Chapter 31 — Shadow Guard
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
To be honest, Gao Yang was rather surprised to see Amber actually drag a captive back. An hour ago, he might not have been so astonished—but ever since this Shadow Master had been sent flying by a single slap from a bank salesman named ylittlepony, he had given up all hope for her combat ability. Sending her out on watch duty was less like posting a guard and more like deploying an alarm bell...
After all, Amber's shadow techniques really were formidable; letting her spot an assassin or a spy and raise the alarm should have been no problem... But who would have thought she'd bring one back alive?
At the same moment Amber hauled her catch inside, another set of hurried footsteps sounded outside the study, and Sir Byron burst through the door: "My lord, what's happened here?"
He had been stationed below to guard the main gate, but the commotion on the upper floor this time had been loud enough to rouse him.
As for Miss Meitzen's earlier visit... Amber had been sent flying at the first exchange, so it hadn't made much noise at all.
"It's nothing—just a petty thief, already caught," Gao Yang waved Byron off. "Go back to your post. Tonight is not a peaceful one."
Byron peered into the study with some confusion, taking in the smug Amber and the stalker sprawled on the floor, but faced with an order, the middle-aged knight still nodded: "Yes, sir."
"How did you catch him?" Gao Yang asked, looking at Amber in surprise after Sir Byron had left. "You beat him?"
"What's that look supposed to mean?!" Amber was thoroughly displeased with Gao Yang's reaction. "My frontal combat ability may be just a tiny bit lacking, but I'm not so bad that I can't beat anyone! I killed one of those monsters you called 'aberration' before..."
Gao Yang kept staring at her.
"Of course, the main thing is that this guy is an idiot," Amber, as expected, had more to say. "He probably could have won in a straight fight, but he just had to show off his shadow step to me, so I kicked him right out of shadow form. His mind got jolted between the Shadow Realm and the material world, and he passed out."
Gao Yang stared at her, dumbfounded, thinking that only a freak like her could pull off such a crude and brutal maneuver.
Shadow step was the signature skill of stalkers. Basically anyone who made a living in this trade had one or two tricks of "shadow walking," but an ordinary person's shadow walking and Amber's utterly unreasonable ability were not the same thing at all—one could even say they were completely different skill trees. A normal stalker could at most temporarily turn invisible in the material world and slip through the crevice between the material world and the Shadow Realm (what mages called the "Shadow Threshold"). This was an extremely dangerous technique, demanding precision and caution like dancing on the edge of a blade, because one misstep could send you tumbling into the shadow side, where the nameless things of the Shadow Realm would tear you to shreds. And Amber... heaven only knew what her ability was.
Under normal circumstances, stalkers only needed to focus on their own footsteps. As long as they didn't misstep, they needn't worry about falling into shadow, because "shadow walking" was also called the Lonely Road—every stalker knew that no matter how skilled a shadow master was, they could never step into another's shadow stride. So any stalker of refined technique could handle this "dance on the blade's edge" with ease. But that was under normal circumstances...
It was a different matter entirely when, while you were dancing on the blade's edge, a freak with a combat power of 1.5 geese suddenly lunged out from beside you and kicked you.