404. Vs Dravros (1)
As soon as the drinkers started chasing after him, Kai realised there was no point trying to keep running.
He could’ve kept moving through the sandstorm for longer, at least for a while, but open space was the worst possible place to fight when he had people to protect.
So instead, he moved quickly, created a deflection, and headed toward a nearby cave. Once inside, he put Maari and the other tribal down there before sealing the place with a barrier, hoping that no one would stumble on them.
He had not been careless about it either.
With an elder-ranked drinker leading the others, Kai knew he had to hide more than just their bodies. So he used specific spells to cover not only their life force but also their blood signatures, something most Mages of this era likely would not even think to protect against, but he knew better. In the end, it only took a few proper seals.
He also layered mana over his own veins before stepping away, making sure that even outside the barrier, no one would be able to trace his blood easily. Only after that did he leave, telling Maari to go deeper into the cave and stay hidden.
Afterward, taking out the first few drinkers searching around had been easy enough.
They were nothing more than pests, things he could crush with one or two spells.
Unfortunately, that had also revealed his position, and when Kai finally saw the elder standing there in the storm, he decided it was better to face him directly than waste time chasing lesser drinkers while the real threat watched from the back and possibly led him into a trap.
That choice had worked out well enough so far.
Even though the elder had tried to trick him and likely thought Kai did not understand his racial abilities, he had still managed to catch him off guard and destroy one of his eyes before he retreated.
Unfortunately for Kai, blood drinkers—especially one as old as the creature in front of him—were absurdly regenerative.
So within just a few seconds, he saw the ruined eye begin to restore itself. Flesh knitted back together under the pressure of blood mana, and the damage he had just dealt started disappearing in front of him. Blood mana had some of the best regenerative qualities in existence, even better than light and water in some cases, and Kai already knew that was going to make this fight irritating.
The moment the eye began to reform, he created another spell.
Projectiles burst from his hand in different shapes, some like knights, some like wyverns, all of them burning hot enough to turn the sand around them into glass as they rushed toward the drinker. But the elder only swept his hand out and created another sea of blood in front of himself, letting it rise and take the full heat of Kai’s constructs.
The blood boiled violently, but it still held long enough.
Then the creature moved. He turned and rose higher into the sky at once, his wings stretching wide as another layer of blood mana ran across them to strengthen them further.
Kai didn’t chase him immediately.
He already knew better than to rush after an elder blood drinker without thinking.
Blood drinkers had become extremely common in the later centuries of the world, and his master had even fought one of this level before. He had heard enough from him to know the shape of the tricks such a creature might use, and because of that, Kai already had a fair idea of what Dravros could possibly do in battle.
That didn’t make killing it easy.
If anything, what he had seen so far only made the problem clearer. The creature was very close to becoming a progenitor, and that alone made it dangerous enough. On top of that, Kai didn’t even have the freedom to use everything he wanted. He still couldn’t comfortably rely on double-casting through both hands, and that limitation mattered in a fight like this.
There was another thing he had to account for—Whatever gifts Maleficia might have given Dravros.
Kai had no real doubt that the creature stood at the same level as Regina and Selenia in their organisation, which meant one thing was almost certain.
If pushed near death, it would probably explode as well.
All of that made Kai keep calculating the best way to bring Dravros down, especially with more blood drinkers still moving through the storm. They might have been searching for the tribals for now, but it wouldn’t take long for them to become smaller distractions in the middle of the fight, and smaller distractions were often enough to turn a close battle into a disastrous one.
As those thoughts moved through his mind, Dravros raised his hand. Through the sandstorm, what looked like cannonballs of blood came hurtling toward him, tearing through the air with enough force that Kai knew there was no simple way to dodge all of them. He raised his own hand at once.
