All nine assailants stood before Valdan. The distance between him and them was so large that it would be impossible to cross it without them noticing.

  The technique?

  Lord Lacheart had taught him two incomplete techniques. One was designed to put down around eleven opponents within a certain distance of each other while the other was designed to bring down one opponent. Valdan had only mastered the former well enough to take down three men confidently. Even then, he had not mastered it well enough for the system to deem it a technique.

  The system didn’t even give him any kind of notification upon the techniques’ conclusion.

  Then there was what Aiden had shown him mere moments ago. A living opponent was very different from a training dummy. Aiden had taken him down in one simple hit while he had been in the process of executing the technique.

  And while Valdan had been more than certain that an opponent would hit back, he hadn’t known how easily the opponent would be able to put him down. At first, Valdan had thought that Aiden wanted him to learn how to use the move-set against a moving opponent, but Aiden had basically told him otherwise.

  It is a trump card to be used in a moment of surprise, Valdan thought, discarding the idea of using the technique right now. I’ll only get one shot at it.

  So with his sword held out in front of him, he gave his opponents his attention. Slowly, they were beginning to spread out. If they were any closer to him, they would attempt to encircle him. But they were not.

  His eyes settled on two who stuck close to each other. A man and a woman. From the little that he knew of the criminals in front of him, the both of them were not close. They were neither partners or friends.

  Did they develop an acquaintance in prison or is this a momentary alliance.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Teams were not good opponents to fight against. A team in perfect sync was almost impossible to deal with.

  Along with the two who seemed to have teamed up, standing a little too close to each other, everyone else was itching for a fight. They inched closer so very slowly. Cautious even from the distance between them.

  Valdan activated a skill, focused it on all of them.

  [You have used skill Detect]

  He ignored their names. They were not worthy of remembering. His opponents would either die here and he would have no need for their names, or he would die here and he would still have no need for their names.

  “Come on, Knight!” Taract, the man who’d slaughtered an entire village goaded him. “Do knights always act so scared?”

  Valdan’s gaze did not even move to him. None of his attention more than the simple peripheral view was afforded to him. Valdan rarely understood how goading a man into anger in such a situation worked.

  “If you do not come to us,” another prisoner said. “Then we will come to you!”

  He darted forward, almost crossing the distance in an instant. Valdan was not surprised by the man’s speed. After all, for some reason, King Brandis had decided to give him opponents that were all level forty-nine, just like himself.

  But I am a knight.

  The moment the prisoner crossed the distance, Valdan moved as well. [Dash] carried him across the distance, sending him through the air. The black sand rose beneath his feet as his position changed.

  He made a straight line for the man and woman who seemed to have made some kind of alliance with each other.

  Knights were honorable people. They stood against the world, fighting with honor and decorum. But that honor and decorum was not something King Brandis had taught them. It was not a policy of a knight to fight with honor and decorum, merely a culture. A culture born from knights being predominantly children of nobility.

  Valdan was not a child of nobility.

  His sword short forward and straight at the male prisoner who raised his weapons, dual swords, to defend against the blow. Before their swords connected, Valdan pulled himself to a stop. His sword arm snapped out to the side and the tip of his blade tore a gash in the woman’s neck.

  [You have dealt Perenit a Fatal Blow!]

  [You have slain Perenit Level 49]

  Valdan turned away from the fallen woman without hesitation. His arm came out to his side, hand held out to the prisoner he knew would be coming for him even as he swung at the man he had attacked first.

  The man parried him, recovering quickly from the shock of his partner’s death. As the sounds of metal steel clashing filled the air, Valdan triggered another skill with his outstretched hand.

  [You have used Class skill Protected Sword]

  A massive apparition of a sword came to life where his hand was held out. It was as high as ten feet and as wide as twelve. It shimmered as a transparent yellow that distorted the air where it was and a burst of flame struck it heavily enough for the ripples from the impact to scorch the ground around it.

  Of all the prisoners in front of him, Taract, the village slaughterer, was the one he was most intimate with. After all, he had hunted the man down himself, learning everything about him up until he’d captured him alive as had been demanded.

