At the same time, in the Holy Capital.

Two large groups of cultivators were clashing in an open field. Cultivators up to the undying body and grand mage realms were fighting on the ground, whereas mage kings were fighting in the sky. Mage emperors had not started fighting yet.

The battle was bloody, with people dying every second, and even the lives of powerful cultivators were not guaranteed.

This was naturally the clash between the Myriad Sword Palace and the Order of the Blood Raven.

The entire battlefield was displayed in real-time on the screen of a large, mirror-shaped magical artifact. Watching the scene were four elders, in a small building that was floating in the sky through powerful wind magic. Two of the elders were seated on a sofa to the left of the mirror, and the other two were similarly sitting to the right.

These were the two immortal elders of the Myriad Sword Palace, and the Order of the Blood Raven respectively. If the immortals of the Order made a move, then their mortal army would be decimated. Knowing this, the Myriad Sword Palace had sent out two true immortal mages of their own to restrain the immortal mages of the Order.

It was hard to reach the immortal realm, so people at this level usually wanted to avoid life-or-death battles unless absolutely necessary. In this case, there was no reason for the immortal elders to risk their own lives fighting each other, so they had their mortal disciples fight instead and determine the winner with the outcome of that battle.

Unaware that they were pawns in the game of immortals, the mortal cultivators fought each other to the death.

But there was one person who knew the real game that was being played.

An old woman dressed in black hooded robes was slowly walking into the battlefield. Anytime an enemy attacked her, a wind blade would cut them down instantly.

The woman was naturally Dalia. She had summoned her most powerful wind spirits to help her reach the capital as soon as possible. Luckily, she seemed to have made it just in time for the final battle.

Dalia walked up to the centre of the battlefield, hands behind her back, and released her mage emperor aura.

A choking pressure was exerted on all nearby cultivators. Grand mages were brought to their knees while those below that realm instantly passed out. Only mage kings could remain stable against the aura, but they quickly fled as well.

“Mage emperor! She’s a mage emperor! Everybody run!” the cultivators ran away in a panic, unwilling to become her victim. However, Dalia had no interest in those cultivators.

Ten extremely powerful auras appeared on the battlefield and rushed towards her. But before they could reach her, four powerful auras appeared from her side and clashed with four auras from the other. The remaining six auras continued rushing towards Dalia before stopping several metres away from her.

The figures of four men and two women were revealed.

“Ha! Dalia Krueger. You should have stayed inside whatever hole you were hiding in. We have you surrounded now; you cannot escape!” one of the men exclaimed.

Despite his mockery, however, he was extremely alert facing Dalia. It was clear that he did not underestimate her at all. The rest of the mage emperors also had serious expressions on their faces.

Guess I can’t expect them to go easy on me, Dalia chucked to herself.

“In that case, how about I kill all of you?” Dalia mocked in response.

“Arrogant! You may be powerful, but there are six of us and one of you. Do you really think you can take on all of us and win?” another man yelled.

Dalia looked at him deeply before breaking into a smile.

“I don’t think I can take on all of you and win – I know I can,” saying so, she raised both her hands into the air. Mana gathered into her palms from her inner realm, before transforming into a dark and corrosive mist that enveloped the battlefield.

“Phantom Stallion!”

A huge amount of mana formed a gigantic pillar reaching up to the sky, which all condensed into a singular figure behind Dalia, and became obscured by the mist.

Neigh!

The loud neighing of a horse resounded from behind Dalia, before being replaced by the echoes of hooves heavily bashing against the ground. As the spirit walked close to Dalia, its figure was revealed.

An armoured black horse, sitting on which was a black, heavily armoured knight, wielding a cone-shaped lance. The only thing peculiar about the spirit was that the knight was headless.

The headless knight pulled the reins and the horse reared on its hind legs, before bashing its front legs into the ground. The impact released a tremendous vibration and aura that pushed all the mage emperors several steps back.

