402. Killing drinkers
Taking down the nine blood drinkers took around forty-five seconds, fifteen more than Kai would have preferred.
One of them, the one closest to him, had reacted faster than expected. It struck at the dome around him just as he was casting, and the brief disruption was enough to cost him a few precious seconds. That was all the time the others needed to start waking properly, but by then the ropes of heat were already around their throats. Tightening them and letting the flesh melt away was not difficult after that.
None of them were anything more than pawns anyway.
They were barely strong enough to test his defenses.
Once they were dead, Kai looked through the cave and found nothing except a skeleton in one corner. It was human, with scraps of flesh still clinging to it, which meant it was almost certainly one of the tribals. Whatever had been done to the person had left the body in too poor a state to identify.
A flicker of anger passed Kai’s body, but there was nothing he could do for the dead right now. He simply marked the cave in his memory so he could return the remains to the tribes later, once every other blood drinker in the storm was dealt with.
Then he moved on.
Over the next hour, he found and wiped out two more small clusters. They were farther apart than the first, but both had chosen similar caves for shelter. These, however, were a little better protected. The entrances had actual defenses placed on them, including a wall of blood at the opening that was hard to notice beneath all the sand stuck to it. Even so, it had still been made by one of the lesser drinkers. Against Kai, that was hardly meaningful. The moment he walked close enough, the protection dome around him tore through it without much resistance.
A drinker had been sitting just behind the wall in both caves, and the moment the blood barrier got disrupted, it sprang up and screamed for the others to wake.
That happened in both clusters.
In the first one, Kai wasn’t fast enough to kill the sentry before the warning went out, and because of that, he ended up having to fight the drinkers head-on. That cost him a few extra minutes. By the time he reached the main part of the cave, the blood drinkers had already formed blood swords and arrows in their hands. Those attacks did nothing to truly threaten his shield, but there were still twelve of them and the constant barrage cut into his visibility.
That was the more annoying part.
Kai still couldn’t use anything too wide either, because in the distance he had already noticed one of the tribals chained to the wall. So instead of ending it all at once, he was forced to kill the blood drinkers one by one. He created wind hands and drove them through the cave, smashing each drinker down wherever he could catch one.
Unfortunately, the tribal he had seen was already dead.
There was one clean line on the man’s neck. He had bled out slowly, and Kai had no doubt the drinkers had enjoyed watching it happen.
That made his anger settle deeper.
So when he found the next cluster, he did not bother with restraint from the start. He created blades of wind around his hands and moved straight through the cave. The blood drinkers barely had time to react before heads, arms, and limbs started falling apart from their bodies. It was less a fight and more a line of death cutting through them.
And even then, he found nothing.
Still, in a short span, he had wiped out a good number of pawns, and that was more than a small victory. Unfortunately, there were still around a hundred blood drinkers left in the storm, and there was no easy way to get through them all. After clearing the third cluster, Kai decided it was time to put heavier pressure on their numbers.
So he moved to target one of the bigger groups next.
It was one of the larger clusters, around two dozen blood drinkers in total, and Kai only had bad luck to thank for what happened next.
By the time he reached the cave, which was hidden in the side of a ridge, three of them were already outside and there was no way to be stealthy this time. They saw him almost at once.
Kai moved immediately and managed to kill two before they could react properly, but the third had already turned and fled back toward the cave. Less than a minute later, the whole cluster was out, and Kai found himself surrounded in the middle of the storm with a lord-ranked blood drinker leading them from the front.
All of them had globes of blood wrapped around their bodies.
The shifting red spheres kept the worst of the sandstorm off them and also worked as a kind of shield, but Kai didn’t care. He raised a hand and sent fire projectiles in every direction. Even with the storm raging all around him, he had more than enough mana to keep the attacks from slowing, and the fire streaked through the sand with full force while the blood drinkers scattered to dodge.
They sent attacks back at him at once, but none of them came close to reaching him.
A few of the pawns abandoned ranged attacks entirely and rushed him with their claws instead. Kai let them get close. Then he tightened the dome around himself, trapping their claws inside its edge for just a breath before using the wind mana woven through it to shear into them. Their screams cut through the storm, and Kai could only hope the sand and wind swallowed most of the sound. The last thing he wanted was for nearby clusters to understand what was happening and start converging on him.
So he moved faster.
He kept killing the pawns around him one after another, but his real focus stayed on the large lord among them. The thing was standing farther back, shaping blood into long lances and hurling them through the storm one after another toward Kai.
But even the lord had realized that as long as the sandstorm kept raging around them, ranged attacks were not going to end this. So it shifted strategies. Blood rushed over its claws and wrapped around its body in a streaming veil before it lunged straight at Kai with its lance, choosing the exact moment when the other drinkers were crowding his vision.
It was a good attempt.
But Kai had seen enough fights like this to know what was coming.
Instead of letting the lord slam into the dome and wear it down, he changed the structure at the last second. The moment he felt where the strike would land, he let the wind loosen in that section of the dome for the briefest instant. Sand blasted in through the opening—and so did the lord.
Kai sealed it shut again immediately, and that was all he needed.