  Now, Valdan was pleased with the chance to kill him.

  [Protected Sword] deactivated after the impact, which did not surprise Valdan. The skill was not designed to be activated for a long period of time at its level, and it took up mana using it. And the fact that Valdan knew that Taract’s strongest attack skill was that burst of fire gave him an assurance of safety.

  But that was safety from Taract.

  Valdan pushed backwards and off his feet as something shot at him through the air. Unsure of what it was, he swung his sword in a violent arc through the sand as he landed. It raised a wave of black sand in front of him, obscuring the view between him and the direction the blast had come from.

  Knights do not fight this way.

  Even as the thought crossed his mind, he rejected it. It was not that knights did not fight this way. King Brandis had seen him fight so dirtily once and had not chastised him for it.

  Nobles do not fight this way.

  Valdan darted out from behind the wave of sand he had raised to protect his view and something blasted through a portion of the sand missing him completely.

  When the wave of sand fell, Valdan was already gone from behind it. He did not attack Taract immediately.

  From what he knew, Taract was the most skilled amongst his opponents. And in a group of enemies of the same level, the most skilled was the strongest. And the strongest was the one he was going to deal with last.

  Right now, he had every intention of weeding out the weaker opponents.

  “Cut him off!” someone shouted from somewhere.

  Valdan catalogued the direction of the shout, stored it away somewhere in his mind as he attacked the second woman in the group.

  She pulled her hands up in front of her, raising them as if pulling something from the ground. Her weapon of choice was a Morningstar with its spiked round head.

  Valdan couldn’t remember her very well, but her complete disregard for the weapon in her hands as she raised her hand as if trying to raise the ground was proof that she did not use weapons. She probably only had one because weapons had been offered to her.

  What skill does she have? Valdan found himself wondering.

  His eyes darted to her hands, then they moved around her. It all happened in a split moment, and he frowned at his inability to notice.

  You’re getting desperate, he scolded himself. Don’t focus so much.

  He stopped trying to find out and simply took her in as he charged. When he got to a certain distance from her, the ground trembled beneath his feet. Valdan darted to the side, evading that patch of sand and pushed forward. The sand bubbled slightly like boiling water but nothing happened.

  What was that supposed to be?

  The confusion on the lady’s face told Valdan all he needed to know. Whatever her skill was supposed to do, it wasn’t that.

  She raised her weapon as he got to her and parried his first sword swing. The second swing missed her neck as she leaned away chaotically from the blow. She leaned too far back and found herself falling. But before Valdan could end it, something came from behind him.

  Valdan turned quickly. His feet carried him to the side in a mastery of footwork gained from learning the sword. When his sword came up to protect him something blue exploded against it, igniting the swords protection enchantment.

  Valdan was pushed back by the force of the blow. When he came to a stop, one of the men had three blue balls hovering over his head.

  Mana bullets.

  They were a basic combat spell most people with the [Mage] class learnt. But he wasn’t worried, a [Mage] wasn’t standing in front of him because he hadn’t put a [Mage] away yet.

  This is going to get annoying.

  The remaining eight people hovered around now that he had been pushed back. They were slowly encircling him. It wasn’t a good sign. They were only small fries when it came to the fighting abilities. Being surrounded was a death wish.

  But he had a disabling skill that worked.

  I just need to time it properly, he told himself as they slowly encircled him.

  If he could take them by surprise, he had a chance of killing another one, maybe two opponents.

  In the stands, he watched Brandis seated casually on one of the chairs, Elaswit looking a little worried beside him.

  Alright, Valdan. You can do this.

  When the first skill struck, he weaved out of the way. It was a red blast of mana that looked like a massive red arrowhead.

  Behind Valdan, the person on the other side dodged it very easily.

  Valdan’s free hand twitched, his feet shifted beneath him. Not yet.

  The second skill that came at him was a spike from the ground. He barely avoided it, raising his sword so that the spike grazed along the length of his blade.

  Not yet.

  His eyes moved about, cataloging everything, everyone. Taract was the real threat, but so were the others now.

