Chapter 91: Graveyard of Adsagsona (3)

Zayn’s current situation was like some horrid IRL bullet hell game.

Ducking, diving, jumping, sliding…

That was all he could do.

And it only got harder as he got closer to the wraiths.

“Damn!!”

Zayn was forced to dive and roll between the specters.

They didn’t give him any room to breathe, immediately unleashing hell upon him. Wind blades carved through the air above his head. Chunks of stone tore across the graveyard at his sides. Every time he found an opening, another attack swallowed it.

His space to move was getting choked out…

When, suddenly, the two specters’ attention snapped to their left.

Unlike what they’d been doing, the wild attacks halted.

They both held up their hands, Aether gathering around them in increasingly violent waves. Wind compressed into a shrieking mass above one specter’s palm, while stone ripped free from the graveyard and began compacting above the other.

Following their gaze, Zayn watched Jarlock running alongside Nathan and Paul.

‘Fuck…’

“Look out!”

Obviously, their eyes had been on the specters the whole time as well — they didn’t need Zayn’s words.

What they needed was a miracle.

And a miracle…

Wasn’t something that simply happened because one wished for it.

The two specters released their respective attacks.

The first unleashed a gigantic blade of wind, wide enough to cleave through all three men at once. Beside it, the other hurled a massive boulder, the thing spinning through the air like it had been fired from a cannon.

Paul and Nathan skidded to a stop, reinforcing their bodies as much as they could.

Nathan raised his shield.

Paul planted his feet and brought his axe up beside him.

Though it was clear that resisting what was coming was futile…

The attacks reached them almost simultaneously.

The impact thundered across the graveyard. The ground trembled beneath Zayn’s feet as dirt, shattered stone, and clouds of dust exploded outward, instantly swallowing Jarlock, Nathan, and Paul from sight.

‘What happened?!’

Sadly, the specters cared not for letting Zayn find out.

Almost the instant their attacks landed, both turned back toward him.

A wind blade screamed past his face.

‘Shit!’

Zayn threw himself sideways.

A stone spike erupted from the ground where his foot had been a moment earlier. Before he could fully recover, another blast of wind forced him into a low roll, followed immediately by a chunk of rock that tore through the space above him.

“Jarlock!”

Shouting, Zayn rolled under the legs of the rock specter and burst toward the corner of the graveyard obscured by thick dust.

If Paul and Nathan were dead, it was up to the next nearest person to become Jarlock’s next protector.

And that next nearest person was Zayn.

And if Jarlock were dead… their hope of victory died with him. At least, if he didn’t leave the Relic behind.

Zayn sprinted straight toward the dust cloud, keeping his head low while attacks continued ripping through the graveyard behind him.

Zayn felt a sudden pain tear through his calf as he ran.

When he looked down, he saw a strip of skin hanging loose from his leg, the exposed flesh beneath it already slick with blood.

He hadn’t even felt the attack.

The particles in the air cared little as they entered the wound and exacerbated the pain.

‘Guh!’

Still, he rushed forth into the blinding dust cloud. He screamed:

“Jarlock!”

A weak voice came back.

“H-here…”

Zayn’s head swiveled, snapping towards it. Then, he rushed at it only to suddenly run into something, knocking him back. He barely managed to stay standing only by shoving the falx into the ground behind him and slamming down his wounded back foot.

‘Geruh!’

More wind split through the air, somewhat replacing areas of dust. One such attack allowed Zayn to spot Jarlock for a moment, as well as what was before him…

Jarlock was bloodied, but alive. He was kneeling on the ground, leaning against his staff.

In front of him was a golden barrier. It was what he’d run into.

Within that golden barrier was another ghost lady.

‘The third specter…’

Zayn wasted no time in running around to the other side of the golden dome where he’d seen Jarlock, using it as a defense against the others’ attacks.

Finally, he slid to a stop by the haggard man’s side.

Huffing, Jarlock knocked his staff against the golden dome and said:

“I can’t… break it.”

Zayn didn’t waste time responding. He immediately reinforced his body and sword as much as he could and unleashed a relentless barrage into the shield, which did nothing but harmlessly bounce off one after another.

