Chp.35: Desperate move

Haku had never been someone who acted with only one goal in mind. While he had primary goals that allowed him to blaze his trail, in each of them there were millions of secondary ones. Sometimes (basically always) he tried to get them, other times (rarely) he decided it was too risky and not worth it and so he gave up. But in principle, when Haku put one of his plans into motion, he always aimed to obtain not only victory, but also the greatest number of advantages possible. After all, every single benefit he gained, even the smallest one, would still be a benefit and could prove crucial someday in the distant future. Therefore, he never wasted anything and never let anything slip from his hands. Actually, he could really consider himself a greedy person.

This time was no exception. Haku's main objective was obviously to kill Carrion: he was tired of having him on his heels and wanted to get him off his back once and for all. After all, having a legendary level around wanting to kill him wasn't going to help him sleep peacefully. Carrion had to die, for his own safety and that of his entire family and even his allies. He had once made the mistake of showing leniency (if it could be called that); this time that he was not bound by any agreement he was not willing to do it again. If a mosquito stung a man once, the man could just swat it away; but if the mosquito bothered him again, then the man crushed it with his hand to get rid of it. No one really liked having pesky bugs buzzing around them. Therefore, Carrion wouldn't see another sunset: that day, that desert would become his grave.

However, just like in his entire life, Haku also had other things on his mind. In fact, he wanted to use the opportunity to acquire as much information as possible about the spirits and learn how it was possible to defeat them. Up until now, he had only won against them with trickery, but that couldn't be a long-term solution: it worked if the fight had long been premeditated by him, but if a legendary level suddenly appeared and hadn't left him time to think of a plan, Haku would have had no chance to escape, much less to win. He therefore had to be able to find a way to defeat the spirits by force. He had to find out how to kill a spirit. Once he discovered that, that method would almost certainly work with angels, demons, and ghosts as well. At that point the only remaining opponents who could have worried him would have been the gods, but Haku was going to use that opportunity to get information about them as well. In fact, he had devised a plan to capture the lesser spirit summoned by Carrion and make him their slave. He was sure that his sisters would be able to perform that task admirably. He could have just tried to summon one, but since he didn't have any information about where the spirits came from, he wasn't sure opening a window into it was a good idea. It was much safer to steal an already summoned spirit, without opening doors he didn't know if it were wise to open. Once this spirit was at his service, Haku would have extrapolated from it every possible information on spirits and above all on the gods. With a little luck, he would be able to figure out why the rules of the world worked so differently for these beings and where their powers came from. Once he understood that, perhaps he would be able to harness the divine power and control it, or even turn the spirit his sisters had captured into an avatar and use it however he pleased. It would have been a huge step forward from a security point of view… and also from a war point of view.

And of course, as he fought he was still acquiring information. By the time he understood that his secret weapon, which he had created especially to fight against the legendary levels, could also seriously injure spirits (and consequently probably also angels, demons and ghosts). He had even been able to almost completely disintegrate Sutekh's body. However, he had also understood that these beings didn't follow the same natural laws as mortals: at least, their life and their consciousness were not tied exclusively to their brains. All living beings that Haku knew died if they lost their brains: while the other organs could still be regenerated thanks to mana, even if not to extreme levels, the brain was the seat of consciousness and therefore, without it, death was assured. But this could not be the case with the spirits: Suketh had been compressed until his entire head imploded, yet he had survived and managed to partially regenerate. This meant that spirits must have some way of preserving their consciousness even in the absence of a functioning brain. At least it didn't seem that they were immortal: in that case Sutekh would not even have been injured, instead he had suffered a lot of damage. As a result, Haku was sure that there was a way to kill even a greater spirit like Sutekh. He couldn't do it at the moment, but he would find it sooner or later.

For the moment, however, it was not the time to experiment. He had already determined that with his current weapons he couldn't kill Sutekh, so it wasn't worth trying new techniques. All he had to do at the moment was to stop Carrion from escaping, wait for the divine power infused into the spirit to wear off and he return to his own world, and finally eliminate his opponent once and for all. Carrion hardly had the strength to fight anymore, killing him would have been as simple as swallowing a piece of boar meat.

Carrion and Sutekh seemed to have understood his intentions, because they used the last remaining energy to get up in the air as much as possible in the hope of getting away to escape. They expected that only Rhaegal would be able to chase them at high altitude... but they were in for a nasty surprise when they saw Darbi and Haku also take off and head towards them. "How... how do you do it!?" Carrion exclaimed in astonishment; both Haku and Darbi had a damaged wing, and to top it off they were both too heavy to fly, as they had demonstrated several times.

Haku scoffed at him. "Our avatars continually regenerate until their brains are nicked! The brew that fuels them contains adult dragon blood, so they have practically infinite energy! We just need to stick the pieces back in the right place and they fuse again!" he answered. "As for the flight part... come on, don't you realize by now that I've been fooling you from the start? Of course I lied about the physical limitations of my own creation. It's true, neither Darbi or I could lift off the ground under normal circumstances, but by replicating the sand sharks' use of their mana we can make ourselves as light as a feather. Then it's easy to use updrafts and soar, even if you're twenty-five meters long. Keep that in mind, Carrion , even if it won't do you much good - we dragons learn from every other life form we encounter, even the seemingly lowest! Everything in this world has a lot to offer if used in the right way!"

"Yeah! And we always use it in the right way!" Darbi exclaimed as he spat a stream of venom in Carrion's direction. Sutekh got in the way and deflected it using his staff, but he couldn't avoid being hit by the blast as Haku set it on fire. The spirit was thrown back with further wounds on him, which unlike the previous ones didn't begin to heal, except for a few on his face which however did so much more slowly.

Sutekh let out a few deep breaths, then approached Carrion and whispered: "My lord, at my signal, begin to flee. I will release all the divine power that is left in my body in one go and send these monsters back to the ground. When I I will say, run to the top and use the force of the shockwave to your advantage to get as far away as possible. Let me do this one last thing for you"

Carrion narrowed his eyes. What Sutekh was proposing was the spirits finishing move, the one they used when they were really cornered and had no other choice. It consisted of releasing at once all the power that had been given to him by the summoner, be it mana (for minor spirits) or divine power (for major spirits), in a single immense explosion of energy. It obviously wasn't harmful to the spirit: even if from his words it seemed that Sutekh wanted to sacrifice himself to allow Carrion to escape, the reality was quite different. The explosion would have occurred outside his body, not inside, and the energy released would always travel in the opposite direction to his position; as a result, the spirit was in no danger. It would simply lose all the power the summoner gave it, and since it feared it anchored in the mortal world, doing so would send the spirit back to the realm it came from. For this reason, this move was to be considered desperate: it meant not only potentially endangering the summoner's life (since he could have been hit in turn by the energy wave), but also abandoning him to his fate. If even after that move their opponent survived, the summoner would find himself facing him alone, and since even that desperation hadn't worked, most likely he would die.

Carrion didn't like the idea of ​​parting with Sutekh, since that was what was protecting him from dragon attacks, but he knew he didn't have much choice. Even if he refused, very soon Sutekh's divine power would have run out anyway and he would have returned to his realm, leaving him alone. Consequently, he might as well risk everything and at least try to exploit the situation to escape. "Okay, you have my permission. Go ahead"

Sutekh nodded, then a strange aura began to form around him. Very soon his entire body was engulfed in what looked like a grainy storm in which red sparks continually darted. Even the dragons noticed it and moved away, expecting the worst, not without reason. "Now! Go!"

Carrion complied and used every last bit of energy he had left to fly upward as fast as possible; an instant later, there was a burst of light behind him. A flare so strong it faded the sun appeared in the middle of the desert, giving off so much heat that some of the sand tens of meters below melted into glass. The dragons were dazzled by the strong light; their avatars' eyes obviously didn't feel the effects of the glare as they would if they were real, because otherwise they would have exploded inside their eye sockets; however, the light was so intense that the world seemed to turn completely white, preventing them from seeing even the slightest silhouette. The intense heat affected them too, but thanks to the dragon scales their avatars didn't catch fire; if they hadn't had them, their skin would have instantly charred. Carrion, expecting that result, had already wrapped his body in all the necessary protections, but he still felt the temperature rise around him. That light, however, wasn't the most destructive part of Sutekh's move: the flash was in fact followed by the shock wave.

The air around the spirit heated and compressed from the light, charging with energy every millisecond, until it exploded and expanded in every direction faster than the speed of sound. The dragons, which were currently slightly lower than Sutekh's position, were hurled downward as if they were twigs, crashing to the ground with the immense force. Dunes within a radius of several kilometers were blown away as if they were made of paper, doing in a second what the very strong desert wind would have done over the course of weeks. Carrion, who instead was higher than Sutekh, when hit by the shock wave was thrown into the sky, further away from the dragons. The roar generated by the breaking of the sound barrier was heard tens of kilometers away, like the pained roar of a colossal dying beast.

When the chain of destructive events stopped, Sutekh reappeared in the middle of the sky, completely unharmed, but his body quickly began to sizzle and be drawn into another circle of energy that was opening above him. He had finished his adventure in the world of mortals. He had only a few ounces of divine power left, the little that still allowed him to partially resist the sucking force of the portal. Sutekh then extracted it from his body and threw it towards Carrion, who in the meantime was now very far away. "I hope it will help you" he said a moment before being sucked into the portal and disappearing from the mortal world.