I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 910: Crushing Dead Wood

Jack stayed hidden behind the tree. He was in no hurry to move, and instead watched the pursuing party behind the running man.

Their objective was perfectly clear, and even as the chase went on more men in black kept closing in to join them.

Jack’s eyes fixed on that stumbling figure, and he soon had his answer.

“So it’s you they’re after,” Jack murmured to himself.

He thought back to the scene when he had killed those first two men in black.

Those two had likewise been searching for something, and Jack, still badly on edge at the time, had instinctively assumed they were tracking him.

But thinking it over carefully now, that did not hold.

If those men in black had already caught wind of his movements then, the noise he had made afterwards, going back to the campsite and prising apart the distress bands, had been anything but small; and yet they had never appeared.

And the direction those two had come from in the first place did not match the route he had taken away from the camp at all.

So it had in fact been a misunderstanding. From the very beginning, the target they were looking for had never been him!

Watching the student fleeing so wretchedly below, Jack thought for a moment and quickly made up his mind.

Save him!

Of course, this had nothing to do with any bond between classmates.

What truly made him willing to act was the supplies on those men in black.

Firearms, energy crystals, military rations; in this forest, now beset with dangers on every side, such things were the capital one lived on.

More importantly, at the level of strength he had now, even if this prodigy he was about to rescue suddenly turned on him, Jack was confident he could kill the prodigy along with all the rest!

His own safety was assured, and he could make trouble for the other side into the bargain. That being so, why not?

With that, Jack lowered his body and began to judge the distance.

As Gavin drew nearer and nearer, the pursuers behind him were closing fast as well.

A few of the most eager among the men in black had already broken away from the main body and rushed out to the very front, and the formation of the whole party had grown somewhat disjointed.

As the fleeing student passed the thicket where Jack was hidden, Jack gathered himself and held his breath, picking out the footfalls of the men in black with his ears to judge the distance between them.

Now!

Jack’s gaze sharpened all at once, and he burst out from behind the tree.

His timing was perfect; the three men in black who had strung out ahead were passing his position at that very moment.

The foremost of them sensed something wrong, but before he could turn his head a cold flash had already swept across his throat, and his head flew up into the air.

As the blood sprayed out, Jack turned his wrist with the motion, and the second cut came down close behind it, splitting another man open on the diagonal.

The third had only just raised his muzzle when Jack was already on him, the edge of the knife drawing upward from below and cleaving him in two.

In the space of no more than two breaths, all three pursuers lay on the ground.

Looking at the sight before him, even Jack was stunned for a moment.

Without thinking, he glanced down at the short knife in his hand.

When he had struck from ambush before, the reason he had chosen only to open his enemies’ throats rather than take their heads clean off was that beheading meant cutting through bone as well, which took too much effort.

But just now, never mind beheading; when he cut down the second and third men, he had sheared straight through them entirely.

The blade had met almost no resistance going into the body; the feel of it was like a heated knife passing through congealed fat.

Apart from the slight hindrance of the uniform armoured clothing they all wore, his hand could scarcely detect any noticeable check as the edge went through flesh and bone.

“That easy…” he murmured under his breath.

But the remaining men in black had reacted by now; after a few furious shouts, a volley of gunfire tore the woods open in an instant.

Jack did not fall back.

His enhanced senses had already changed what he saw. Bullets that had once been too fast to catch were far clearer in his eyes now, and he could even judge each precise trajectory in advance.

Facing the rounds coming straight at him, he brought the knife across to block; there came several sharp ringing clashes of metal as bullet after bullet struck the blade and was knocked bodily away.

Seizing the chance, Jack was already in among them.

Having seen for themselves how terrible Jack was, the men in black fell back in haste, trying to open the distance again.

But Jack gave them no chance at all. With his enhanced speed and strength he drove forward again and again, threading swiftly through the narrow spaces between the trees; the short knife in his hand left no more than a few cold flashes behind it, and the remaining pursuers went down one after another.

In no more than a few breaths, all ten-odd men in black lay on the ground.

The forest went quiet again, leaving only the sound of blood dripping onto the rotting leaves.

Jack stood among the bodies, his chest rising and falling slightly, and then looked down at the short knife in his hand.

The blade was still smooth. Where it had blocked the bullets head-on there was not the least mark left, not so much as a shallow dent.

“So it really isn’t an ordinary weapon.” A trace of delighted surprise showed in his eyes.

Not far off, Gavin was utterly dumbfounded.

He had been running for his life a moment ago, and yet in the space of a few breaths that pack of men in black who had run him so ragged were all lying on the ground.

And the man standing in the middle of the corpses was, of all people, that utterly unremarkable classmate of his.

“J… Jack?”

“Hello, Gavin.” Jack put the short knife away, his tone as calm as if nothing at all had just happened.