The blood lord had not expected the dome to give way so suddenly and stumbled forward with its blood lance still extended. The weapon struck his inner wind shield, but before the creature could recover, Kai moved. He cut off the fire projectiles from his left hand and instead released a concentrated blast of flame that washed over the drinker’s body.
It shrieked and tried to retreat. Kai did not let it.
He shifted the mana in his wind armor again, refining it, sharpening it, making every edge around him thinner and deadlier. One of the best things about reaching the sixth circle was how finely he could now control mana. The advancement from the fifth circle had already changed his body enough to make that possible, and the next step had only deepened it.
So the wind shield grew sharper and sharper. The blood lord’s limbs hit it first.
Then gave way.
In the next instant, parts of its body were cut apart, and the force of the impact sent it smashing against the inner wall of the dome. Kai opened the barrier just enough for the ruined creature to be thrown back out into the sandstorm, where it vanished into the raging dust below, likely to end up as food for something even worse.
Once the lord was dealt with, Kai didn’t waste any more time on the others.
In less than a minute, he created more projectiles from his left hand and killed the remaining drinkers one by one. It would have been even faster if he had been able to use his other hand as well, but until he dealt with the poison in his arm, one hand was enough.
Either way, these drinkers weren’t strong enough to truly slow him down. The moment the cluster was dead, Kai moved.
He found the opening of the cave and went inside at once. This cave was larger than the others he had entered before, with branching paths running deeper into the rock, but the lingering effect of his soul spell still let him barely make out two souls down one of those passages.
Every part of him hoped they weren’t just more drinkers left behind. And when he finally reached them, his eyes widened.
There were two tribals.
Alive.
He didn’t recognize one of them, but he recognized the other immediately. Maari.
She was groaning in pain, blindfolded, while the man beside her had a face so swollen it looked like he had been beaten over and over again. Even if he didn't have a blindfold, Kai doubted he was able to see anything. Maari wasn’t much better off. Her face had been spared the worst of it, but her legs were clearly broken from the angle they lay at, and bruises showed all over the skin beneath her torn clothes.
Both of them had been through far too much. But they were alive.
That was the only good thing Kai could take from the sight, and it made him let out an audible breath of relief. The sound was enough to make Maari flinch, likely thinking the drinkers had come back.
But then Kai let the dome around himself fall away. “Maari, it’s me. You don’t need to worry.”
She froze for a second before saying in a shaky voice—“Lord Arzan? Is that really you?”
Kai moved closer at once and pulled the blindfold from her eyes. She blinked up at him, disbelief plain on her face, as if her mind couldn’t quite accept that he was really standing there. He didn’t give her time to ask questions. He simply passed her a healing draught. “Drink first. Then talk.”
After that, he moved to the man beside her.
Looking at the state of his face, Kai couldn’t help but let out a small sigh. “This might hurt, but you’re not in any condition to drink this.”
He took out another draught and poured it directly over the man’s swollen face and bruises. The man immediately cried out, the sound rough and muffled, but Kai knew the pain would pass quickly enough and the potion would do its job.
Then he looked back at Maari.
“We don’t have time to sit here and talk,” he said. “I haven’t dealt with every drinker in this storm yet, and getting you both back to the tribes matters more. You can tell me everything once we’re safe.”
She nodded slowly. “How are we supposed to get back? You can’t carry both of us.”
Kai smiled a little. “I can.” At once, he created two large hands of wind and added, “Don’t panic.”
Then he moved the spell forward and lifted both of them. Maari stayed quiet through it, though the man made a startled sound before settling down. Once both of them were secure, Kai wrapped the dome around them all again and started moving back through the cave.
It only took half a minute before he was out in the sandstorm once more.
If Kai’s estimate was right, it shouldn’t take more than an hour to get through the sandstorm, especially now that he no longer had to move carefully to look for the drinkers.
So he pushed forward at full speed.
The storm still hammered against the dome around them, sand and dust scraping over it from every side, but Kai kept speeding. Getting Maari and the other tribal out came first.
Then, from behind him, Maari spoke.
“There were more tribals there,” she said, her voice rough with pain. “I saw them before the drinkers separated us into different caves.”
Kai gave a low grunt. “I found some bodies. I’ll come back for them.”
Maari went quiet for a few seconds. Kai waited for her response and then she said, “What if some of them are still alive?”
Kai didn’t answer right away. Because she was right.
There were definitely more tribals hidden somewhere in the storm, and he knew well enough that Maari didn’t want to abandon them. But what exactly could he do right now? There was no chance he would leave her and the other man somewhere in the middle of all this while he went searching again. He had to get them back to the tribes first, especially with the elder blood drinker likely still somewhere nearby.
So after a while, he spoke up. “I’ll go back for them. But right now, you matter more to the tribes.”
Maari’s voice tightened at that. “That doesn’t mean I want to leave them beh—”
She never finished her sentence.
A screech tore through the storm.
Kai’s expression hardened immediately. He looked back, but through the sand and dust he saw nothing. Then another screech came, and then more, echoing through the storm from multiple directions.
Kai cursed under his breath.
The earlier fight must have been enough to alert the nearby clusters after all, but he could do only one thing right now.
Hence, he pushed even more mana into his spell and drove them faster through the storm, even as more screeches hit his ear.
***
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