The Ghost Shepherd

New Conflicts

Right in the open space beyond the foliage he was looking through, there were corpses of Dracos and hunters alike. The scariest part about the whole situation was that there were six people still alive after the battle but he happened to see 3 of them killed by their comrades in the most cowardly way.

Gonzo did a couple of shady things in the past but betraying his team was something that was taboo for the majority of the races. There was never a good ending to people that behave like that, they never had a quick death and the suffering they would be submitted to, made it all not worth it.

When the last person dropped to the floor, Gonzo turned around to leave but his nervousness got the best of him and he broke a couple of branches that alerted the trio.

“Oh s**t… Oh s**t”

“I’ll take care of it...you two clean up,” said Chameleon as he ran after Gonzo and blended into his surroundings.

Gonzo double time it back but his speed was lacking when compared to his pursuer. The only beacon of hope was the fact that Sly and the others were not that far away. He was sweating profusely while he ran as fast as he could while looking back from time to time without being able to see anybody, his eyes were telling him one thing but his heart was telling him another.

His heart was telling him that the moment he stopped, it was the moment he would perish.

Swoosh!

A knife suddenly came flying from a side position and thanks to Gonzo's agility he was able to move his arm in front of his face to stop it.

Gonzo immediately manifested his Nanotron weapon and fired a barrage of fire streamers towards the aggressor while staying on the move and screaming, “Help”.

The next moment another Knife came flying from the opposite side in an impossible feat of agility that mindboggle Gonzo into thinking there were two people. The knife hit gonzo straight in his thigh and sent him tumbling on the floor.

Gonzo did not drop his weapon and instead started shooting in every direction until his weapon was pretty much without energy.

“Too Green kid, if you would have remained calm and withdrawn carefully, we would have never found out you were there but you let your emotions cloud your judgement and now, here we are… I guess, better luck on your next live”

The Chameleon was about to send some flying knives towards Gonzo to finish him but a giant Hammer made out of Fire Energy descended on top of his head. The Chameleon didn’t feel the impact, the head of the hammer swung down like it was about to nail the chameleon to the ground but instead, it incinerated him in real time converting him to ash as it made his way towards the floor.

Gonzo was speechless and scared, he thought he was a goner but that display of power was scary as well, it was truly beyond comprehension.

“I heard you screaming kid, I can’t believe you were about to be skewered by that weakling” Steelforge had her hammer over her shoulder and was walking leisurely towards him.

“Thank you”

“What happened?”

“Head Hunters...I saw them killing their teammates so I ran and he followed me”

The team arrived quickly to see Steelforge talking to Gonzo who was removing a knife from his leg. “What happened?”

“Come on Sly, I’ll show you what happens to head hunters that get caught”

Steelforge started running in the direction Gonzo indicated and Sly followed while processing what was happening. Allan was curious to see what would happen and followed them from a distance while Anku and the others took care of their friend without wasting a second.

The moment they crossed the foliage, Sly saw all the corpses and the two people that were cleaning the scene. Coincidentally, the two people stopped what they were doing and saw a dwarf and a blindfolded albino looking at them.

(Silence)

“Sly? Is that you?”

It was the Cryomancer that invited him to the hunt before he joined Overpowered and if that was the group he was invited too, then he could have been one of the corpses on the floor.

“I am glad to see you. We got ambushed by 30 Dracos and it was a slaughter, please help us clean the area before more Argonians come, we can compensate you”

Sly saw red, he wanted to destroy the enemy in front of him with every fiber of his being. It took only a fraction of a second for Sly to manifest his weapon and in one swift motion, he activated the area ability around the two people that barely had time to react. They were a little confused as to why the people would just attack them even if they were in the middle of a bunch of corpses.

Teams got wiped out on a regular basis and it was common practice to take the corpses back to the Bunker for weapon processing and collection of the fee. It would be too audacious to trade the weapons themselves and to melt the nanotrons into Varanium required technology that was hard to acquire.

The Area around the Cryomancer turned dark, smoke started to come out while the visualization of a bunch of hands that wanted to drag them to the deepest parts of hell and convert them into one of their own was clear for all to see. The sinister energy of the skill was palpable and even Steelforge hair stood up looking at the people that were screaming.

Sly started running and then his view changed, everything in the surroundings started dissipating and in his view there were only the two souls of the cryomancer and the other headhunter. In Sly’s view, the ominous hands that in the real realm were black and hard to see were clear as day in the spirit plane and belonged to multiple spirits of the previous alliance members and Argonians alike and they were the ones holding their feet.

Thanks to the energy fed by the core, the Scythe in his hands phased out of existence and moved quickly towards the hunters that were still trying to figure out what was happening.

Foosh….

It looked like a short teleportation and the Albino was within striking distance before the Scythe was swung and the heads rolled.

Only a whisper of the second head hunter was heard, “Why”

Until his head fell off his shoulders, he couldn’t understand why the people attacked them from the get go and since Kled had said hello to the person, did it mean he was being betrayed? but then again Kled was also the first to die, for a couple of seconds it was an unsolved mystery.

Sly stood still staring at the corpses and to the onlookers it looked like he was praying for the souls but then he moved his hand like he was grabbing something from the air and squeezing it like a ripe tomato.

In front of Sly there stood the souls of the two people that he had just killed, they were a little confused but the core didn’t give them time to ask questions. It immediately started to exert pressure on the souls to compress them into a couple of Orbs that felt on Sly’s hand which turned ethereal. Next, he focused all his will into squeezing the orbs really hard until they popped.

The veins all over his head bulged to abnormal proportions and before they came back to normal, Sly fell backwards onto the floor and fell unconscious. In the meantime, the core mopped up all the lingering souls and Steelforged collected everything in the area with a smile on her face, “you money grubbing Goblin!! you did it again, you are a motherfucking genius, f**k the Mystical Order, we will be the best!!”.

Ha..ha..ha.. hah... hah

Allan watched it all from a corner and was a little scared, Sly’s abilities were incomprehensible by normal standards and the maniacal laughter of the dwarf led him to believe that he was stepping on somebody else's lawn that was full of Dogshit.

With the scene cleaned up there was nothing else to do but to go back to the camp and wait for Sly to wake up. The spoils were massive, the amount of money for returning the nanotrons and the amount from the bounties of the head hunters was going to be juicy while the bodies of the Argonians were the Icing on the cake .

Sly’s body was also evolving, the Glyph located in the middle of his head was finally completed and the link between him and the core was rock solid. The Spiritual Energy allowed Sly to enter a moment of enlightenment that allowed him to understand part of the symbols that made up the glyph in the middle of his eyebrows.

It was a wonderful experience, Sly was like a newborn baby ready to absorb any information that was presented to him but he was also experiencing changes at the physical level since two small horns were growing from his forehead in real time.