Gavin opened his mouth, and it was a long while before he found his voice again.

“You… saved me?”

“For now, more or less.” Jack did not go on with the pleasantries; he crouched down and began searching the bodies.

He cut the communicators straight open, and packed away the energy crystals inside them together with the firearms lying beside them, the energy bars and the spare energy crystals.

Thanks to the standard-issue equipment the men in black carried, their supplies were stowed in much the same places on every body, and Jack soon had every usable resource into his pack.

“Let’s move.” He stood up as he spoke. “That made too much noise. There’ll be more of them here soon.”

Only then did Gavin come back to himself, and he hurried after him.

Once the two of them had plunged into the forest, he quickly realised something more astonishing still.

Jack’s speed was even more outrageous than what he had just seen.

Neither the tangled scrub nor the slick rotting leaves noticeably slowed his stride, and where the ground turned steep here and there he did not even need to slow deliberately; his body passed lightly between the obstacles and landed almost without a sound.

Gavin, by contrast, was giving everything he had and could barely keep up.

And by the look of it this was still not Jack’s full speed; he seemed to be making allowances for the state Gavin was in, and so had not opened up completely.

Just how much strength had he been hiding all this time?

The thought went round and round in Gavin’s head.

He had always believed that, as a fifth-level apprentice, he was the absolute first in the school.

But everything that had happened before his eyes made him realise for the first time that he might never truly have understood this classmate of his at all.

Even his own father, who had become a first-stage transcendent, might not be much stronger than Jack was now in sheer physical quality.

After they had run some distance, Jack gradually slowed and looked back to ask:

“How did they come to fix on you?”

Gavin, breathing hard, answered somewhat vaguely.

“They attacked me out of nowhere. They probably didn’t expect me to be a fifth-level apprentice. I killed one of them, and after that they kept after me the whole way, without giving me a chance to catch my breath.”

Jack gave him a look and did not press.

The account sounded barely plausible, but there were still obvious holes in it.

An ordinary student was not worth the other side committing so many men to, still less worth being hunted this relentlessly the whole way.

So Gavin was carrying some other secret.

It was simply not the moment to press him on it.

Besides, if it came to secrets, it was hard to say whose was the bigger.

“Let’s survive first and talk after,” Jack answered mildly.

Just then a dull sound of explosions came suddenly from far outside the forest.

Rumble, rumble, rumble… the explosions went on without a break, like muffled thunder bursting endlessly along the horizon.

Jack stopped short and listened for a moment with his head turned.

“Artillery.”

Which meant the military had finally entered the field.

Gavin’s eyes lit up; but at that very moment Jack caught another set of footsteps, exceedingly faint.

The sound was closing fast from behind them, plainly a good number of them, and moving very quickly.

The pursuers had arrived too.

Jack’s brows drew together slightly, and he soon made his decision.

In the state Gavin was in, he could not possibly outrun the pursuers behind them; if the two of them kept going together, they would only both be dragged down.

“You go on ahead.” Jack pointed in the direction the guns had sounded. “Run that way. Once you find the army, tell them everything that’s happened in this forest.”

Gavin froze. “And you?”

“I’ll stay and cover the retreat.” Jack had already turned away.

Gavin looked at his back, and his expression changed at once, as though he had misunderstood something.

“On your own?”

“No arguments. Run.”

Gavin clenched his teeth, and at last nodded hard.

“I’ll get the word out, I swear it. You… you have to hold on!”

With that he turned and ran flat out towards the sound of the guns, and was soon lost in the dense woods.

Jack watched him go and pulled at the corner of his mouth helplessly.

He knew Gavin had misunderstood; after all, his staying behind was nothing so noble as a heroic sacrifice.

With hearing grown outrageously sharp after his enhancements, Jack could tell that there was nobody particularly strong among those pursuers.

Beyond the question of safety, the reason he was willing to stay behind of his own accord was that those pursuers had energy crystals on them.

These men in black might each carry a communicator and a spare energy crystal, but out in the world the things were outrageously valuable, near enough to contraband.

Were it not for the distress bands issued by the military, it was not even certain that the students of the entire school could have put together a single communicator between them.

Once this affair was over, Jack could think of no way at all to replenish energy crystals in quantity within any short span of time, so these men in black were very nearly his only source of them for the near future.

Besides, he had only just finished an enhancement, and he needed some real fighting to test the limits of what he could do.

Jack turned around, worked his wrist loose, and looked again at the brand-new enhanced short knife in his hand.

Deep among the trees, dark figures were closing quickly.

He lowered himself slowly, and his gaze sharpened with the movement.

The night wind passed through the canopy with a low rustling.

Jack tightened his grip on the hilt, and a cold smile touched the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, then. Let the hunt begin.”