30 ch 4 the next two weeks

yesterday has been a blur. I don't remember much after immortal entered into his mind castle.

that kid has been with immortal, doing his mental magic on him the entire night. right now it is almost noon and the kid is still sleeping. whatever he did seems to have exhausted him.

I don't know what this mind castle is but based on the number of movies I watched, I can tell that it has something to do with the mind. ( to be honest, I did not need movies for that ).I will need to ask the kid someday.

I can ask the phantom snow after he wakes up. for now, I have to gather wood. luckily every house seems to have some kind of wood storage. it is very chilly during the night.

(after a while )

me( dumping all the wood I had gathered into the house ) - so, what are we going to do. I was expecting him to give us a plan. how long before he wakes up and can speak again.

phantom snow( who had just woken up when I had begun to move the wood inside, quite grumpily if I must add ) - a month or so, if I am lucky, a week or two. he has been dragged to the deepest part of his mind castle. it will take time to completely break him out.

me (sitting next to the wood)- so until then we will fight against them.

phantom snow - you will have to do that on your own, personally I have not fought too much in my life, I won't be able to help you in that field. to be honest I have no idea how I managed to hold on for so long against those flesh blobs. even you know that was a scared kid fighting.

I also need to go inside his mind castle and locate him and get him out. both of us need him to have a chance.

me - what happened to him, anyway.

phantom snow - the mind castle is what we call the levels of our consciousness. some forces are capable of dragging you deep down into the mind castle. these can be like my mental mana or a few other forces. we need to be in our most upper levels of mind to control our body. beyond that, we are trapped in our minds. if I start to explain to you what the mind castle is, you might as well begin to learn mind magic.

( after a few minutes, at the gate )

the enemy snakes still had their intelligence. at least one of them did. it looks like immortal can't be correct about everything. in the forest, I have faced such beings. the ones that command their fellows and seem to have an effect similar to mind control on them. they are almost impossible to fight. the army under them is a machine.

this is going to be a tough fight. attacking them directly will be suicide. guerilla tactics will not work. they tend to adapt pretty quickly to guerilla tactics. if they came inside the city, I can create quite a few traps for them. I tell you I saw some very interesting toys in the armoury.

but they have no incentive to attack us. they seem to be content to stay in that place. for now, I will study them and see how they react to different situations. it is a hard job, because the snakes can sense the change in temperature.

it is somewhat similar to my ability in that factor. so my usual style of observation won't work in this case.

with them, I have to follow a different method.

( a couple of hours, in the evening. )

right now my target is the patrol at one of the outer edges of the gate. it consists of five first ranks, all mindless. for this, I have borrowed a couple of exploding dagger and some rope. this is called a mental rope. it allows a person to control it freely and move it however they like and the last is the frigid cloak, which can somewhat hide my temperature.

after this attack, I should be able to finally produce my own blood energy, after the tiger destroyed my armour, the lifeforce can be used to produce blood energy. after that, I can finally be considered to be a mage at the very least. I might be able to become a class second with it, but I am not very sure. this class system is still hard for me to wrap my head around.

so that means I can finally call myself a blood mage. anyway, enough daydreaming.

removing my cloak, I throw a couple of exploding daggers at two of the snakes. I throw the rope at one of the snakes and my cloak at the fourth one, blocking its vision.

the fifth has yet to put up defenses as I drive my sword into the snakes head. it does instantly.

meanwhile, the one covered in a cloak has already removed it and was slithering towards me. the snake was not panicking and was steadily coming towards me. that is why the mmind-controlledones are impossible to fight.they are fucking machines.

I swing my sword, hitting the ground as the snake dodges me. I can feel the mental rope tearing, not able to handle the strain of the snake struggling against it. the bound snake had escaped.

that moment of distraction was enough for the cloak snake to get a drop on me as it lunges to bite me. I don't have enough time to jump to the side, so I instinctively throw my hand out to only have it bitten.

I am poisoned, but the snake is stuck on my hand. I can already feel my hand numbing as I swing my sword right through my arm. the snake is skewered and so is my arm. thankfully the exploding dagger took out the other snakes. the rope snake was escaping slithering toward the city, as soon as the snake goes a certain distance, protrusions begin to come out of its body and it collapses to death right in front of me.

