novelnext 396. Drinkers in desert
396. Drinkers in desert
The first thing Kai noticed when he entered the Ashari Desert was how peaceful it seemed.He had honestly expected to find blood drinkers everywhere, circling through the air like vultures over a battlefield, but there was nothing like that. The heat pressed down on him as heavily as ever, and the mana in the atmosphere was still so thin it barely felt worth acknowledging. At first glance, the desert looked exactly as it had the first time he set foot in it.
That should have been reassuring. Instead, when he flew further, it felt… wrong.
Kai was heading straight for Valkyrie’s Tower. He wanted to see Amyra, hear directly what had been happening, and judge the situation with his own eyes rather than through secondhand reports. But before he got anywhere near the center of the desert, a thought struck him hard enough that he slowed without meaning to.
The desert was so quiet that it had started to bother him.
Normally, there was always something beneath the silence…some distant movement, a beast shifting through the sands, the low rumbling of sand elementals moving below the surface. Even on its emptiest days, the Ashari Desert had never truly been still. Every time Kai had crossed it, some sound or motion had lived in the background constantly.
Now there was nothing. And that silence made him more uneasy than open danger would have.
He stopped only for a heartbeat, then he sped up.
Kai pushed himself harder toward the center of the desert, cutting through the burning air toward the tribes and the tower, but he had not yet reached them when the screams hit him. They carried over the dunes sharp enough to turn his stomach, and barely a minute later he saw the source.
Dozens of blood drinkers circled in the sky.
Below them were the tribesmen.
The blood drinkers were not simply attacking to kill. They were playing with them. Every so often one would dive, claws tearing through shields and breaking apart what little protection the tribesmen managed to throw up. Sometimes they would snatch someone off the ground, rise just high enough for panic to settle in, then let them fall while laughing.
It was almost as if they were enjoying it.
One of the blood drinkers even dropped low enough to speak to a tribesman, lingered there for a moment like it was making some sort of offer, then rose back into the air again with a laugh, as though telling them to give up and make things easier.
Kai watched the scene from far enough away that none of them noticed him, but he had no intention of staying there as a spectator.
His mind immediately shifted to the problem of killing them all.
Most of the blood drinkers looked like pawns. Knights, perhaps. The sort of creatures that sat low in their hierarchy and were meant more for numbers than true threat. But as Kai narrowed his focus, one of them stood out. It was larger than the rest, and its wings were patterned in a mix of dark red and black. It might have been some mutation or it might have been a lord. Someone like Shakran.
That name came back to him more quickly than he liked, though the battle itself already felt strangely distant, like it belonged to another version of his life. Anyway, this was not the same situation.
He did not need mana cannons now. He did not need a perfect setup or some desperate trick. Even with the poison in his right arm making spellwork more difficult, he still had his left, and that was enough.
So as the blood drinkers began another swoop toward the tribes below, Kai moved.
He pushed more mana into the spell already forming, then closed the remaining distance in a rush. A few of the blood drinkers turned at the last moment, their instincts finally catching him, but by then it was too late. Kai raised his left hand and let the fourth-circle wind spell loose.
Small, tightly compressed daggers of wind burst from the spellcode and shot through the air with terrifying speed. The blood drinkers barely had time to react when that happened. The aiming structure built into the spell did most of the work for him, correcting the flight just enough that the attack found their throats.
About half of them dropped at once.
They didn’t even scream properly, simply spasmed in the air and crashed down into the sand.
A few of them crashed straight into the men below, forcing the tribals to scramble out of the way as the remaining blood drinkers finally turned all their attention toward him.
The moment they noticed him in the air building another spell, several of their veins lit up red. Blood-aspected mana surged through their bodies, turning their movements even sharper, and then they came at him all at once, fast enough that an ordinary Mage would have been ripped down to the sand before finishing a second incantation.
Kai had no intention of letting the fight drag out that long.
From his left hand, a great whip of flame burst into being, and he lashed it straight through the first line of blood drinkers. The fire wrapped around three of them at once.
They shrieked immediately, claws slashing at the flaming whip while their flesh began to char, but Kai only tightened his grip.
The whip constricted harder and harder until blood burst from their wounds and their bodies started splitting apart beneath the pressure.
Before he could finish them fully, though, his senses caught movement behind him.
Without even turning properly, Kai moved left, and a blood drinker shot past the space where he had just been, one claw extended with a lance of hardened blood formed around it. The creature saw the attack miss and shrieked in frustration before twisting in the air and charging him again.
Kai let it come close instead of blocking. He waited for the last second and rose.
The attack swept beneath him. In the same motion, he formed a wind blade on his legs and drove down onto its head. Flesh tore at that instant and blood burst outward. The body and head dropped to the sand in two separate pieces.
A few of the other blood drinkers hesitated after seeing that. Kai gave them no time to recover.
He released the three creatures still trapped in the flaming whip only long enough for their ruined bodies to start falling, then snapped the spell again toward the rest.
All three of them were already close to death anyway. Most of their flesh had been burnt and torn open, and the moment Kai let the flaming whip go, they dropped back to the sand below like pieces of broken meat.
Then his attention shifted to the dozen blood drinkers still left.
He was about to move on them when he felt a heavier rush of mana crashing toward him. He turned just in time and in the next instant, a massive axe made entirely of blood slammed into his wind shield.
The larger blood drinker—the one he had marked earlier as a possible lord—glared at him from the other side and swung the blood axe again.
“You will die a dog’s death, human.”
Kai met its gaze. “I doubt it.”
The lord snarled and brought the axe down once more, clearly expecting the shield to finally break under the force. But this time Kai changed the spell at the last second. Instead of simply taking the blow, the wind shield shifted and wrapped around the axe itself, gripping it in place.
The drinker’s eyes widened.