  Valdan’s gaze snapped to the side, and he activated [Protected Sword]. The shimmer of mana came alive shielding him from a blast of fire from Taract as well as a splash of liquid from another prisoner.

  The liquid was green and he remembered it for what it could’ve been.

  Either poisonous or acidic.

  Valdan turned, switched stances.

  “Not sure who to face?” Taract goaded.

  Valdan nodded. “I’m well and truly confused right now.”

  Taract paused, clearly confused.

  Valdan couldn’t help but take pleasure at the man’s confusion. Still, he was in a tight spot. Surrounded, he would need to act fast and act well.

  I’ll need something to stop all of them at once.

  The only skills he had that could come anywhere close to that were [Aura Strike] and [Resting Cleave].

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  The problem was that none of them attacked in a circle around him.

  Unless I can make them.

  He jerked in one of their directions and the man there flinched.

  Come on, he pleaded. Act as one.

  His mind was already formulating possible solutions, but the one that would be most useful to him was the one that started from all of them attacking him as one.

  Do not depend on the chance of one plan, he reminded himself, a lesson he’d learnt as a child on the streets. Depend on all the plans.

  “Enna, you take him from the right,” Taract said suddenly. “Farog will move in from the left.”

  Enna, Farog. Valdan remembered the names and who owned them.

  The problem was that Enna couldn’t take him from the right, not from where she was, and Farog couldn—

  Farog moved.

  Farog was a handsome man who had mostly killed women. And he hadn’t been nice about it. He had played into his beauty to do so. So, when he had been caught a level one hundred and three [Knight] had carved his face terribly with enough power to leave the man horrendous to look at.

  Below level fifty and with no potions to heal him, Farog had been left scarred when the injuries had healed.

  Valdan stepped back from an approaching Farog. Farog came from his back.

  Enna, Valdan thought, picking the lady out. No.

  It was a chaotic dissonance in his mind. Taract had called the right name but the wrong attack. What if Enna was the wrong name but the right attack. His eyes shifted to the person that could take him from the right even as he parried a thrust from Farog’s glaive.

  You’re thinking too much.

  Valdan parried a sweep from Farog’s glaive. He caught the strike with the side of his sword and turned it over him. The sword came down on the other side of him and the man that had been on his right that was now his back charged him.

  No, no, no.

  Valdan drove his shoulder into Farog. With all the force into the action, he threw the man back, turning in time to counter whatever his new assailant had for him. His instincts flared a moment after. But they were too late.

  The new opponent swung a club at Valdan. Valdan was already parrying the blow, his body moving with the motion. There was nothing he could do about it, so he braced himself, tightened his muscles and committed to the blow.

  His sword clashed with the club, his blow barely throwing back the man’s club, and pain erupted in his side. It was cold and sizzling, somehow burning through his shirt and skin.

  Valdan fought against the pain, moving to avoid his current opponent’s second blow. He ducked beneath the swing, knowing that his opponent’s strength far outweighed his own.

  Rolling away from the blow would’ve been better, creating more distance between them, but Valdan had hesitated. The idea of his new fresh injury rubbing against the black sand worried him.

  “Scared, Knight?” Taract goaded from where he was standing, giving orders.

  Valdan refused to listen to him. He’d just taken what he felt was an acidic skill to the back. And the people around him had just shown that while they were nothing but simple people with a talent for killing, they were also people who could work together.

  People who could corner him.

  And if they could corner him so easily. It also meant one thing.

  They could kill him so easily.

  So yes, Valdan was terrified. And the last thing he needed was Taract voicing his worries. Especially while he was still in the center of all eight of them.

  Valdan raised his sword once more, ignoring the growing stinging sensation in his back. Something told him that if he checked his health stat, he would find it counting down ever so slowly.

  The question was how long would it be reducing?

  Still, even if his fear didn’t rise, his anger did. None of the people in this place with him deserved to walk out of here alive and free. He would not allow it.

  He would not let his king do something so wrong simply because he was supposed to be punished for doing something wrong. Lightning crackled through his hand, it singed his sleeves as his anger kindled.

  Control yourself, Valdan.