I can't feel my body as I quickly make my way back into the city. I can't even see my surroundings, which seems to have turned into a grey blur.

( after god knows how long )

phantom snow - why were you trying to get yourself killed. you had collapsed en route to the city. if not for me getting curious, you would most likely have died today. are you trying to commit suicide?

me - leave that be and tell me this. is it possible that we can break the mind control of the snakes?

phantom snow - what benefit would it serve us, regardless of whether their mind is controlled or not, they will put up a resistance.

me- I don't think so, ...

then I explain to him the fight I had, especially the part about the snake running away from the gate. something felt very off about it and something does seem to be off about it. the kid seems to have understood something, I did not. he did not bother to explain it. we are two completely different branches of magic after all. the actions of the snake felt instinctive, not as if it is under some kind of control.

I have spent long enough in the forest to understand the instincts of animals. the only reason an animal would run away from a place is if it is dangerous or something dangerous is on its way. well, that is a problem for tomorrow, for now, the snakes are my biggest concern. maybe it is the undead that immortal is talking of.

(later that day )

I struggled to get up, but I can feel the pain in my body. it is like somebody made me swallow fire. poisonous snakes are very annoying. I will heal in a day.

stuff like today are the reason that I can't

sleep. you see the mind is a very funny thing. it is just not capable of handling pressure. Earth is also a shitty place, the very food we eat we could be eating could poison us to death, walking in the road might cause an accident. basically every part of our life, death is possible. the mind was good at filtering it all out. here in this world, I don't have that advantage. every moment my brain is making these thoughts of all the threats around me, all the enemies around me. I am a stranger in this weird world. the vine on the tree next to me could be a snake in hiding, a birdman will come to attack me when I am sleeping. these are all the thoughts that fill my head nowadays.

death is always a step away in this world. I did not expect the rope to get torn. if the snake had decided to attack me, I would have been dead. how the hell is a man supposed to cope with that.

( sometime in the next couple of days)

I have finally have a method of dealing with the snakes. It is a device called the thought breaker. it Is used to break psychic links like the one I had with kid thd first time I met. over the course of the last two days, I have been confirming this. the kid entered the gate to confirm it. well, I have no idea how he did it( not a mind mage here.).

well, according to him if the mental link is broken, the snakes will break free from the mental link placed over them.

the only drawback, the damnable device has a limited range and we only have one. so the only way we will be getting all of the mental links is to attack the source of all this mental links, which means that I will have to enter deep into enemy territory and fight them till their leader comes to fight me and then activate the thought breaker.

the only reason that I dare to consider It is I have an ace in the hole, a very powerful ace in the hole. though it will take quite some time to prepare for it.

( after approximately a couple of weeks, the day for me to execute the plain came.it is noon, so the time when these snakes tend to be somewhat lazy)

me - so when I need to activate the device, just twist the device and throw it.

phantom snow - don't activate it when you are too close to it. the device is like a mental explosive. you will end up falling very deep into your mental castle if you are too close to it. I can't have another patient to deal with, it is very exhaustive to enter the mind palace of another living being.

me - I will try my best, even now I am not very confident about all this. while the enemy might have a chance of having a second class it is just an army of first ranks.

phantom snow - do you need to take this risk, it is a dangerous move. we can't tell the behavior of the snakes once they are free of this thing. for all, they could come to attack you. as I said there is a mental bond, but I can't say if it is the type we use for mind control. based on what you said I have the feeling that it is a mind control.

me - we need to leave this place as quickly as possible. can't you feel the danger in the air? it almost feels as if we are at the brink of something very dangerous.

phantom snow ( in a tired manner, we have had this argument many times ) - you can't really take such a risk for a feeling, can you?

me - you don't know how many times It has saved my life. anyway, it will be helpful if you took a step back, I have to power up for this battle.

saying that I took my totem and plunged it in my heart. don't worry I am not committing suicide. this is a spell from the third page of the book of bloody mage. the simplest spell of the third page to be precise.

my totem has already begun to dissolve into my body. for the spot where the sword had appeared, blood like patterns had appeared on my body and the blood armor I had worn is beginning to change shape.

the spell has been a success, now to apply it In a battle.