Magus Reborn [Stubbing in Three Weeks]

401. Purge

Kai moved through the Ashari Desert with too many thoughts in his head, and not one of them was pleasant.Strangely enough, most of them weren’t even about the blood drinkers.

He already had enough plans for them, or at least the beginnings of plans. Before he could decide on the best way to kill this Dravros, he would need to know more about his actual strength, but beyond that there wasn’t much else to do. It wasn’t as though Kai was preparing to fight some world-famous Mage whose battles had been recorded in books for later study. There were no neat records to look through, no manuals on how Dravros fought, no convenient warnings written down for him. All he could do was rely on his own experience, his own instincts, and the spells he knew.

And even then, for all the uncertainty, Kai still couldn’t bring himself to seriously believe he would lose his life in that fight.

He had that much confidence in himself.

Especially now, with soul mana in his hands and his enemy almost certainly having no idea it even existed.

No, what occupied his thoughts more than the blood drinkers was Maleficia itself.

More specifically, the fact that he now knew they were trying to lure him out and kill him.

It wasn’t as if that realization shocked him. He had known for a while now that Maleficia considered him a real threat. But there was something different about seeing the shape of their efforts more clearly. They weren’t just striking at him from one direction. They were pressing from several angles at once, and that made Kai uneasy in a way he didn’t like.

It felt coordinated and dangerous like the sort of thing that only got more dangerous the more one thought about it.

Kai had a bad feeling because he could already imagine what that meant. There was a good chance they hadn’t laid one trap for him, but several. The plague in Lancephil might have been worse for a reason. Maybe they had expected him to go there first and had built something around that. Maybe the same was true for what was happening in Vanderfall. Maybe there were still other problems waiting for him that he knew nothing about yet like he was some mouse they only needed to herd in the right direction before cutting him apart.

In all of that, Kai’s thoughts also kept returning to Killian, Feroy, and the other Mages and Enforcers who were already inside the corruption zones.

He had sent a drone back to Francis with everything he had learned, but there was a good chance it would arrive too late to matter. By now, every party should already be deep within their assigned zones, and that left a hard knot of worry in Kai’s chest. He trusted Killian and the others to handle themselves in a fight. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that Kai had no idea what Maleficia had truly prepared.

They might be walking straight into a trap that had originally been meant for him, and if that was the case, then strength alone might not be enough. He couldn’t let that happen. But for the moment, there was nothing he could do except hope they endured until he could reach them.

They were strong, and if he finished with the blood drinkers today, then he could head straight for the corruption zones afterward. That was the only clean path he could see through all of this.

Until then, he had to trust Killian to survive.

With that thought settling uneasily in his mind, Kai pushed himself faster through the desert, passing over sand beasts moving below as he headed east, toward the place the blood drinkers had described as their gathering point.

Given enough time, he might have guessed that location anyway. There was one reason for that.

This whole stretch of the desert was avoided even by the tribals. Sandstorms gathered here often, not the kind that swept across the whole region, but smaller ones that seemed strangely self-contained.

Kai had never fully understood why they formed like that, but even without growing too large, they still made the land miserable to travel through. It was a shame, really, because according to what Ansel had told him long ago before his first trip into Ashari, this part of the desert also held several species of monsters that were highly valuable.

And if Kai had to guess, there was a good chance those beasts were the reason the sandstorms existed in the first place. Something beneath the sand might have been creating them as a natural barrier, but he couldn’t tell for sure, and he had no real interest in finding out.

Right now, he only cared about hunting down the blood drinkers, and if the storms could help him move without being noticed, then all the better.

It didn’t take long before he saw them.

The sandstorms were brewing ahead in the distance, huge shifting clouds rolling across the desert in different directions. To step into one was to lose sight of almost everything. Kai briefly wondered how the blood drinkers were managing to stay there without choking on sand and dirt, but magic could solve many problems.

As he drew near, he formed another layer of protection around himself. Wind spun outward from his body, circling him again and again until it shaped itself into a dome that kept the worst of the sand from tearing at him or throwing him off balance. With his wind armor already intact beneath it, that gave him two separate layers of defense in case something struck through the storm before he saw it coming.

Especially because he couldn’t rely on his mana senses here.

The desert was too poor in mana. Something as concentrated as his senses, if stretched too far, would stand out immediately and give away his position. So he kept them tightly controlled, no farther than the dome around him.

Then he entered the sandstorm.

At once, sand and dust slammed into him from all sides. The winds pressed against his body hard enough that even moving forward took effort, and his vision dropped almost to nothing as he forced his way deeper through the storm.

And soon he realized that finding the blood drinkers might be harder than he had expected.

No wonder they had chosen to hide here.

Still, he had a few ideas on where they could be. With how violent the sandstorm was, they couldn’t simply remain out in the open forever. No matter what magic they used, their wings would still be at risk of being torn apart if they stayed exposed too long. And if they were keeping the kidnapped tribals alive somewhere, then they needed an actual place for that. It had to be either some kind of cave or a shelter dug beneath the sand.

For now, Kai leaned toward the first option.

