RD 4 Ch 11

"For now, Merlin, let's have your golems walk in front," I suggested. "I'll stick with you guys, just in case anything else pops up again."

Circe glanced up at the hole that the Hivnara had entered through. "So many people forget to look up," she said, craning her neck before returning her gaze to the rest of us. "Is that a weakness for the Hivnara, too? With my control of the wind, we could get up high. If that's safer."

"They can climb just as well as any ant, Circe," I replied. "And I don't think you want to start throwing around your air hammer while we're on top of a building full of holes. Come on. Merlin, you lead." I gestured for her to continue with the golems.

Merlin glanced at the group before shrugging. The six golems made of ice, trundled forward, their feet thudding with each step in a faint cracking of ice echoing inside the building as they walked.

We didn't encounter another Hivnara on the way out. However, once we made it to the front door, the ladies had their first look at what we'd be encountering.

The city was ruined. Everything was filled with holes like swiss cheese. And there were clearly Hivnara going in and out of many of them.

Monsters in an instance always acted a little bit off. The way these ones moved around, it was sort of like a working ant colony. They weren't actually accomplishing a whole lot, except making a ton of patrols that were difficult to dodge.

"That one," I pointed at a larger specimen nearby, and one of the golems broke off from Merlin's pack, getting close enough to get its attention.

The warrior Hivnara glanced up from its patrol, spotting Merlin. It chittered as its antenna waggled in what I could only assume was some sort of a territorial display.

A moment later it reared up as the golem came close, snapping forward with surprising speed. This Hivnara’s pincers were larger than the scouts, which matched its larger body. It crushed the golem quite easily before picking up the 8-foot-tall humanoid of ice and tossed it fifty feet into the air. The warrior then spread its pincers out wide before snapping them closed and two arcing beams of light ripped off the side of its mandibles and shattered the ice golem into thousands of little icy flecks that floated in the wind.

"Oh great. It has a ranged ability," Nyx said, sarcasm dripping.

"I know, isn't that great, Nyx? That one is about to be your opponent." I informed her.

"Me?" She asked incredulously, pointing at herself. All of her hair serpents turned to look at her and then back out at me.

"Yes, you. I want you to pick a fight with that one. Dodge it as much as you can while firing arrows. Merlin, if you'll do me a favor and watch her closely, I'm going to take Circe and Simone. We're going to see if we can't smash through as many of the weaker ones as possible."

"What about me?" Gloria asked.

"I don't know. How about you jump off 85-foot cliffs to train? I hear you had fun with that last time." A giant grin spread across my face.

The mob princess gave me a well-deserved eye roll. "I'll help Nyx," she said after a moment. "You said these things hate fire. I've been struggling with my fire mastery. Any tips?"

"Yeah, mastery is not about using it. It's about controlling it. So if you want to level your fire mastery, what you need to do is expand and contract your abilities. Change their shape or simply play with them while you use the fire."

Leaving the other group to their own training, I moved off with all due haste.

"So, what are we doing?" Circe asked, keeping up.

"Your job is to keep me from dying. Well, Simone's job too." I started making one blood blade after the other, feeling my regeneration kick in as it fought to keep me conscious while I continued to lose blood.

"Wait, keep you alive?" Circe paused, mid-step.

"Yeah, fighting two of these at once is gonna be at least a little dangerous for me," I grinned back at her. "But don't worry, if they almost kill me, then my last stand will kick in, and we'll settle things up."

Swinging a blood blade back and forth, two red arcs shot out and cut into a building where I had just spotted movements. Two of the scout Hivnara crawled their way out, and I looked around to make sure there wasn't a surprise third.

"You're insane," Circe spat.

"No, Circe, this is how you step above all of the A and S rank abilities and actually get to the point where you can fight on the level of someone like Shiva." I answered.

My words seeming to galvanize her as her brows pressed down and wind danced at her fingertips. Amongst the five clans, Shiva was like a legend standing above the rest. "Fine, go ahead and show me your training," Circe spoke the last word with a hint of venom.

The two Hivnara came for me. They were both scouts unlike the warrior that I had the other group fighting. I stabbed a dozen blood blades into the ground around me, leaving just one in my hand as I stepped towards the monster to engage.

I parried the first as it charged using my blood blade, then I stabbed the second. I fell into a rhythm parrying and stabbing that kept them both from going at me at the same time.

Every hit was like striking a steel door. Regeneration kicked in to help my hands regain their feeling as I spun around and slid out of the way of the second Hivnara that had gotten a little too close for comfort.

Its pincer scraped along my ribs as I narrowly escaped. The moment I got free, I turned and ran back at it like a madman, swinging my sword in wide sweeping arcs as I tried to get its eyes.

The Hivnara backpedaled, closing its pincers and swinging them like a blunt weapon. We traded a few blows like that before on the third, my blood blade shattered, and without even flinching, another formed out of my wrist.

I stabbed two more into the ground as I continued dancing with this one.

Only for the first to come charging in from the side, its head low as it tried to snap the pincers up and gore me like a boar.

I stepped into the assault, using its strength to lift me up as I stepped on the flat of its pincer and it tossed me into the air. I quickly flipped and landed on my feet with a heavy thud.

"And what am I doing again?" Circe scowled.

"Try and control them with your wind. Wind is an odd magic element, Circe. It's really just physical mass and pressure that you build up and swing around like a blunt weapon, or perhaps you sharpen it into a blade. However, as with so many things, control is critical. And it's harder than the other elements because you can't exactly see what you're doing. There's not as much visual feedback." I instructed her.

