The Golem Mage

Alec looked toward the skies, feeling as though the Blood Moon held some kind of prejudice against summoner-type mages, after realizing he might have to pull his own weight for now, Alec started walking toward the bushy forest not far from him.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side from where he had gone, two human mages were crouched down in hiding.

“See? I told you he’s nothing more than a newbie, now let’s go reap the benefits he left for us,” one of them whispered, his companion let out a restrained chuckle as the two of them began making their way toward the only circular clearing in the entire forest.

Their attention was locked entirely on the City Heart cube levitating in the air.

The first mage stretched out his right hand, aiming to pull out the temporary lord token embedded inside it, the very token that made Alec the rightful owner of the clearing.

However, before his hand could even touch the cube, a loud bang rang out, he froze in place as he watched a stone bullet that seemed to be covered in some type of lava energy tear through his hand, entering from one side and bursting out the other.

For a brief moment, he couldn’t even process what had happened, it took a second before the pain finally registered in his head.

“Ahhhh!” the mage screamed, staring at the gaping hole blown through his hand.

His companion, still shocked by how quickly the attack had been launched, immediately turned and followed the trajectory of the shot to see who had done it.

But when he looked over, all he saw was Alec calmly walking toward them, his left hand resting on the hilt of the bone katana, which sat slightly higher than the Bloody Changdao, both hanging at his left waist.

And then there was his right hand still raised with two fingers pointing and positioned like someone aiming a gun.

The moment he saw Alec, he instantly put everything together and realized they had been fooled, the two of them had come here hoping to steal Alec’s lord token and exchange it for points.

However, while they waited there with such vile intentions—intentions that would have left Alec defenseless against the horde that was coming, without the slightest care that they were all human, Alec decided to play a little game of his own, baiting them out.

He still needed information about how this format worked, especially since this was his first time participating in a Blood Moon battle in the origin realm.

So he chose to act the fool, he pretended not to notice their auras and moved deeper into the opposite forest, just far enough to slip out of sight and give them the confidence to come out of hiding and do whatever they had planned.

And that was exactly how everything played out.

“You bastard! Don’t you have any respect for your elders, you little punk? You’re so small, yet so vicious. How dare you attack us? We’re all humans!” the second mage—the companion of the one whose hand had been pierced—shouted.

But even as he spoke, he was stepping forward with the despicable intention of catching Alec off guard as he was trying to draw out a short sword, however; he was the one who got caught off guard instead.

In one smooth, almost instantaneous motion, Alec drew out his bone katana with his right hand and placed the tip against the second mage’s neck, not even bothering to look directly at him.

The man was a peak Tier 6 mage, yet his form and movements were so inferior that he looked painfully slow when he tried to launch hidden attacks at Alec.

It actually disappointed Alec that someone like this had managed to reach the Tier 6 realm.

“It seems you’ve suddenly grown very talkative and want to act righteous about humans attacking humans, but if you truly upheld that rule, then why were the two of you standing so close to my City Heart in the first place?” Alec asked.

“You—”

Before the man could continue, his expression changed, he could feel the tip of the long bone blade digging into his neck with frightening ease, and he immediately went silent, unwilling to risk straining his neck any further and worsening his situation.

“Don’t annoy me, before you even think about making whatever move is running through your head, realize that I can drive this blade through your neck and take your head off in a split second.” Alec was speaking to the mage with the katana pressed against his throat, yet his eyes were fixed on the first one, the one with a hole blasted through his right hand.

“So I have a question for both of you, and the first one who tells me exactly what you were trying to steal and what it does gets to walk away.”

“Like we would ever betray each—”

The one with the blade at his neck had barely begun speaking when the other suddenly shouted everything out.

He explained that if they stole the temporary lord token, they could either use it to become the new lord of that region—if they had already been kicked out of their own territory or if their former region had been destroyed—or they could take the token back to their own region and sacrifice it to get energy points.

The points gained from sacrificing a single token were worth more than what they would earn from hunting at least three Tier 6 demonic beasts, which was why this had seemed like the more profitable venture to them.

They could also have tried robbing an abyss lord of a token instead, but they were far too terrified to attempt that.

From everything Alec heard, he was able to confirm that the lands were truly set up much like they were in the normal regions, Alec just felt the unfortunate part of it all, however, was that he wouldn’t be meeting the Orc lord who had seized one of the nearby human cities near his lands, because he is a Tier 8 lord.

Which meant he was most likely fighting in the Tier 8 battlefield, while he was in the Tier 6 battlefield, and each land near by him was the closest Tier 6 cities that border him outside the blood moon region.

There was also something else they had said, that the clearing in Alec’s area was much larger than theirs, the only thing Alec could link that to this was the fact that he was the lord of about eight cities, so by some magical reason his land here too was much larger than usual.

After the first mage finished explaining, the second looked at him with a face full of disbelief, as if asking why he would betray him.

However, a promise was a promise. Alec simply slashed his throat and shoved him straight toward the core as the body collapsed beneath it.

“Convert to energy,” Alec said.

The body of the mage who had just been killed was immediately bathed in a strange light from the cube, then broke apart into fragments that rose into the air and merged with the cube.

[ +100,000 Energy ]

“Now construct a level one wall around the limits of my territory,” Alec ordered.

The next moment, stone walls rose up around the clearing, they were not especially tall, but they were high enough, and they carried a magical property that prevented anyone from simply flying over them—they would have to break through instead.

The walls looked sturdy, yet rough at the same time, almost as if they had been built from the memory of some ancient primitive era, much like the walls of his city.

[ -8,000 Energy ].