Chapter 169: I don"t want to claim your life
This time, I was perfectly aware of what the stone in my hand would do. Given the few times I used it already, I was slowly getting used to the sight of complete and utter devastation. What"s more, what I would be aiming this deadly weapon at wouldn"t be fellow humans, but some kind of hideous monsters, making the activation far easier on my broken morals.
"Now then, do you have any specific requests for the place where you want me to ma.s.sacre your enemies?" Rising my head at the prince, I could see a tingle of surprise appearing in his eyes, only to disappear right away, hidden behind a cold and expressionless face of the n.o.ble.
"I know that was your previous deal, but it doesn"t matter now. As long as you will be able to put a dent in their lines, my soldiers will be able to explore the gap." Shaking his head in denial, the prince ultimately gave up on my offer.
"Since that"s the case, then I will pick the place at random." Shaking my shoulders without a care in the world, I jumped before using the repulsion against the ground below me. Thanks to the third Newtonian law of dynamics, my body was repelled from the ground with the same force I was using against it, allowing me to glide through the air above the heads of the soldiers crowded in their ranks.
If anyone were to take my place, they would be worried about joining the battle. As the saying went, in a battle, an archer shoots, but G.o.d guides the arrows. In other words, even with all sorts of armours, weapons, barriers and tricks, all it would take was a single stray arrow or attack to put even the greatest hero to his death.
But for me, it was hardly the case. With three barriers from the stones surrounding me at all times and the recurring barrier stone always within my reach, unless someone would be capable of blasting through all my defences and still dealing fatal damage to me, nothing could really stop me.
Yet, my lack of worries wasn"t a sign of carelessness. Gliding through the air, I exposed myself as a pretty easy target for any form of ranged attacks. And as expected, before I even reached the area where two opposing forces continued to clash, a flurry of arrows, pebbles, huge stones and even magic attacks came my way, only to shatter when hitting the first of my barriers.
"You better not move any further." Suddenly, another winged person appeared before me. This time, not only was it a female rather than a male, but her wings also lacked the black colour, covered in a dark grey instead. "I don"t know who you are and why are you here, but if you don"t stop, I will have no choice but to kill you."
Slowing down my momentum to the point where I hung still in the air, I sent a taxing glance towards the flying being. While it was already my second time seeing someone of this strange race, given how I didn"t pay any mind to look properly at the previous winged man that I killed with my barrier, only now I could let my curiosity run free.
"Tell, are those wings transplanted, or were you born with them?" Not making anything out of the female"s threats, I recovered my momentum, once again creeping closer to the area I designated to start my bloodshed.
"What?" Taken by surprise by my sudden question, the female failed to react in time to my movement. By the time she managed to recover her focus, I was already several steps behind her back, not paying her any further attention.
"You f.u.c.ker! I will kill you!" Up to this point, I dared to act s.e.xist. If it was a man threatening me, I would simply slap him to death… Or not. The real reason why I didn"t kill the girl right away, was because I wasn"t confident in my normal strength at all.
It was true that I managed to use the lingering force of the disaster to bring my cultivation way higher than it used to be. But the problem was, I couldn"t even gauge or test how powerful those breakthroughs turned my body to be.
While I could vaguely feel that I broke through some major barrier, making it pretty hard to reject the notion I reached the second stage of the cultivation, it didn"t mean s.h.i.t to me. I saw my fellow eartherners who reached the second stage, but when faced with all the means at my disposal, they would simply turn powerless.
There was a chance that the stones Sander created were simply too potent, making it nearly impossible for anyone outside of just the cream of the top of cultivation world to challenge their might. There was also a chance that reaching the second stage of cultivation didn"t actually increase one"s power by all that much.
And even though there were enemies I could test my skills freely all around… Doing so would require me to take my barriers down and join the fight along with other soldiers.
In other words, as great as an opportunity to gauge my newfound strength this battle was, doing so would be just too risky for me to even consider doing it.
"Can you stop blabbering around? I"m not interested in you, begone." Hearing the constant shouts of the girl frantically chasing after me, I barely managed to hold a chuckle. Given how I was constantly using a small amount of repulsion to keep myself up in the air, I could hardly see her as anything but an annoyance, even though her features would easily give her a spot in a beauty contest back on earth.
"Blabbering?!" Hearing the shocked phrase of the girl, I gently turned my head to the back, only to see her rooted in place, with only her wings constantly flapping to keep her midair.
"You are blabbering! Your entire family is blabbering!" Maybe it was that she was truly infuriated or maybe the redness that appeared on her cheeks was as visible due to her otherwise pale skin. But for some reason, seeing her act so childishly right above the ongoing mayhem of war, managed to catch me off guard.
"Well, not going to deny it." With my desired location reached, I changed the vector of my repulsion from up and forward, to up and backwards. Right now, rather than bothering the human soldiers with a strange force pressing them down to the ground, my float started to annoy the mutants instead. "My entire family is known from talking way too much." Cutting the discussion, I reached to one of my pockets before pulling out the familiar stone.
"I wonder how big will the explosion be this time…" According to the further explanation that I received from Sander just yesterday, this disaster-summoning stone didn"t have any power storage within its structure. Rather than using a saved-up fuel, it was constructed in a way that sucked all the available energy from the surroundings.
On earth, it worked. Between the time I returned from Ayda"s world and before I moved to a new world altogether, Sander apparently took a one-day trip to the single desert that existed in the entire country just to see the effects of those stones with his very own eyes. In Ayda"s world, it worked, but it seemed to have way greater effects.
That meant, the amount of energy in the air, varied between worlds. And given how I only managed to observe the situation when activating the recurring barrier stone, I have yet to actually learn just how dense magic was in this particular world.
"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Finally calming herself to the point where she was able to actually glide through the air forward, the girl returned to her place between me and the direction the mutant army came from.
"Didn"t I just say it? I"m just blabbering nonsense." Ignoring the girl"s attempts at sounding me off, I aimed the stone directly towards her. There was no hate for what I did. She just happened to be the exact direction I had to fire the disaster to claim as many monsters as possible.
"Seems like that"s the case. Or do you really think that waving this fancy stone around will scare me away?" Even though the female"s words appeared to be confident, I didn"t even need to use the tiniest shred of my witch abilities to notice the hints of fear appearing on the girl"s face.
At this point, I couldn"t really tell. Did she see the earlier results of my actions? Or maybe she was just scared of the unknown?
But no matter what, no matter how much she was trash-talking me, she has yet to even draw a sword at me. So far, she limited herself to just speaking.
And that made me reluctant to just blast her out of existence.
"Argh… How annoying.." Shaking my head in anger directed directly at myself, I then looked towards the girl with a cold expression on my face. As annoying as it was, it was pretty d.a.m.n hard to just kill someone I already managed to talk with.
It would be a different matter altogether if she attacked me. Just like the winged man from before, I wouldn"t have any qualms at disposing of her. But now? She just talked to me in a way I would expect my teammates to write on the chat while playing some online game.
And it wasn"t something I would actually kill someone for!
"Do me a favour and move aside, please." Shaking my head to get rid of all the doubts, I looked at the girl before shaking my stone-wielding hand. "Since you have yet to attack me, I don"t really want to claim your life for no apparent reason."