Rivers of the Night-Chapter 435: Cruel (1)

Thessa writhed on the ground in pain. The arrow wasn’t just sticking out of her knee; it felt like every bone, ligament, and tendon even in the general vicinity had been burnt away.

Her leg had become as useless as if it had been severed cleanly from her body.

Faintly, through the waves and curtains of pain, she managed to hear Sadie’s voice. But that only left her confused and broken. The original reason she had started hating Theron so much in the first place was because of Sadie.

No, wait. That voice only had tinges of Sadie in it. But the tone, the vibrancy—it was all so much more beautiful. Was it really Sadie?

A shadow appeared before her. It sighed, bending down.

Another spike of pain ripped through Thessa as the arrow was taken out of her leg. Then, the pain slowly faded away. She still couldn’t feel or move her leg, but at the very least, it was soothed.

Struggling, she opened her eyes to see a pair of emerald eyes she recognized all too well.

"Sad...ie...?"

The rest of the face was covered, even bundling up the hair in fabrics of black. But Thessa could feel it.

Sadie sighed. "Thessa, there are some things that you should just let go."

"You..."

Thessa was caught between being hurt and being infuriated. Her whole life had been under the control of others for so long. She had given it everything she had to reach this moment.

That damned marriage, her controlling elder brother, her parents, the Empire she had given everything for...

This just felt like another one of those moments. Another time someone else was trying to control what she could do. And for what?

She knew that Malaya was pitiful, but wasn’t she also?

The irony that the power she was using to turn her life around was handed to her by the man she probably hated almost as much as anyone else wasn’t lost on her. The fact that the reason for their falling out was the one stopping her now only made it even worse.

"How could you do this to me?"

Sadie’s eyes tinged with sadness as she looked up to the skies. She didn’t have an answer.

"You really still love him? After everything he’s done? After all the people he’s killed? The things he’s left in ruins?"

"... If you had his power, you would have probably already done the same, wouldn’t you?"

Thessa froze, her rationality almost winning out before it became rage instead.

Sadie shook her head. She knew that it wouldn’t be so easy.

"You’re just the same as all the rest of them! Out for yourself and no one else! Damn the world if your little boyfriend gets to live out his murder fantasies, right?!"

Sadie closed her eyes, a pulse of power coming from her. The shouts of Thessa didn’t stop, but somehow they became fainter, and fainter still, still echoing until they were no longer echoing through the world itself, but instead in Sadie’s own mind.

As for Thessa herself, she seemed to have disappeared through means maybe no one in this world but Sadie herself could understand.

The bombardment of words, though... never seemed to leave her side. However, even as they continued to echo through her soul, it began to dim even then, slowly but surely, until it was gone.

And then, her cultivation foundation shook.

With a rustling, she broke through again, her aura soaring from the low-tier of Gold Mancy, to the mid-tier, and then from the mid-tier to the high-tier, until suddenly...

Her cultivation couldn’t be sensed at all, almost as though she had returned to the state of being a mortal.

She stood there, her frame every bit the tiny little girl she had always been.

"How cruel..." she said softly.

Then, her head turned, looking in the direction Theron had disappeared to. She shook her head once more and then vanished.

As for the voice of the mysterious shadow that seemed to follow her around everywhere, it seemed to be gone as well.

The world was shrinking.

**

Theron’s mind danced with thought, analyzing what he had just seen. He went through Aeryn’s technique again and again.

Every technique was unique. Theron’s time in the Luminescent Tower had actually laid out the foundation for his sword style. With it, he learned to tap into his Water Resonance to sharpen his skill with a blade.

Since then, he had actually been expanding it. Every time he improved his Resonance, his swordsmanship, movement skills, and a variety of other aspects of his combat improved as well. It could be said that he had actually far surpassed what the Luminescent Tower gave him alone.

This technique, though, was for Aeryn, a Flux Mancer. The requirements for use were very different. But Theron still felt that he could use it.

Striking the air with enough force to lift off wasn’t something a Silver Mancer or even Gold Mancer was strong enough to do. And even if they were, it would completely destroy the ground beneath them, something that wasn’t happening when Aeryn used the method.

That meant that there was a different sort of secret to it.

Theron found the crux quite quickly.

The formation of a vacuum with the motion of the foot, and then making use of the rush of air back into this vacuum to send yourself back up.

It was a lightness technique. Because if you really displaced enough air to send yourself flying into the air once more, it would, once again, completely destroy the ground.

’It would take almost 300 cubic meters of air to offset the weight of a single person. With this inner armor on, I’d need an order of magnitude more than that. There’s no way Aeryn was forming a vacuum that large. Even if you account for the momentum of the air requiring a lesser volume, it isn’t enough...’

The scientific knowledge Theron gained from the library seamlessly flowed into his deductions.

’That means that there’s another force pushing him upward at the same time, making him lighter. A force related to his Mana. This... this I can copy...’

Theron completed the technique before he even reached the Thistles’ territory. Unsurprisingly, though, it didn’t require entering the territory completely to be stopped by one of them.

Once again, it was someone all too familiar.

Sigil.