It was a kid.
Dirty raven black hair covered parts of his face, making him unrecognisable. The sword saint searched his body for any injuries and noticed a fatal gash in his side that still had blood flowing from it.
'No wonder he looked pale,' she voiced internally. She couldn't tell how long he had been bleeding for; the injury looked more like a stab wound and less like what the vines were capable of. Her eyes searched through the chaos—everything that surrounded her was either dead or destroyed.
Finally, they landed on a wagon that looked partially intact. She walked towards it and placed him down gently. His dark lashes fluttered for a moment, then parted to reveal a pair of emerald eyes that looked half dead.
Her lips parted, but no words came out. She wanted to give an emotional speech of how everything was going to be alright, but the words failed to fall through. She didn't want to reassure him with a lie.
"It's okay. You can rest now, I'd take care of it," she eventually said, the subtle words more reassuring than any formulated lie she might have told. The child could rest; she would handle the beast.
She turned her back to the wagon and faced the latest monstrosity. The beast itself still hadn't been seen. Waves of pure, unadulterated spite rolled off the countless vines; they recognised the one that had caused them pain and wouldn't rest until she became another mutilated body in their gruesome masterpiece.
The sword saint gripped her long sword in one hand and outstretched the other. The wind moved, as if drawn by a suction force to the base of her palm. In less than a second, dozens of miniature translucent blades orbited around compressed air. The vines rushed forward once more—the sword saint vanished, leaving behind a fading fragment of image.
With a spark of blue light, her body rematerialised amidst the countless ravaging vines. Her palm shot forward, and the compressed wind blades erupted into a fierce gale that consumed everything. The vines were shredded once more under her assault, but she knew eventually they'd grow back. Their regeneration speed had surprised her, each one not taking more than a second to reach maximum length.
She needed to find the main body, and if slicing through its vines persistently would irritate it enough to show its gruesome face, then so be it.
The sword saint was a dual affinity wielder. A rare ability to possess, but not an unlikely one. Most people, on awakening their mana core, were restricted to one affinity their entire life and rarely awakened another. But there were exceptions—prodigies who, on awakening, possessed a talent for more than one element.
She was one of those prodigies. Her affinity to both the wind and space element was what made her truly fearsome in battle, aside from her graceful yet deadly sword techniques. She used both elements flexibly, interchanging between the space element for instantaneous movement and the wind for pure offence or long-term sprinting.
In mere seconds, the shredded vines were revitalised and plunged in for another assault. The sword saint, this time, didn't use her mana to teleport. Blitzing through space, as useful as it was, consumed astronomical amounts of mana. She focused her mana flow within herself; evoking her wind affinity made her body extremely light despite the armour.
The sword saint bolted forward, her body shooting towards the vines like a sharp gust of wind. The moon's light became obscured by the dozens of vines that surrounded her. It seemed shredding them twice had greatly agitated whatever beast they originated from, as more began to rush forward from the darkness.
The vines surrounded her in a tight enclosure, yet to make a move. The sword saint remained calm, heightening her senses enough to detect the slightest spatial disturbance. She didn't need to dart her eyes around frantically—if they moved, she would know.
At once, they all slithered towards her. She dodged to the side, avoiding one while using her blade to slice through another. She kicked off the ground, performing a flip as dozens of vines attacked her previous position. A fierce burst of air halted their approach, giving her a second to land before swinging her blade towards another target.
The deadly dance continued, the sword saint gracefully weaving herself through the hundreds of vines while her sword decimated their numbers. The most frustrating thing for her was the vines' high vitality—their innate ability to regrow in seconds was infuriating.
She needed the beast to show itself, and the thought that another war grade, apart from the one she might currently be facing, was somewhere around still lingered at the back of her mind. She slid under a vine, her silver blade splitting its body in half.
"Cutting through them one by one isn't going to get me anywhere. I need the beast agitated, more so than it already is," she mumbled under her breath, her mind working once again to try and remember what had agitated the beast.
Then it clicked. The beast had grown agitated when countless of its vines were shredded at once—the first time it had let out a roar, and the second it had sent more vines. This was it.
She drew her palm back, compressed air already gathering at its base. Unlike the first, she poured more mana into the attack. The suction force felt palpable—destructive, and one mistake away from chaos. Her palm shot forward.
The compressed wind twisted violently before bursting forward. Dozens of translucent blades spiralled into existence, expanding in a widening arc like a moving vortex. The vines were caught and sucked in mid-motion, their bodies torn apart as the storm of blades carved through them from every angle.
A furious roar, filled with pain and madness, erupted from the bestial maw of the unidentified monstrosity.
A small smirk split across the sword saint's face, she had achieved her aim.
"The bastard is now angry enough to come out and play," her inner voice said sarcastically as her eyes locked on the pair of dark green paws that had stepped through the darkness.
The beast had finally decided to show itself.