Chapter 476

When bards told tales of adventure, they always loved to go on at length about adventurers battling evil monsters for three hundred rounds, both sides battered black and blue, until everyone was utterly exhausted. Then the adventurer would remember justice, remember his companions, remember honor, remember his family far away and the people waiting eagerly for help—and so his potential would erupt. He would leap into the air and, amid tense, stirring music, cut down the monster with a single stroke...

Of course, if it was a tale themed around knights, then the knight was bound to remain forever graceful and elegant. No matter how powerful the monster, it would be utterly vulnerable before him. Even the battle scenes had to be accompanied by lighthearted music, to prove just how effortlessly the knight had won.

But all of that was vastly different from real combat.

In real battles, especially for low- and mid-level adventurers, fights were often fierce and brief. For one thing, they did not have the stamina to sustain a prolonged battle; for another, they would not encounter enemies that powerful.

Thus, their battles generally consisted of cautious probing and maneuvering, followed by a sudden eruption that swiftly decided life and death.

Just like this time.

The stages of preparation and planning had been long, as had the time spent probing and circling each other, but the actual clash had been extremely brief. Even counting from the moment the evil spirit tried to trap the adventurers in an illusion, the whole thing had taken no more than a minute.

And if one counted from when the evil spirit began fighting Yui, it had probably lasted only around twenty seconds.

What happened in those ten seconds went roughly like this: the evil spirit faced off against Yui—Yui fired a