  Unfortunately, as much as he wanted to control himself, there were moments in his life when control was not his strongest ability. Most people did not understand why he was so stoic about most things. Aiden had once called him stuck up.

  But the truth was that he was the way he was because every day was a day he spent controlling himself. And sometimes, just sometimes, his control slipped.

  Once was when he sparred with Aiden and left a crack in the training field, a crack that was still there, unfixed.

  Taract had not goaded him to anger, Valdan really wanted to believe that as he raised a foot off the ground, he had just lost control.

  “BRACE FOR IMPACT!” Taract roared.

  But he was too late.

  [You have used class skill Knight’s Stomp]

  Taract braced for impact, his legs switching to a more stable stance as Valdan’s foot hit the ground.

  Valdan felt his mana flow out of him. It ran downwards, straight to both legs and into the ground. A tremor spilled from him in a ring. The ground shook, then undulated, swaying upwards then downward.

  One of the opponents around him jumped back but she didn’t get far away, when she landed, the tremor shook her as well. Destabilized, they were easy pickings.

  Valdan battled with his anger for control. It was not a difficult battle. He had faced greater anger than this growing up as a child. Once upon a time, he’d been so enraged that he hadn’t known what had happened. He’d simply opened his eyes at the end with scarce recollection of what he had done, three broken people with too many broken bones around him, and one corpse.

  Valdan darted forward, went for the closest group, then pulled to a quick stop. Without any physical ability to protect themselves due to their lack of stability, they all had only one way to stay alive. He had been banking on it and it had worked.

  Unsure of which one of them he was going to attack, they all protected themselves and the air lit up with the chaos of mana and activated skills. It was colorful and deadly. And there was a tremor from the ground from a skill Valdan did not know.

  Five of eight people activated their skills with him as the target. But Valdan didn’t care. He had been waiting for this.

  [You have used Class skill Knight’s Repose]

  …

  [Knight’s Repose]

  The knight is his own sense of peace. Manifesting their own peace, they envelop the area with a calming mana that quiets the ambient mana disabling all active skills.

  Valdan felt a dip in his mana as he stretched the reach of the skill, attempting to envelop the entire space. In the distance, he thought he saw King Brandis lean forward on his chair.

  The colorful array of mana winked out as skills were silenced and disabled.

  Without hesitation, Valdan held his sword to the side and swung it with as much force as he could muster, hoping to reach as far as he could. With the lightning crackling through his hands, activating the skill that came next came naturally.

  [You have used Class skill Aura Strike]

  A blast of mana shot from his sword in an arc that was almost as wide as his swing. It was a deep yellow and crackled with yellow lightning in a violent way. Even as it left him, Valdan could feel the strands of hair on his forearm stand from the effect of the skill.

  He turned away from them immediately. The skill would not suffice to kill them but killing them was not the necessity in this moment. Giving himself some space to breathe was.

  Turning in the direction of the men with Taract, he was already channeling another class skill. [Dash] pushed him across the distance in a moment.

  The men with Taract stepped back in shock or caution, Valdan did not know. But he did not care. If they were behind Taract when he struck, they would be caught up in the skill.

  Valdan swung his sword as he got to Taract. Taract wielded two daggers and he raised them to take the impact of the blow.

  Valdan didn’t care. He knew for a fact that he had more raw power than Taract. The moment their weapons clashed, Valdan activated his skill.

  [You have used Class skill Resting Cleave]

  …

  [Resting Cleave]

  The Knight strikes with great force, delivering a ripple effect of damage forward.

  Taract gritted his teeth against the impact of the blow as the air shimmered in a ripple from where his daggers met Valdan’s sword.

  The ripples went through him, extending beyond him. When they came in contact with the other two, both men gasped in pain, staggering back.

  But it was not enough.

  Valdan shoved Taract back with force and struck again. When Taract defended with both blades, sparks were sent flying.

  “No, you don’t,” Taract snarled.

  He defended against a third strike, then a fourth. Weaving beneath the fifth, he came up on Valdan’s side, thrusting forward with a single dagger to stab Valdan in the face. Valdan raised his sword, switched his grip so that he turned the dagger away with his hilt.