So powerful! Where did she learn to summon a spirit like that? they thought.

However, they were all mage emperors and had gone through many battles. They were not going to be scared of just a powerful spirit, especially with so many of them working together.

“Humph! You’re not the only one who has mastered a powerful spirit summon, Dalia,” one of the female mage emperors exclaimed. “I want to see how your phantom stallion fares against this.”

“Celestial Wolf!” she yelled.

“You two can’t have all the fun by yourselves. Three-tailed Fox!” the other female mage emperor giggled, summoning her own spirit.

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“Sky Gryphon!”

“Behemoth!”

“Celestial Ruler!”

“Triton!”

The mage emperors each summoned their own spirits. Dense and violent mana condensed into numerous spirits on the battlefield and released unbelievably powerful auras which all clashed against each other.

All the lower-ranked cultivators, including mage kings, had retreated. It was now the battleground for mage emperors, and nobody wanted to get caught in the crossfire.

The immortals silently watched this scene with their mirror artifact. The Order’s immortals especially had cold sweat trickling down their brows, while the Myriad Sword Palace’s immortals were smiling.

“Things are going to get interesting,” one of the Myriad Sword Palace’s elders said.

…

Drake’s party, Basindale.

The group of four exited the carriage to spot dozens of grinning bandits surrounding them. They were dressed in loose, and slightly worn leather armour, and were brandishing all manner of weapons including swords, spears, and bows.

Some of them spotted Blaze and Sylvia’s unique appearances and stopped.

“A dragon… and a dryad?” they all recognised the two and instantly many terrifying legends appeared in their minds.

“What do we do? We didn’t sign up to fight a dragon!”

They started hesitating but immediately, a man shouted out.

“Cowards! They are both clearly young, so they can’t be that strong!”

Drake saw the voice coming from a middle-aged man with a large scar running across his cheek. Out of everyone, he was dressed in the best armour and looked the most intimidating.

‘He must be the leader,’ Drake thought.

“It’s only a problem if we kill them, we can just tie them up and steal their stuff. Imagine how many treasures a dragon and a dryad would be carrying!” the leader explained.

One of the main reasons why dragons and faeries were feared was due to a skill unique to their race – enemy of race marking. It essentially placed a mark directly on the soul of an individual which was impossible to get rid of. It was a skill that every member of both races could use only in their dying moments; hence they could use it to mark all the individuals attacking them.

Once marked, every other member of their race could instinctively identify the marked individual as someone who has killed one of their kind. Given their territorial and protective nature, this meant that if you ever came across any new tribes, they would all attack you as well.

This is what the bandit leader was talking about.

Even if you were powerful enough to kill off a weak, individual dragon or faerie, or even an entire, relatively weak tribe, it would be a very bad idea to do so, unless you were confident enough to take on every dragon or faerie in the entire world; or wanted to live the rest of your life hiding in fear.

If not for this skill, powerful and greedy cultivators might have hunted down individual dragon and faerie tribes to extinction for their resources and treasures. However, whenever some greedy noble or sect leader had tried to do that in the past, it had never ended well for them. Eventually, they’d get discovered by a more powerful tribe, and be surrounded and killed.

After countless years of establishing their dominance, they gained a fearsome reputation and no one dared to mess with them anymore, especially since they were not ordinarily aggressive to other races, so you could gain a lot more by befriending them.

Hence, the bandits didn’t want to kill Blaze or Sylvia, but just knock them out and steal their belongings.

Drake and Helen on the other hand, were a different matter.

“Yea, let’s kill the boy and the girl, tie up the dragon and dryad, and take all their stuff!”

Everybody cheered as the bandits’ morale rose with their leader's words.

Of course, Drake wasn’t scared of them. He could sense that most of the bandits were tempered body martial artists, and a few were just ordinary mortals. The leader who looked like the strongest, was only at the peak of the tempered body.

