Chapter 95 - Devastation (2)

Efari and I reached the enemy mages.

A fireball and a lightning bolt came hurtling toward me, and I blocked both of them with my enchanted black longsword, which was now surrounded by flames. Covered and enhanced by red flames, the lightning bolt and fireball dissipated before the sword, overcome by my flames.

Threads of my black colored magic also formed an aura around me, becoming denser as the enchanted armor conducted and enhanced the aura by a tiny bit.

I neared the two mages, one female and the other male, that had shot those magic attacks at me. I turned my horse a little to the side as I arrived and burnt and hacked both of their heads off with one fell swoop.

Then I jumped off my horse, abandoning the mount. It was just in time too, as six colums of flame and five earth spears came sprouting out of nowhere. The horse was neighing in agony as it was roasted alive by the enemy fire. The pain continued before the five spears stabbed its body, causing it to drop dead to the ground.

Seeing our blatant intrusion into their forces, more than two tens of enemy mages were now focused on Efari and I. Enemy knights and soldiers came charging forward from one side and the rows and columns of enemy units strategically moved forward, swallowing both of us.

Efari and I were now besieged on all sides, a circle of hundreds of enemies around us. Snake-like arcs of fire came bursting from one side, while water honed sharply into fine spears came shooting forth. Efari and I both jumped simultaneously and landed on top of the bodies of soldiers. Our jump dodged all the magic spells, causing self-inflicted casualties among the enemies.

Upon landing, our superior physical strength instantly gave us the advantage and we used our weapons to hack off the heads of the closest soldiers. There was just about enough space to do so also, since our landing had caused multiple enemies to fall down.

Efari made another graceful little dance and an enemy head flew off into the air, making dizzying arcs. It was as if a goddess of death had descended. With a white aura mist surrounding her whole body, Efari deflected all the aimed sword strikes as if the attacks had come from toy swords.

A concentrated column of fire mixed with blue lightning suddenly appear from below the ground, piercing through her aura. But it was not able to pierce through all the way, and the magic quickly dissipated, leaving only a small scorch mark and some bleeding. Efari only grunted a little in pain before devouring the life essence of a close by enemy soldier.

Devourers!

They were undoubtedly monsters that excelled in group fighting. With such a large amount of humans and so much life essence to freely take, Efari had a limitless amount of stamina and power.

As four huge knights in black armor came charging at me, I created columns of fire in a circle around me. These flames instantly burned every enemy in a twenty feed radius around me. Agonizing screams were heard and the acrid smell of burnt flesh wafted across the field.

“Monsters!”

Many soldiers were shouting that word a far distance to my front.

It was only natural.

In a far distance, perhaps about four hundred enemies blocking, Eden and Kiara were each creating two hells. An icy hell and a fiery hell.

Hundreds of soldiers fell to their explosive nova of fire magic and ice magic. Tens upon tens of humans turned into blocks of ice, their ugly expressions forever encased in the blocks of ice, before the block was finally shattered into pieces. Blood did not even flow out from these ice-encased limbs and body parts, as Kiara's ice magic froze everything, including blood flow.

“WATER PRISON FORMATION!” an enemy yelled out from afar.

Out of nowhere, dozens of enemy mages began working in concentration, their threads of magic flowing together. The power of the magic was enormous, more than I could ever hope to put out. The magic was soon released, and smashed apart Eden's natural magical resistance territory like a hammer smashing against a small wooden toy.

A huge spherical shield of water more than thirty feet in radius instantly surrounded Eden and she became trapped inside.

At the same time this was happening, another voice from other enemy units called out, “FIRE PRISON FORMATION!”

Using all of my draconic physical strength and speed, I cut through and batted aside the knights and soldiers that had already began surrounding me like insects. But I was too late to reach both Eden and Kiara. I could only hope the both of them could somehow counter more than twenty human mages pouring their magic together.

A blazing sphere of fire with tendrils of flames that crackled and popped with energy soon swallowed the wide-eyed Kiara entirely. Kiara had sensed the outburst of enemy magic, but the magic was too wide and encompassing to dodge even if she had used all of her physical speed.

