"The entire layout is wrong," he knew the main problem stemmed from this. And yet trying to go through everything and modify it was a true nightmare. Soon enough, the masters met monsters again, and they started to get busy fighting while advancing.
William restrained the ones who released their techniques and forbade them from taking part in any attack or fight. He even asked Sloth to deploy a few formidable masters to watch over their safety, and protect them from the unending lava fountains.
Even in the past peaceful matches, lava fountains never stopped coming. And that was the only danger they had to watch out against. Yet the old masters already devised a perfect way to handle this love, using a combination of earth, metal, and ice element-based techniques. It proved its worth, protecting everyone from any danger they met so far.
As they progressed forward, the monsters kept increasing in number and ferocity. Higher-grade monsters seemed to dwell in areas close to that bear monster. And that made their advance speed greatly decreased.
During all this, the formidable masters kept their eyes and senses over William. They were curious about the next version of that scary technique, and how such a terrifying attack would get even more terrifying.
William kept his silence for ten straight hours. He kept revising and editing everything in his mind, using the experience he lived before as a reference. He could spot a few glaring issues in the technique, but he found it hard to find all the flaws in one go.
"I need to test it again," the moment he muttered these words to himself, other old masters got both excited and worried. They knew William was going to do it again, and they waited for him to act.
Yet he didn't move at once. First, he checked the terrain they were marching in. William could tell that rocks would help in shielding masters from the final form of the technique, so he had to wait until they passed through rocky terrain.
This area wasn't filled with great mountains, just many hills and a few low-altitude and small mountains. It felt like they were babies waiting to grow by the long passage of time. But it was better than the open plains they were marching through in the past few hours.
"I'm going to do it," William knew Sloth and others were watching him keenly using their spirit senses. So he didn't need to look for Sloth personally and just shouted towards the air, "Make everyone head towards these mountains when others would release their techniques. And make sure to release torrents of long-ranged attacks to cover us up!"
William thought about withdrawing everyone back while keeping only him and the few hundred selected masters with him. But doing so wasn't practical considering the fact of the densely packed high-end monsters surrounding everyone from every possible direction!
If he dared to let most of the masters go away, others with him wouldn't survive. They'd have to fight brutally and weren't able to do anything to help him execute that technique. Not to mention he needed time to gather these attacks up, fresh and concentrated minds of all to focus everything over synchronising the techniques with his orders.
In return for this, he had to shield and shoulder the attacks he'd accumulate, and dash for as long as he could before releasing it. He didn't notice in the middle of all this one single point; he never got a single damage from the technique despite him being the one closest to the entire thing!
This was all thanks to him being the one who mixed all together and unleashed the grand attack at the end. At the same time, his technique helped his three spirits to merge, and the amount of spirit power his body absorbed would be all directed towards such an end.
"Are you sure?" Sloth appeared after a few seconds, moving fast and headed directly towards him, "we won't get far enough from the attack."
"The rocks will help," William motioned towards the hills, "just make sure everyone is hidden inside safe caves there."
"Better to be in underground tunnels," another master appeared, and many followed. They all shared their thoughts, ending up sending small earth-based old masters there, working over these hills and preparing the setups for others.
They decided to build underground caves, linked to the surface with many tunnels. Then they'd leave at least one earth-based old master in each cave, just in case something bad happened to the tunnels they dug before.
William didn't have a saying in any of that and just agreed on whatever they wanted to do. He was taking care of the part regarding mixing the techniques into one, and they had to take care of other things.
As they agreed on the general plan, they moved the grand army and surrounded these hills and low mountains. Luckily for them, the lava fountains didn't come near this place. And only monsters tried to kill them, but there wasn't a single one of them coming from the direction of these hills.
This greatly helped in alleviating tons of pressure on them. Then the old masters started to dig the ground, build these caves, then they spread a big net of tunnels everywhere.
ραΠdαsΝοvel.cοm They made tunnels and linked them to the surface, to other caves, and even to other tunnels. They were just preparing for anything and took around four hours to do so.
In the end, they were ready, and then William asked the selected masters who did nothing in the past hours to unleash their techniques.
As they stood there watching others fight without help, they felt great stress and desire to take part in all of this. So when they got the order, they hurried to execute it with everything they had.
William felt their techniques were a bit different, much stronger than before. He thought this was thanks to their desire to fight, never expecting that these masters grew stronger after absorbing the spirit power from the recent attack.