It immediately tried to pull the weapon back by turning it to blood again, but those few moments of surprise were all Kai needed.
He moved. In one burst, he was behind the blood lord, and by the time the creature turned, another weapon of blood was already beginning to form in its hand.
It never finished. Kai’s own hand had gone bright red with heat, and he seized the thing by the throat with such speed that even the others barely had time to register it.
The lord screamed.
The sound tore across the desert, loud enough that even the nearby blood drinkers stopped advancing. His grip tightened around its neck, the flesh already beginning to scorch under his hand. The creature lashed out with its claws, but Kai drove wind around its limbs and locked them in place, then pushed more and more heat into his palm.
The burning turned worse. Rather than scorching, it melted. Parts of the lord’s flesh sagged and blackened while the screaming grew more desperate, but even through the pain, the creature still glared at him.
Kai let the body drop, and it hit the sand beside the others, dark blood soaking into the desert ground. He gave the corpse one last look, and for a moment his mind went back to Shakran.
That fight had been a gamble from beginning to end. This one had taken less than a minute. The difference between the two was enough to make one thing obvious.
He had grown far stronger in a short time.
Kai lifted his gaze to the rest of the blood drinkers still in the air.
They were staring down at the body of their lord, and the moment their eyes met his, every one of them seemed to understand the same thing.
Hence, none of them turned to fight. They turned to flee.
Kai thought and raised his hand again. From it shot out ropes made of wind and flame, twisting together as they tore through the air. They caught most of the fleeing blood drinkers before they had gone far, wrapping around their limbs and torsos, and then Kai yanked downward.
The blood drinkers slammed into the sand.
Some hit hard enough to go face-first, their noses bursting and bones cracking on impact. Their cries filled the desert, but Kai only tightened the ropes further, making sure none of them would be able to move or fight back.
A few of the blood drinkers had already made it beyond the dunes by then, but Kai let them go.
He had enough captives to question.
The others could run back and tell whoever led them now that, with Kai here, they were not going to be free to torment the tribes any longer.
Once that was done, Kai turned and flew toward the tribals below.
They were still staring in stunned silence, clearly not expecting to see him descend out of nowhere, and a few of them had already dropped into bows.
Although Kai didn’t see any of the tribal leaders among them, he did recognize one face.
Kael.
One of the Enforcers he had left here to keep watch over Amyra.
The man’s eyes were fixed on him with something close to reverence, and Kai slowly lowered himself to the ground before Kael stepped forward. “Thank you for your assistance, Your Majesty. If you hadn’t come when you did, I’m not sure how things would have turned out.”
Kai shook his head. “It’s fine. There were just too many of them. How did this happen?”
Kael’s face tightened.
“The tribes asked for support for their scavenging groups. The blood drinker attacks have been stretching them thin, and they can’t spare enough fighters to protect every expedition.” He glanced toward the dead and captured blood drinkers on the sand. “So I was escorting them to a beast nest when the drinkers suddenly appeared. They didn’t speak, didn’t demand anything. They just attacked.”
Kai nodded slowly.
Looking around, he could see that the tribals were armed, but their weapons and formations were clearly meant for threats on the ground. The desert did not have many natural flying enemies, which meant they had little reason to learn how to fight things attacking from above. Against beasts like the blood drinkers, that weakness had nearly gotten them slaughtered.
He looked back at Kael.
“I’ve heard enough from Ansel to know things here haven’t been quiet. Where are Khalid and the others?”
“In their city,” Kael replied. “We can head there now.”
Kai nodded and glanced at the tribals who were still listening to every word.
“We should. It’ll also be easier to question these drinkers there.” His gaze shifted toward the bound blood drinkers lying in the sand. “And for their sake, I hope they know better than to stay silent about what exactly they’re doing here. Otherwise, they’ll die for nothing.”
Kai made sure to say that last part loudly enough for the blood drinkers to hear.
A few of them groaned on the ground, their bodies still bound by wind and flame. He knew their kind was fanatically loyal to whatever stood higher in their hierarchy, but that hardly mattered. He did not need every secret they carried. He only needed enough to identify who was leading them here, and once he had that, he could deal with the matter himself.
It was certainly someone above the level of a mere lord-grade blood drinker.
An elder, perhaps. A progenitor, if things were worse than he hoped.
The first would not be difficult to kill. The second might become troublesome.
In the history Kai knew, blood progenitors had been among the most unpleasant enemies one could face. Their racial abilities alone made them dangerous even to a Sixth-Circle Mage, and the older they were, the worse that became. Blood drinkers did not age into weakness. They ripened into something more lethal with every passing decade.
The next two hours were spent dragging the captured drinkers back toward the tribal city.
Kai could have made the trip easier with spells, but there were too many people to move at once, and a part of him kept expecting the escaped blood drinkers to return with reinforcements. He stayed ready for that the entire way, but no such attack came.
So he used the time to speak with Kael.
He drew out every piece of information the Enforcer had, then shifted the conversation toward Amyra. At that, Kael’s expression changed into something halfway between resignation and amusement.
“She’s bored,” he admitted. “Painfully so. She complains about it every day.”
Kai could believe that.
According to Kael, Amyra had grown tired of spending all her time reading or practicing spells. And after the blood drinkers began attacking the tribes more openly, both Kael and Neris had made certain she stayed inside Valkyrie’s Tower instead of wandering out into the desert. That, on top of Kai’s absence, had only made her more irritated.
He understood it well enough.
Amyra was still a child.
No matter how gifted she was, no matter what she had already seen, there were limits to how long a child could stay shut away before restlessness turned sharp.
So as they neared the city, Kai was already thinking that after speaking with Khalid, he would go see her first.
But then the city finally came into view, and what he saw made everyone stop.
The city was burning ahead.
***
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