Escape (1)

"..The guardian is coming." Acedia grit her teeth as she picked up Zenith's incapacitated body, carrying him on her back. "We have to escape quickly."

Carrying Zenith on her back, she opened the gate and dashed right through it.

"Just let me be. I can run by myself." Zenith tried to act tough and retaliate. However, the tone of his voice didn't match his words.

He sounded weak. Almost like he was just about to break down.

"Shut up." She sounded annoyed. "You were always like this with your 'logic' bullshit! You probably think that you will slow me down and be a hindrance to me, don't you?"

"But I am..?"

"I don't care!"

Although Zenith thought that the girl was idiotic, he just couldn't help but take a liking to her. It made her likable somehow.

"Fine." He grumbled as a faint smile formed on his face. "Do what you want."

"Hehe, that's exactly what I'm doing, anyway!"

The sound of the approaching guardian got louder. Both of them could hear and feel it approaching, as the sound of falling rocks and crushing floors gradually got louder.

"It's there."

With a loud boom, the head of the guardian burst through the hallway behind them, revealing a snake head made of white rocks.

"That's nasty!" Acedia used the surrounding mana to get an exact image of what the guardian looked like.

A large white snake made of rocks slithered across the hallway, chasing them. It was around 50 meters long and 12 meters wide, filling out the entire hallway.

With the speed of a class 10 assassin, the guardian chased them across the floor. The slithering motion of its body destroyed the walls of the hallway in progress.

"It's fast." With a slow and shaky movement, Zenith turned his head around, scanning the snake in the corner of his view.

"No shit, genius!" Although Acedia kept using blink in succession, the guardian didn't want to let them off. Instead, he slowly caught up to her, as a magician is not made for speed.

Although blink was good for combat mobility and 'teleportation' was good for long-distance traveling, mages rarely have spells for long-distance running.

However, that only goes for average mages.

High-tier mages, or talented mages, use their creativity to create their own mobility spell.

"What are you going to do about this, you ugly reptile?!" With a mana-infused kick, she broke a nearby wall and jumped out of the hole.

"Wave rider!" Using water magic, Acedia summoned a levitating water wave that created a path in front of her.

She used mana to create a platform beneath her feet, surfing on the waves.

The guardian glanced at them for a moment, watching them from the corner of his view. However, as he had no way to catch up with the flying Acedia, he just kept slithering through the hallway, waiting for a chance to attack.

Flying, Zenith looked down on the kingdom, watching the chaos that he created. Monsters were roaming around everywhere and ate the corpses of the dead cultists.

By enhancing his sight, he could also identify some survivors who tried to gather somewhere. Judging by the fact that Nadir ate the soul of this ruin, he deduced that he probably had limited control over it.

At least, he should have the ability to freely leave the ruin at his own will.

'So they are trying to gather and escape the ruin together.'

Nadir was an interesting person to him.

While he was a part of an evil cult, he mostly cared for his cult members. However, he was also ready to sacrifice them at any time, and judging by the fact that the guardian had only awoken now, killing people was also something he had no qualms about.

Zenith guessed that, after extracting the black ink, he threw their bodies to the guardian to satisfy their hunger for a while.

He was cruel.

But somehow, Zenith knew that he wasn't cruel to his core.

To him, Nadir was like a walking contradiction.

There were also many questions left.

What are his motivations? Why did he leave them alive? How did he get Gram? And wh-

"Zeni!" Acedia yelled, snapping him out of his thoughts. "Do you know where the main hall is?"

As Acedia was already concentrating on maintaining her spell, she didn't have any time to try to sense the location of the main hall.

"Judging by our speed, we would have to fly straight for around twenty seconds..." Instead of giving Acedia the location of the main hall, he decided that giving her instruction would be far more efficient. "I'll tell you when we have to take a turn."

Acedia didn't complain and merely nodded. "Don't give me false ones! I don't want to find myself crashing into the guardian."

With a tired expression, Zenith rolled his eyes. "Calm down. I got this."

Slowly getting irritated, the guardian snake began to pick up its speed, preparing itself to jump out of the window to grab them.

CRASH

It lost its patience and ran head-first through a wall, leaping into the air, toward them.

"Zeni?!" Acedia panicked. "Instructions, please?!"

Sighing, Zenith turned his eyes to the snake, judging the distance between them and calculating their time until the collision.

His whole body just screamed in pain, which just added to his irritation.

"When I tell you, disperse the spell and just dash forward."

"What?"

"Just do it."

When the snake almost reached them, it opened its mouth, revealing a large set of gigantic teeth.

Judging by the looks alone, they both knew that in their current state, they would be done for.

The teeth looked sharp.

In fact, they didn't just look sharp but also were sharp, as the mere revelation of those teeth was enough for the fabric of space surrounding the teeth to rip apart.

Zenith waited until the Snake approached, almost touching them with its teeth, ready to bite and snap their bodies in half.

As only a few inches were left, and he could smell the stinking breath, smelling like human flesh, he mustered all the remaining energy in his body to influence the surrounding Ether.

"Do it now."

Although Acedia was still in the air, she trusted Zenith's judgment and dispersed the spell.

As the waves disappeared, no ground was beneath her feet, thus letting her fall.

However, she didn't doubt Zenith's instructions for a single second and just started moving her legs, as if she was sprinting, looking like a bird who tried to fly..to no avail.

What she couldn't notice, however, was the surrounding space between them moving strangely.

The Ether in the atmosphere began to gather and influence the space, reshaping it to Zenith's will.

"Void step."