Will felt the same feeling as the last time he was teleported, of a heavy blanket enveloping and compressing him. He knew no other sensation but that compression, saw no sight but blackness, heard nothing but his own blood surging in his ears. He forgot to hold his breath this time as well.
A second later he was released into the air again, gasping, arm extended forward, desperately reaching for his masters.
His eyes were wide open in panic, sweat, dirt and grime from the residue of the titanic fight covered him. He started coughing, trying to catch his breath after the teleportation made it unexpectedly impossible to breathe.
A part of him wondered if he was in a state of shock. The rest of him was barely processing anything at all.
After a shakey few seconds had passed his mind finally started registering things again.
He saw a forest around him, sunlight streaming from above. Then he heard a light thud. He turned to his right and sees Alea folded to her knees, tears silently streaming down her face. Her eyes staring at nothing, her hands tightly gripping the material of her pants. Her hands were shaking; clenched so hard they appeared bone white.
Will doesn’t know what to say, let alone what to do. He wants to comfort her, but he doesn’t know what to do himself. Once again he has found himself transported to a place he doesn’t know, with no idea of where to go or what to do. The biggest difference this time is that he’s sad to leave where he was before and he desperately wishes he can go back. He needs to know if his masters are ok.
He crouches down next to Alea and puts a hand on her shoulder.
“Alea we need to go. I don’t know where we are but we need to move. We’re sitting ducks out here for anything that happens to come by.”
She blinks. Once. Twice. And then looks up at him.
“Will. Our masters…”
“I know. But think.” As Will says it to Alea he does it himself. “What do we know?” He thinks through the problem as he talks to her. Listing the facts, trying to get a grasp on the situation. Trying to calm himself down as much as Alea.
“Taleya sent us away. We don’t know if she did it and stayed, or transported themselves away at the same time.” Alea’s eyes come more in focus as she works it through herself. “Think about it. She teleported to Amos’s side just before sending us away. There’s a chance she sent them away at the same time that she sent us away. There’s a chance they’re safe.”
“But then..” she coughed and swallowed, trying to clear the dust out of her throat. “Why didn’t she send us to the same spot she was sending her and master Amos?”
Will paused. Why didn’t she do that? “I have no idea.” Alea’s shoulders fell slightly. “But if I know anything about them, it’s that both of them don’t do anything without a really good reason. I trust them. If she sent us to different places, there was a reason for it.”
Will didn’t say the other option. That she didn’t send them to two different places. That she sent them away with the last of her strength, and then was killed by Belial afterward. Alea didn’t say it either.
Will looked around to try and take stock of their situation. Alea was still pretty beat up from her fight. He was scared to move her, but they didn’t have much of an option.
They were in another forest, but this one was more mountainous. They were on a wide dirt road that had what looked like wagon tracks running along it. Will said wagon as a default. He doubted they had cars here, and wagons were what everyone traveled inside in fantasy stories so that’s what he went with for his guess.
He tried looking through the tops of the trees. If he had to guess, he would say they were in the foothills of a mountain range. He could just make out mountains in the distance but it was hard to tell with how tall the trees were here.
He had no idea if there were any powerful beasts in this forest, or powerful cultivators for that matter. He didn’t know if this was an intentional location Taleya had sent them to, or if she just flung them randomly as far as she could to get them as far from Belial as possible.
Will was unsure what the right thing to do was. They needed to find civilization. Alea needed medical treatment, and they needed food, water and shelter. Moving Alea would be risky because of her injuries, but would leaving her here to go get help be an even bigger risk? She would be hard pressed to defend herself on her own right now.
The fact that they seemed to be on a well used road was heartening, but he still didn’t know what to do. For all he knew they were in a hostile country.
Alea started to look around herself. He hoped she had an idea of where they were. She had actually grown up in this world, so there was a chance she knew or at least had an idea.
Right as he was about to ask her she made to get to her feet. She grunted in pain halfway up, and then collapsed back down and fell to her side.
“Alea!”
Will dropped to a knee and just barely caught her head before it hit the ground.
Her injuries must be worse than I thought. What do I do?!
A massive screeching sound went off somewhere above them, followed quickly by a shadow.
The shadow took up the entire breadth of the road and then some.Will’s head snapped up, scanning the sky.
Predator or just another animal?
He gently laid Alea’s head down and looked for the bird, walking slightly away so he was close enough to protect Alea if the creature tried to attack her but far enough away that she hopefully wouldn’t be hit by an attack meant for him.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“What are the chances it’s just a regular bird that is flying around and it isn’t some powerful beast that wants to make us its next meal?” Will says to himself as he scans the sky.
He hears another caw and turns in the direction of the sound and finds himself staring towards the sun.
It used the sun to hide itself?!
Will ignites his element around himself, golden lightning covering and arcing around his entire body.
The beast veers off from its dive, as if understanding that getting in close would be a bad idea. Will tries jumping after it, hoping that maybe he can finish this thing quickly in a single blow.
The bird twists deftly in the air and Will feels a massive blade of wind impact him into his back. He’s sent violently into the earth, bouncing slightly off of it.
He tries to get back to his feet quickly, but he’s gasping for a breath that won’t come. He’d had the breath knocked out of him before. His school bully liked to punch him in the stomach hard enough to make it happen when no teachers were around and he thought he could get away with it.
He hadn’t gotten used to it; it still sucked.
Despite the inability to breathe, Will leaps back, not wanting to leave himself as a sitting target.
Just as he moves, another wind blade strikes the spot he was just standing, slicing into the ground, leaving a gouge three feet long and a foot deep.
