34 Midnight Assassination
Chi, Chi Chi!
In the dead of the night, Deon's small figure blurred past five guards unnoticed. He slit each of their throats in rapid succession, then caught their bodies with difficulty by extending his ancient demon spirit into a pole and slowly lowering them towards the ground. The moment they hit the ground, Deon pulled out the soul extraction spirit.
He managed to harvest 3 origin souls this time. Extracting each spirit took some time, so even with his perfect timing, he still missed out on the other 2 souls.
With no time to waste on anything non-essential, Deon vanished from this position, then reappeared besides 3 more soldiers who were chatting just outside the waterfall. Their conversation was quiet, but Deon's hearing was too good to miss it.
"Such a good find, we'll surely earn lots of merit this time!"
"Even though it's split between 25 of us, we'll still all strike it rich!"
"We need to remain alert though. After all, this is the up-"
Chi!
"Wh-"
Chi!
"I-"
Chi!
Three clean kills, followed by the extraction of all 3 origin souls. Perfect.
Deon briefly glanced at the waterfall that he couldn't quite see through, but ignored it for now. He hid himself in the shadows and turned towards the 7 people sleeping on the hard ground. They lay around the pool of water below the waterfall.
He suddenly narrowed his eyes and his body flashed. He ran across the surface of the water for 4 steps before making it to dry land, then landed on top of the shocked woman who had just woken up for no real reason. Her eyes widened as the devilish gaze of a child stared back at her. That shock was eternally plastered across her face as Deon slit her throat cleanly and extracted her soul.
He quickly glanced around at the 6 still sleeping individuals, but luckily, his actions hadn't awoken anyone. Even so, he couldn't relax just yet, there was still work to do.
Chi!
Extract…
Stab!
Extract…
Slit the throat!
Extract…
Remove the head!
Extract…
Pierce the heart!
Extract…
CHI!
Extract…
Between each kill and extraction, Deon checked the bodies for any rare spirits, but more importantly, for any spirits that might escape and make enough noise to wake the others. Whenever he found such a spirit, he directly killed it by turning his core spirit into a knife and stabbing it with the demonic power.
All unbound 1-Star spirits died immediately when pierced by the ancient demon spirit. Interestingly, he found that after they were killed, 1-Star spirits also released some sort of power that was absorbed by his ancient demon spirit! This power was hardly anything to speak of compared to that harvested from a shaman though. Killing 100 ordinary 1-Star spirits would be as useful as killing a single initial stage 1-Star shaman. It wasn't very efficient at all, though it was certainly much easier to kill spirits than shamans, so it was something of a free bonus.
After extracting the souls of the deceased, Deon quickly looted some more drop spirits, before finally turning towards the waterfall.
His actions until now had been basically silent. Compared to the sound of the waterfall, there really was no way for anyone to hear him.
Deon quickly jumped through the waterfall and landed inside the small cave. He already knew that there were 5 people in here, but it was only after entering that he found 3 of the 5 sleeping, whilst 2 remained awake.
Deon's adrenaline was pumping to the max whilst these pitiful guys were completely caught off guard.
Chi Chi!
Their throats were both slit in an instant, before he turned towards the now awakening trio on the floor and ended their lives quickly.
Three stabs, 3 hearts pierced. It almost felt clinical, this method of assassination. Deon certainly loved the ferocious thrill of battle, but this sort of thing was quite exciting too!
He again only managed to extract 3 of the origin souls. He took their drop spirits and after finding no spirits of use in their bodies, he slowly turned towards the rear of the cave.
Mountains, rivers, streams, lakes, forest centres and waterfalls. These were all examples of places with higher levels of spiritual energy, where the essence of nature accumulated and spirits often found themselves born into this world.
Right now, this was a waterfall, at the optimal atmospheric height of the mountain. Deon was already quite hopeful, but seeing the source of the blue glow that was faintly lighting up this hidden cave made his mind tremble.
There wasn't only a single spirit, but 3. They were all the same, 1-Star spirits, but this…
"Moon river reed…1-Star gold class…" Deon muttered after regaining his bearings. To think that he discovered 3 gold class spirits all in one go!