Circe wasn't an idiot, and she had a lot of knowledge to use. Quickly taking in my words, winds began to swirl around me. If she wanted to improve from the plateau that she’d likely been at for so long, she needed to become more flexible with her abilities and use them in ways that she hadn’t before.

Too often, those who had gotten to a certain level of strength and age, fell into reliable patterns rather than continuing to flex and adapt their abilities. Sure she’d likely raised her stats considerably over the years, but if I had to bet, she hadn’t improved the ranks of her skills in a long time.

I went back to grappling with the two Hivnara as they came from either side. Putting my sword in front of me, I stared down the red blade at the two wolf sized purple ants charging me.

Though I disagreed with my mother on the quality of my sword technique, she was at least partially right. It wasn't good enough at present. Like Circe, I too had grown complacent and needed to remind myself at times to push into the uncomfortable fights and temper myself.

Stepping into the two Hivnara, I let my blade be my focus. Everything else bled away, and my entire being was centered on the crimson sword, forcing myself to rely on my sword technique against two more powerful opponents. My other abilities were discarded. If I wanted to rank up my abilities to defeat their SS defensive ability, then I needed to rely on just them.

Much of my training beyond the basics had come from being forced into a fight that I could not win at my current strength and ability. Of course, regeneration helped me get that practice without dying, which was perhaps why I found regeneration to be one of the best abilities.

It kept me alive long enough to grow to defeat the stronger and stronger opponents.

Blood pooled out of my wrists one after the other as I stabbed them into the ground and made a field of swords. Every time one shattered, another was within reach.

The Hivenaras mowed over the swords on several occasions, destroying them before I got a chance to pick them up. Not that it mattered, I was searching for an upgrade for Blood Blade in all this too.

On the next attack, one of the Hivnara pincers got a touch too close, scraping against my skin as I tried to roll away, and giving it enough traction that it slammed them closed and punched a hole in my ribs.

I gagged, tasting the all-too-familiar tang of blood in my mouth, but that taste only encouraged me as I roared with the pain. Simone was working to keep me alive while I shattered Blood Blade one after the other. And steadily, I felt my sword mastery rank up.

Two notifications went by and my sword stopped feeling so blunt against the Hivnara. With each hit, I was beginning to leave deep gouges on their armor. I flowed from technique to technique, injuries piling up on the two scouts as another blade shattered and another only for another to replace it.

I managed to knock one of them back. Seeing the killing blow, my instincts took over and I charged forward, pinning its pincer with a stomp only to drive my sword into its compound eye. The blade punched through far more easily than it had before and using the weak spot, I buried it in the monster's skull.

It collapsed to the ground, melting away.

A grating sound made me spin. The second was dragging its pincers along the ground, telegraphing the charge before it came.

I was ready and I rushed in, dropping my shoulder and meeting the charge head-on. The Hivnara might be ridiculously strong, but it was still smaller than me and before it could snap those pincers closed, I had grabbed one with my free hand and stepped back at the last second, feeling its venom pump into me. I spun, using its own momentum against it, lifting it up into the air and slamming it down on its back.

I fell on it with my sword, punching deep but not deep enough. I tried to add more blood to that blood blade, pushing it and reinforcing it as I threw my weight on it several more times, finally getting it to break through the joint of the Hivnara and into its body.

I flicked my wrist and even though my sword didn't move, a small crimson slash erupted from my blood blade inside the monster. A grin split my face as I threw my wrist back and forth, slicing it up from the inside out as it squirmed and screamed, dying on the tip of that blood blade.

Only once it’s body melted into the ground did I relax. I leaned back panting to see how everyone else was doing.

Sometime during everything that had just happened, Circe apparently had paused to recover her mana and was watching me with a dumbfounded expression.

"You were struggling against the first one. How long ago was that? A few hours?" she squinted. "And now you're just handily killing them."

"It's unfair, I know," Simone said, reaching over to pat Circe’s knee. She was sitting next to the leader of the Odyssey Branch, but I could still feel her healing magic soothing me. Even while she was engaged in conversation, she hadn't stopped casting.

"It's been that long?" I asked with a scowl.

"That long," Simone confirmed.

Circe threw her hands in the air. "You may have knowledge about the future, Bran, but you are a freak of nature. No one improves this quickly."

I rolled my shoulder, feeling a strain that was slowly healing. "It's a skill set you learn through hardship, Circe. It takes survival instinct to really learn to push everything aside and focus solely on combat. And to push yourself to your limits before they become your downfall. If you'd like, I can work with you and see if we can't get you there." I grinned, watching her face pale.

"Simone's been able to tell me a little bit about your… training," she said, though the way she said it, I didn't think 'training' was the word she wanted to use.

"It's absolutely brutal," Simone chirped. "But thankfully, I'm a healer. I've seen what he does to people like Gloria and Nyx. They're a mage and archer. I can't imagine what he'd do to someone who fought in the middle of the melee like him."

"You might never figure that out," Circe said. "It really seems like you only need one with Bran, especially now that he's gotten the bloodlines and abilities that he does. He's exactly the type of juggernaut that you just throw in the middle of battle to turn the tide and win."

I shrugged at the compliment, checking my system and confirming several skills had improved, as a way to avoid acknowledging it.

[Sword Mastery A]

[Sanguine Slash D]

I swung my most recent blood blade over my shoulder to rest there. "Well, if you two are done, how about we continue on?"