Benton watched his sect members engage the third wave at melee range. The heaviest hitters were Ye Zan’s two guard groups, but Zi Delan and his team did surprisingly well. Other assorted fighters who’d advanced to the peak of Bronze Body Cultivation also joined in the battle.

Overall, the group was smaller than for the previous waves, as planned. Rank three beasts were simply too strong and too dangerous for anyone not tough enough to handle them.

The surprising addition to the defenders outside the wall were two of the Poison Claw sect members. Not Pan Jiang or Kang Lin obviously. Benton honestly had no idea the names of the two combatants, one using a spear and the other a sword. If he’d ever been introduced to them, he’d forgotten it.

Neither of them had asked for permission to join the fight against the rank threes, and they had not been asked to do so, either. They were at Qi Gathering minor realm seven and eight respectively and had thus been welcomed to participate in the previous two melee battles.

They simply didn’t meet the criteria to face rank threes. Not a mass of them, anyway. If they were facing a beast two against one or maybe even solo, Benton wouldn’t have had any concerns. Considering how outnumbered they’d be, though, he doubted the two Poison Claw Sect members would last long.

He considered grabbing the two of them by their necks and removing them from the fight, but he refrained. For one thing, such a loss of face would be devastating to the young cultivators. Normal teenagers back on Earth didn’t deal with embarrassment well, but they had nothing on kids in a cultivation world. Causing someone to get momentarily flustered could lead to a blood feud impacting generations.

Seriously. Su’s memories contained historical accounts of at least three major disputes that cost dozens of lives each that had resulted from just such an occurrence. Cultivators could go absolutely nuts about the smallest perceived insults.

Honestly, if that were the only reason, Benton would have pulled them in a heartbeat, but the second justification was more consequential. His main goal was to teach his sect members and any other youngster important life lessons, and failure was an even better teacher than success. Besides, with his speed and given how much he outranked the beasts, Benton had no doubt he could rescue the two before anything truly bad happened.

They did have enough sense to work together and minimize the danger by landing far from the scrum. Even cautiously approaching the outskirts of the teeming mass wasn’t enough to prevent them from being quickly overwhelmed, however. There were simply too many beasts versus a relatively small number of cultivators.

Deng Meixiang, the Poison Claw Sect archer on the wall, was paying attention and picked off as many of their attackers as she could, but her aid was like trying to bail out a boat with a bucket when it was already underwater. The two melee cultivators were subsumed by a furry multitude, and unlike his Rising Tide Sect members whose high ranked Body Cultivation provided decent protection, the toughness provided by their Spiritual Cultivation couldn’t hold up against similarly advanced opponents.

The seventh minor realm cultivator was the first to fall, followed quickly by the one in the eighth minor realm. Each curled into a fetal position, protecting their vital parts from claws and jaws.

Benton waited, giving them a chance to fully realize their mistake in taking on a foe they weren’t ready to face. With any luck, the lesson they learned today would prevent them from a situation in the future where they couldn’t be as easily saved.

He slowly counted to five. There. That should be enough.

A Quickstep brought him almost instantly to the two downed allied sect members. He just had to figure out the best way to save them because, unfortunately, none of his techniques that were capable of killing many foes at once were great for use when a friendly fighter was nearby.

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Sometimes, one just had to get their hands dirty.

Well, not too dirty. It wasn’t like he was going to crush the creatures with his bare hands or anything. That would be messy and hardly an action befitting an unfathomable old monster.

He first created a ring of high gravity around him and the two injured cultivators to keep any more beasts from intruding on his rescue operation. Both the spear user and the sword wielder were bleeding in multiple places and, while not in any danger of dying for a little while, were suffering quite a bit.

Charging into a battle half cocked wasn’t a mistake they’d repeat.

Benton touched each of them and channeled Healing qi into their bodies, closing up their wounds and alleviating their pain. None of that solved the source of the problem, though, namely the dozens of spirit beasts trying to burrow into their bodies.

He grabbed a muskrat, threw it into the air, flung a metal ball at it, and as soon as the sphere made contact, triggered his technique for delivering Void qi. The beast disappeared.

Which, in retrospect, was a bad thing. A rank three core along with the meat, skin, and assorted other parts were worth a decent amount of taels.

He snatched a raccoon off one of the cultivators and threw it even higher into the air than the muskrat. Instead of using a metal ball and his Void Technique, he triggered Chain Lightning. Which worked. But again, it worked too well.

The first strike fried the raccoon, but the technique was named Chain Lightning for a reason. Several smaller bolts forked off the initial victim and slammed into the scrum, killing three more beasts.

And okay, the extra damage wasn’t the bad part but only because it was just beasts that had been struck. It could just as easily have been his sect members.

Careless. That was way, way too careless.

Screw it.

He tossed a monkey into the air, pulled his bow from his ring, and shot it with an arrow.

There.

Using archery wasn’t the fastest way to deal with the problem, but it guaranteed no collateral damage and left behind valuable materials he could sell or use.

In that manner, he killed the rest of the beasts trying to eat the two Poison Claw Sect members, and once done, he healed both of them again before Quickstepping them back inside the village.

“So, was it a good idea to take on rank threes in melee at your cultivation level?” he said.

“No, Sect Leader,” the two said, chastened.

Benton didn’t have much time to spare in further admonishing the two foolish youngsters as his people were still in danger. He hopped back up onto the allure.

Just in time, too.

Zhong Kun was in real danger of bleeding out. Even though peak Bronze Body Cultivators were pretty tough, they weren’t invulnerable. One of the spirit beasts must have had a special bite ability to have torn through the sect member’s throat like that.

Zhong Kun was minutes away from death, though, not seconds, and Benton was nothing if not fast. He Quickstepped to the young man and healed him in an instant.

The others were hale enough to jump back over the wall on their own as Benton transported Zhong Kun.

Once Zi Delan’s crew was all settled, Benton turned back to watching the battle, but it was winding down by that point. The remaining melee fighters were a little more seasoned than the kids from Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town and had spent more time fighting together. The value of that experience was proved against the beast tide.

Ye Zan’s guards really showed a lot of promise.

Thinking of things that performed their function really well, he had to add his Healing technique to that list. Just the amount he’d used it during the first three waves saved him two Major Healing Pills and three or four minor ones. That was a lot of Shop Points he saved, replaced by a resource that regenerated all on its own.

Nice.

One of the guards killed off the last of the rank three spirit beasts, officially ending the wave, and soon, the fighters were back inside consolidating their gains while Kang Lin, the twins, and several sect members who hadn’t been involved guarded the ones collecting arrows.

Benton started getting notifications. Zi Delan had reached Large Success with his spear, as had three other sect members. Two archers had achieved the same milestone.

There were few things in life better than raking in points by the half dozen.

All too soon, however, that accumulation came to an end.

Really too soon.

A large group of rank fours appeared at the extent of his spiritual sense.

The fourth wave had begun, and by his estimate, it was close to an hour early. Benton did not like what that acceleration portended. He didn’t like it at all.