So he kept moving, searching for any structure that might hide such a place. Without spreading his mana senses far out, however, it was slow work. He could only travel quickly, stay low to the ground, and rely on the old method of simply searching everything he passed. The spells around him gave him just enough light to see his immediate surroundings, but beyond that, anything more forceful risked revealing his position. So he held back and kept going.

Like that, more than two hours passed.

He found nothing useful.

Only a few rock formations here and there, none of them large enough to plausibly hide a cave. More than once, Kai considered simply dispersing the sandstorms for a short while and searching the area properly after that, but every time the thought came, he let it go. Doing that would cost him the one real advantage he still had—surprise.

By now, the blood drinkers probably knew he was somewhere in the desert. What they would not expect was for him to come after them this quickly.

Otherwise, some of them would have already been waiting just outside the storm for him, but Kai had seen none. That meant only one thing. They were still preparing their next move and, more than likely, trying to wring as much information as they could out of Maari before committing to anything bigger. That gave him a narrow window, and he needed to use it well.

But searching like this, blindly and slowly, might not get him anywhere even if he spent the whole day inside the storm.

So Kai stopped in the middle of the swirling sand and thought through his options again. Out of all of them, one idea stood out.

It was something that wouldn’t reveal his position. But it would also cost him nearly half of his soul mana.

Earlier, he had decided that was too much of a price to pay if the elder blood drinker was truly here, but now he no longer felt like he had the luxury of holding back. If he used the spell, he would know where every blood drinker in the storm was hiding, and if the elder was among them, then he could prepare for that properly.

That made the choice simple. So Kai began to build the spell.

His experience with soul spells was still limited. Most of what he had done with them so far had happened during the battle with Spirit King Vaelthoros, and even now he could not claim to be truly comfortable with them. But this time he had time; the one thing he had lacked back then.

So he took his time to build the spell carefully, pushing more and more power from his soul into it until the structure fully took shape. Even then, he didn’t release it right away. He checked it once, then again, then a third time–to make sure every line was stable.

Because the spell would travel through a different layer of existence than ordinary mana, it should not reveal him to anyone watching. Especially not to blood drinkers, whose senses were not trained that well. At most, they might feel something faint and unfamiliar, a strange twitch in the world around them that would not resemble any magic they understood.

After making sure the structure was stable and there was enough power in it, Kai released the spell.

At once, a golden wave passed through the sandstorm.

It spread outward in every direction, silent and unseen by ordinary senses, but Kai felt it moving through the storm all the same. Reaching that far was exactly why the spell had consumed so much of his soul mana, and for a few breaths he simply stood there and waited for it to finish washing over the whole area.

Then the answers came back.

Kai felt souls.

At first there were only a few. Then more. Then more still, until his eyes widened as the count kept climbing. Dozens became hundreds. The entire storm was filled with blood drinkers.

He had expected a lot, but this was still more than he liked.

Fortunately, they were not all gathered together. As the feeling of them settled more clearly in his mind, he could tell there were many clusters spread through the storm, some small, some large. Even the smallest group held at least a few dozen. If he read the layout correctly, then their strategy was obvious enough. If he came after one group directly, others could stay hidden and circle behind him for a surprise attack.

Still, out of all those weaker souls, one presence stood apart from the rest.

Kai’s focus fixed on it immediately.

It was strong enough that the wave could not properly gauge it, which alone told him what he needed to know. That had to be the elder. The creature was here after all, positioned near the largest cluster of blood drinkers, one with around three dozen gathered close together.

And if his reading of the spell was right, that whole group was inside a cave that went underground. Which only meant that, that was where Maari most likely was being questioned.

Unfortunately, at his current level with soul spells, Kai still couldn’t clearly tell human souls apart from blood drinker ones. So for now, it was only an educated guess that Maari was with the largest cluster. Still, learning just how many enemies were hidden in the storm was already a major advantage, and he moved to make use of it immediately.

He made one decision fast—Take out the smaller clusters first.

One of them was actually not far from him at all. The only reason he hadn’t found it earlier was pure bad luck, so Kai changed direction at once and moved left through the storm. The winds kept slamming against the dome around him, but it took less than a minute to reach the place.

It was a small rock formation with a narrow opening leading into a hidden shelter.

Kai only had to circle it briefly before he found the entrance, and once he did, he sensed nine blood drinkers inside. Half of them weren’t even moving, likely asleep. He could have killed them all easily by filling the cave with fire, but Kai didn’t want to risk destroying anything inside without checking first. If there was even a single tribal corpse in there, he wanted to recover it so the dead could at least be returned for a proper funeral. So he chose a cleaner method.

He still had surprise on his side after all.

After making a rough calculation in his head of how much force it would take to kill each one of them, Kai slipped into the opening and moved through the shelter. It took him barely ten seconds to reach all of them, and he was already building the spell as he went.

Before the first blood drinker could even yelp in surprise, ropes of heat shot through the air and wrapped around their necks.

By the time the last one tried to rise, it was already too late. In less than a minute, all nine were dead.

And just like that, Kai began his purge of the blood drinkers.

***

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