“RALLY TO THE GENERAL!” a powerful voice came from behind me. It was most likely the voice of an allied knight commander.

Dozens of fireballs came falling from the sky at the enemies that were surrounding me. The enemy soldiers and knights rolled against the grass futilely, screaming and hoping to put out the fire that was devouring at them.

“Ashes. Where is Lana and the rest of the Earth mages,” I muttered to myself.

Almost as if my somewhat of a prayer had been realized, crevices formed on the ground a few thousand enemy soldiers, knights, and some mages were standing upon. The earth nearby shook as the ground ruptured and pieces of earth jutted outward, ripping the very grasses from their roots.

The enemies fell screaming into these holes and the audible noises of armor and weapons clattering were heard.

From the deep tunnels we had secretly built below, Four Earth Mage Battalions came pouring out of them. Blocks of earth came dropping from the sky and more than a hundred wave of earth spears cleared the enemies who had not fallen to their crushing deaths.

I looked toward at the spheres of water and fire which encased Eden and Kiara. It still had not been interrupted one bit by the ambush our Earth mages caused. I could only think that the enemy mages who had formed those prisons were still not dead.

“Mage Captain Falna,” I said to the bearded middle-aged man. “Just in time.”

“Judging from this,” the mage captain said, “only about three thousand infantry and a few mages were killed, General Verath. The enemy still has the numerical advantage.”

“Indeed. But first we need to do something to about those two spheres of magic.”

“An amazing piece of work that is. I wonder how they formed it,” Mage Captain Falna commented.

I turned around—for some reason, I could feel Efari's presence coming closer and closer toward me through our bond.

Covered in blood and surrounded in her white misty aura, Efari was sprinting toward me with a look of horrid expression mixed with worry on her face. And suddenly, I could sense the strongest magical power I had ever felt. It was slightly even more powerful when the Eldest had destroyed the camps during the second tribulation.

When Efari reached me, everything turned scarlet red.

When I could somewhat see and feel again, I could feel pain all across my body. Then I wondered why I was looking at the clear and somewhat bluish sky. I groaned a little as pain wracked my body. I realized I was lying on the ground, my hearing and vision still somewhat blurry and unclear. I was bleeding in multiple places and my left hand had been seared off, blood flowing profusely from the wound.

The area around me had become desolate. Nothing remained except a large crater of perhaps more than four hundred feet wide and ten feet deep.

I heard a voice laugh out weakly in front of me as I tried with extreme efforts to stand up. I finally got up, and the sudden change in position caused more blood to pour out from the stump that was my left wrist.

“Efari...” I said, seeing the female lying on the ground with a jagged hole where her stomach should have been. Blood was pouring out heavily and dust and dirt covered her face, and no doubt, also covered mine. She no longer had the aura of white mist covering her, and her face looked as pale as freshly fallen snow.

“Hah...” Efari laughed out weakly, forming a sad smile, while shaking her head slightly. “I guess I should have listened to the soothsayer, that you would be the death of me. Ah, my Deathwalker, it seems I can no longer accompany you in your journey. ”

Flecks of scarlet blood spurted out from her mouth as she weakly tried to laugh some more. “To think that I would die when we had not even truly met yet...the things I wanted to accomplish...to tell you...I am sorry...” Both of her hands touched my cheek, and she said in an even weaker voice, “It begins...be wary, my love.”

Her hands fell away from my cheek then as the light in her dark eyes died, making that pair of eyes which could swallow you whole, which could make you gaze into them for an eternity, even darker.

There was no more light in them. Never again would there be.

Something inside of me snapped then.

I screamed as I felt the bond between Efari and I disappear forever, as if a string had been sharply cut into two. As if the string had been entirely burnt out of existence, eaten up, not even releasing smoke.

The pain it caused was as if every drop of blood in my body was being boiled. How could it hurt this much? What was this unbearable agony I felt?

