They must have greatly underestimated the cacophony that a single man could wreak, and when the name of the Empire was uttered, even now, many didn’t know the weight it carried.
Many who understood the weight of the Empire, the devastation that a single man birthed from that nation could wrought, were of the old generation. They were old, and even though they had told the tales to this generation, the new generation was much too arrogant and pompous to understand the weight and significance of such tales.
The battlefield upon the plains hundreds of meters away from Ryugan’s walls reverberated with terrible sounds of battle. Thousands of soldiers who had lost their lives once in battle were being called upon again, descending upon six humans who fought like forces of nature themselves.
A wild and untamable fire thrashed across thousands of soldiers with violence and without mercy. The army of dead men were relentless. They didn’t know when to stop and pushed themselves through the wall of fire, the huge walls of flames nothing to them.
They didn’t fight like normal men, and even though these six individuals were probably the best that the rest of the Central Plains could manage to present, it was difficult for them to get used to the fact that they were fighting beings who couldn’t feel pain.
The thralls could simply be punched, they would reel back from the impact, but would shoot forward with no regard for their bodies. They held shields and swords, but those were merely extensions of their true weapons.
The true weapons the thralls used to fight were themselves. Their limbs, their bones, their mass. They threw their heads into the path of an attack to let their hand lunge forward instead, catching their opponents in a web of flesh and steel.
At first, this was easy to deal with. It didn’t matter what the thralls threw at them. The result ended all the same. The people the thralls were fighting were bathed in overwhelming power and had been soundly trained by the harshest teacher that existed.
Suffering had beaten and battered these people, and if there was one thing it had taught them well how to do, or to be more specific, had beaten into them with terrible losses, it was the ability to adapt.
So the group was moving well against the thralls’ pressing offenses. But this was beginning to change. The thralls never stayed dead, nor did parts of their bodies.
A hand that was severed came back to grab the leg of who severed it. A tongue that was cut off flew to distract the opponent. The thralls made use of their bodies as weapons so thoroughly that it was beginning to get irritable to deal with them.
For Annette it was relatively easy. At the same time, not quite so. She lunged into the air and descended with a torrent of flames that flooded the ground and rushed forward like an unstoppable tide. She rode on top of her own flames like a surfer and was pushing forward to the center of the battlefield where the mander of this dead army had situated himself.
He was embedded in a box of thralls. Annette didn’t even know if he was still there or if he had simply switched his location, because she had lost sight of him at a point.
Nonetheless, she drove her flames forward.
For Vida, things were different. And more difficult.
She was surrounded from all sides. Unlike Annette, there was no clear way out.
But Vida wasn’t looking for a way out. She fought within that cage.
Her hands moved with a fluidity that there was no thrall she did not hit. Each of her blows was the blow of a Master, but Vida didn’t simply strike. She knew where to punch to shatter bone. She knew where to hinder movement, where to send an impulse of stillness into the enemy’s body with a single strike to a particular point.
She was majorly a duelist, a close-handed batant, and her talent was a Class D talent that merely enhanced her strength. Nothing special. Nothing that would make anyone look twice. For as long as anyone could remember, Vida had survived by being the underdog. In her family, in the Dark Continent. She had spent a long time being irrelevant, latching onto Annette not out of weakness but out of respect for the woman’s strength and her lackadaisical approach to life.
Unlike Raven or Terence or Braham, Vida had no aura of recognition on her. What that darkness had done to her was force her to build a relationship with it, and she had learned patience through irrelevance. It had embedded itself into every movement of her body.
And it showed now.
Unlike the others, Vida adapted fast to the enemies she was fighting. She fought them like she was fighting beings who couldn’t feel pain, and how quickly her strikes followed each other told very well that she was not expecting a halt or any kind of restraint in the motor response of her opponents. One strike flowed into the next and the next and the next, each one finding the exact point where it would do the most damage to the body’s ability to function.
Regardless of their number overwhelming her from all sides, she herself did not seem overwhelmed. She hit them one after the other with brutal patience.
And then there was Jeci and Lynus.
Those two moved like a tide of darkness and ash. It was slightly unexpected that they were moving together across the battlefield, and the way they plemented each other made one want to know what exactly had happened for the two to fight so coolly next to each other.
But all of that could be temporarily forgotten to focus on their hypnotic movements.
Jeci moved across the battlefield, her spear turning like a red gale of wind and severing the thralls. The spear sometimes clashed with shields and released fiery sparks, but that didn’t happen too often, because this was where Lynus came in.
He moved ahead of her like a grey bird, breaking formations before she reached them. Shields that would have blocked her spear were already wrenched aside. Thralls that would have flanked her were already crumpling. He made sure her advance did not meet any resistance.
As Annette was advancing towards the mander from the west, Jeci and Lynus were advancing from the east, pushing further so that the sphere of her talent’s ability would be able to affect him.
Her talent usually were not so effective against higher-ranked Drifters, but she was not alone. All she needed to do was weaken his talent ability and let the others take care of him.
After all, they had a Paragon amidst them.
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