Chapter 36: Tai!

Tai desperately tried to hold on. However, he was but a human, a mere Unlocked, even. Such perilous situations could even kill the strongest of cohorts, but this group of three teenagers on an expedition were not ready to die anytime soon.

Nikki frowned on seeing Tai strain himself that much, so she did the only thing she could.

"Claire! Wake up, Claire!"

Soon, the blonde speech impaired girl groggily stirred awake. She frowned slightly at the complete darkness that enveloped them all, and made a shooing motion with the back of her palm and tapped her wrist.

Nikki frowned slightly.

"You want to go on time?"

Rolling her eyes, Claire shook her head.

Nikolah frowned even more deeply than before, then raised a brow.

"How long were you out?"

This was apparently correct as the blonde girl promptly nodded in approval, making Nikolah let out a small smile, obviously proud of her achievement.

They would all need to learn sign language sooner or later.

Tai groaned even more as he could feel the burden of maintaining the shadow dragon summon's soul essence around the entire ship, and his energy was continuously sapping away like a broken tap. Heck, a lot of residual energy had accumulated in his neck, slightly suffocating him.

"A... A little help here, guys?!"

His words brought Nikki out of her reverie, as she quickly held Claire's hand and dashed over to Tai. She put her hand on his back, and held Claire's hand tightly as she began to circulate energy around her body, and over to Tai.

Claire could feel the energy Nikolah was circulating, and quickly got the hint.

They were supplying Tai with energy!

Another very useful function that the system served, was the ability to share energy with other people. This helped the Protectors to survive in situations wherein a few members of a cohort were drained and needed a little boost.

In fact, Tai could have done this with the two girls earlier. But he saw no need to as he had reasoned that he would need it later.

And he did.

However, his energy alone was not nearly enough to maintain the impromptu shield he had built.

Slowly but surely, the shield had begun to weaken. Each strike of lightning hitting the ship drained the red haired teenager by massive chunks, and not even Nikki and Claire's energy could help.

The blue haired teenage girl scanned the room looking for anything that could help in any way, when her eyes fell on a very valuable object. Something so valuable, that even a hundred thousand full powered Protectors with god level systems would perish within a Time Storm without it.

"There's a Storm pass!"

A Stormpass was a special type of compass that only Protectors were trained to read. These particular compasses, instead of having the four cardial points, North, East, West, and South, like normal compasses, instead had six cardinal points.

Where north would be, there was future.

Where south would be, there was past.

Where east would be, there was present.

And where west would be, there was another present.

Within a time storm, going north would mean traversing into the future, and going south would mean travelling into the past. A Protector had to meticulously calculate his trajectory of flight, if he wanted to end up back in his time period after successfully conquering a Time Storm. This was the hardest part, but luckily, The White Family were famous for their compass reading and map creation skills.

Thus, Nikolah had found it rather easy to calculate their trajectory.

Clutching fast to the helm, the blue haired girl grimaced. She was playing with fire and was not afraid of getting burnt if she failed, but she also had to look after her two cohort mates.

Their lives was in her hands, and she could not afford to fail.

She was about calling out to Tai, making him remove the shadow dragon summon's soul essence shield, but before she could talk, Tai had collapsed from essence exhaustion, followed fast by suffocating due to the accumulated energy in his throat.

He had tried his best but it wasn't enough, luckily, Nikolah was there to take over.

She had already calculated the precise direction where a time portal would open, and turned the helm to steer the majestic ship in that direction.

However, as she made the sharp turn, a crashing sound resonated despite the storm, as a body went flying out the window, and plummeting down into the dark storms below.

"Tai!!!"