Protection

Thirteen had confirmed the faces of every combatant before killing them in unarmed combat, and was sure that he knew none of them. The 8th generation were under express orders to never make an attempt on the lives of the Helpers, but after eight years in the estate, Thirteen knew the names and faces of every helper, he even remembered those few specialists who had been brought in for only months at a time before leaving again.

The man standing before him now though donned heavy plate armor, his lower face covered by a veil of chain mail falling from his helmet. Thirteen took in everything he could about the man but was unable to make a conclusion based on what he could see, and so as he moved backwards, leaning to avoid a wide sweep of the man's longsword, he spoke.

"Helper?"

His reply was a step forward and a downward strike that served as a feint while the man transitioned into a thrust.

That was all the confirmation he needed and Thirteen immediately got to work. Relying on his versatile footwork and the defense of his crimson gauntlet which had now grown to include a vambrace, rerebrace, and pauldron, effectively protecting his entire right arm and part of his chest, Thirteen took control of the battle quickly.

He positioned the man to block the archers whenever possible, but quickly realised they were not aiming for him.

"What are they– crap!"

After having exchanged blows with the man a few times, Thirteen became too engrossed in his fight and forgot about Ron. With a swift deflection of the opposing blade that seemed ot vibrate eerily, Thirteen retreated to Ron's side just in time to witness an ongoing assassination.

The attacker was thin but long and held a short and wide hiltless blade, more like a spike than anything else, with which he stabbed through the bloodbond currently surrounding Ron in a dome.

Thirteen felt for his connection to the bloodbond and willed it to reinforce itself as much as possible, shrinking its area of protection as he closed in on the assassin. With a strike of the ball of his palm, Thirteen snapped the long spike held by the man, which he now knew to be bone, and delivered a fierce kick to his ribs, launching him a distance away.

Thirteen could tell that the kick did not injure the man much, merely knocking him flying as the assassin had not employed an anchoring technique quickly enough.

'Another third stage cultivator' That made two.

Thirteen spun to defend against the armored juggernaut approaching him, only to recognize another volley of arrows flying at Ron at that moment.

'Damnit!' he roared inwardly. He was unable to maintain his calm and collected attitude while so desperately defending this baggage. For once, combat was not fun at all for Thirteen.

The armored man swung heavily but swiftly, preventing Thirteen from stopping the arrows in time, and so he had to will the bloodbond protecting Ron to morph shapes again, while at the same time, using his armored arm to defend against the blade of his assailant.

That longsword, bordering the length of a greatsword, yet swung single handedly by the man, carried a strange vibration that Thirteen was very wary of. He avoided clashing with the sword directly to avoid those vibrations, but as the armored man continued to swing that was becoming increasingly troublesome.

Every time Thirteen successfully parried the man he would deliver fierce unarmed blows and sword hands, his tempered hands carrying enough force to dent and rend the man's steel armor. At the same time, he had to be constantly aware of the arrows fired by the archers and defend Ron from them using his bloodbond. Then there were the two other third stage cultivators, the bone spike user and another that had remained hidden without acting.

Thirteen could feel the stress bearing down on him. It was a near impossible task to defend the man like this. Did Mentor Fane truly think he could achieve this? Even Thirteen himself had major doubts about it.

In his lifesense, Thirteen caught a flash of the assassin who's bone spike he had shattered. The man had acquired a new one somehow, atleast three feet in length and was dashing towards Ron from behind. At the same time the armored juggernaut fiercely pinned Thirteen down under his assault, while the archers all loosed arrows.

For a fraction of a second, the thought crossed Thirteen's mind that he would fail this challenge. He had not failed a martial challenge in years, not since he first came to the estate.

'No.'

Cold determination washed over his frustration as he decided he would not lose. He did not want to lose. He had put in eight years of grueling effort and proved himself the strongest in his generation, at least, on and off again with Four.

He would not fail to get a good assignment after all this and be stuck acting as some dance instructor, hiding his training to gather information.

Thirteen switched his tactics. He no longer frantically defended, instead stepping in as he struck the plate armor of his foe with a blunt palm, severely denting the middle of a torso plate and disrupting the man's attack.

He followed quickly, forming a sword hand by extending his right hand's armored fingers. The fingertips of the gauntlet were all sharpened like claws, and he used this point to stab at the chainmail curtain of the armored man's helmet.

Thirteen knew his foe had just employed Anchoring to withstand the incredible blunt force of his first attack, and so the man would not be pushed back easily at the moment. That was what he needed as he drove his clawed sword hand into and through the chain main curtain, the metal links popping and breaking, as the armored man remained anchored in place, and Thirteen's hand stabbed through the lower jaw and the back of his head.

While this was happening, Thirteen willed his other bloodbond, the one protecting Ron, to form a condensed shield facing the arrows coming from the front, leaving the back exposed for the assassin with bone spikes. As the assassin closed in however, the bloody shield morphed and a spike shot out from its interior, piercing through Ron's own shoulder, and reaching the assassin just before his own spike could stab Ron in the back.

Ron screamed in pain, as did the assassin behind him, and the volley of arrows were mostly deflected by the rounded shield protecting their target, though some pierced through slightly, none reached Ron.

Thirteen considered this a success until he turned and saw what he had been waiting for, but was not at all ready to receive. The final third stage cultivator.

Thirteen suspected the armored man and his vibrating weapon, along with the assassin wielding bone spikes, were both body cultivators. But this man, cloaked in intense heat and fire as he dove through the air at Ron, his hands flexed into a claw position, this man was definitely a daoist.

'What do I do? Think!' He thought to himself. He felt as if everything slowed to a crawl as he watched the man, wreathed in a cloak of fire, swooping towards Ron, his claw like hand getting closer by the second.

