Chapter 125. Killing Farm
The few remaining guards who hadn’t been thinned by Rhys and Lira’s attacks charged. Rhys charged to meet them. He struck with his sword, knocking the first guard’s weapon aside, then gripped the guard’s face and pulled, drawing the man’s energy and body into his trash star. Lira struck. Her sword swirled, dancing like a whip. It swirled past the guard’s sword and slashed deep cuts into his arm. He released his sword and stumbled back, directly into Rhys’s waiting hand. Rhys gripped his skull tight and pulled, drawing out his energy, then his body.
The guards here were all Tier 1 and 2, or else he wouldn’t be able to absorb them so freely. He struggled to absorb people at his Tier unless they were severely injured or dead, on top of the basic path limitation. If they were a lower Tier than him, though, it was ridiculously simple to absorb them. They barely even made a dent in the massive storage space around his core. Of course, there was also that void in his core, that hole to somewhere that he didn’t understand anything about, but that… was something he was better off not thinking about. At least not in the middle of battle.
The last of the guards fell under his and Lira’s combined onslaught, with the newly-reinstated mage barely getting to combat before the fight was over. He stood around awkwardly, looking a little out-of-place. Rhys quickly absorbed the remaining guards, then turned to the ones who were following them and pointed out another two former prisoners. “You two, step forward.”
“There’s more guards coming. You, come with me. We’ll keep them off him,” Lira ordered, gesturing at the other mage. He nodded and jogged over to her side, and the two of them ran to meet the next set of guards.
Rhys smiled at the two he’d chosen. “This won’t take long. It might hurt, but it should be over quickly.” He lifted his hand.
The first one stepped forward, placing her shoulder under her hand. The resolve in her eyes told him she wasn’t going to give up no matter what. He closed his eyes and poured power into her, forming a core as quickly and robustly as he could. She clenched her teeth in pain and sweat rolled down her brow, but she refused to make a noise, until at last he released her shoulder, and she stepped back and gasped in shock, then raised her hand. A fireball whooshed into being in her palm.
Rhys gave her palm a longing look. “Treasure it,” he said quietly.
“I will, of course I will. I’ll treasure this core until the end of my days,” she promised.
I meant the fireball… oh, well. Rhys put his hand on the next man’s shoulder and pushed power into him, reforming his core.
As he reformed the man’s core, he turned his attention to the bundle of bugs in his core. He’d absorbed hundreds, no, thousands as he’d walked through the fields, all of them pests. There were beetles, flashy, petal-eating things with nothing but their carapaces and wings to help them survive. There were centipedes with their long, slinky bodies and venomous fangs, and millipedes with their rounded tops and hundreds of tiny legs moving in sync. Grubs, too, joined the mix, caterpillars and pupae of all descriptions. There was a bundle in his core of just ants, some of them fiery, with a powerful venom in their bite, or simply large fangs. Flies, undesirable worms, silverfish, roaches, wasps and hornets, every kind of bug except for spiders, which weren’t pests and didn’t threaten the plants in any way.