Tales of the Endless Empire

Chapter 446: Stress Test

Seeing the warriors rushing him, Thalion wasn’t the only one who had a good feeling. The Sanguine Impera’s hunger and desire to devour spiked to new heights as the fighters came closer. Thalion had seen it with his eye skill before, but this close there was no doubt. They all were some kind of blood users and had potent blood. This was exactly what he needed right now.In a fight of blood mage against blood mage, normally the one with the stronger will and stronger blood won. Yet with Thalion, that rule didn’t work anymore since he had the plant designed by the strongest vampire in existence to easily hunt other vampires—or in this case, blood users. Every skill against him would be consumed, while his bloodthorn and vines couldn’t be consumed or manipulated. Even worse, once Thalion hit them, he could drain their blood quite easily, and so far no one had managed to resist the Sanguis Impera and his combined effort to do so.

The warriors would learn very soon that their skills were useless against Thalion, which would make them change their tactic to close combat. They likely had more strength and agility, yet when it came to close combat, Thalion had just gotten a new sword which clearly was so much better than everything the guards had that this also shouldn’t be a viable option for them.

Regarding all these advantages, Thalion saw his chances of mass murdering those cultists as very high. This was in fact his chance to catch up to the top contenders even while being at F-grade. The former consideration hadn’t even involved his curse or the ability of his blood to burn.

Thalion didn’t know how they were sacrificing the people, but if he managed to spill a few drops of his blood into one of the channels, whoever wanted to use it would have a big problem. Normally the individual resisted the curse, but blood outside of the body, with the person already dead—what better medium could there be for a blood curse to travel through?

In this final stage, Thalion also didn’t need to hold anything back. Everyone here would sooner or later learn of his blood curse. Losing the surprise attack in a future fight compared to a higher chance of making more leaderboard points in this event—the choice was easy.

Before the fighters arrived, Thalion released all locks on his divine passive skill. From now on, all the flames igniting in his proximity would take on his bloodline affinity, and he would be able to fuel and control them. This also counted for the many torches and buildings inside the city and around the captured villagers. At the moment they were too far away to be in his range, but that would change very soon.

Thalion had to admit, given how the last stages went, the inhabitants were all offered the reward to be teleported to the new universe after the treasure hunt was over. Chances were relatively high that should his blood curse spread, an infected might end up in the new universe. This could lead to all kinds of negative effects for Thalion. One was that people might create an antidote against the curse, rendering it useless in battle.

Still, getting the divine class came first for Thalion, and he would sacrifice any future advantage for it. It was all or nothing now.

“Hey, why are you not moving? Don’t you see that they are channeling their blood skills?” Saranya asked, still with watery eyes. She was probably thinking that Thalion was crazy too, by how he was standing there with open arms and a big smile on his face.

He couldn’t do anything else. There had been so many things going wrong in the last stages, but now it was like the universe was shining down on him again. He had a chance. He had a real chance to make it.

“Oh, this is perfect. Just wait,” Thalion grinned while waiting for the warriors to fuel their blood skills with even more power.

Thalion thought, his grin taking on a far more predatory nature, and it was difficult to hold back his aura and killing intent. He didn’t want to disturb their channeling.

“Hey, who is this crazy guy speaking to?” one of the soldiers shouted at his companion.

“He probably just went insane like most of the others. Let’s kill him and deliver his blood with the livestock,” the other soldier shouted back.

Thalion couldn’t think further as a beam of blood was fired at him. He only stretched out his left hand, with the right one still holding Saranya. The red beam impacted his open hand and disappeared without doing any noticeable damage.

At first, the ritualist who had fired the beam didn’t know what was happening and just kept going until the first blood spears turned into bloody rivers when getting close to Thalion, who also disappeared them in his palm.

“What? He can use blood too?” one of the ritualists shouted, stopping his attack immediately before bellowing at the soldiers. “What are you standing around like that? This is your job—go get him!”

Six soldiers drew their weapons, still annoyed. They had identified Thalion and weren’t thinking that an F-grade could put up much of a fight against them, which was understandable with Thalion holding back his aura. Releasing his aura would have shown that he was far from the normal peak F-grade.

The soldiers all wore two different weapons: a spear on their backs and a shortsword around their waists. For the fight, two decided on the spear while the others picked the shortsword.

Thalion had to hold the Sanguis Impera back for now, which was almost in some kind of feeding frenzy after absorbing this much high-value blood. It wanted nothing more than to send out its vines to squeeze every single drop of blood out of the soldiers and ritualists behind them. Normally Thalion wouldn’t have anything against it, but this was a good opportunity to get used to Saranya.

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Thalion almost surfed over the ground, which looked like black clumpy sand with only a few dead plants sticking out of it, utilizing telekinetic dash. Through this whole system event he had trained and refined his control, which allowed him to fight in his human form like in every other.

The only thing he wasn’t able to do was keep exact control when fully fueling his movement skills with maximum power. Actually going a bit over half of what he could do made things a bit sketchy, but that wasn’t needed anyway. The amount he currently pulled into telekinetic dash already surpassed the speed compared to a fully fueled skill before adding the bloodline of the elven prince.