Deon was able to identify many common natural spirits and their uses by memory, he knew all of this from a mixture of the academy training, and from the identification books left behind by Blood God.
However, he couldn't celebrate just yet. Normally, Deon would have dragged the bodies into this cave to store their spirits for later on, in case he returned to camp along this path. However, currently, he had no thoughts of doing so. Earlier, just before he attacked those guards, he overheard one of them say something a bit disconcerting…
"Even though it's split between 25 of us, we'll still all strike it rich!"
It was true that these spirits would make 25 1-Star shamans 'rich' in their eyes, but the problem was, that Deon had only killed 20 of the Fan Kingdom troops.
After checking behind him again and peering out from the waterfall, he confirmed that nobody was nearby right now. With a shrug, he ignored the scattered bodies…he had already made use of these corpses. He looted their origin souls, their drop spirits and their badges, they had nothing else of value to him.
All that remainder was to take away these 3 spirits…
Unfortunately, he would need to discard some of his own spirits in order to do this. This type of spirit was one that would die quickly if picked but left unbound, so he needed to bind all 3 spirits to take them away. He currently had nine 1-Star spirits in his soul space…after a moment of thought, Deon discarded the bed bug spirit and the steel bones spirit.
He could easily buy back these spirits from the kingdom and they weren't exactly essential right now. Well, starting again with a new steel bones spirit meant that he would need to start right from the beginning, but he'd barely began to use this spirit anyway.
After discarding these 2 spirits and killing them for good measure, Deon felt the change right away.
A small amount of energy drained from his bones, whilst his mind immediately became exhausted. He forced himself to stay awake, then grabbed the first of the moon river reed spirits and injected his origin energy. A moment later, the faint blue reed appeared in his soul space, gently floating around.
He repeated this with the other two reeds, then forced himself to trudge out from the cave.
Without the bed bug spirit to combat his fatigue, Deon felt like he had been awake for over 2 days straight, during which time he was moving about and fighting non-stop. He almost passed out on the spot, but he bit his tongue hard and used the pain to stay conscious.
"E-enemy attack!"
Ah, well hearing that woke him up at least. Deon sighed and looked up with bags under his eyes as 5 people ran down from a nearby hill. He quickly jumped backwards and entered the shadows, but before he fully disappeared, he made eye contact with the person leading the charge.
When the girl saw a child, covered in blood and surrounded by bodies, her mind trembled. She stared at him for a moment in shock, unable to believe that a mere child could do this.
However, what she didn't know, was that Deon was feeling infinitely more shocked than her right now. His body moved on its own, retreating into the shadows and running away as the girl stared at him blankly.
His body's natural instincts helped to save him from this situation, but his mind was shook, well and truly shook. Not many things could make Deon feel this way, but then again…
Seeing someone that closely resembled his childhood friend from earth suddenly appearing in this battleground would of course leave Deon feeling stunned.
The girl stared into the darkness as the child departed silently. She was in somewhat of a daze, not even noticing that her four comrades had appeared besides her until someone flicked her on the forehead.
"Ah, Derek…" Rian mumbled as she turned to her friend slowly.
"Rian, don't get distracted. I know that this is shocking, but this is war…this is the upper region." Derek said firmly.
"Mm, I understand." Rian forced a smile and nodded. Between her 20 dead comrades and the mysterious child from earlier, she really wasn't feeling well.
"At least the 5 of us have survived…maybe…maybe we should leave this upper region." A middle aged man sighed and shook his head as he looked around at the desolation and death.
"Right, we need to look out for each other." A woman added, then the woman besides her hurriedly nodded. She never really wanted to come to this place, but she also didn't want to get left behind.
After all, the 5 of them were the only remaining survivors amongst the transmigrators from earth. The other 16 people all died one by one due to this damn war…they all died because of that damned Kingdom of Restari!
"Deon…" Rian muttered absentmindedly. For some reason, she was reminded of her old friend.
Deon died even before they transmigrated here though…but still. It was definitely strange that all 21 of the transmigrators from earth turned out to be closely related to Deon in one way or another.
