407. Was that wind?
The screams were so blood-curdling that Kai was sure even the beasts lurking around the storm would have run and hidden by now, if they had not already done so.
But Kai had no room to focus on that.
He was still inside a violent dead mana storm that had already torn through parts of his shield, and he knew well enough what was going to happen to Dravros’ body soon. So he pushed what little mana he had left through his body and forced himself forward, ignoring the heaviness spreading through his limbs and the pain flaring up from having driven his reserves too far.
Dead mana still brushed after him in places, crawling over his legs and catching at his robes, but he didn’t stop for it.
With the drinker nearly dead, the storm no longer surged forward after him the same way, and soon Kai managed to rise above it.
Then, he looked down and what he saw made him let out a breath of relief.
The soul spell had done what he wanted.
The bindings it created were not fully part of this world. They came from the gap between two different realms, and because of that, they kept melting Dravros’ body no matter how much blood mana and dead mana the creature threw at them.
His power could struggle, could push, could scream against them, but it could not truly damage what did not belong to the same layer of existence as himself.
And with every second that passed, more of those golden bindings emerged. They wrapped tighter, burned and restricted more.
In the middle of that dark storm, Dravros almost looked like a lantern, his body wrapped in golden light while the rest of the world around him stayed black. The contrast was almost beautiful if Kai ignored the way flesh kept coming apart under the bindings.
Dravros screamed again and again.
Then, just for a brief second, his eyes found Kai above the storm. The glare in them was filled with hate, but the creature couldn’t move toward him. He couldn’t even take one step closer.
All he could do was scream while his body kept breaking apart. Dravros seemed to realise that as well.
Even through all the screaming, the anger, the frustration, and the fury twisting across his face, another emotion slowly rose through his eyes—Fear.
Kai saw it clearly.
It kept growing inside the creature’s eyes until there was no denying it anymore. Dravros knew. He knew that no matter what he tried now, his death was already certain in the next few breaths.
Then it finally happened.
The golden bindings melted through so much of its flesh that its eyes soon lost focus. Its regeneration had already fallen behind, and even through the dark storm, Kai saw parts of its insides tearing loose and dropping onto the sand below. But he did not stay there to keep watching.
The moment he saw the end getting close, he moved higher, pushing himself farther and farther away, trying to put as much distance between himself and the dying blood drinker as he could.
He knew what was coming next. He waited for a few seconds—BAM!
Dravros’ body exploded.
Kai had seen it before with Regina and Selenia, but that did not make it any less horrifying. If anything, this one was worse.
The blast was larger, far larger, swallowing a wide part of the dead mana storm around it. Flesh, blood, dark mana, and shattered golden light all burst outward at once, and because so many violent forces were clashing together in the same place—blood mana, dead mana, and soul bindings—the whole thing turned even more unstable.
The explosion spread through the storm like a rotten sun going off in the dark, black and red and gold tearing through each other while the air itself seemed to scream under the force of it.
If Kai had not climbed higher when he did, he would have been caught in it for sure.
Even from where he was, he felt the blast.
The shockwave struck him a breath later, carrying bits of corrupted blood and dead mana so foul that he had to reinforce his defenses again on instinct. Below him, the storm twisted wildly as if the explosion had punched a hole right through its heart, and for a few moments, the whole area looked like it had become nothing more than a churning grave of dark wind and burning filth.
And even while he watched it, one thought rose in Kai’s mind again.
What kind of master turned its own servants into bombs upon death?
To any Mage, that was one of the ugliest ways to go. Kai knew that well. In the future, some Mages would eventually create self-destruction spells meant to take their enemies down with them at the very end, but such methods were always looked down on in the magical community. No matter the excuse, there was something vile about ending a life that way.
But here, a being was doing exactly that.
Its followers were nothing more than tools to it, disposable even in death, and that only made things clearer in Kai’s mind. He was not fighting some king who still had scraps of humanity left in him. He was fighting a dragon, something whose entire existence was bent toward ruining the world and nothing else. In a strange way, that made the ugliness of it feel almost fitting.
With that thought in his mind, Kai stayed in the air and waited for the smoke below to thin and started clearing as much dead mana from his body and robes as he could at the same time.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have much mana left to work with. His soul mana was completely drained, and that would take time to recover. Whatever ordinary mana remained to him would be needed for flying and moving around, especially because he had to check on Maari and the other tribal.
So he couldn’t properly purge himself now.
The robes were the easier part. He could abandon them if needed. But the dead mana had already started creeping through his legs, and that was a much worse problem. In the end, Kai did the best thing available to him. He drank one of his mana potions, recovered just enough to work with, and then used a small amount of that mana to block off parts of his legs from the inside so the dead mana would not spread any farther.
It was not a true solution.
The corruption would still jam his veins and continue damaging the flesh there, but at least it would stay contained to the less important parts of his body for now. At worst, flying would become more difficult.
That he could accept.
Once he made it back to the Valkyrie Tower, he would let Amyra deal with it.
If anything, she would probably be more than happy to purify his legs for him.
And from what he had seen of Amyra’s powers, Kai was sure he would be fine soon enough.
It also helped that his current body was much more resistant to dead mana than before because of all the advancements he had gone through. Even so, the thought still crossed his mind that it would not be a bad idea to focus more on his Enforcer side later and unlock another vault.
For now, though, he only kept pushing mana through his legs to hold the corruption back.
As he did that, the smoke below finally began to thin.
