Chapter 22: Chapter 22. The Beasts and The Plant
There was no going back now, not that it had before, I had to give it my all. My Fiery Sword slashed through left and right. It found victim everywhere it goes. The ordinary purgers and the beasts were simply no match for its sharpness. I still had to be vigilant, some distance had to be maintained because I needed it to be able to utilize my sword. If they swarmed me, I'd be dead for sure.
At this time, I regretted not paying much attention to my grandfather swordplaying. I liked sport. But what I did was all high-impact sports. In my eyes, what my grandfather did was more like sword-dance, probably because he did it without sparring partner. And that kind of exercise, well, eluded the young me.
"Hah!" I finished this group before the purgers and the beasts from the front arrived. Repeatedly casting Earth Breaker really consumed my stamina so I grabbed the marbles of the dead purgers and swallowed them. The energy from the marbles were coming inside my body and I felt better immediately.
When the other group of purgers and beasts were near me, I slammed the ground and used Earth Breaker. Purgers and beasts around me were all losing their ability to react. More were coming so, as fast as I could, I hacked and slashed without stopping. I never saw a butcher used a knife capable of cutting through cow's bone to cut chicken?
Splat!
Because of the close proximity, the blood from the purgers and the beasts were splattered all over me. I didn't have the chance to use next Earth Breaker before I was swarmed with the other purgers. Frantically, I swung my sword around.
To my surprise, I found that I didn't need the cooling down Earth Breaker. The monsters failed to overwhelm me because the sharpness of Fiery Sword was far greater than their defense. It might not be able to hack through the orange-eyed purgers, which I suspected was due to my own lower power level compared to the orange-eyed, but it's totally different when going against ordinary purgers and the tiger-like beast. It's easy to dominate them.
"Come! Come!" I shouted, taunting them, and attacked everything coming my way.
Purgers or beasts, I didn't spare a single one. Tens and tens of the monsters went down like autumn leaves. Their blood were showering me. They were howling in pain and anger but none of them were retreating. They still came at me even even when they saw their comrades were easily slaughtered right in front of their eyes.
I didn't know why they were like that. I knew they were fearless, or to be more precise, they have no common sense. I was obviously much stronger than them and I had the stamina to keep up with them. Their superior number meant little because I could use Fiery Sword, Earth Breaker, Titan Armor and the marbles. Despite all these, they still kept charging in.
During this fight, I realized something. If I didn't have Fiery Sword, Earth Breaker and Titan Armor, and only relying on my evolved body as an Acolyte, I'd be in a tough spot. Without all those skills, I meant arts, the monsters would swarm me with their superior numbers and prevented me from replenishing my stamina with the newly emerged marbles. So, my original conclusion was right all along. Ordinary Acolyte would be dead if swarmed.
This senseless dying of the ordinary purgers gave different vibe when I compared them to the ones that fell on the water with me in the canyon. The purgers down at the canyon tried to avoid me. My guess would be that as long as they were fit and could fight, they felt no fear. The fear only started to sink in when they lost the ability to fight. Yeah, I know, it's just a guess for now. A guess based on my observation.
The fight went on for a few minutes. I was brutal, hacking left and right, from start to end, until the last purger fell.
I panted, trying to sort my breath. My adrenaline was pumping wildly. I watched all my surrounding. Bodies of dead purgers and their beasts were slumped on top of each other. Was this not the same as what they were doing to us? Genocide? Yet, I still didn't feel bad. Nothing could be done though, and there was no point to ponder upon it.
I picked up every tiny marbles from the dead purgers. Then I saw something. On the dead bodies of the tiger-like beasts were tiny marbles too. The marbles were attached to their chest, just like how it was for the marbles produced by the purgers. They were pitch black. Curiously, I picked them up.
'Is this for animals?' I looked at it closely. Turning the black marble around and around, checking if there's something interesting about it. Apart from the black color, it looked exactly like the other marbles. Since the dark translucent marbles from the purgers were for us human then this pitch black marbles were probably for animals of our world.
