Seemingly realizing this, he began to chuckle. “Well, seems we’re at a stalemate.”
I stayed silent, not taking my eyes off him.
“But I guess there’s no harm in livening things up in the meantime.”
Then, a familiar sight entered my eyes: Blood began to leak out of his sword and pool beneath his feet over a large area.
“Oh? Seems like you remember this trick. Last time, you were able to avoid my thralls and focus solely on me, but I wonder if you can do the same while defending her.”
I gritted my teeth in anger. There is no limit to how low he’ll go.
Then, out of the pool of blood, certain figures began to emerge. A total of fifty or so bodies began to limp forward toward us.
“Just in case,” I said, leaving my knife—the symbol of my bond with Soreya—by El’s mouth as she lay on the ground. I wasn’t entirely sure how this was going to play out, and I didn’t want to leave her completely defenseless, even if she didn’t currently have hands to hold it. It wasn’t ideal, but at least she could hold it in her mouth. “But don’t worry,” I said calmly to El. “I won’t let them touch you. After all...” Soreya’s face flashed through my head. “This isn’t where we end.”
El looked up, giving me a conflicted look from where she was lying on her stomach, before frowning. She began tracing her eyes across the ground as if she was drawing some kind of magic circle, but I couldn’t pay attention to what she was doing. I had to focus on him.
I exhaled, trying to calm myself. Letting my emotions get the best of me in this situation was the absolute worst thing I could do. As scummy as he might be, it didn’t change the fact that he was still a powerful opponent. I couldn’t let my guard down.
But how am I going to deal with all of those thralls and him? Even with my time freeze, I wouldn’t be able to defend both of us at the same time especially when she was in no condition to fight. No, this isn’t the time to wimp out. We’re doing this. If Soreya were here, she’d take him on and not falter for a minute.
I raised my blade, determined. As I did, I wasn’t sure why, but something felt different inside me. It was as if I was overflowing with mana, memories of different blades, and a strange scent of fire, blood, and burnt corpses. For a moment, my chest felt constricted by familiar feelings of regret, loss, and uncontrollable rage. What is this? Is all of this coming from the blade? Or is this because of whatever El was doing with her eyes? But I didn’t have the time to spend too much thought on what’d just happened. Right now, I needed to follow my instincts.
I shook off the torrent of emotions, and all that was left was a newfound sense of confidence. It was as if I knew the exact solution to this seemingly impossible problem I was facing. As long as I have the Flash Blade, I can get through this.
I tightened my grip on its handle while the library of blades appeared before me once more. This time, a new blade appeared before me. It was one that would allow me to deal with this large group of enemies. I commanded it to come forth.
“Lotus.”
In the next moment, my blade transformed into a small curved knife with a bouquet of blades around the base and the usual red gem right by the hilt.
“Huh? You...changed it to a knife? Ha... Ha ha ha!” he cackled. “Do you plan to take me and all my thralls on with a mere knife?! There are at least ten times as many of them as what we had the last time we fought. Are you a fool, underestimating me, or are you just resigning to your fate?”
I stayed quiet and instead held the knife forward, pointing it at him and the army of thralls marching toward me.
“Well then, if you won’t answer me, I’ll have to slice it out of you.”
“Hall of Blades!” As soon as I said that, the bouquet of blades scattered like petals falling off a flower before disappearing and then reappearing about three arm’s lengths away on either side of me. All identical, the knives were arranged in five equidistant rows pointing toward the ground. They seemingly stretched out endlessly past me and toward him and his thralls, easily outnumbering them by at least ten to one.
His eyes widened in confusion, but it was over before he could even say anything. I disappeared, and in the next moment, it was as if a bolt of lightning struck him and his thralls from each of the thousands of knives surrounding them, only that the strikes were not lightning but the blade in my hand crashing toward them over and over.
Hall of Blades was a skill that allowed me to go between any of the blades here at a speed so quick that it looked like I was a lightning bolt threading attack after attack against my enemies. In the span of mere seconds, all the summoned thralls had been reduced to bloody ribbons. If he’d been a little slower, he would’ve been caught up in the attack too, but he was able to fully escape the range of the attack with just a few gashes across his body.
The lightning subsided, and I reappeared in the center of all the floating blades. The gem by the hilt of the Lotus darkened, and in the next moment, the Flash Blade reappeared in my hand as the rows of blades vanished.
“The rumors were true...” he frowned. “There really are all kinds of blades stored in there that you can summon at will.”
He was partially right. Though I was only starting to use the Flash Blade to its full potential, I could instinctively tell how it worked. The Flash Blade was the base form of the relic, and the red gem on its hilt had three functions: First, it could freeze time; second, it used that opportunity to scan for blades in the area and add new ones that it didn’t recognize into its compendium; and third, it allowed the user to summon a blade from the compendium.
The only thing I needed to keep in mind was that each blade had its own operating time limit. Some could be summoned for as long as tens of minutes while others could only be summoned for a fraction of a second. Just like with the time freeze mechanic, the cooldown for each blade depended on how long you’d used it and its cognitive burden. When time ran out for the summoned blade, it’d turn back into its base form, the Flash Blade.