Chapter 152: An Aura of Success or Failure?
Benton dropped Stealth just before loosing the bowstring simply because it felt more sporting to give the eagle a chance in lieu of having the swift arrow appear literally out of nowhere. Not that it mattered. His Foundation Establishment level archery technique made his arrow faster than a bullet and added a seeking function.
Even if the bird would have had time to dodge the arrow, it wouldn’t have been able to.
The tip struck true, aimed at the junction of the right wing and the eagle’s body. Wood qi overwhelmed the bird’s Wind aspected qi shield, and Void qi destroyed a good chunk of the wing.
The creature was tough, though. Even a hundred qi supercharged with a Concept wasn’t enough to kill it. In fact, if Benton hadn’t hit a critical location, the beast might not have even been all that injured. As it was, the bird couldn’t fly with only a single operatable wing and soon crashed to the rocky ground.
With its five allies still far off, Benton Quickstepped to it and finished it off with his spear. The tough bird took three more strikes to die.
Rank nine beasts truly were on another tier compared to the last wave. If there had been thousands of them like the rank ones in the first wave, he might have been in trouble, especially if each of them took four hits or so to kill.
In the end, though, he still had way too many advantages over the rank nines to consider them a true challenge. His Gravity technique, while not slowing them to barely moving or anything, hindered their movements. Time Manipulation sped his relative velocity so fast that it would have been like the beasts were standing still regardless of the gravity. His attack technique countered each of the beast’s qi shields with an opposing element, giving each of his strikes more penetration power and allowing his Void qi to touch skin or fur or feathers or what have you.
Between his extreme effective speed advantage which allowed him to strike the beasts with impunity and the absurd amount of damage each hit with his spear caused, the five didn’t last long, and bonus, the extremely valuable carcasses weren’t too beat up to sell.
Well, they were kind of missing chunks from the use of Void aspected qi here and there, but still, he’d be able to get some decent money for them. It wasn’t like there were a lot of rank nine beast pelts going on the market. Even scraps were worth something, and he had a lot more than just that little amount.
Reflecting on his last couple of fights, though, he did have a worry. The overall toughness and prowess of the beasts steadily improved from rank to rank. Which obviously was to be expected. But the magnitude of the jumps was still a bit disconcerting.
The entire seventh wave had been completely incapacitated by his gravity field, and he’d been able to one shot all of them. For the eighth wave, the beasts were able to still move in an equivalent gravity field, albeit slowly, and three of the creatures had survived his first strike to be taken down by the second. Finally, for that last wave, the beasts were only somewhat slowed by the field, and all had taken multiple hits to kill.
What was really bad about that progression was that all those ranks were jumps in minor realm only. They were still all the equivalent of Golden Core cultivators. Rank ten represented an advancement to the next major realm, the realm above Benton—the equivalent of Nascent Soul.