  He was about to twirl his sword back to a righted grip when a flash of orange caught his attention. Valdan’s gaze snapped downwards in a moment and found Taract’s second dagger in the sand. In his hand was a ball of fire. A ball of fire that Taract jammed into Valdan’s face.

  Valdan brought his second hand up, leaning away just in time to avoid the swing to his face. Taract’s hand swung past him, cutting through the air where Valdan’s head had been. As it swung past, he shoved Taract’s arm with his raised hand, forcing his hand back against himself.

  A small explosion erupted between them. It sent Valdan staggering back but sent Taract flying, his voice trailing after him as he roared in pain.

  Valdan turned and was on the other two that had been with Taract in the blink of an eye. He rushed them, sword swinging, his body carrying him through the motions as he struck and parried and weaved and blocked.

  He parried a blow from one of the men, then swung his sword. The man blocked and movement in Valdan’s periphery caught his attention, forcing him to step back. It had been a faint yellow, crackling with lightning.

  But even as he leaned away, nothing came at him. He frowned, noting the confusion on the face of the man he had been attacking.

  Both men fell on him once more and he fought to hold them back. Again, he went for a killing blow, a slash to one of the man’s necks only for him to step back after the man had dodged it. Another whisper of something yellow had appeared between him and the man.

  Valdan’s frown deepened. What the fuck is going on.

  The third time it happened again, he had seen the weapon. He parried a blow only for a yellow sword, translucent and crackling with yellow lightning to appear above the man’s head as if stabbing him from above. Then it disappeared. When it happened, Valdan suspected that the weapon was not against him but for him.

  He went after his opponents without hesitation.

  The first man to go down went down with his head cut in half from a vicious vertical swing. He dropped to the ground, head opened like a bowl.

  Valdan had seen worse deaths and didn’t pay it any attention as he returned his attention to the other man. Unfortunately for him, he was forced to back off and reorganize as the others came back to form.

  Valdan’s breaths were beginning to come at a heavier pace. But there was something on his mind as the others gathered once more, understanding that their favor lay in their numbers. Dwindled down to seven people now, they looked as desperate as they were afraid.

  Taract looked mad, ravaged by his own rage, a part of his face burnt by his own skill.

  But that wasn’t important to Valdan, what he found important was the distraction he was beginning to experience.

  As he stood there watching his opponents, preparing for what would come next, the ghost like swords kept blinking in and out of existence around him. They were faint, barely there, and no one in the group paid them any attention.

  But Valdan could see them.

  Valdan could feel them.

  They were there, blinking in and out of reality.

  They were his…

  … And they were manifesting.

  …

  Aiden stared at the moving spell construct as it approached him so slowly. Even with the [Sage’s] mana engulfing the entire place, he was no longer terrified of it, no longer hindered by it. He believed the [Sage] when the man had said that he wasn’t here to kill him.

  Just to test me. Aiden kept an eye on the spell construct and an eye on the [Sage]. How do you stop a spell construct?

  Aiden rummaged around in his brain. He knew the answer, he always had. The first method he knew was brute force. If your mana was stronger than the owner of the spell, you could dispel it with a force of mana. A powerful enough blast.

  Sadly, he was not at the stage where he could just go throwing his mana around. And even if he could, he wasn’t powerful enough. He could not overshadow the spell construct of a [Sage].

  That brings us to the second option.

  He pulled a piece of the broken vase from his coat pocket, reducing him to only three more shards and scribbled a quick engraving on it. Channeling mana into it, he waited until it started glowing and tossed it at the spell construct.

  Timed perfectly, the shard exploded at the heart of the construct.

  [You have used Enchantment of Lesser Madness]

  Aiden watched the shimmer as the enchantment took effect. But nothing became of the construct. It continued to approach him, taking its time.

  Aiden frowned. Well, there goes that idea.

  “That was creative,” the [Sage] said. “But ultimately stupid. You watched me crush that enchantment in the palm of my hands. What gave you the impression that it would affect my spells?”

  Aiden had no answer to that. There were only two ways he knew of that could crush spell impressions. There had been nothing he could do about it.