A wail filled with intolerable sadness resounded inside my mind. At the same time, I screamed along with the voice that was lamenting inside my head. The battlefield around me was filled with my screams, much louder than the screams the dying made.

An enemy Air mage suddenly descended from the sky above.

A lightning bolt came at me from the corner of my eyes, and the yellow flash of a strange weapon he was holding came swinging at my neck. I couldn't move. I could only continue screaming. On my face, I felt tears, red hot tears flow down. Red? Was I crying tears of blood?

Time slowed down for me. The lightning bolt and the strange yellow weapon both traveling in slow motion, both of them aimed at me.

Then suddenly, all around me, as far as my blood tears-blinded eyes could see, a sea of flames surrounded me, drowning everyone and everything that had been around me. The soldiers, knights, mages, and commanders—all of them screamed as they were drowned and burnt alive in that sea of flames. Allies and enemies were all burnt alive. Indiscriminate. And I was the epicenter of this sea of flames.

NOOOOO! She is mine! She is mine! HOW CAN YOU DIE NOW!

The mental voice that was lamenting inside my head did not seem to belong to my other self.

Who are you? I screamed back at this entity inside my head.

The voice did not answer, merely repeating his words.

SHE IS MINE!

The repetition of words continued for a long while as I stood in a kneeling position on the burning battlefield.

DAMN YOU VESSEL! SHE DIED PROTECTING YOU!

Another voice, a darker and more indifferent voice, yet similar to my own voice, interrupted.

IT SEEMS, MY OTHER SELF, HE HAS AWOKEN. AND I HAVE REGAINED SOME OF MY MEMORIES DUE TO THIS INCIDENT. KNOW THIS! THIS SHALL BE THE ONLY TIME I WILL HELP YOU, AS I DO NOT WISH FOR THIS INTRUDER TO TAKE CONTROL OF OUR BODY. I SHALL SEAL HIM ALONG WITH ME!

NO! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO AS YOU PLEASE! MINE!

I screamed in agony even louder as a mental pain exploded inside me. The two entities that were inside my mind and my very soul were fighting for domination.

The crater around me, upon which a sea of fire had started blazing, ruptured as jagged crevices appeared. Small earthen slabs that were more than forty feet tall and perhaps even wider than that erupted and formed around the blazing sea of fire that was the battlefield. Then a blinding nova of fire shot out in multiple rings from my body.

I did not know how long this outburst of magic from my whole body lasted. My vision was half-blinded by blood and the mental and physical agony that was coursing through me made everything seem slow and out of focus.

Finally, silence.

I stood up, wiping away the blood tears from eyes.

An acrid smell pervaded my nose. It was the smell of burnt flesh, of fiery deaths. All around me, I could see a dying sea of flames and ruptured earth slabs, rather like small hills, and with large crevices in the ground. I stood on one such earth slab. It gave me a vision of the ruptured battlefield, where not even a blade of grass remained for a far distance.

Enemies and allies alike who had stayed the closest to me had been entirely burnt to ashes. Not one trace remained of them. Further away, perhaps more than a two thousand feet, there were burning corpses.

Casualties. I had caused all of these deaths.

I roughly estimated the number of deaths, judging from the remaining soldiers on my side and the enemy side. Only perhaps about 2/5 of both armies remained from the decimation the nova of fire and the earthquake I had created.

More than forty thousand humans had died.

I looked down at Efari in front of me. Only her corpse had remained untouched from the devastation.

“In the end, you still told me nothing...” I whispered with just a small amount of sadness and perhaps regret. The Matriarch Devourer, if she was even one, had grown on me.

Kiara. Eden. Were they both even alive?

I searched around, but could see nothing but devastation and the retreating backs of the frightened soldiers of both armies.

I felt lost.

It was a feeling I had never truly felt before.

Truly, I felt lost.

“Just what am I...”

As I muttered those words to myself, I heard a cold and somewhat mad laughter resound across the area of the ruined battlefield I stood in.

Out of nowhere—I did not even sense the magic nor saw it—the four-horned female entity I met during the forest appeared before me.

“So we meet again.”