Chapter 242: The First Goal
Benton snorted. He was growing overconfident. Just because the battle had started out going his way didn’t mean it would finish that way, not against two Nascent Soul cultivators. If he wanted to win, it was up to him to make the victory happen.
His most important objective was to cut the number of his adversaries in half, meaning he needed to get one of them into the trap. The man, the Fire cultivator, was farther away from the hidden formation, so by simple expedience of the woman, the Water cultivator, being closer to the trap, Benton chose her.
The array would trigger as soon as anyone besides him who possessed a cultivation base entered a circle with a radius of about fifty yards from its center, an area that extended above the ground pretty much all the way to space. Once triggered, the trap would latch onto its target and hold them until either they gathered enough power to break free or the formation was broken. Since the schematic came from System, though, not even a cultivator in the Nascent Soul realm would be able to break it.
Unfortunately, Benton hadn’t been able to afford the necessary materials from the Shop to make the formation indestructible. That failure meant that the formation itself was vulnerable. To counter that weakness, he’d camouflaged it both physically and with anti-detection formations. He’d also buried it deep and kept the channels thin and isolated from their surroundings, not to mention adding multiple redundancies. His final countermeasure was the creation of multiple fake trap arrays that were easier to detect.
Still, he was dealing with Nascent Souls. He was positive the target would be able to quickly either find the trap or send out enough destructive force in such a wide area that locating it precisely didn’t matter.
Its destruction was inevitable, but that was okay. He only needed it to hold for the tiniest fraction of a second. The towers’ real main weapons were linked to the trap triggering, and the qi from that System-designed beam traveled at the speed of light, faster even than a Nascent Soul.
Getting the cultivator into the trap was the same as killing the cultivator.
That summed up Benton’s first goal in the fight. Or second goal. The first was to not die. Not dying was important.
The female cultivator was only about twenty-five yards from the trap’s trigger point, but she was staying completely stationary, relying on ranged attacks as she searched for Benton.
He had two possible avenues to move her into range—trickery or brute force. Neither were slam dunk solutions, though. His best idea to trick her was to appear on the opposite side of the trigger area and try to taunt her into moving straight toward him. The instant she passed within the trap’s range, she would be done for.
The issue there was that she seemed content to remain stationary. There was no guarantee that anything he could do would entice her to move. Worse, his actions might cause both Nascent Souls to suspect the trap’s presence.
Brute force was equally problematic. He would need to produce enough raw power to physically push her back the necessary twenty-five yards. Against someone in his realm or lower, the exercise would be trivial, but he was dealing with someone almost an entire major realm higher than him. Not only was she stronger than him, but that aura of hers would make moving her an inch, much less more than a score of yards, a pure pain in the buttocks.