Except for Helen, any one person in their party could take on this entire bandit group, and even Helen could take on most of them except for the bandit leader. Hence, he wasn’t worried at all.

Sylvia was tired of this nonsense. She readied her bow, summoned an arrow, and was about to take aim.

“Wait!” Drake held his hand in front of Sylvia. She was surprised but lowered her bow anyway.

Drake thanked her and stepped forward, releasing his steel body cultivation aura. All of the bandits were slightly pushed back, and they looked at Drake warily.

Drake spoke loudly. “Even if all you worked together, there’s no way you could beat us. Why don’t you just surrender?”

Everybody went quiet - and then the bandits started laughing.

Even his own party members looked at him flabbergasted.

But Drake was serious. If their groups fought, then they would have to kill the bandits.

And Drake… he had never killed a person before.

Despite everything, the bandits were still humans.

Maybe because he was from Earth, but the very idea of killing someone repulsed him and it was the last thing he wanted to do.

Of course, nobody knew what was on his mind and the bandits just started yelling.

“So what if you’re steel body martial artists?”

“Yes, we have so many tempered body martial artists as well!”

“It’s 50 of us against 4 of you, there’s no way we’d lose!”

Normally they would be right, as the gap between tempered and steel body realms wasn’t as much as the gap between mage kings and grand mages for example, fifty tempered body martial artists would normally be more than enough to take on four steel body or warrior mage cultivators. However, battle strength was also determined by the quality of your artifacts, martial techniques, summons, battle experience, and more. And Drake’s party had the bandits completely beat in those regards.

However, the bandits didn’t know that and continued shouting.

“This kid must be an idiot. Let’s teach him a lesson!”

“Yeah, let’s go!”

A couple of bandits made the first move and ran towards Drake. When they reached him, they started attacking with their swords, slashing left and right.

Drake easily dodged all of their attacks, before punching some of them in return, but he controlled his strength and didn’t use any martial techniques that would severely injure them.

“What’s… wrong with him?” Blaze asked, confused as to why Drake wasn’t making mincemeat out of them.

“I think… I understand,” Sylvia said, her green eyes sparkling as she watched Drake hold back most of his strength.

Helen sighed. “Master Drake has always been like this. Back in our village as well, he was against killing or hurting people unless absolutely necessary. He would be extremely gentle to even slaves. Master Drake is simply too kind,” she explained, shaking her head.

Blaze didn’t understand. “But they clearly started attacking us first and want to kill us, what’s wrong with killing them back?”

The girls became quiet and watched as Drake fought six bandits at the same time. He was mostly dodging, and occasionally punched some of them back, just enough to make them think twice about getting back.

In his mind, Drake thought that if he showed them how outclassed they were, they would surrender. He didn’t want to let them retreat either, as they might hurt more people. Ideally, he wanted them all to surrender so he could capture them and take them back to Basindale for the proper authorities to deal with.

Maybe he was being naïve, but in his mind, that was the ideal he was aspiring for.

However, things didn’t go as planned.

The bandits felt as if Drake was toying with them and just became enraged. A couple of them from further back started shooting arrows too. Drake dodged most of them, but one grazed his cheek.

“This is ridiculous,” Blaze cursed, finally losing his patience.

“Fire blade!” he yelled, shooting a blade of fire towards the bandits. That single blade killed all the bandits attacking Drake and some more.

“Indeed,” Sylvia agreed before taking aim with her arrow again.

“Rain!” she spoke softly before releasing her arrow. The mana arrow multiplied in number, becoming twenty different arrows that rained down on the bandits. Some of them dodged or tried to block it, but most of them hit their mark, each resulting in the death of a bandit.

The leader of the bandits was shocked to see so many of his men die so suddenly, but before he could react, a fiery mist appeared behind him, and transformed into Blaze.

“Wai-”

Blaze cut through his neck, sending his head flying. It landed right in front of Drake’s feet.

Drake stared at the severed head, his face aghast.