'Interesting', I thought. I picked them up too and kept them on the same container I kept the other marbles. The shape was the same but the color was different so I was not worry about eating the wrong ones.
I kept about a hundred of the purgers marbles and ate the rest. There's so many marbles and yet almost no improvement sighted on my bars. Never mind that, they weren't my purpose of coming here, anyway. I turned around and walked toward the middle of the camp.
The circular platfrom, this was my real target.
Swoosh!
Standing on the platform I felt energy rushing in. The engraved symbols were lighted and my body was covered with its light. I could feel it, the status of my Spirit was rising. My guess was correct.
The situation was different compared to when the first time I was on this magical platform on that first camp. Despite being basked in light, I could turn my head and looked around. I couldn't move my legs to leave the platform though, not until it's over.
After that the light went out and I stepped down from the platform. I looked for nearest large rock and then summoned Fiery Sword.
I hacked the rock with Fiery Sword. The rock was broken into many parts. I shook my head in slight disappoinment. I couldn't see any distinction between the Fiery Sword before and after entering this second magical platform. It's either the change was minimal for my eyes to catch or there's no improvement at all. Unlike when our creator god told me about Titan Armor progressing the same time as my body, the female god didn't say anything about Fiery Sword or Earth Breaker.
I took off my blood drenched shirt and saw the improvement on the creature symbol on my chest. It was extremely faint but still visible to me. Based on the improvement of my Spirit bar, I'd say that the improvement was around three percent of the total circle.
I changed all my clothes with new ones. Before leaving, I thought of something. I walked toward the circular platform and swung my arm down bringing Fiery Sword clashing onto the platform.
Clang!
That was the sound of my Fiery Sword going against the platform. Not surprisingly, no damage to both of them. My hand was a bit numbed because I use full power, but that was it. I was never afraid that my Fiery Sword would break or dented in any way. The sword was created using my spirit power. It would stay the same unless I have no energy to maintain it.
I wanted to destroy the platform to prevent any purgers from using it to increase their level. I failed. To be honest, I already suspected that it was just a wishful thinking. How could something a god created be destroyed this easily?
I left the camp and continued with my journey.
When I saw another camp, it was also depleted of the many purgers it's supposed to have. Less than a hundred purgers were here together with a couple of beasts. I gave no thought and immediately charged toward them. With my Earth Breaker I made every monster in my immediate surrounding lose balance and became easy targets for me. Of course I could not simultaneously use more than one Earth Breaker at a time. I've been using the term 'cooldown' to make it easier for me to remember, I could also use the term 'power up' if I wanted. Anyway, whatever the term was, the effect was the same, I had to wait almost a minute. It wasn't a problem for me since I didn't actually need Earth Breaker to win against only this small number of purgers and beasts.
I decided that I should not rely too much on Earth Breaker since it consumed a lot of my stamina. What would happen if I did not have enough tiny marbles to replenish my stamina? It was game over.
I started working on my timing to utilize all my arts better. It's easier said than done. I wasn't an experience fighter before the Doom. I tried to control myself, to take full charge of my emotion, but sometimes when horde of purgers came at me I still felt frantic. Well, many times.
After collecting all the marbles, I stepped onto the circular platform and felt that my Spirit status was rising once again. Judging from the bar, my previous calculation was not that far off. I should have about two to four percent filled. I deduced that me getting this far using two platforms meant I need between twenty eight to thirty platforms more to completely raised it to full.
I couldn't wait to know what would happened when it's completely full.
I kept going to the east. Along the way I met more camps. The number of purgers and beasts were varying but never more than I could handle. Aside from the tiger-like beast, there were also lizard-like beasts.
Actually I just called it lizard-like because it was the nearest comparison I could think of. I could call it a dragon-like too, since it resembled how western comics or stories depicted dragons as well. It had two larger hind legs and two short front legs. The head was, well, what you expected of any lizard. Fortunately, it didn't spew fire, nor it had wings. It did, however, spew some weird-looking grayish gas, which I avoided like a plague.