  “Thinking,” the [Sage] mused. “Always thinking. For children your age, stopping to think is good. But sometimes… sometimes, you should just act. Isn’t that what youthful exuberance is all about.”

  Yeah, I lost all that exuberance five years ago.

  Aiden took in his entire environment and knew there was nothing to work with. His mind ran through the enchantments he knew and found nothing of use. If the [Sage] was unwilling to let him out of this place, then there was no avoiding the spell.

  So Aiden stood in the face of the kind of power that just skill could not conquer.

  “Your arm, child,” the [Sage] said with a sigh. “Your arm won against a time spell once upon a time. You might as well take the gamble.”

  Aiden looked down at his blackened arm. To his surprise some streaks of red had returned. Is it because I used it for an enchantment?

  It was a surprising discovery.

  What happens if all of it turns red?

  The spell construct was getting terribly close now. The [Sage] stood waiting patiently. Aiden could run around, but if he couldn’t get away completely, he could just end up annoying the [Sage], and who knew what that would make the old man do.

  With no other option, he raised his blackened arm and held it out. The [Sage’s] attention sharpened, his eyes focused on the arm.

  The spell construct wrapped itself around Aiden’s arm. Then it shattered like broken glass, dissolving into the mana around them.

  [Spell Reset has been detected]

  …

  [Spell Reset does not take effect]

  Aiden let out a sigh in relief.

  “Sometimes,” the [Sage] said, “the solution to the fight you find yourself in is past experience. Sometimes, it is the person you are fighting against. And sometimes it is the fight itself. Remember that.”

  Aiden looked at the [Sage] and tried his luck. “Does that mean that I can go now?”

  The [Sage’s] response surprised him.

  The old man raised a surprised brow. “What gave you that idea?”

  Aiden opened his mouth, then he closed it. His lips parted once more but his mouth did not open. He was hoping to have a reasonable answer, but he had none except for the fact that he had hoped that he would be free to go now.

  “We are almost done, child.” The [Sage] looked past Aiden and the mana seemed to tremble behind him. “But we are not done.”

  Please there really shouldn’t be a spell behind me.

  The [Sage] gestured at him with a free hand. “Look at your arm, then defend yourself against the spell.”

  Aiden looked down at the arm and found more red. They weren’t streaks this time. It was as if he had dipped his entire hand in red paint. More like someone scraped off the black on my arm.

  No matter what the reason was, each time he used the arm, it seemed like he lost some of the black color and it was replaced with red.

  “Defend yourself.”

  Aiden reacted to the [Sage’s] words. Knowing that he would not be coming to any harm now, the fastest way to get to Valdan was to satisfy the [Sage’s] curiosity. The faster he satisfied it, the faster he could get to Valdan.

  Aiden turned and buried his arm into the spell construct.

  [Spell Reset has been detected]

  …

  [Spell Reset does not take effect]

  When the circle shattered, dissolving into nothingness once more, Aiden saw how exactly his hand reacted. Vein-like cracks spread up along the blackened arm, then they widened, revealing red on the inside. Then the black color peeled off, evaporating into the air.

  Now his arm was more red than black, and growing.

  The [Sage] stroked his beard. “Interesting.”

  Aiden held his hand up, staring at it.

  Where the [Sage] saw interesting, all he saw was terrifying.

  The weight of the [Sage’s] mana in the air dropped abruptly and the [Sage] turned away from him and began strolling.

  He waved a hand over his shoulder. “You may go about your questionable endeavor, child.”

  Aiden shook his head, dispelling the worry about his arm. It was important, but right now, he needed to hurry and find Valdan.

  As the [Sage] walked forward in the opposite direction, the wall that had sealed off the exit, preventing Aiden from escaping simply reverted back to its original position, all without so much as a gesture from the [Sage].

  “You should ask yourself this,” the [Sage] said into his departure. “What happens when the black is gone and all you have left is red?”

  As worrying as the question was, Aiden could not dwell on it. He ran quickly, taking a turn down the hall, following a whisp of the wind as it led him to Valdan.