Chapter 141: Saving Resources
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.