He wanted everything done quickly so he could get back to the tower as soon as possible.
He dropped lower at once, looking over the scorched sand below. There were still traces of dead mana moving through it, like black veins spreading through the desert, but after a few breaths he finally found what was left of Dravros.
His body was torn apart and ruined in every piece.
His head had been completely blown away, leaving behind nothing but dark blood and scraps of brain matter. The sight was bad enough that even Kai felt his stomach lurch for a moment, but he forced it down and started checking the remains anyway. If there was anything on the corpse that might help him learn more about Maleficia, he wanted to find it.
Sadly, there was nothing.
The explosion had been too violent and too complete. Even an elder-ranked blood drinker’s body had not been able to leave much behind after that. In the end, Kai could only spare a brief thought and hope that whatever soul remained of Dravros would not carry the same cruelty into its next life.
Then he turned to leave.
But just before he moved away, something brushed against the back of his neck for only a moment.
Kai froze.
Mana rushed into his hands on instinct as he turned and looked around, but there was nothing there.
Still, he immediately rose back into the sky and muttered to himself, “Was that just the wind?”
For some reason, Kai didn’t think it was just the wind.
Still, no matter how much he looked around, he couldn't find any sign of danger. Nothing that would explain what he had felt. In the end, he let out a breath and wondered whether he was simply imagining things before turning and moving toward the dead mana storm in the distance.
Whatever that had been, his first priority was still the tribals.
Fortunately, the dead mana mixed into the sandstorm had already weakened somewhat with time. The natural sand aspect in the desert was starting to take over again, and because of that, Kai did not need to build a very strong wind shield just to move through it.
Even so, he knew he would have to come back here later with Amyra and cleanse whatever residual dead mana remained. That was just one more task added to the long list waiting for him.
At least finding Maari and the other tribal didn’t take long.
They were still inside the cave where he had left them. Some dead mana had drifted in, but they had moved deeper inside and managed to avoid the worst of it. The moment they saw Kai, relief showed plainly on their faces, and both of them immediately wanted to know what had happened.
Kai only told them the most important part. He had killed the blood drinker leading the others.
After that, he used more mana to shape hands and help pull them back out of the storm.
Maari was clearly unhappy when he first told her he couldn’t go searching for the other tribals right away, but then he gave his reasoning. He was almost out of mana, his body needed rest, dead mana was already inside him, and if he pushed himself further by searching the whole storm now, there was a real chance he would end up losing his life for it. On top of that, the elder was dead, but some of the lesser blood drinkers could still be wandering around.
Once he explained it that way, she understood. And as it turned out, that caution was justified.
Because they were attacked again soon after leaving the storm. Some of the blood drinkers had only been waiting.
They had stayed back, hidden, biding their time until they saw Kai. He did not know why they still thought attacking him was a good idea even after seeing their leader’s blood all over the sand, but he guessed part of it was revenge and the other part was them believing he had to be too weak and out of mana now to properly defend himself.
Unfortunately for them, they were wrong.
Kai had kept some mana in reserve for exactly this possibility, and the moment the drinkers rushed at him with their claws stretched out, ready to tear into him, he raised his hand and formed dozens of projectiles at once. They blasted downward in a rain and slammed them into the sand.
Kai didn’t even stop to check whether they had died.
He simply kept moving through the desert, wanting to reach safety as quickly as possible.
Fortunately, after that, nothing else came after them. What remained difficult was the journey itself. With his reserves so low and both his body and mind already pushed too far, Kai had to keep lowering himself to the ground every so often just to rest for a few minutes and force down more mana potions. He could not drink them all at once either. His body still needed time to absorb outside mana, and in this desert there was barely any ambient mana to help with that, which made the whole process even worse.
Both Maari and the other tribal kept watching him with worry clear on their faces, but every time they asked, Kai only told them he was fine and that they would reach the tower soon enough.
Even so, in the end, it still took more than two hours before they finally got there.
The moment they reached the tower, Kai finally let out a breath of relief.
More than once during the flight, he had felt like his body might simply give out before he ever made it back. He had pushed himself too hard for too long. Not only had he been forcing mana through his body to keep the dead mana in his flesh from spreading, he had also been carrying both Maari and the other tribal the whole way.
By the time the Valkyrie Tower came into view and he stepped inside it, he could not help feeling safe for the first time in a while.
The mana around the tower felt soft.
It settled around him like a blanket after a storm, and even that alone made some of the pressure inside his body ease. Once they moved through the lift, it did not take long for Neris and Kael to find them. Both of them rushed over the moment they saw Kai’s state, their eyes immediately catching on how haggard he looked and on the two tribals behind him.
Kai only told them not to panic.
He let them guide him to a room where he could rest. Once there, he dropped onto the bed and told them to send Amyra to him and to take care of the tribals first.
After that, everything blurred. Kai did not even notice when they left the room.
The moment he was alone, the battle started running through his mind again.
Dravros. The dead mana storm. How hard he had needed to fight just to kill a single follower of Malefic.
The thought sat heavily in his chest. It made him feel weak in a way he had not even felt when he first stood before Spirit King Vaelthoros. At least back then, there had been enough reasons for the gap in power that he could accept it. But this was different. Dravros had only been a subordinate. A servant. And if someone like that had pushed him so far, then how much stronger was Malefic itself?
That thought stayed with him as exhaustion finally dragged him under.
Kai fell asleep without realising that very soon, he was going to get a glimpse of Malefic’s power for himself.
***
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