The fight was slightly complicated because of the gas from the lizard-like. The tiger-like only wanted to bite or claw me, I could handle that with my superior agility or using Titan Armor. Titan Armor was great defense against any physical attack, but I wasn't sure of how it stood against suspicious gas. I wasn't keen to test it now so I had to run around and create a chance to decapitate the lizard-like.
From now one, I'd call the tiger-like as tigerboss and lizard-like as lizardboss. I attached the boss because they looked meaner and uglier than our earth's actual tiger and lizard. The lizardbosses were harder to kill compared to the tigerbosses. It was not that they were stronger but simply because their skin were tougher and they had gas.
Sometimes, I had to make a bit detour because the camp still had thousands of ordinary purgers, several yellow-eyed ones or at least one orange-eyed. I encountered five camps like this. I saw they were moving, toward northeast. I did not want to wait for them to empty out the camp since they didn't seem to be moving in a hurry. The detour wasn't really far from my original direction, I just walked south-east and then corrected my path again after I was sure the purgers couldn't spot me.
Even without these five camps, my container was full with more than one thousand marbles. I swallowed the excess marbles so they didn't go waste even when the improvement in my status bars were really negligible. I put a few of them on my pocket, just in case I couldn't grab any from the dead during a heated fight. Because of the limited space on the container, I took out and wrapped the marbles from the beasts into a different container I made from the tent fabric.
My journey took me hundreds of miles toward my home country.
It was not an easy road to take but I knew it had to be done. It was a long, dangerous and lonely journey. Nevertheless I had always believe that I would be able to make it. As time went by, I was getting more and more accustomed to killing the monsters, at the same time I got more skillful at using my sword.
There was one more time when I almost died because of miscalculation. I thought there were no high level purgers on one of the camp I hit. Suddenly one orange-eyed purger appeared. I instantly ran away. There was no way I could fight it while being surrounded by so many other purgers at the same time. This cost me many tiny marbles to replenish my stamina. I would have died if I did not have these many marbles at my disposal.
While on the run I noticed that the purgers were avoiding coming into contact with certain shrubs that grew sporadically. I took a chance and jumped into the thick of those shrubs and ran inside. Just as I guessed, the purgers didn't pursue further.
Why did they stop? The fearless stopped, this was suspicious.
I didn't have to wait long for an answer. On every part of my skin where I had direct contact with the leaves were now having a burning sensation. It's like at those parts, my flesh was burnt by a candle. The burning sensation was then transmitted throughout all my body. When it finally reached my heart, I've almost gone berserk from the pain.
I sat at a small opening inside the group of shrubs. My limbs were trembling and my mouth was dry. I reach for the purger's translucent darkish marbles and ate a couple of them.
As the energy was flowing inside my body I withstood the pain to the best of my ability while trying hard not to bite my own tongue. It took a lot of my stamina, a lot more than what Titan Armor would take. The marbles became the source of energy for me to fight against the pain and stayed sane. I felt tremendously weaken because I exerted so much strength.
My hands were trembling as I grabbed a handful of those tiny marbles and with the provided energy I continued my plight. I could not lose my mind or faint, it would be dangerous if I rolled on the ground and touch more of those leaves.
I punched the ground repeatedly, an act I did to share the pain and kept my sanity. My sweat were pouring down like rain, soaking my clothes, and my teeth were gritted against each other. I could not help grunting hard and loud sometimes. My heart was thumping wildly and my brain almost fried. On this occasion I could even feel my own pulses and blood flow without touching my body. Every part of my internal organs were attacked by the pain. I almost passed out many times due to the extreme pain.
Persevere! I told myself many times. I wasn't willing to submit my fate like this. I survived from the orange-eyed purgers, how could I let myself be defeated by mere plants? Persevere!
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone