(Reminder: Excessively confusing.)
Snore!
"Geez... How do I wake these?" I asked myself as I neared the gigantic beasts. I knew that touching it will be venemous for me, and I was honestly greedy to think I wanted to kill one of them to gain resistance against their venom. But to finish them off, I would need to know its weakness, which I couldn't anymore because I fed a few of my skills to Puppet.
Since I had fed it my least used skills, it could be understandable that I didn't need that one anymore. Because whether I know their weaknesses or not, I loved to pluck their brain out of their skulls. This was an unknown addiction of mine honestly... To get rid of their brains.
"Hah! Its not like they won't wake when I pluck out those leaves... So why bother?" I finally let out a sigh as I stood up and walked towards its tail. I was lucky I was wearing heels, to levitate my feet high enough. Due to their slippery scales, I almost slipped sometimes, but I still managed to make it towards the very back of their hump. There were ten or more laying still, and anytime soon, if I am not fast enough, a disturbance would arise and I would be in huge trouble.
Not only that, I would put Cedric in problems too.
As I crept towards a bush, a huge collection of the orange maple leafs stacked together like a fan and twitching as the beasts moved. I crouched near the bush, and inspected the leaves with my fingers, while calculating just how much at a time I could pluck. I soon came to realize that it would require two full sweeps of my sword back and forth to gather enough. Because he had only told me an average, I couldn't think much other than just gathering the entire bush just in case. But it would also be painful enough to trigger my death almost instantly if they jump and catapult me away.
As I watched the leaves, I could see very slight hints of golden veins along the leafs orange backgrounds. It took me long enough to find out that those were pulsing with energy, enough to not only cure, but to bring back a literal person back to a new-born's health with no genetic illnesses.
Since I was still running on the toxins from those sleeping pills, I figured that if there was still enough of these left for me after having cured the patients right now, I would injest some. Now that I have gotten a chance and a taste of this good life, I plan on using it to retrieve the moments of my life that I had missed just because I got caught into this problematic situation.
Nevertheless, I took out Spectrum at my side and held it near the root of the leaves, eventually, I had made my move and sliced through them back and forth, twice. I did all that while holding my breathe of course. Before I knew it, my muscles were moving without my orders.
"Cedric! Catch them!" I shouted as soon as the leafs fell to the ground and I worked on getting down from the beast's back. Suddenly, I found myself dangerously tilting as I was staying stood. My mind panicked as I looked towards the ground and the surroundings, and then jumping down.
Then, the walls started to crumble. Not because those beasts had awaken, but for I was standing against it all of a sudden.
I was standing near a crumbling wall, because I had somehow smacked my back against it. During the impact, and while I was jumping down, I must have missed a step, because there was also two arrows that held me up in the wall behind me. Furthermore, to add onto the matter, I had actually kept my eyes shut for a short amount of time. Within that time, it seemed that I must have underwent such attacks that I couldn't dodge.
My head was threatening me. The pain making me sure that I was bleeding, because that blood was currently rolling down my chin and down my right eye.
"Aefia!" I found Cedric running towards my direction with a panicked face. Maybe he knew what had happened. But instead of doing that, he flicked open his venom vile and sprayed it on the floor in an arc. Then, he held out a hand for me to get down. Because Spectrum was out of grasp long time ago, I was helpless, and tired.
"Are you that overwhelmed? You can't help me down like that. The ground is pretty low, a little too low for me to not dislocate a toe as I go down." I smiled at him while lazily using my arms to push myself above the two arrow, until I was stepping on them. Luckily my element granted me extra strength, and I had the help of my Guardian powers to make up for the lost energy from my blood.
Then, I jumped down, but on the way, I was hit with another arrow at my stomach. However, it didn't pin me to the wall this time, so I managed to reach down with my two feet. I used my heels flat bottom to to land, then immediately took them off to stand barefoot inside the dungeon. As soon as I made sure I was not injured badly at my foot and legs, I wore my shoes again.
Immediately afterwards, I started to search for my cobra venom at my pockets and in my inventory. I only had two, so I didn't have space for an 'incase broken'.
"Are you looking for your venom?" Cedric asked while looking concerned. "You are lucky I came along even after your complains for a solitude journey." He furrowed his brows angrily at me.
"Why though? How did I end up like that?" I asked in curiosity as I took the arrow out of my side. As I looked closely, I realized that I had seen it somewhere in the Guardian Realm before. And by the way it looked, it seems to have belonged to the Guardian of Everlasting Health. Does she plan on killing me next? As the Guardian of Death?
"That's... Something even I can't explain. Everything happened in the blink of an eye. The beasts suddenly all dissolved into the ground and the leaves were at our location. Then, when the entire dungeon cleared, I found you hanging like that."
"Than I guess this explains it enough. No wonder..." I frowned while staring at the arrow mindlessly. "And my venom?"
"It broke... Shattered when you hit the wall." He answered while pointing towards the shattered glass vile at the foot of the ceiling and exactly below my feet when I was hanging.
"I see... So I was about to get killed." I muttered to myself while looking up at the ceiling for no reasons. Then, when I looked down again, those beasts returned. It looked like a distortion in time to me. If it were related to the guardians... Then it was definitely explainable.
Only this time, the beasts returned with no leaves behind at its backs. And the five minutes of both of the snake venoms had dissolved, I knew that unless I killed these new ones, none of use would be able to get out of here.
"Cedric... Go look for the exit." I ordered while walking towards the beast. At their foot, I found Spectrum laying recklessly.