He moves farther away from Alea, trying to draw the beast away.
He hates this. He’s trained a few times against Amos while his master kept himself airborne on a small platform of metal. Will wasn’t the most skilled at it. Which is to say he was terrible at it. Also this beast is exceptionally skilled at keeping itself hidden until right before it attacks.
Will draws his knives and leaps into the trees. He jumps from one branch to another trying to get as high as he can. Once he finds a suitable branch that can hold his weight and isn’t too far from Alea, he sits in wait.
He has a few new techniques he could try. But not only are none of them ready to be used in combat yet, but none of them are good against airborne enemies. Only one would work but that attack was still in the theory stage. Taleya said he wouldn’t be able to make it work until he hit the back half of cultivation realms.
Will absently wonders if she meant the Royal Realm. He doesn’t like how much they had kept from him.
He scans his surroundings, seeing and hearing nothing of the bird. Hawk? Eagle? Whatever. The thing that flies and wants to kill him.
Another loud caw ignites directly above him. Only this time the caw is much louder, and seems to pierce deeply into his mind. His vision blurs and he begins to lose his balance as the bird sends down multiple wind blades.
Will struggles to block and dodge the volley of death and is only partly successful.
He thinks the blades even start coming from different directions. One lands on his left shoulder, another on his right thigh, and another takes him right across the chest as he attempts to jump away.
The blast slices a deep cut across his chest and minces his new clothes. He is sent hurtling into the ground, the impact sending him half a foot into the soft earth.
He loses his breath again and his lightning covering him dims as his concentration and breathing pattern slips.
Will can see a hazy image of the beast barreling towards him. It’s too fast and he’s too slow to recover from the previous impact to roll out of the way.
Its massive claw slams into him, pinning him to the ground. The dim lightning around him not enough to hurt it. He scrambles to reengage his lightning to full power, panic fighting with his effort to stay calm.
He sees a blurry outline of its beak coming down toward him with lightning fast reflexes.
His eyes widen as his adrenaline surges through him as the beak descends like a guillotine.
Lightning burns bright gold as he finally manages to bring it forth completely again.
He’s hurt, tired, and his senses impaired. But he doesn’t need to see clearly with the bird this close. Blurry vision doesn’t matter when the bird is right on top of him. Balance isn’t an issue when he doesn’t have to move much. Aim isn’t a challenge with a massive bird right on top of you.
Plus, in the air the bird has the advantage, but while on the ground, Will has the edge.
Faster than the bird can respond to Will uses his element’s full power and sends a surge of it into the bird through the same claw that has him pinned. The predator becomes stunned and hopefully injured. More importantly, Will knows the lightning should be locking its muscles in place, preventing it from moving. Will channels as much lightning as he safely can into his long knives and then drives one into the claw holding him in place. The other he points to what he hopes is the center of the beast’s chest and unleashes a bright golden lightning bolt straight into it through his knife. The bird is launched away from him like a cannon.
At least..he thinks it is. A claw is still wrapped around his torso, but he knows he saw it being blasted away.
Will wrestles half blind, but as quickly as he can with the claw and gets it off of him. Standing, he starts to panic that he still can’t see but he forces himself to calm down. Master Amos always said the best way to heal is to cultivate and circulate Qi throughout your body repeatedly. It’s worked for bumps and bruises but he was never sure if the result was from cultivating or just a fast healing factor due to his Realm of cultivation. He doesn’t even know if cultivating would help with this kind of injury. He prays it does.
He fights the urge to start send lightning blasts in every direction and forces himself to stay still and quiet for a full five minutes, waiting to see if he can hear the bird moving or coming for another attack. He doesn’t hear a thing so he quickly sits down in a cross legged position and begins to cultivate. Praying that his head isn’t bitten off or his chest impaled while trying to get his senses back.
It takes him a second to slip into the breathing technique and level of concentration necessary to cultivate. His breathing is heavy and ragged, his adrenaline high. He can feel his heartbeat racing from the fight, and especially from the close call.
Once he stabilizes his breathing and is able to start cultivating he notices something. This must be a high concentration area for Qi because Will can feel the Qi flood into his body. It’s almost as strong here as it is in master Amos’s home.
After only a few minutes Will can feel his sense of balance return. He cultivates for a couple minutes more to be safe and then stops and opens his eyes.
He breathes a sigh of relief as he can see as perfectly as he could before.
He jumps to his feet and looks for the bird.
It’s not hard to find.
Most of it is lying broken and bloody a dozen feet further into the forest. A hole blown straight through its center, blood flowing out of its beak, its head loosely hanging to the side.
The bird is massive.
It’s beak looks to be a foot to a foot and a half long and looks razor sharp. It looks to be at least three times Will’s size. Its other claw is lying a couple feet away from him.
Between the one dagger in its claw, and the force of the lightning bolt, it must of torn the claw right off as it was still gripping me. Huh.
Its underside is a mix of white and gray, but its main coloring is a mix of rich brown with splotches of green.
Will can’t believe the amazing camouflage of this thing. Between its camouflage, its speed, its size and intelligence, it must be an apex predator around here.
Will looks around at the damage the two of them caused in their fight and is instantly glad this happened in a remote area.
The thought makes him think of the control Amos and Taleya had in their fight. He resolves to train as hard as he can to increase his own level of control.
If he had to fight this thing around innocent people, he knows he would have had no way to protect them from the bird, or even perform his techniques safely without harming them.
As he thinks on how he could have done better he hurries out of the forest and back towards the road. He’s left Alea alone for to long.
He steps foot back onto the road and stops cold.
“We were wondering if you’d survive the fight with the razor.”
