Chapter 436

Nick took a slow breath and reset his stance. The wooden practice sword in Xander’s hand hung loosely by the Grandmaster’s side, with no clear target and no immediate threat. That, Nick quickly learned, was the most dangerous stance of all."Again," Xander said calmly, seemingly unfazed that this was the tenth match. “Don’t try to strike me. Control the space.”

Unlike the previous bout, Nick didn't try to cast a powerful offensive spell, knowing he wouldn't succeed in time. Instead, he focused inward and drew a small amount of wind mana, keeping it completely fluid.

Xander appeared to sense something, because he covered the distance with a smooth, gliding step, barely disturbing the golden grass.

Ignoring the looming threat, Nick focused on the patch of ground halfway between them. Using combined with a sharp updraft of wind, he altered the terrain just as Xander’s lead foot came down.

The dirt shifted, creating a sudden pocket of low pressure.

Xander’s rhythm faltered. It was a tiny pause, just a fraction of a second where the swordsman had to readjust his center of gravity due to the uneven footing, but it was enough, given the level the Grandmaster was holding back to.

A telekinetic pull moved Nick to the side, helping him keep his distance, and he quickly responded by sweeping his staff upward, kicking up a thick cloud of dust and dry grass to block Xander's view, while at the same time dropping a patch of the behind the dust screen.

Xander didn't let up, skillfully avoiding the invisible trap guided by instincts Nick barely understood, and closed the gap. His wooden sword shot forward, lightly tapping Nick's ribs, but by then, several swirling blades of wind had appeared behind the old man, indicating this wasn't a total defeat.

“Still dead," Xander noted mildly, lowering the blade. "But that was significantly better. You forced me to take the long route and to respond to the environment rather than ignore it. If you can string three of those disruptions together, you’ll buy yourself the time needed to cast something that really matters.”

Nick rubbed his side, feeling the lingering sting of the tap. "It feels counterintuitive to use magic just to be annoying when I could build up to something more definitive.”

“Disrupting your enemy is often what keeps you alive.” Xander countered. "A dead mage is usually one who spent three seconds casting a perfect spell while a swordsman reached him in one. Use your spatial awareness, even in tight spots where you can’t prepare in advance, and you’ll become someone worth taking seriously.”

Devon was waiting by the carriage, tossing a waterskin to Nick as he approached, and they exchanged a look of shared disappointment.

Not that either of the two brothers thought they could beat the old swordsman, but it still felt a bit discouraging to be so easily defeated time and again, even if they were getting better.

The young knight had already finished his set of drills, focusing entirely on parrying and edge alignment under Xander's strict supervision. Even Nick could see that, beyond his impressive strength, his brother was becoming a skilled swordsman, which probably made all the pain worth it in the long run.

In quick order, they washed the dust off their bodies, broke down the temporary camp, and climbed back into the carriage.

As they resumed their journey west, Sonya sat across from Nick, quietly organizing a small ledger she used to keep track of their travel supplies.

Not that they needed to, given the abundance of stuff they had brought along, but he could sense that the girl needed to do something to work through her nervousness, so he stayed quiet, taking the chance to rest his sore muscles.

A few hours later, the companionable silence was abruptly shattered.

As they were crossing a tall hill, the vehicle lurched hard, its reinforced suspension groaning in protest as Xander sharply pulled back on the reins. The horses whinnied, stamping their hooves forcefully as they were brought to a sudden halt.

Nick was out the door before the carriage fully settled, and Devon followed a second later.

"There," Xander said from the driver's seat, pointing ahead. He clearly had no intention of handling the issue himself, and Nick recognized it as yet another small test.

Following his finger, he saw a trench cutting straight across the packed dirt, tearing up the grass on both sides and stretching out into the open plains.

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The furrow was nearly six feet wide, and the soil was churned up and pushed into large clumps. The edges of the trench were covered in a muddy film that hissed faintly as it ate into the dry grass.

Devon crouched at the edge of the furrow, examining the residue without touching it. "Rock Worm. A large one, judging by the width of the displacement, and to have this much mucus… We might be dealing with an adult.”

"It's fresh," Nick noted, expanding his senses. He couldn't sense the creature nearby, but the residual mana lingering in the slime was still active. "They usually avoid the main roads, since the vibrations from the carriages bother them, so this one must be very hungry.”

“Then you should probably hurry up,” Xander said, pointing toward the northwestern horizon.

A couple of miles away, barely visible above the swaying golden stalks, a cloud of dust was just beginning to rise into the clear blue sky.

It was just outside Nick’s sensory range, explaining why he hadn’t detected it earlier. But since the trench was cutting a straight line directly toward that dust cloud, it didn’t take a genius to realize the Rock Worm had found prey.

“Damnit,” Devon cursed, breaking into a sprint.

Nick didn't need to ask for permission to follow, and Xander offered no objections. Protecting the roads leading into their fief was an unspoken responsibility of any noble scion.

allowed Nick to cover the distance easily, his boots barely skimming the ground to avoid alerting the monster, while Devon kept pace, leaping hundreds of feet at a time.