‘Tch!’

Still, he tried.

He tried and tried, hoping that something would change.

Jarlock hung his head.

“It’s… no use. We should just run… while we still live.”

Suddenly, a scream tore out from the dust behind them.

“Like hell I went through all of that to run!”

A hulking man’s visage appeared in the haze. A shield in one hand and an axe in the other.

Nathan kicked off the ground and slammed the axe down into the barrier, then launched one attack after another, all of them meaningless, inflicting no damage. Yet, he continued.

Zayn’s eyes widened at the sheer iron resolve of the man who should be dead. Even if… possessing that axe suggested there was a caveat for that to be the truth.

‘What the fuck do we do?!’

Suddenly, Zayn remembered something…

Or more like, he’d been an idiot for not thinking to use it.

Zayn stopped hitting the barrier for a moment, then dropped his blade.

Holding out his left hand, a book appeared, reading ‘Graveyard of Sins.’

In his right hand grew a blank golden card.

In a vain attempt to startle the specters for some reason or another, Zayn shoved the book against the barrier.

Alas, it did nothing.

Even as the dust cleared slightly and the other specters were able to see and sense it, they showed no reaction.

‘Whatever!’

That wasn’t his true purpose in summoning it. It was merely something he should have tried at the start that was better to attempt now than never.

Still…

Zayn flipped the card in his right hand and drove it toward the barrier.

The Mythic Relic easily punctured the translucent golden dome.

Pushing his left hand against the tome into the dome to anchor himself, he dragged his right hand down. Slowly, as if he were unboxing a package, Zayn opened a gash in the barrier.

Even if not meant for it, a Mythic Relic was a Mythic Relic, and for it to possess such an insane Enchantment, the material supporting it had to be of equal quality.

Suddenly, Zayn shoved his hand to the side, then back to the start, crafting a triangle entrance into the dome.

Neither of the men at his side knew what had happened. All they knew was that the barrier had been breached.

“Jarlock!”

The man threw his staff in and dove in with the specter.

The specter wasted no time in recalling the barrier.

With visibility returning, Zayn watched as the wind one began sending attack after attack in their direction.

The rock one, however, abstained from attacking them due to the destructive nature of her power.

Thankfully, the barrier specter was harmless.

Zayn rushed by it and raised the card in one hand and book in the other.

Trying to sense them was useless, given that he was now standing at the epicenter of the Aether maelstrom over the graveyard.

But, with the dust still thick in the air, he could watch the displaced areas.

‘This better work!’

As if he was presenting some sort of backstage pass, Zayn reinforced his hand with all the Aether he could and thrust the card out flat, face-side up, in front of the first attack.

He nearly expected his fingers to be chopped off, but the wind slammed into the card before the attack simply fizzled.

Better yet, he was able to block another one with [Adsagsona’s Diary], which survived with merely a scratch.

One after another, Zayn swung his arms around.

Jarlock, kneeling behind him with his eyes closed and staff planted on the ground, suddenly snapped into motion.

“I think I found them!”

Zayn felt the earth rumble and shake beneath his feet.

Jarlock was doing just as Zayn had hoped: Jarlock tightened both hands around his staff and forced his Aether deeper underground.

He wasn’t trying to strike the corpses directly.

First, he softened a thin layer of earth beneath them, turning the packed soil into mud and robbing everything above it of support. Then he pressed downward with his Aether, forcing the heavier layer of dirt above the buried bodies to collapse into the weakened ground below.

Soil compacted somewhere beneath Zayn’s boots with a deep, grinding thump. Then, he was thrown to his knees as the ground began to sink.

The wind specter immediately changed tactics.

Its attacks stopped scattering across the area. Every blade began converging on Jarlock.

But it was too late for the ghostly bastards.

Jarlock cheered:

“I- I think I did it—”

A moment later, the Aether contained within the corpses erupted outward. Spraying everything, everywhere.

The three men were blasted away in different directions.

As Zayn was flung through the air, the side of his head smashed into the head of Adsagsona’s statue.

Everything went black.