Chapter 88: Wooden world(24)
Cades currently sat in a vast area of nothingness, the fire long since having burned away most of the forest that had been hiding, also greatly damaging the occasional puppet that tried to come towards and kill him, as if they, the normal ones, would ever be capable of doing such a thing.
He had been sitting here for some time, waiting for Manug, who was still alive, to recover, both from Cades 'attack' and the exhausting fight against the mage that had taken everything out of the archer, whether he himself had realized it in that moment or not.
After some time he had felt his mana being blocked again, but this time he was easily able to solve it, perhaps it was being perpetuated by his usage of the mana, probably so, but Cades was fairly able to hit himself with lightning, not nearly hurting as much as the first time, though the healing had long since stopped, but after about half a hour of waiting it had recuperated and was ready to activate once more, all the while he just sat there, as previously mentioned only rarely standing up and taking care of a few stray puppets that had found their way to him.
Only once was there a stronger puppet, a knight covered in armor, but he was quickly dismembered and served as a kind of research object, hadn't the body disintegrated as soon as it died, perhaps because the being in control was scared of him, a understandable fact when one began to really understand that all of those that served as puppets had lost, unknowing as to how they should obsolve themselves from the weakening, but Cades hadn't, Cades had found out the weakness of the.. weakness.
And perhaps because of that very fact the sickness, if it even had a consciousness, which Caes thought of as very likely, had begun panicking, it had stopped strategizing, pulling the stronger ones somewhere else and sending as many of the weaker ones away, to the place where the two monsters that had been ripping apart its defences were located, trying to hold them back while it recuperated the consciousness of some of the warriors, especially the mage and the hunter, both of those had worked together as a team after all.
The sickness loved them, it adored them, they were the first ones to fall to its might, the ones that fell long before it arrived here, long before the tree on which it resided and grew was uprooted by the formless hand made of mist and put here, like a simple weed that besmirched the garden of a god.
It was actually kind of ironic, the sickness had to spread its intent out over a large area, or at least its influence, which had an intent, and while the sickness itself had been capable of defeating beings that had most likely been much more powerful than him, it could not do so without anyone to control, which meant that it wanted Cades to quickly come closer, he could feel that as well.
In all honesty, Cades had quite the gift when it came to identifying intent, he had after all even been able to ever so slightly do it before, such as when he instantly came up with a likely meaning for the paintings in the first of the temples he had visited, and all of this resulted in him practically hearing everything the sickness, or weakness, or curse, or whatever one might wish to call it, from this far away, from so far away that it would take him about fifteen minutes running there, even at his greatest speed.