As they approached the final half-mile, sounds of shouting and frantic braying from pack animals drifted on the wind. The caravan included four heavy wooden wagons and a dozen hired guards, all currently stopped in a defensive circle.

The guards lowered their spears to the ground, their emotional signatures trembling with fear as the earth beneath the lead wagon started to bulge and shake.

"It's right below them," Devon shouted as a skill's glow spread over his blade. “We need to push it out and away!”

Nick grunted in agreement, covered the last few hundred feet, and collapsed to the ground like an avenging angel, driving the Shard into the earth.

He didn't have a natural affinity for earth magic and never felt the need to develop it.

In the past, attempting to manipulate so much ground would have required a slow, inefficient conversion of his raw mana, resulting in feeble outcomes, or a complex setup, like what he’d done against the Thunderhoof herd.

But his soul was different now. Its new solidity let him bypass traditional elemental limits by applying pure force, so Nick drew on the ambient earth mana beneath the wagons.

It felt sluggish and heavy compared to the fluid ease of his wind magic, but he didn't try to finesse it, flooding the earth with his dense spiritual energy and weaving his imprint into the soil.

Visualizing a thick, impenetrable dome of hardened bedrock directly beneath the caravan, he granted it his steel nerves, forged over countless battles where he was outmatched.

The ground shook violently, and Nick felt the strain of manipulating an element he didn't naturally control, but the spiritual infusion held.

The earth hardened and compacted into a barrier just as the Rock Worm surged upward for its ambush.

A muffled impact echoed through the ground as the worm slammed headfirst into the underground shield and failed to break through.

Denied its main target, the beast sought the path of least resistance. The ground about thirty yards to the left of the caravan exploded upward as the Rock Worm broke through the surface, emitting a deep, clicking roar.

It was a massive, segmented beast of interlocking stone plates, its eyeless head dominated by a circular maw filled with rows of grinding, stone-crushing teeth.

Devon moved to intercept it before it could reorient itself, smoothly dodging a blind, thrashing strike from the worm's head. Tracking the creature's movement, he identified the unarmored seam between two of its heavy neck segments as it reared back, stepped into the opening, and drove his broadsword in, twisting his wrists to align the edge perfectly.

He used the worm's own momentum against it, leveraging the blade to pry the heavy chitin plate upward, exposing a wide patch of vulnerable, grey flesh beneath.

"Now!" Devon shouted, pulling his sword free and rolling to avoid a spray of acidic blood.

Nick was already casting. The previous day of practice had given him plenty of inspiration, so he gathered his wind affinity, compressing it into a hyper-dense needle of air, and aimed carefully, targeting the exposed flesh Devon had laid bare.

As he did so, something within his soul echoed along with it, and Nick seized the moment, blending the light from Gevurah, the essence of judgment, into the spell.

The words came to him as the magic assembled, and he sighed them out, almost as if releasing himself of a burden. “.”

Unlike , which harnessed the omnipresence of wind mana, this new spell was born from Nick’s desire for righteousness, to protect those weaker than him, who fell under his House’s responsibility.

A moment later, a green flash punched through the soft tissue and drove deep into the worm's central nervous ganglion, then emerged on the other side, dispersing harmlessly into the air as its job was done.

The massive creature stiffened, its circular maw snapping shut with the sound of grinding stones. It swayed for a long moment as its primitive nervous system struggled to process the damage before it collapsed heavily into the dirt, lifeless.

The guards surrounding the caravan stood frozen, their spears still raised, staring in shock at the two young men who had just killed a monster that could have eaten them in seconds.

The caravan master, a stout man wearing a dusty velvet doublet, was the first to shake off his shock and hurried forward, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. "By the Gods, you have our thanks. We felt the tremors for the last mile, but we couldn't outrun it with the wagons fully loaded. I’m afraid it must have sensed our cargo of steel ingots!”

“Don’t lower your guard just yet," Devon warned, wiping his blade clean on the grass before sheathing it. "Rock Worms usually travel alone, but the tremors might attract scavengers.”

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have developed a new spell:

+101.000 Exp

Your Trait has ranked up!

You have developed a new Trait !

+250,500 Exp

You have participated in the defeat of

+87.340 Exp

Nick hummed happily as he approached the carcass.

With a few precise cuts, he severed the Rock Worm’s primary acidic glands and pried loose several of the thickest, most intact chitin plates, sealing the materials in a spare bag and placing them in his spatial ring.

By the time they finished, Xander had brought the carriage up the secondary road and parked it a short distance away, while Devon had managed to get the caravan into a semblance of order, somehow gaining control over the guards without anyone noticing.

"We're heading toward Floria," Devon told the caravan master. "We can travel alongside you for the rest of the journey if you'd like the extra security.”

The merchant looked at the lifeless worm, then looked at the heavily warded black carriage, and nodded so excitedly that Nick was worried his head might fall off.