Chapter 364: A Vow Honored
With fleeing no longer an option, Benton had to figure out the best way to fight a battle against the fifteen Nascent Souls preparing to attack him—well, fourteen, anyway. The idiot who made the inferior formation didn’t appear to be an active participant.
His first step was to activate all his defenses. Even as a Nascent Soul, his Aura Defense technique wasn’t useless. It still worked to diminish Auras being used against him. Next, he activated Clone and Invisibility. Finally, he fired a massive Earth Shot coated in an inferno of flames high into the air. If that didn’t signal “help” to the Poison Claw Sect, he didn’t know what would.
Typically, he would have been pretty confident in his countermeasures. Since no one could detect him with their spiritual sense, the combination of his invisibility and clone made him almost impossible to fight. They couldn’t hit or defend against him if they couldn’t even see him.
The strategy worked the first time he fought Nascent Souls, after all, and he’d only been a Golden Core. There were two problems he currently had that his previous self didn’t, though.
One, his sect members were in a much more vulnerable position. They only had his pylons to defend them—admittedly a lot of pylons stacked—and those were only meant to hold up as a temporary measure that would hopefully last long enough for him to figure something out. And, two, he was almost out of qi.
Not that he hadn’t experienced that last issue in the other fight, but back then, he’d been able to disappear into a prepared position to replenish his pool while relying on his defenses to protect his sect members. If he stayed out of sight for too long in the current fight, he had to believe that his enemies were competent enough to take hostages.
Which he absolutely couldn’t allow.
On the plus side, he’d have at least four allies joining him soon. Probably in less than a minute. Which was approximately an eternity considering the realm of his opponents.
Benton did the only thing he could do—activated Time Manipulation to the greatest extent that he could, pushing it so that his bubble ran twenty times faster than objective time, and stuffed greater spirit coins in his mouth.
Zou Tian suspected he might have made an enormous mistake. Time had been of the essence, and as Master always said, it was almost always better to make a suboptimal choice fast than to make the best choice too late.
The problem was that he expected Master’s initial strike to be much more effective, killing multiple Nascent Souls and sowing chaos in the ranks of his enemies. But only one had died. And the rest prepared to fight back.
The hope had been that Master would keep the enemy force engaged until reinforcements arrived, and Zou Tian and his sect mates would only engage at a crucial point if they were needed.