Going to War

Blue had been kidnapped by the people of Ivory Tower? Then why they had come to him with all those questions and pretending that they didn't know where she was?

The youth's eyes flickered with a dangerous light.

"How do you know?"

The blond Fighter snickered in response. Her Fighting Aura expanded to the white sword she was holding and slashed her sword towards Sif.

A wave of energy departed from the blade, moving towards the youth in black.

Sif didn't even see it coming, it was way too fast for his mortal eyes. Only when he sensed something crashing on his Energy Shield, he realized that he had been attacked.

The blow was seriously strong and probably a middle stage Rank 3 Fighter wouldn't be able to block it without being gravely injured.

However, Sif wasn't a rank 3 Fighter. He was a Summoner. The blow wasn't even strong enough to put a dent in his defenses.

A robotic voice echoed in Sif's mind. [Analysis Completed. New Page added to Library.]

The youth sent rapidly his consciousness inside the information disc of the treasure. He immediately found the new page and gave it a rapid look.

[Name: - Angry Sun - ]

[Species: Human]

[Danger: 1]

[Strength: 2]

[Resistance: 2]

[Velocity: 2]

[Reflexes: 2]

[Class: Flesh Cultivator - Rank 4]

[Soul: 1]

[Soul Root: Fire]

[Energy: Life / 70]

Sif rapidly determined that "Flesh Cultivator" should be how the people in the Broken Empire called Fighters. What intrigued him more was what came after that.

'Rank 4?'

The last time he met her, he was sure she was just a rank 3 Fighter. It looked like that she had increased her power recently, becoming a Great Fighter.

Then he looked again at her speed. It was twenty times his own! It was no mystery why he couldn't see her attacking!

During the time he was looking at her stats, Angry Sun attacked him another two times. Naturally, they didn't cause any kind of damage to him.

However, he couldn't just stand there and let her attack him.

"My turn."

He sent mental order to the flying treasure next to him. The metal scrap stopped in place, and the space around it twisted, almost as it was being ripped apart.

A white silent flash emerged from the distortion, darting towards the woman shrouded in a red Fighting Aura.

The latter's eyes shrank. Even with her Great Fighter reflexes, she could barely see the figure of a long bat tearing through the air with insane speed.

Angry Sun knew that Sif had a familiar, but it was just a bronze ranked little beast.

She was a Great Fighter now, and she could put up a fight alone against a bronze ranked magic beast with no problem.

Yet the thing that was flying towards her seemed a lot faster than what a normal bronze ranked magic beast.

'It's a creature specialized in speed? Yes, it must be so!'

With renewed confidence, Angry Sun moved her sword to meet the sharp claws of the beast, as the flame that surrounded her exploded with even more power.

A loud bang echoed in the air as the armored warrior and the white bat clashed.

The confident smile on the lips of the blond warrior disappeared in a fog of blood as she was sent flying like a bullet for several dozen meters.

'So strong...'

She thought before crashing inside an opened pagoda on the Yellow Side of the border, falling unconscious on the spot.

Sif's eyes lit up with praise. Luna was already close to becoming a Silver Class beast.

It seemed that all that hunting that she had done for him in the past few months had allowed her to express some of her inner potentials.

She just needed some help to make the jump.

The youth moved forward and patted the beast on its head. Then, ignoring the bad look that his own familiar gave him, he moved towards the padoga with the unconscious Great Fighter.

"I wanted to go a little deeper, but I guess this will have to work..." murmured the youth taking out a bronze coin and putting it on an opening in the wall next to the door of the padoga.

He then entered the small building and closed the door behind him.

The inside of the pagoda was pretty simple: there were a couple of rooms and a circular pond at the center. He could feel strong gelid energy starting to pour out from the pond.

'Yeah, there is plenty of Yin there... it should be fine... come out now...'

The space around his spatial treasure distorted again. This time it was a black colored bird that emerged from that strange distorted vortex.

The body of the poor beast was thin and trembling. It looked like if just a feeble puff would delete it out from existence.

The black bird gave Sif an even more bad gaze than the latter received frequently from Luna. The youth, however, wasn't troubled at all by that hostility.

Both creatures had been soul-refined. He could literally wear them as clothes, moving with their bodies instead of his. He didn't care if they wanted to be his friends or not.

"Just go there and heal."

He pointed the bird towards the pool of water. The crow's red eyes moved towards the pond, and gradually widened in shock.

Yin energy! Lots of it too!

It made a strange guttural sound and darted towards the waters, disappearing deep inside them. Sif could feel that the crow had delved to the bottom of the pond and was now absorbing large quantities of Yin energy.

'He will definitely survive this...' Which meant that he already got his hand on a Silver Ranked Magic Beast! Luna was also very close to becoming a Silver Ranked beast, he just needed to find a way to boost her up.

Sif couldn't help but feel proud for his fast progress. In the past how much time did it took him to get to this precise power level? 4 - 5 years?