Thirteen instinctively tried to do many things at once to solve his issue. While everything still moved as if in slow motion, Thirteen saw his own right arm raising to point at the man, his legs moving to dash forward, his left hand extending slightly while erupting with bloody projectiles while the bloodbond protecting Ron morphed.

None of these would do anything however. They were all too slow.

The man's fiery hand raked closer and closer as Ron's hair began to catch alight.

'I won't make it. I need to move. Faster!' He stressed the muscles in his arms and legs, willing himself to move faster, but they could only achieve so much.

'Make it! Just. Let. Me. Strike. Him!'

As Thirteen screamed inwardly, frantic at the speed of his surroundings catching up to real time once more, his mindset no longer shocked enough to maintain the compressed perception, Thirteen felt something shift within him, as if in response to his will.

It was not lifeforce, nor qi, it was nothing he had felt before, and yet something he was intimately familiar with. Just as he noticed that unique feeling, he realised his field of vision had changed, as his face was assaulted with a wave of heat.

In front of him was the man cloaked in fire. Or rather, the man's back!

Thirteen's hand was already reaching forward at an incredible pace from earlier, and with that momentum and power, the clawed fingers on his gauntlet stabbed into and grasped the attacker by the back of the neck, the projectiles he had been forming from the blood of his left hand all shot forward at once, like buckshot, they tore through the attacker from behind.

The shield he had been trying to reposition earlier now had enough time to face the attacker, and Thirteen willed it to morph into spike that pierced the man, as both the bloodbonds began to employ withering, black veins formed within their translucent forms as they sapped the man of life and blood.

As a third stage cultivator, he would not die within a mere few seconds from this, and so Thirteen used his large left hand to grasp the face of the attacker, Thirteens whole body being burned from the flames engulfing them as he crushed with all his strength, breaking the daoists face and delivering enough shock and pain to render him unconscious, as the withering reaped what remained of his life.

The fire surrounding the daoist vanished and the blazing fires in the woods all began to die down unnaturally, as Thirteen, confused, bloodied, and burned, fell to his knees before a quivering Ron.

'What… in the world' Thirteen thought to himself, his eyes dazed as his body worked to recover from the surprisingly nefarious burn wounds.

*Twang*

"Crap" he groaned in a tired, guttural voice.

Thirteen threw himself forward feebly and caught an arrow in the back. An arrow meant for Ron.

Thirteen was not terribly injured, but his whole body screamed at him for sleep, and he didn't understand why. It was as if he had not slept for a week, and even his sense of touch was becoming vague. He had been fine just before...

More twanging of bows followed and Thirteen felt a series of thuds on his back. He could tell his body was fighting off some type of poison from the laced arrows, but he barely had the strength to move at this point.

Shakily standing, Thirteen willed his two blood bonds, joining them as he had them morph back into liquid. He then formed them into an array of small balls before they solidified again. Without any hope of aiming them, he simply mustered as much sudden force as he could and launched those dozens of small projectiles, like steel balls, forward through the woods the archers now hid in.

A cacophony of crashing, piercing and screaming rang out as his random blast of tiny projectiles filled most of his field of vision and even pierced through thinner trees.

'That should do it' he thought, content that any survivors would be scared off after that display.

Slowly moving back towards the armored man, Thirteen was followed by two resplendent drops of golden blood, the lifeblood that had served as cores for his bloodbonds. It was only through these that he could imprint his will quickly on foreign blood, something the Sanguine Control by itself was incapable of.

He opened his mouth as one of those drops floated in and he swallowed. The other, he shot into the armored man;s body, where it rapidly drained the blood and life to form a new bloodbond, sprouting from the man like a tree in the form of a vermillion spear that he grasped as he approached the spike user.

This man was not dead, but crawled away from Ron with an open and bleeding stomach.

'Wait, I didn–!"

Thirteen skewered the man with his new spear, only to find his bones incredibly tough. He leaned his weight on the weapon, and managed to pierce through the hard skull soon thereafter.

Another wave of fatigue assaulted him.

"What is going on?" He muttered with the tired voice of a man gone a week without sleep.

"Why am i so… tired."

His body swayed slightly, but he caught himself with the spear, treating it as a walking staff.

'Nevertheless, I really pulled it off. I wonder what that was, how did I get behind the man all of a sudden?' Thirteen's lips subconsciously pulled into a thin smile at his success.

He moved back to Ron and lightly kicked him with his foot, more of a tap really.

"Come on. We need to get out of here" he muttered.

Ron scrambled to his feet with a start, clutching the bloody whole that had been pierced through the man's shoulder. He looked at the exhausted Thirteen with frightened eyes and a sickly pale face.

'Oh god, I dont have the energy for this' Thirteen thought as he watched Ron open his mouth to speak and envisioned the rebellious attitude to come.

"You… don't you feel anything?" It was a soft voice that was also somehow accusatory.

"Tired. Frustrated. Relieved. Also tired." he replied with an amused smile that only looked ugly with his currently dropping eyes.

"You joke about it? You killed… so many. You murdered so many people, does that not mean anything to you?" Ron's fearful eyes were now accusatory, but that only confused Thirteen. This was not the type of rebellion he had been prepared for.

"Does it mean anything?" He mimicked with confused eyes and a slightly tilted head.

"Do you wish I had not killed them?" He genuinely asked.

"No that's not what I… You really don't get it?"

Thirteen paused for a while, but the lack of activity was only helping his fatigue spread.

"Sigh… come on, we have to go." He said softly as he turned to walk away.

Ron watched his back for a moment before looking around. His actions stopped only as Thirteen called out while walking "I may be tired but I can still drag you along if need be."

Ron jogged to catch up to Thirteen, causing him to smile. 'It's much easier if he doesn't remember he's in charge' He stifled a chuckle.