Chapter 232: Hunt
’Okay. Fine.’ Zarek thought calmly as the bullet of water spiraled toward him in a twisting torrent.
With a low shout, he thrust the lance forward, his arm torquing and his hips pivoting to place his maximal power behind it. His strength surged and he burst right through, but not at the cost of anything less than a quivering wrist.
A splatter of water as sharp as knives shot out like shrapnel, slapping against the bark of trees and carving into them. A single one could likely cut Zarek down to the bone. However...
[Wind Shield] had already been cast, controlling the cycloning winds around him to divert their path away at the same time as his strike. At the same time, Zarek had already brought out a quill, his wrist flickering.
Before the second hidden bullet struck, it slapped against an ancient scroll first, \[Unholy Beacon] being drawn right onto its body.
Zarek ducked and rolled. The scroll didn’t have any defensive capabilities and crumbled the moment its Matrix was transferred.
In that instant, Zarek felt an elevated sort of connection with it. Between the time the scroll tore through one tree after another, its power quickly dispersing, Zarek had already found it.
’There.’
BANG!
Zarek activated \[Angel Wing Flash], crossing a 12-meter distance in an instant. By the time he landed, he was already using it again, flashing once more and appearing by the edge of a streaming river.
With a leap, he had already taken a huge step toward entering.
A creature lurking in the depths hurried to make distance, but this was exactly what Zarek expected. No beast with real grit and power would use a hide-and-fire tactic like this. They would almost certainly be physically inferior, and even if they weren’t, the cowardice would be baked into the bones.
Whether it was real cowardice or not, Zarek didn’t care. All he did care about was the fact that its actions would mirror such a thing perfectly.
Without missing a beat, he activated \[Sudden Drop].
With a WHOOSH the water he was falling toward suddenly reversed its tide. The surface tension was pulled into the vacuum Zarek formed around himself and the escaping beast found itself rushing toward Zarek’s lance with blinding speeds.
It didn’t have a chance to react before it was impaled.
Chi.
Zarek’s body flashed and he landed on the surface of the water as a pillar of blue rose up behind him, the residual effects of the vacuum.
Zarek paused for a moment, waiting for another attack, but none came. With narrowed eyes, he devoured the fish Turned with his Ash, swallowing it up and forming a new Ashen Soul.
’We’ll play the long game, then...’
...
Zarek found himself being continuously attacked. This wasn’t anywhere near the first or last time he lost an Ashen Soul unexpectedly.
The method Urouge was using for this wasn’t something Zarek had quite seen through just yet.
Zarek’s own ability itself didn’t actually have anything to do with shadows. It was just that Ashen Souls were sensitive to the sun, so keeping them in his shadow was actually a matter of convenience and control.
However, therein lay the problem.
Because of this, Urouge had already figured out exactly where to target. All he had to do was pay attention to the direction the sun was coming from and where Zarek was going to get them.
If Zarek had the Ashen Gate, this obviously wouldn’t be a problem. It would be his own personal dimension where his Ash could be stored.
So long as he deployed his Ash quickly, it was easy to crush opponents before the sun even played a real factor.
But now, he had no Ashen Gate and Urouge was still lurking in the shadows.
By now, Urouge had also seen Zarek use Mnemonic Anato Scribe several times already. So not only did he trigger this Skill of his unpredictably, he also knew how to avoid the scroll so that his Skill wasn’t traced back to him.
Unfortunately, Urouge had observed Zarek’s battle with the small panther from afar, so there was no chance for Zarek to hide this ability of his to reverse a taunting Skill at all.
It was unknown if Urouge had figured out exactly how he was doing it. But what the man certainly knew was that he couldn’t allow himself to get hit by it because those that did tended to die horrible deaths.
Like this, Zarek spent the entirety of the next week getting harassed.
There were several times in there that he had to pause to redraw his three chosen Skills into Matrix Tattoos, as he decided to formally call them. But even those periods were taken advantage of by Urouge, not to mention revealing the fact his \[Angel Wing Flash], \[Sudden Drop], and \[Wind Shield] Skills all had a 10-use limitation on them.
Well, seven uses. Zarek wasn’t going to show all of his cards so easily. But even if Urouge thought he could use them three fewer times than he actually could, there was no easy way to use those three combinations of Skills to deal with the situation at hand.
They were better used for short-term, burst battles where there was only one, maybe two or three opponents. When he was dealing with a lurking nightmare like this one, with the patience of a well-fed predator, there was little he could do.
But Zarek’s expression remained unmoved all along.
He hardly slept at all, using a combination of Godsfall and short burst naps to get him through. He was a veteran in these sorts of things, and his ability to remain alert while resting his mind was second to none.
But he also got little to no training in. While his familiarity with Axiograft was improving, the path from D+ to C- still felt long, and because he was continuously using the same Matrices, his Profession wasn’t improving much at all either.
However, there was one thing that was improving...
[Ash Reborn].