Chapter 31: One Minute

The fiery red and icy blue nitrified and combined into a glow of white.

'Not good!' Ginlin's soul sensed the accumulation of potent mist energy.

The sheer quality of the mist energy indicated that the mist refinement technique Hagen cultivated was several times better than his. With the mist refinement technique Ginlin cultivated, to match the destructiveness of the coming attack he had to reach the Advanced phase of the third Core Master's level.

The spinning hawk shaped comet rained down faster than Ginlin could bring his body to avoid it. The beak of the hawk, like a rifle's bullet, mercilessly hit the yellow fox's six tails that sprang forward to accept and defend from the piercing attack.

...

"Hahaha, a third realm Core!" For the first time in his life a sense of greed overwhelmed Zax. Furthermore, the third realm Core belonged to an enemy. There were not any compassion or remorse thoughts. Only strong desire!

Watching Hagen flying toward the immobile Ginlin, carrying an attack that could topple mountains, Zax felt like it was his time to move.

"Don't try to stop me, big brother Mes". His voiced echoed from far away by the time he mentioned Mes' name.

Mes, in his animalistic form, from the tension of Hagen forthcoming collision with Ginlin, became unresponsive. When he noticed that Zax was gone and heard his name resonating in his hears, the shockwave from the collision already reached the distant nest he and Zax settled in, and blasted it along with countless rocks and other nests in the mountain area.

"Eh?! You ssstupid brat!"

...

The rumbling shook the mountain on which Hagen and Ginlin fought, and quakes spread through the ground in a radius of almost five kilometers for a full minute, before the earth started to settle and the cloud of dust at the epicenter of the collision showed signs of dispersing.

Within the very same minute...

In the midst of the uproar Zax darted, undisturbed by the instability of the earth or the fluctuations in the air.

Zax was a bodily cultivator, he practiced the bodily maneuvers, his balance and reflexes were topnotch, capable of putting even a third realm mist cultivator to shame.

Upfront, roughly eight hundred meters head and the distant growing shorter, was an immense cloud of dust and terrifying winds that almost carried Zax off the ground a few times.

The field of battle stretched beyond the area of the gravitational force.

Unleashing his Soul Sense far and wide, Zax immediately figured out the positions of the two, Hagen and Ginlin, inside the hovering dust cloud. However, while his Soul Sense spread and encompassed them, Hagen and Ginlin, with souls no weaker and even stronger than Zax's, also felt the foreign Soul Sense.

From his Soul Sense Zax perceived the two inside a forty something deep crater at the base of the mountain. After the collision they enter a provisional cessation, ninety meters from each other.

Hagen had a broken wind and a fissure across her beak. Ginlin, on the other hand, was in a much poorer state. Five of his tails were nowhere to be seen. The sixth tail was bent unnaturally and lost a lot of its magnificent fur. And worst of all, from an egg size hole between Ginlin's left eye and his forehead poured endless amount of blood. Needless to say, the look on Ginlin's face was ashen as well as very ugly.

A second after Zax comprehended the picture his Soul Sense perceived, he sensed the retaliation of Ginlin's soul energy, and then his dejected yellow fox figure vanished.

'Where-' The thought was deafened by an impending sound...

"RaaaAOOH!" A huge maw with abnormally sharp teeth reached from within the dust cloud, so close to his face it got in a single breath that Zax could perfectly smell the blood covered fangs.

When Ginlin felt Zax's Soul Sense, he instantly activated his own Soul Sense to get a better understanding of the sudden invader. Ginlin did not have a human in his escort, therefore he assessed that Zax was not a bored reclusive expert but an ally of the "Wretched bird". But what made this human confidant that he can interfere in the fight. From what his Soul Sense perceived in the short moment Ginlin used it to discern to owner of the invasive Soul Sense, he found that the human of but a youngling with not mist cultivation, but disbelievingly an oddly body strength. With regards to Zax's soul, Ginlin discerned that the human boy was inferior to him and logically not a threat, but from his abrupt, daring appearance, he suspected the human boy possessed some concealed means. Thus, before his Soul Sense could get to Zax's sea of consciousness, he turned his broken remaining tail to Hagen and pounced to finish the threat sooner than letting it materialize.

The sense of danger from the practically half dead yellow fox dazed Zax. What he felt was no longer a simple killing intent, but the presence of the grim reaper, lifting his scythe from underneath his neck!

At this moment Zax could not remember if he ever has been so close to death door. Raising his arms to abstract the yellow fox's maw from closing over his head, he felt the sharp teeth bite through his skin, then flesh, lastly bone.

Gritting his own teeth, Zax silently admitted to himself that he really underestimated Ginlin's might, even in his beat up state. Somehow, three words flashed inside Zax's mind, 'Third realm Core', and he got back to his senses just about as his arms got stuck inside Ginlin's mouth. But to Zax's astonishment, despite the superiority in body fitness level, Ginlin's fangs were incapable of completely tearing off his arms.

The reason, actually, was known to Zax, but only one part of it. To fend from Ginlin's bite, as the yellow fox's teeth reached his bones, Zax instinctively summoned kinetic energy and converged it to small ripples of Kinetic Force. Those ripples prevented Ginlin from locking his teeth and ripping Zax's arms. As for why Zax did not blast Ginlin's head off with a burst of Kinetic Force? That was because he felt the toughness of Ginlin's fangs and in his plight he was more likely to blast his arms instead. At best, he could kicked Ginlin's lower jaw with Kinetic Force, but even if he will manage to break it, the kick would first assist Ginlin's teeth to dismember his arms.

The part Zax was not aware of, or to be precise, did not take into consideration, was the method of which Ginlin's body attained its fitness level. Like nearly any mist cultivator, Ginlin's body was tempered by the natural cycle that occurs when breaking through a new level in mist cultivation, and then allowing the newly refined mist energy to nurture every cell in the body. That method of bodily refinement, however, was akin to the lowest, basically useless, bodily refinement technique. Zax, conversely, cultivated the best bodily refinement technique in New Earth that then even got improved further, thanks to the Black Core. Yes, Ginlin's body fitness level was higher than Zax's, but the quality between their standards for the same level was worlds apart!

Returning to the scene of the fight...

"Scree!" Hagen was not slow to react to Zax's arrival, either. Then again, her flying speed was severely impacted by her broken wing. By the time she got to Zax, Ginlin was holding his arms with his teeth, savoring the taste of human blood and swinging him like a dog's toy.

The strong flapping of her wings blew a portion of the dust cloud away. Hagen double pupils concentrated on the yellow fox, rather than her dumb Martial brother. Raising her legs, her hawk's talons, as if ready to snatch a prey, shimmered in an intense white light while exuding both extreme heat and cold.