Against those soldiers, Thalion had no problem keeping up with their speed, and wielding Saranya felt amazing, to say the least. The sword wasn’t too light like a plastic sword but had a bit of weight to it—not too much so that it would slow him down. It was the perfect balance between speed and power, and that showed.

Thalion dove under the first spear, deflecting the stab upward while spinning forward to not lose any momentum. There was barely any resistance when Thalion cut through the torso of the soldier with a single strike. Even the spear had been damaged, which was crazy given that Thalion had just lightly deflected it upward.

Not wasting a second, Thalion dove for the next soldier before they had the chance to encircle him. A sneaky vine also emerged from his back and consumed the leftover blood in the corpse.

The next soldier didn’t want to let Thalion get any closer and stabbed forward, his spear glowing with red light. A red telekinetic image of a stab shot forward like a projectile, and since Thalion didn’t feel anything through his blood sense, he decided to be on the safe side and deflected it with Saranya.

Speaking of the sword, it wasn’t really quiet and also not that happy with the fight.

“Hey, what are you doing? Upward slash. UPWARD SLASH. Don’t you hear me? Do you just let him attack from afar without countering? Do you really think I’m just made for melee combat? Oh, don’t look at me like that and just make a horizontal cut.”

To have her complain in his right ear all the time wasn’t a pleasant way of fighting, but the sound the blade made with every swing made it worth it. To hopefully shut her up for a bit, he did what she said.

He stopped in his tracks and swung forward in a horizontal line. If he had still used his old blade of the Blooded Templar, he could have unleashed a red slash to destroy the five soldiers before him. Yet with this blade, it would likely result in a silly motion that—

The deep hum intensified drastically as invisible power gathered around the sword, and all of a sudden it was like he was trying to swing the sword through a meter-thick steel wall, the intensity rising significantly so that Thalion had to put all his strength to use to not slow down. His heart also went into overdrive to deliver the additional power needed.

It was like an invisible cut was fired at the guards, who didn’t seem to have any idea what happened as every single one got bisected. Even their weapons were cut apart. What Thalion liked most was the sound the invisible cut made while in the air. It was the same loud, deep thrum as it flew at the soldiers in a split second.

Otherwise nothing happened until Thalion saw how a relatively large black stone was detonated out of existence as the slash hit it.

“Okay, I like it. Do you have any other tricks?” Thalion laughed out loud, looking down at the sword.

“Hey, I’m over here, and yes, I have a bunch more secrets, but you need to prove yourself worthy first. Also, I don’t have access to some myself, with my soul being too weak for it. Guess father wanted to give me a reason to progress further. What a fool—he should have known better that I am nothing but ambition…”

Her tirade went on while Thalion focused on the cultists, who decided that they didn’t want to stay in this place anymore. They used blood under their feet and the red runes on their robes to speed up even further and ran far faster than normally possible.

“Commander, we need help! The sword is far more dangerous—”

He didn’t get any further because Thalion had wanted to test the range of the skill, and for the best target he had chosen the commander.

It seemed that after some distance the slash exploded, ripping anything into pieces. It was a bit like a bomb, but not that flashy, and the explosion radius wasn’t as wide, but it was far more destructive. The ritualist viewed that destruction from only a meter away as the whole body of the commander was ripped apart. The vertical slash also cut deep into the ground.

He would have liked to experiment a bit more, but sadly he couldn’t try it out again since he wanted to steal a robe from at least one of the cultists, and there was no chance that the robe would repair itself when cut with the skill of the sword.

There were two ritualists. One was currently standing frozen, looking at the empty air where his commander had been a second ago, while the other was already one step ahead, running away with everything he had.

From his elevated position, Thalion sniped the running one with an extra-long bloodthorn before using mistform to almost teleport downward beside the ritualist, cutting the man’s head off in a single go.

This left Thalion with a few wagons of villagers and the complaining spirit of his sword. The other ritualist was still alive, currently lying face-first in the dirt, trying to pull the over two-meter-long bloodthorn from his chest.

While Thalion took the clothes of the ritualist, thinking about what he would do next while Saranya was constantly talking to him, a sneaky vine emerged from his back, wriggling its way to the priest a few hundred meters away. The moment it connected with the bloodthorn, the ritualist died, losing all the blood in his body.

“I won’t allow you to wear those horrible clothes. They make you look fat,” Saranya continued to complain while Thalion ignored her and switched out the clothes. The suit he had bought in the eighth stage actually was worth two thousand leaderboard points—more than Thalion had paid for it.

Thalion complained internally while swinging himself into the seat of the carriage. With a single use of the whip, the lizards took off.

A sigh of disappointment echoed through the people trapped in the cages. Thalion would have liked to save them, but he needed them as entry into the city. If he came back with an empty wagon, the guards would definitely check him closely. This way he hoped to have the best chances.

Pulling the dark red hood of his new robe over his face to obscure it, he reminded himself that he was human—but the glowing red eyes would stand out for sure.

On the positive side, the commander had been a Scarlet Warden, which rewarded Thalion with two million leaderboard points for the kill.

Checking the top of the leaderboard, he had to swallow heavily. They were all also gaining points fast. But Thalion had also had a slow start, and the city was quite big.

He was confident that he would be able to catch up.