of their creation vast patches of the forest were up in flames.