A beam of fire ripped through the blood projectiles one after another, but the moment they burst apart, Kai understood what Dravros had truly been aiming for. The blood didn’t vanish. It exploded outward and rained down over his dome, striking him from all sides, and just then huge claws of blood tore through the weakened outer layer and slammed into his wind shield beneath it.
Kai immediately reinforced the shield. Through the tearing red claws, he met Dravros’ eyes.
“You have more battle experience than I expected.”
“I got it by killing your kind,” Kai replied back.
Dravros didn’t react to the jab. The claws only kept pushing harder against the shield, trying to split it open. Instead of casting another straightforward spell, Kai changed the wind shield itself, molding parts of it into great hands that shot out to seize Dravros.
The drinker noticed at the last possible moment and turned to escape, but one of the hands still caught it.
In the next second, however, a burst of blood exploded out from Dravros’ back and shredded through the wind construct.
Before he could fully break free, Kai raised his left hand again and unleashed another beam of fire. It struck Dravros across the shoulder, and for the first time the elder let out a pained sound. But he recovered quickly, turned back around, and answered with a beam of blood of his own.
A beam of blood mixed with dead mana tore through the storm toward him, and Kai immediately moved out of his path. But even while he did that, he saw Dravros’ shoulder already beginning to heal.
The eye he had ruined earlier had also fully restored itself by now, but that didn’t bother him much. If anything, it only gave him the answer he needed. Now he knew how fast the creature could regenerate, and if one or two wounds meant nothing to it, then the only answer was to create so many at once that it would not be able to keep up.
For the next few minutes, once he had a proper feel for Dravros’ attacks, he went fully on the offensive and tried to drown the elder in spell after spell.
By now it was obvious that both of them were the kind of fighters who could switch from ranged combat to close quarters in the span of a breath, so Kai kept his senses stretched and ready.
Every second, he sent out another spell, chaining them together so quickly that Dravros barely had time to deal with one before the next was already there.
Hundreds of flaming lances tore through the sandstorm, followed by sheets of ice meant to pin the blood drinker down and interrupt his movement. Since he still couldn’t comfortably use his right arm, Kai also started shaping parts of his wind shield into something like a cannon, sending sharpened pieces of it outward as bolts.
He kept the pressure constant, never giving Dravros a clean moment to breathe. To his credit, the creature handled all of it as though none of it truly mattered.
He raised huge waves of blood to swallow the projectiles. He smashed through the sheets of ice with brute force. The wind bolts he simply let his flesh take, trusting that the shallow cuts would close in moments anyway. But while he defended, he never stopped pressing forward.
Every opening, no matter how small, he tried to use. Again and again, he extended his claws into massive weapons and crashed them into Kai’s shield, trying to break through by sheer pressure.
And that was the problem.
While Kai needed to carve hundreds of wounds into Dravros to keep him down, Dravros only needed one good hit to make Kai rethink everything. Dravros certainly knew that and fought with exactly that intention.
But his shield was not something that would collapse so easily. More than once it held through attacks that should have broken weaker defenses apart, and once, Kai even met one of Dravros’ strikes head-on by creating a flaming spear and driving it forward.
Even then, he still couldn’t properly contend against the raw strength of an elder blood drinker and had to pull back right after, following it with another spell that Dravros simply twisted around.
Like that, the battle continued inside the sandstorm, both of them refusing to give the other even the smallest opening.
From time to time, Kai did notice other blood drinkers at the edges of the storm, but with the amount of spells flying between him and Dravros, none of them dared come too close. That was for their own good.
Dravros itself didn’t seem interested in letting anyone else interfere either. The more the fight went on, the more his eyes changed. He became too focused, too sharp, completely swallowed by the battle itself.
Kai knew that look.
He had seen it before, and he had worn it before too. It was the look of someone fighting an opponent they could not easily measure, one they didn’t know for certain they could defeat but wanted to all the same.
There was always a certain thrill in facing someone close enough to your own strength to make the outcome uncertain, and Dravros clearly reveled in that feeling.
