"Good… Let's retreat then…"
William was struggling for hours to handle these five, but all of sudden he stopped seeing them anywhere around. He didn't lower his guard, and even after ten more hours, he kept his vigilance raised high against these five.
Anyone else he met ended up either dead or severely wounded. The team members recalled his previous instructions down to the letter and decided to take prisoners with them. They selected the toughest guys who couldn't move and asked a team of ten gold grade members to seal their moves, before dragging them around like sheep or cattle.
It was humiliating to watch, seeing the grand and mighty gold and even dark gold comrades getting dragged like this by the normal spirit master team they were fighting.
They would never expect that things wouldn't turn for the better later on but for the worst, and they'd be forced to ditch these cattle they just collected.
But for the time being, seeing their comrades in arms being led like this drove the blood of all the dark spirit master forces here to boil. And yet that didn't change much. Things kept happening the same, and William was massacring everything and everyone without a single moment of pause.
"Damn! It's my fifty bottle of potions! I'm almost running out of these potions and the boss is still fighting like it was the start of the battle!"
"I got extras, here, take these…"
"How can the boss keep doing this? Any clue?"
"Stop talking and wasting time over something trivial like this! Keep running and fighting! If our boss is doing this miracle now, then let's not fall that much behind or let him be disappointed in us!" Ibra rolled his eyes, spoke in such a harsh way thanks to his exhaustion.
Potions could cleanse away fatigue and heal wounds, replenish lost spirit power, but there were no potions for mental stress and exhaustion. Even if they all consumed potions like water during the past night, they felt truly worn out thanks to the accumulated mental pressure all this time.
They jumped straight into a deadly fight, but that was their only way out from here. If they got strangled behind, they'd end up suffering a ton, ending up dead long hours ago.
And yet this decision that was made on the spot didn't come without a price to pay. They didn't need to face all the deadly and scary folks of dark gold calibre as William handled this part. But they had tons of gold grade or weaker enemies and monsters to worry about.
They kept their vigilance high, over the charts, all the time, without a single moment of rest or pause. William didn't rest in his legendary spree of fighting, and they never enjoyed a single moment of pause during their hectic chase after him.
Anywhere William went towards, lots of enemies appeared. And even if the necklace provided little help, it wasn't the same when it covered William himself.
There was a limit to how much protection it could provide to them. And even in the case when William kept getting spirit power out of God knew where, the necklace always dropped short in protecting all of them.
They learnt about this lesson the hard way when they lost three of their members at one point, suffering tons of injuries when they got hit by a backlash from the five dark gold masters earlier when they fought against William.
That was why these five tried later to take them down. And if not for William's swift reaction to stop them, the team would have lost too many, or even most of them by now.
And so, since that moment, they started to not rely blindly over the necklace protection. As much as possible, they fought and evaded, blocked and defended all the incoming attacks as hard as they could.
In the end, they suffered lots of wounds, but not that severe. The most they suffered right now was that inhuman headache that made them dream about the end of all this.
But they got to admit that after the arrival of the mysterious armies of spirit masters from outside, things started to slightly roll towards their favour. The enemies here had to spare lots of their numbers and attention towards the incoming reinforcements. And that helped in lowering the pressure they felt from the enemies around. But that soon changed.
Just before the sun rose in the middle of the sky, and after ten more hours of the arrival of the armies from the fort, new armies arrived.
"Sh*t! Sh*t! Sh*t! This is bad! Truly bad!!" Thomas, who kept his silence for hours, suddenly said in a trembling and tired voice.
"What? Don't tell me more enemies are here!!" Lang was already sweating profusely like others, panting to catch his breaths while running after William.
"That's indeed what happened," Thomas gulped, "it's not just one army… It's like… It's like…"
"What?!! Just spill it out already! We have seen lots of things to get used to anything bad!" Ro shouted in impatience and frustration. She wasn't feeling any better at all than others.
"The entire world… It seems that the entire world in that direction is filled with endless enemies…" he pointed towards a direction, and weirdly enough, it was the same way William was taking them towards.
"Holy cow! Can't we wake him up? Make him change his path or something?" one of the team members cursed, and others felt the need to do so, despite not knowing how.
"Let me try… Damn! Agh!" Ibra got the courage to get closer to that scary and bloody looking fox. After all this time, William's fox spirit body was now dyed all red with blood of his enemies, monsters and dark spirit masters alike.
The moment Ibra touched him, trying to knock some sense back in his mind, he felt a gush of weird power that sent him flying in the air, landing on the ground, rolling for tens of metres, even hitting many enemies in the process.