"Aefia! You are injured! You might die!" He shouted in protest as he dared not to exit the threshold of the barrier he made to keep himself at a distance from the beasts.
"Don't worry. I am hard to kill. At least trust me that I will return alive." I smiled at him with a single backward glance, and then proceeded towards the main battlefield. Where I was fighting beasts that were recruited helpers of my enemy who wants me dead. She probably thought I would die with just this. So I laughed at my own false assumptions.
There was one thing I could do as the owner of this cursed sword. That was, that I could command it to return to me. Nevertheless, I walked near the foot of the beast and stared up at them, then ran towards them using my skills.
As I levelled myself in the air, I found myself grabbing onto Spectrum with a force that defied my rundown state. I was bleeding and stretching my wound made me hiss in pain. However, I bit my tongue in need to prove that I am not what that Guardian thought of me. It was my fuel to fighting. As I knocked out one of them, I felt Spectrum ragging at my hand.
"Do your thing, Spectrum. If you want, possess me fully." I muttered with a smirk as I skidded across the threshold and then waited as my sub-concious got covered with clawing blackness. Following that, I was deep in sleep inside of my own mind.
[Now then... How do I like wielding my owner's body? Terrifying amounts!]
I heard Spectrum rumbling about nonsense as it continued to slaughter through the beasts in front of me. However, there was actually one thing that I did inside of my own mind that helped me seperate myself from the body that Spectrum was controlling.
***
As the last beast approached from behind, Spectrum looked backwards, then immediately letting go of the possession on Aefia's body. The body moved on it's own, but it couldn't dodge the impending attack, and like that, she had been attacked with the venom.
Cedric watched with utter confusion and shock. But a little too late, did he realize that right when Aefia had pierced through the beast's torso with her second sword, she had actually made a deadly mistake. That although she had managed to get rid of the beast, she has eventually killed herself.
As she fell to the ground right next to the corpses, her eyes shut tightly. Cedric rushed over to the now cleared dungoen and hooked his hand under her head to check for any consciousness. However, she was dead still. Spectrum lay at her side, quiet without even uttering a single word of how the battle was unfair or why he let go of Aefia's body as soon as she was defenseless.
"Well now she is dead... What do we do?" Cedric muttered to himself as he stood up and looked at Cindy, then Puppet. "So what do we do?"
But instead of replying properly, Puppet let out a laugh that defied the current situation. Cedric gritted his teeth and ignored the little wolf floating in the air. However, the moment he turned to look back at Aefia's corpse, it seemed that she had turned slightly blue overall.
"What is... Happening?" He asked himself, then felt a tap at his shoulder. He immediately turned around in response.
"Boo!"
"Holy–what?! How?!" Cedric shouted while jolting backwards.
Aefia smiled while clasping her hands behind her. Then tilting her head to the side, with Spectrum neatly tucked at her side, defying the battle that just happened before him.
"I have my skills. So right when I had slipped back into the deep corners of my mind, I folded my mind into two halves and then seperate my vitalities from a illusion I had created of myself. Using stealth, I divided myself and walked away from the sight. Then, when the fight time came, I created an illusion of Spectrum and divided it from my fake sword. My illusion and stealth skills really are a very good pair in acting and fooling." Aefia explained while walking towards the fake corpse.
"I can control what it does, at a distance. I let the illusion show sighs the moment I stopped using my stealth skill. I planned on using it as a harmless prank though, don't blame me for it. I knew from the start that I would risk my life if I continued like this, so I made my own illusion do it for me. Now, no one is hurt and we can all exit without fear. How was my idea?"
"Well executed. I can't really... Explain just how... Consuming this has all been for the audience." Cedric answered while scratching the back of his head. "Now anyways, let's get going."
"Don't worry, the dungoen will spit us out anyways. I think we will reappear in a graveyard." Aefia added while wiping her bloody forehead. At her hand, she was holding a basket filled with the leafs she had harvested. "Honestly, this should be enough. So let's get going."
"What about the rest?! You worked hard for it!"
"Oh that..." Aefia spoke while snapping her fingers, and a basket of the remaining leads appeared at his hands. "Skills... Of an elemental magic user. You can customize how you use your skills just like I do too. Actually, you should learn do it, it will be very useful if you want to return to your family. Like you said, you brother is dangerous."
With that, they laughed as they exited.
As they reappeared miraculously inside the forest, Cedric continued to talk loudly about whether Aefia had fooled him again.
"But honestly though! Why would you–"
"Can you give me a moment? I dropped something." Aefia suddenly asked with a dead serious face. As Cedric nodded, she dissapeared behind a tree and didn't appear for a long time.
"Well... I don't think she dropped something." Puppet whispered at Cedric's ears, urging him to go after her. As he peeked through a tree, he caught the sight of Aefia using a tree as a support as she endlessly coughed onto her hands.
His eyes turned widened as she turned around with her hands bloodied and her mouth covered with the same dark red. Not only that, she started coughing again.
"Oh no... She absorbed her illusion's injuries too. No... I think she got a small dose of the venom that her illusion had touched." Puppet added in concern as it flew towards her direction.
Then, it came flying back to Cedric with her basket. "Return with Cindy to the Countess' estate, she needs a visit to someone." It spoke with concern.
Cedric took a last glance at Aefia, before running towards the direction they had come from.
In the meantime, Puppet looked at Aefia and then dragged her towards another direction. "We will be visiting that 'doctor' friend of yours... Come on."