Azik and Silica

With the wind's blessing, Qilingus used his ability to fly to shake off his pursuers.

He looked around, intending to create the illusion that he had escaped through the canal into the Tussock River, then turn and race into Hillston District, Backlund's economic center.

Just then, his vision suddenly blurred. He found himself halted in midair, floating above an ever-rising expanse of dark water. Beneath its surface, pale hands reached up to seize him.

Immediately afterward, an enormous humanoid skeleton abruptly appeared. The monster stood a full four meters tall, black flames burning in its eye sockets, its white bones illusory and indistinct.

At the sight, a cold smile curved Qilingus's lips. The glove on his left hand then burst into brilliant light, looking as though it had been forged from pure gold.

A pure, blazing radiance suddenly descended from the sky, enveloping the enormous skeleton. The pale hands beneath the dark water evaporated one after another.

This was a Light Priest's Holy Light.

As the brilliant pillar of light faded, the black flames in the enormous skeleton's eye sockets instantly went out. Then its body turned transparent and dissolved into the air, inch by inch.

But before Qilingus could breathe a sigh of relief, identical skeletal monsters suddenly emerged all around him, one after another. One, two, three... well over a hundred!

Those hundred-odd pairs of eyes, burning with black flames, turned toward him all at once.

Qilingus's expression froze.

When everything was over, a figure with a distinctive broad chin and brown hair tied in an ancient warrior's topknot remained at the scene.

Only now, the figure's cold, dark-green eyes were utterly vacant... and the glove he had originally worn on his left hand had vanished.

Inside an inn in Backlund's Cherwood Borough.

Azik, whose skin was