Picking his nose in an absentminded manner, Brud winced as Jason kicked the back of his left knee in and gave him a rough shove, forcing him to stumble after Sersa with poorly-masked annoyance on his pale, narrow face.
“You guys wait until we make our move, then come out and jump the guy.” Looking at Elisa, he added, “And you, once he shows up here, you’ll pretend that I’m your new disciple, but don’t draw too much attention to me. Make sure your acting is on point.” Seeing an impatient purse of her lips, he gave her the go-ahead to speak.
“Germeil is a shrewd man. It won’t be long until he notices that something’s wrong.” Tugging at her robes in displeasure, she added, “It doesn’t help that I’m dressed as a disciple.”
“Just do what I told you to do. Trust me, it’ll be fine. Well, it should be fine.” A bit distracted as he began to draw out another arrayment diagram, he said, “I just need to do a few things before he gets here…”
Worst case scenario, I order those two to distract the guy while me and Sersa slip away. That’s if this guy is as strong as Elisa says. Jason had just reached the peak of Integration’s seventh level, which gave him enough confidence to face the man in a one-on-one fight. Still, just because he could face the great elder didn’t mean that he could beat him. At best, he’d be able to hold him off for several exchanges before fleeing with his life.
“Hey,” he said to Elisa, “is this Germiel guy able to fight people with higher cultivations than him?”
“By two levels.”
“Two?” Jason’s eyes narrowed, a bit of anxiety building up within his chest. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”
“I warned you.”
Damn it, he thought, wishing that he had the same sense of foresight as Nolan had showcased countless times before he and his friends had been separated. And here I thought I was all smart because of my master plan. He increased his diagram-drawing speed, hands nothing but blurs as they ambidextrously worked on two different techniques.
Displeased though she was, Elisa couldn’t hide the fact that she was impressed by his evident skill as an arrayment practitioner. In her eyes, the amount of arrayments that she’d seen him cast along with their incredible qualities were nothing short of the talents that an Arrayment Master would exhibit.
I hope he gets here soon, Jason thought, ill at ease after having learned of the enemy’s true strength. Now that my spiritual space is so big, I can stop relying on basic arrayments. If I use the more complex ones, I should be fine. The two techniques that he was about to lay the foundations for had been devised by Actius in his late teens, one of them being the same gravity-altering arrayment that Jason had used to trap the disciples he’d refined earlier. On top of that, he sealed them in a near-indestructible barrier arrayment that was impractical in combat due to the fact that the diagram for this technique was very difficult to draw and thus took several minutes and a great deal of concentration to create. This way, if a fight broke out before he could activate the traps then at least the diagrams would be preserved.
Despite his unease, he couldn’t wait to see how the coming moments would play out. Although it was very frightening to fight with his life on the line, such experiences also gave rise to a rare sort of exhilaration that was difficult to describe. When a person was as capable as he was—when it came to combat, at least—simply running at full speed was unimaginably stimulating, let alone doing so while also battling with swords, martial skills, or spiritual arrayments.
Soon, I’ll have two great elders on my side. Hiding both of his arrayment diagrams with a concealing technique, he immediately began to draw out two more. Then, all of those disciples… Greed began to fester within his gut as he contemplated what was about to take place. Standing quietly within the empty, damaged street, Jason enjoyed a precarious surge of excitement as he prepared to lay the groundwork for the next phase in his loose plan of operating out of Hauss.
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***
The great elder arrived an hour later than he’d promised, a bald man of average height that boasted a thick, finger-length goatee the colour of glowing embers. His eyes were a striking silver, his demeanour calm and quiet as he seemingly materialized in front of Jason and Elisa as if he were a figment of their imagination.
“Germiel,” said Elisa after a momentary quiet.
“What is this, Elisa?”
“A meeting, obviously. We need to talk.”
Germiel cast a passive glance at Jason, who bowed his head in the same servile manner that many unsuspecting disciples had done toward him when under the impression that he was a powerful senior brother of theirs.
“Humph, do you think me a fool?”
In a sudden moment of perceived wrongness, Jason jumped backward and barely managed to cross his arms to protect himself from a violent punch that the tall man before him had just aimed at his mouth. Both of his forearms broke in several places, but they held as his body was flung backward with such momentum that the landscape changed at least a dozen times in the blink of an eye. Building after building gave way beneath his rocketing body, the force of the strike so strong that even the surrounding buildings were swept away by the apocalyptic winds that followed it. He eventually hit the ground about two kilometres away from the town, smacking into the soil dozens of times as he trailed onward for another kilometre in a series of painful, disorienting summersaults and tumbles.
What the fuck… Pushing himself upward amidst a storm of discomfort, he coughed up a worrisome amount of blood, struggled to take in a deep breath and then coughed up some more. That’s someone at the seventh level of Genesis? Elisa was right; the man was as strong as someone at the ninth level of his stage, possibly even stronger. I should have just left… Jason had never faced such a strong opponent, but he wasn’t too scared considering all that he’d been through.
Cursing to himself, he ate a handful of relevant medicinal pellets while wondering if his current frustrations were similar to what his victims felt when they were overpowered by someone with his cultivation level.
Off in the distance, he watched on as a large section of abandoned infrastructure was blown away in a bomb-like explosion that cleared up at least a third of the buildings in the area. As expected, Jason’s sensitive eyes captured a momentary glimpse of Elisa as she shot out of town like a rock from a catapult.
This fucking guy… Spitting up more blood, his frustration intensified when he realized that the two cultivation-boosting arrayment diagrams that he’d carefully hidden around his hands had been broken. He’d also hidden several talismans on different parts of his body, and the ones on his forearms had been destroyed by the unexpected attack. Free to draw out a fresh diagram, he patiently spent a minute creating a complex arrayment that almost completely repaired his body upon activation.
“Okay,” he breathed as a gigantic red hand appeared about two kilometres above the city, two smaller ones rising up to match it. “Let me return the favour a bit.”
He drew out the same arrayments as earlier and activated them in turn, boosting his cultivation by almost two levels entirely. Body covered in swirling, snake-like ribbons of silver and golden energy, he conjured two of his trademark spears, their crimson surfaces shimmering beneath the heavy aura that they exuded.
Both Sersa and Brud fled as soon as they threw up their own defensive renditions of the Crippling Blood Palm. Brud’s was about a kilometre long, Sersa’s nearly two, but together they were like the hands of a baby and a toddler beneath the descending palm of an adult man.
The energies that the colliding attacks stirred up were so abundant and so volatile that hundreds of metre-wide lightning bolts appeared in the space between the three hands before they even collided, their charged, spindly breadths spanning about a kilometre each. Seconds later, the fifth-seated elder’s martial skill pressed the opposing two downward after a momentary pause, going on to create a meteoric impact that completely wiped away the last remnants of the abandoned town along with tens of metres of the soil that had supported it. Jason had obviously never seen a nuclear bomb go off in person, though the literal mushroom cloud of swirling winds, dust and debris that appeared above the site of the colliding skills left little to his imagination in regards to what such an explosion might be like.