He moved around the rooms of the pagoda, checking the various things there: a living room, a bathroom, and three bedrooms. A pretty simple design. Then Sif came back to the central part of the pagoda.

His eyes moved towards the unconscious woman near the entrance. Luna was keeping an eye on her, stretched on the ground a couple of meters from her.

Sif moved towards the unconscious woman, scanning her with his Willpower. She had a few broken ribs and some internal damage. Nothing that her vitality couldn't fix for her. She was a Great Fighter after all.

"That some nice armor though... and the sword... bronze ranked?"

A smile appeared on the youth's face. That was a good catch! He could do at least a dozen bronze coins if he sold Angry Sun equipment.

He took her out of the armor, storing it on his metal scrap together with her bronze ranked sword and a purse with a couple of bronze shards.

Then he simply went back to one of the bedrooms, resting and waiting for her to wake up.

He really wanted to get at the bottom of the conspiracy she screamed at him. The youth still didn't care much for the disappearance of Blue, but if there was even a remote chance that Ivory Tower was playing him for a fool, he wanted to know it.

It took a couple of hours before Angry Sun started to woke up.

It wasn't because she had rested enough or that her injuries had been healed and now she was waking up.

No, it was because of the incredible cold coming from the pond. Sif had even taken her armor, letting the poor Fighter on the cold floor, only wearing the brow outfit she had under it.

The blond woman was confused as she started to gain consciousness. She touched her body with an increasingly alarmed look in her eyes. "What? where is my armor?!"

Then her eyes fell on Luna, sitting a dozen of a meter in the distance.

She froze, looking deep in those vivid red eyes. The beast suddenly moved from its prone position, starting to moving towards Angry Sun.

"Fuck"

The Great Fighter didn't have anything to defend herself. She has been left without armor and without a sword. She could only slowly retreat until she was at the door of one of the rooms around the main hall of the padoga.

"Come inside"

The blond woman turned her head, only to see a young man stretched on a double sized bed.

Her heart burned with fury as she screamed with rage against him. "You! What hav-"

Sif interrupted the woman with an annoyed hand gesture. "Blue was kidnapped by Ivory Tower... it is true?"

The woman moved her eyes between the youth on the bed and the white beast behind her. "Where is my ar-"

This time was Luna that interrupted her, with a low menacing sound that made the tall woman tremble more than the cold that she was feeling at the moment.

She gritted her teeth. "Yes! I saw two people from Ivory Tower's took her outside of the Inn."

Sif eyes shined with a dangerous light that scared even Angry Sun.

"I'm not lying! They didn't wear Ivory Tower's colors but they used a sealing technique that I saw Ivory Tower cultivators use on the battlefield!"

The youth knew that the Fighter wasn't lying. His Willpower could check the soul of a person, to make sure that they were telling the truth.

Her soul didn't tremble at all when she was talking about the kidnapping. She truly saw it happen. It did happen.

'So they are truly trying to bait me to Ivory Tower...'

Waiting for the Fighter to wake up to be interrogated, he had given some thought to the matter. In the end, he came up with two possible scenarios.

The first: Angry Sun was lying.

She wanted to destabilize his train of thoughts, to make the fight easier for her.

If that was the case, he would just beat the shit out of her and kick her out. Sadly he couldn't just kill her or kidnap her to sell her into slavery, this was the Harmony Territory after all. Only very powerful people could do such things without any kind of punishment.

Now he knew that this first proposition was incorrect.

The second: Angry Sun was not lying.

Ivory Tower had kidnapped Blue and now was pretending they didn't. It was all to make this Stone Hurricane guy go even madder in the fight against Mysterious Light.

This second proposition made sense especially if the Array Master was as good as they had told him he was. Ivory Tower would only benefit if he became even more enraged with Mysterious Light.

However, If Ivory Tower was so calculating, he had to reevaluate their actions. If they were so canny, every action that they made had to be considered seriously and not as something done randomly.

Why did they approach him? It made no sense that they included him in the plan.

Why send a couple of Great Fighter to wait inside the Inn two days after the kidnapping? Why giving him a War Token for basically nothing in exchange?

"It makes no sense... unless..."

Sif had sudden enlightenment.

His face darkened as he sent his willpower inside his pocket, finding the small token he obtained the same morning. He scanned it a couple of times.

It didn't take long until he found a small array, hidden between the inner mechanisms of the token.

"Tracing... I guess that I am in the plan after all..."

A dangerous flame appeared in his eyes.

Something told him that the moment he put a foot outside Iron Gates Fort he would have a random encounter with some people that wanted to capture him.

If they thought that he was just a random bronze ranked Summoner, they would also believe that it wouldn't be that hard to break him and made him confess that he was a secret agent of Mysterious Light or that he sold Blue to them for money.

Sif laughed.

'I didn't want to enter the fray... but you forced my hand. War it is.'