บท 15: Hard Battle

Zeph was zoning between trees like shuttle to avoid taking straight path as he would be instantly cleaved in two halves by Mantis because it can catch up to him easily in straight line .He was looking for oppurtunity to strike when he heard sound behind him .

He turned to see Mantis covering himself in energy of air .Its speed suddenly increased few time.Zeph hurriedly moved back his sword in time to block claw and felt the force richoting through his whole body .He flew away and collided with tree and fell down.

"Enough kid i am not playing chase here ,if you gonna run like that there is no need to fight i can cut you here and now."

Damn he was playing with me ,he was chasing without his elemental energy . Realisation struck Zeph like hammer.He coughed violently only to threw mouthful of blood .He stood up and took battle stance once again with his sword level.

"You are weak, you are close to dying with just casual strike .oh I understood that's why you were leading me here and there .

Come on if you don't have strength to back you up then why were you showing off like fool in front of your friends,Now I think you can't even give me proper fight then you can die here "

Bephen said in dissatisfied tone and jumped in fast motion to cut through Zeph.Zeph tried to counter the slash with his word and once again was sent flying through force .

"See I can cut you even without using my elemental air",

said mantis as he once again slashed at him to sent him flying once more .

As he jumped again to do again ,Zeph suddenly channeled lightning energy into sword to activate blaze technique . He ducked a little this time to counter slash.Mantis has not at all expected this ,his arm was cleaved by incoming sword in one fluid motion ,He jumped back to avoid further clash.

Green blood was oozing through his arm of which whole claw part was cleaved.

Bephen was totally enraged and confused by outcome,he lost his arm to weak human.He understood that human was pretending to be weak to deliver fatal strike.Actually he was right ,Zeph was taking earlier strikes with only pure physical power he was not channeling power at all therefore when he executed blaze technique mantis was caught off guard.

On the other side battle was fully heated.Yaksha was fighting with three people simultaneously while still maintaining enough dexterity to avoid all attack of those fully powered knife plunge attacks .Sauren was fighting hand to hand with Manvolair while rest of eight arms were tied down by joint efforts of Sephron and Kyton .Veena was using this set up to repeatedly snipe at yaksha but he was always able to dodge with fine margin.

Sauren made fire ball with his hand and threw it towards yaksha.Manvolair was still hesistent toward touching of those blue flames thus he dodged that attack,at same moment on knife plunged toward his neck.

he twisted his body in midair to avoid blow but knife still grazed at his neck leaving thin trace of blood behind .

He stopped all his attack and jumped back ,all others also stopped to take breath .Kyton's hands were deep blue due to overload whereas Veena was sweating profusely due to her mental strain of controlling knifes.Sephora still looked fine and Sauren was beginning to pant .

Manvolair looked at blood of his neck and tasted it with his long tongue.

"Ah , I'm pretty impressed you managed to land strike on me .But this is it ",

He moved his eight vines to elongate and attack at Kyton ,Sauren tried to interfere but was stopped by two vines other six continued on its way.

Sephron and Veena made several strikes at vines but failed to deflect them

"I was playing with you earlier but it is time to end farce ,my children are hungry."

Kyton made snow sheild to deflect the onslaught but combined power of six was too much for sheild to bear.it broke off in second and vines plunged straight at Kyton .

Blood splashed as two vines passed through his both shoulders while rest four of them were tied down by his blue hands .They have immense power in overload status. out of four two struggled and released from grasp and one went to midair Sephora and other to Veena .

Sauren was furiously buring the vines entangling him when he saw them moving toward Girls .He cried and channeled his blue flames to vines to burn them .Vine meant for veena was stopped meter before her as it got struck in Barrier made by iron sand which she carried in her backpack as emergency measure but Vine was slowly drilling through it.Similarly Vine was slowed considerably facing resistance of air forced by Sephora.

Manvolair anticipated that they will be able to stop vines for few minutes then it will be end.But he saw that his vines were destroyed by that fire pest .He furiously strengthened those two vines and decided to finish him off first .Two vines became more durable at that instant and coiled up more badly around Sauren to leave him immobile.

Two vines changed direction from Veena and Sephora to move at full speed to stab through Sauren.

As Vine moved back Veena was left powerless to maintain barrier and Sephora was also drained of energy to maintain herself flying and fell to ground.Sauren saw two incoming vines ,and felt death literally breathing on his neck.

Zeph was getting more and more drained by each slash off full powered strike of Mantis.He was attacking madly in rage due to loss of his one arm.He never got injured in fighting more powerful than himself enemies but got his entire arm cutt off by weak human.Zeph was using blaze for each block to barely maintain force coming through each strike but was still was being pushed back gradually.He felt his lightning energy being depleted to almost 1/4 of total .

It was going to be end of him if he didn't find way to counter this mad beast . Moreover to his despair his strikes are getting more stronger with accumulated air energy around his claws.