Shadow Slave

Sunny was not powerful enough to casually slay a Corrupted Tyrant… yet. Defeating one was not outside the realm of possibility for him anymore, but it would require a good amount of meticulous study and preparation. Even then, challenging a Nightmare Creature of such immense power meant dire risk to his life.

However, Sunny did not really need to kill the jade beetle.

All he really needed to do was to break the balance of power between the monstrous Tyrant and Sky Tide.

Something like that was more easily said than done, but Sunny had several advantages that very few people possessed. He had a bow created by the best forgemasters of the great clan Valor, or maybe even King Anvil himself. That bow demanded immense strength to be drawn, but was capable of sending arrows much further, and imbued them with much greater force.

He had the [Death Dealer] enchantment, a rare divine affinity that translated into highly destructive soul arrows, and the ability to see through the darkness devouring the cold sky of Antarctica.

More importantly, he had enough power and ability to buy himself enough time

to make a good shot.

As a result, the divine arrow he had sent tore through one of the Tyrant’s wings and dealt modest damage to another. Just like that, two of the four wings of the jade beetle were wounded.

That alone might have not robbed it of the ability to fly, but combined with the weight of the [Burden of Peace), the result severely reduced the creature’s mobility in the air. Sadly, it did not plummet to the earth as Sunny had hoped.

But it was enough to give Saint Tyris a crucial advantage.

Using the window of opportunity created for her by Sunny’s arrow, she lunged into a recklessly committed attack without wasting a single moment. Slashed at the two untouched wings of the jade beetle with her steel talons, Sky Tide finally managed to break them.

Then, she delivered a terrible blow with her beak and threw the abomination

down.

Wounded and barely able to keep its weight in the air, the Corrupted Tyrant was ruthlessly sent into a perilous fall. The jade beetle tried to slow down the speed of it, but failed. A few moments later, the massive body hit the slope of the mountain with a thunderous crash…

However, Sunny was too busy to see any of this.

Because, while his arrow had managed to turn the tables of the titanic clash in the skies…

He had to survive the consequences of that success, somehow!

Sunny had to burn through a lot of essence to have a hope of dealing serious damage to the Corrupted Tyrant, and so, his reserves were now very close to being empty. He had discarded the Cruel Sight to summon Morgan’s Warbow and buy himself enough time to create the shadow cage, and so, he was now more or less unarmed in front of the swarm of Nightmare Creatures.

He had wrapped the soul arrow in three of his four shadows, and so, they needed time to return. Ever worse, making the fateful shot left him open to enemy attacks for far too long.

Even before Sky Tide delivered her vicious strike, Sunny was already dearly regretting his actions.

Dismissing both the warbow and the distant Cruel Sight, he then summoned the latter back. However, the somber spear would only appear after several precious seconds, leaving him not much choice but to face the avalanche of chitin and sharp mandibles with his bare hands, or the short and thin blade of the Moonlight Shard at best.

Instead of using the ghostly stiletto, though, Sunny simply commanded one of the wild shadows surrounding him to flow into his hands and turn into a dark odachi.

Manipulating the shape of shadows was not a straightforward task. Forming a simple tentacle was the easiest, since it was not too far removed from the natural state of the shadows. However, the more precise, specific, and compressed the shape was, the more concentration and essence it took to achieve it.

A sword hard enough to withstand the rigors of battle and sharp enough to cut through the flesh of the enemies was not easy to create. Usually, it would have taken Sunny some time and a lot of mental exertion to make one from a formless shadow…

However, the black odachi appeared in his hands almost instantly.

That was because Sunny had methodically trained several applications of Shadow Manifestation during the six calm months after the Second Nightmare. He had come up with a small number of forms that could serve his basic needs in battle- such as a barrier, a spike, a chain, a sword- and created them over and over again, day after day, until manifesting them became an instinct.

That was why it only took a split second for the shadow sword to manifest when he needed it.

…Of course, as a blade created from Ascended essence, it was comparable to an

Ascended weapon in terms of sharpness and lethality.

Sunny was just not sure how long he would be able to maintain the dark odachi, considering that keeping it tangible was slowly eating through the scarce remains of his essence.

‘Crap!’

He barely managed to meet the first foe with a strike, neatly cutting its body in two halves. Although Sunny had long grown accustomed to using a spear, holding a sword still felt the most familiar to him. Fighting with an odachi again felt like meeting an old friend…

He would have smiled if there was not a crushing wave of abominations falling down on him.

Sharp blades of chitin struck at the Mantle of the Underworld, throwing Sunny off balance. Using the residual momentum of his previous strike, he slashed with the odachi and severed the legs of a Fallen beast attacking him, then thrust his sword forward, piercing the head of another….

Something crashed into him from the side, causing Sunny to stagger.

‘Bad…’

Sunny paled as he realized that a moment later, he would fall and become buried under a mass of abominations.

Luckily, at that moment, something massive and dreadfully heavy crashed into

the mountain with terrible speed.

The impact caused the whole slope to tremble, as if from a powerful earthquake.

As a result, not only Sunny, but also every other Irregular, as well as every soldier of the stone hive, were suddenly thrown to the ground.

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