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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 197
🕑 Added 2025-02-21 17:07:02 +0000 UTCJust as I had just finished connecting all the severed and torn muscle fibers in my body while watching the golem wreak havoc across the yard, four men who wore different armor from the Kingdom or the Dominion jumped over the wall, one after another, and seeing that the dominion soldiers did not mind them, it was clear which side they were on.
The four men took out some kind of amulet that glowed, one of them holding two. After looking around the battlefield, they seemed to lock on to what they were looking for and jumped off the wall as their aura covered their body.
They hopped over and stepped on the Dominion soldiers to get to wherever they were heading, but as they split up, it soon became obvious where they were heading. They were going toward where the three glowing sword knights had fallen.
I did not know what they wanted with the corpses, but I was not going to let some unknown people barge in and try to recover something in the middle of a battle. That was downright rude in my book.
I paused my healing to Whisper Wind what was left of my father’s knights and the commanders keeping our troops in line. [Enemy Aura users incoming, headed toward bodies of enemy elites, High priority target, keep incoming unknown knights away.]
The golem received the same message and started lumbering its way to the target closest to it.
As for myself, I grabbed my spear, which a soldier was kind enough to help me retrieve, and pushed myself up with it. I immediately regretted that as I felt the barely healed would ache with pain, feeling like it would tear if I moved too much. But I can deal with that later; now I had to stop one of those newcomers who was heading toward the keep.
Due to still being extremely sore due to overusing my Primal Aura to boost my strength and speed earlier, I resorted to just using my normal aura to chase after the guy heading to the keep.
As I ran after him and jumped up onto a nearby roof, my bones creaked in protest, and my muscles screamed in pain, especially those from my barely healed wound.
After chasing him over three roofs, I knew I was not going to catch him as he was running faster than I was. I also noticed that as he got closer to the wall the keep was on, he was fixated on two glowing amulets he had in his hands. But most important of all, I think he did not detect me chasing him, this gave me a chance to keep him from getting close to where Dad was.
I stopped on the fourth roof, brought back my spear in a throwing position, and threw it as hard as I could, tearing my freshly healed wound in the process. I just gritted my teeth from the pain as I kept running while my spear was in flight.
My spear flew and hit the man, catching him by surprise. But his aura was as strong as it seemed and blunted most of my spear’s impact, causing the tip to veer off course and catch the side of his armor, throwing him off his jump trajectory and sending him spinning and crashing into a building.
I ran toward the crash site of the man while awkwardly trying to unsheath the sword on my left hip with my left hand.
I landed on the roof of the building just in front of the building the man crashed into and was about to reach the edge to jump down and hopefully finish off the man when that same man jumped up on the same roof as me, sword in hand.
The moment our eyes met, he charged me with a speed I had never experienced before. Slower than Professor Sageira, but still nothing to sneeze at. In the blink of an eye, he was before me, performing a vertical slice toward my right shoulder.
In my battered state, I could only tilt my sword in time for his simple yet perfect slice to come in contact with my sword and deflect it off to the side, but even if I deflected the strike, I was still sent rolling from the impact.
I recovered from my roll in time to dodge a stab to the head and parried away another stab. I sent a kick toward the man’s groin, which got him to back off for the sake of his family jewels. This gave me time to get to my feet and ready my sword.
As we eyeballed each other, I knew I was not in a good position. Besides my current condition, I was holding my sword in my left hand, but I was right-handed, and my right arm was in no condition to move. The worst part was that when I saw the look in the man’s eyes, he knew that I was not using my dormant arm. I hate to admit it, but I was always kind of lazy training with my left hand, so I do not have much muscle memory of wielding a weapon with it. Guess this means I will need to get creative.
The man began the fight again by dashing at me and taking a swing at my right side, followed by another at my legs when I dodged the first. I blocked the swipe at my legs and transitioned the impact from the block to swing my sword up and transition it into a stab at his chest, to which he parried at riposted.
Back and forth, we tested the limits of each other’s skills. After exchanging blows with this man, I can say that his technique is rather basic, focusing on setting up the opponent to be open for a powerful strike, and I have to say that those powerful strikes he delivers are close to perfection, something that can only be achieved by doing that same strike thousands, maybe even millions of times.
As for what I think he sees in me, I think he sees me as some sort of agility fighter, and at this moment, he is right because it is the only thing keeping me alive as he is currently overpowering me by virtue of being in better condition than me.
A few minutes later, defending against the man’s onslaught, my exhaustion was catching up to me, and I could feel that my aura could not last much longer.
It was then that I made a mistake. Seeing an opening, I lunged for the man’s neck, but he was able to step back while bringing his sword up to meet my sword, and I pushed forward and guided my blade away from my body.
Not having the speed or strength to contest this, I was disarmed of my sword, and when I quickly reached behind me to draw my dagger, the man’s aura-coated sword lashed out on the return stroke, sending my helmet flying off my head.
I stumbled and fell backward from the blow, and instead of drawing my dagger, my hand reached for the throwing knife holster at my thigh and sent three knives flying with what aura I had left on my way down.
As I rolled backward, I could only hear the sound of one PING. When I laid eyes on the man again on recovering. He had one hand holding his sword up in front of him while his other hand was clutching his bleeding neck. When I looked further up, one of my throwing knives was embedded in his left eye, while his right eye wore the appearance of shock.
A few seconds later, the man clattered to his knees and fell face-first on the ground.
I slowly and painfully got on my feet and went to retrieve my sword, all while keeping my eyes on the supposedly dead man.
It was only after I stabbed his body in the neck, did it fall back on my ass, too tired to move. I am just going to have to trust the other men and the golem to sort out the other three.
