With her level of experience, it would have been quite foolish of Annette to assume that all she was seeing of the mander was all there was to him. He emanated the aura of a Sage, so she knew well that she had met her match.
But she herself would know how devastating the Empire’s army strength could be. Trying to measure a Sage from there with the strength of every Sage she had encountered in the Central Plains was going to be detrimental and foolish of her.
So no, she wasn’t looking down at the mander in any manner. She wasn’t underestimating him at all. But one thing Annette was good at was riling up the emotions of her opponents.
’Stars, if I don’t get them fired up, how else will they enjoy the battle?’
Annette grinned like a mad woman as she caught both corpses by their wrists before they could stab the arrows right into her chest. Her grin spread even wider and her vermilion eyes ignited with ferocious flames as she screamed excitedly and wrenched both their arms apart.
Flames erupted from their joints and melted their bones from the inside. Their arms tore off with Annette’s pull. While it looked easy on the outside, Annette had burnt the resistance of their muscles with her flames.
Moreso, they were dead. Their bodies weren’t so durable to begin with.
With hands yanked away in such a debilitating manner, any normal opponent would have recoiled, flinched or staggered. The action alone was supposed to buy even one second of reprieve, and any batant would expect such. Muscle memory built on a thousand fights said the same thing: after dismemberment, the enemy hesitates.
But Annette wasn’t fighting people who could feel pain or be affected by it. For a moment, she forgot that.
They followed up with their remaining hands, drawing the arrows from their wrenched limbs. The arrows spun in their grips with blurring speed and both hands drifted towards Annette’s neck from both sides.
Her eyes widened sharply and a tornado of flames surrounded her, throwing them into the air. The tornado slowly cleared and Annette’s gaze found them again, fury burning viciously in her single vermilion eye.
"How dare you?!"
"Instructor..."
She exploded forward and not even Raven’s belated call stopped her.
She caught up to both of them as they tumbled mid-air. She battered the first one with fists encased in flames, every punch sending shockwaves of heat rippling from the dead man’s back. She grabbed his head mid-air and wrenched forward, forcibly twisting it off the neck. A gigantic arrow of flames fell from the sky and crashed the thrall to the ground, driving it into the earth with a thunderous impact.
By the time Annette was done with it and turned towards the second one, the second one was no longer alone.
Many more had risen and lunged towards her. All of them held a sword and a shield in their arms.
There were some on the ground too, standing in formation. Two held a massive bow braced against the ground while a third was loading a gigantic javelin to the string, pulling it backward and aiming it not at Annette, but at the others. Sael, Raven, Jeci, Lynus, the rest of them, including the flying ship.
Sael’s eyes widened.
Not just one, not just two soldiers were standing, there were a ton of them. All the soldiers that had died were rising back up, armed and arranged in the very formations they had used in life.
The mander hadn’t just reanimated corpses. He had reanimated his army, plete with the tactics and coordination he had drilled into them. Every formation, every strategy they had used to devastate Ryugan’s gate was now turned against Sael’s group, and who was in a better position to execute them than the mander himself?
Sael finally understood why the man had said they were just about to start properly.
’He has a very unlikeable talent.’
Sael looked at mander Zebelon with displeasure. He was low on essence, and he truly didn’t want Lord Northern to enter a battle like this.
Of course, something told Sael that for the mysterious man, such a talent would be useless. Once again, Sael was reminded of the one person his gaze was upon. The person that had managed to make him feel weak and made the need to grow again consume him.
’Essence is low? Well, how else will I overe my limits.’
Sael inhaled deeply and stretched the bow forward, right towards the javelin that was aimed at him.
All around him, the cacophony had broken loose. Annette was the loudest, her flames resounding like a mighty thunderstorm as she simply detonated the thralls that lifelessly threw themselves onto her.
Raven had also descended, meeting the javelin midway and swiping it away with the torrent of wind generated by her black wings.
Jeci and Lynus moved on the ground.
Jeci herself was hauled back by the force of the javelin, furious sparks screeching off her spear as it pushed her back through the dirt. She wrenched it aside and launched herself forward with immense speed, her armor emanating an unfortable darkness as she sprinted through in less than a second before she leaped and twisted her body, then crashed her spear into the group of three, throwing them all away with the impact.
Lynus carved his own path, moving with fluid speed, beating through the air like liquid wind before unleashing his wings amidst the group of archers.
Sael challenged himself. Despite his drained essence, he pulled Tideturner’s strings over and over again and loosed arrows straight into the battlefield below him. Nightmare Wyvern also moved, dodging attacks by disappearing and reappearing elsewhere, and each time Sael would unleash an ice arrow from the bow, sending frost spreading across the ground. Since they couldn’t die, it was a better idea to restrain them.
And it was working.
...It seemed so at first.
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