It showed in the way the creature attacked.
His strikes became cleaner, faster, and more dangerous with every passing moment. Once, Dravros formed a massive lance of blood, nearly three metres long, and drove it straight into Kai’s shield with enough force to try and skewer him through it.
Honestly, it might have worked if Kai had not reacted in time by creating huge chains and wind hands to catch the lance and hold him back before firing another spell at Dravros in return.
But even that exchange told Kai something important.
Just that one attack had cost the creature a good amount of energy, yet Dravros kept fighting with the same level of intensity even after that attack had failed.
That alone told Kai that the creature’s mana reserves were likely larger than he had first estimated, and that became a problem almost immediately, especially when he noticed something far too late.
During their repeated close-range clashes, Dravros had been slowly mixing dead mana into his blood attacks and letting that filth seep into the edges of his wind shield. It had been in such tiny amounts each time that Kai had honestly dismissed it as nothing more than residue from the storm around them.
But it wasn’t.
The moment he properly noticed it, he understood what Dravros had been trying to do all along.
The creature wanted to corrupt his wind shield enough that Kai would have no choice but to drop it and rebuild it from scratch. And the moment he did that, Dravros would use the opening to land a killing blow. There was no simple way to purge dead mana from the shield while still maintaining it, especially not when the corruption was this concentrated.
That made it a real problem, and one Kai was annoyed at himself for missing.
Dravros seemed to realize halfway through their next exchange that Kai had finally seen through the trick.
Naturally, he grinned.
“So you noticed it?” the drinker said. “I honestly thought you would have figured it out much sooner. It seems I overestimated you. Why don’t you stop and repair your shield before your right hand ends up even worse than it already is?”
Kai let some annoyance show on his face even if the taunt itself didn’t truly get to him.
Then he answered with another spell, a fifth-circle fire spell. He called it [Sunflare Spiral], a tightly wound burst of white-orange fire that rotated inward as it moved, dragging heat and wind into itself before bursting outward at the point of impact.
The spell tore through the storm toward Dravros in a screaming spiral of light, forcing the creature to break away rather than continue speaking.
Kai wasn’t much of an actor, but in fights at this level, messing with an opponent’s mindset mattered. If Dravros thought the taunt had landed, then it might push too hard or make the wrong read.
And for now, even the smallest crack in the creature’s judgement was worth creating.
It was the best kind of advantage one could get against an opponent who was fully capable of killing you. If you could make them feel in control, then they might start leaning toward the idea of victory and stop looking as carefully for what was hidden underneath.
As for Dravros knowing that he could not use his right arm properly, that was only observation. Kai doubted the drinker understood the real reason behind it, but that changed nothing.
He was still being pushed into a disadvantage little by little.
Till now, Kai had been slowly shaving away at the drinker’s reserves, but if those reserves were larger than expected, then he needed to change his approach.
More than that, he was also on a timer now.
The thin sheet of corrupted dead mana moving through his wind shield was becoming harder to ignore. If his estimate was right, then he had around three minutes before he would have no choice but to discard the shield and make a new one.
Maybe a little more if he stacked another shield underneath the current one, but that would not solve the actual corruption spreading through it, and it would be too close for the dead mana to stick into it too. Purging the dead mana directly also did not look possible, not with how concentrated and potent it was.
Hence, as Dravros defended against the newer spells he sent at him, Kai moved through possibilities. He needed a way to hold the drinker back for a few seconds, replace the shield, and also injure it badly enough that the shift in momentum would matter.
He had already considered several methods earlier in the fight, but now the time limit had changed everything. He could no longer just drown the creature in projectiles and hope the pressure eventually broke it down.
As Kai kept thinking, the sound of the sandstorm around him suddenly pushed into his attention.
For the briefest moment, it distracted him, but then something in that noise clicked in his mind and began to grow into a real idea that might just work.
And if it worked, it might be enough to kill Dravros.
***
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