Chapter 129 — The Righteous Projectile
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Gao Heng had no way of knowing whether his acting was up to standard, but he was confident the Shadow Cultist would take the bait.
Because he genuinely was in a weakened state—he truly did not possess the strength of a true Legend. There was no need for acting at all on that front!
For Gao Yang, who knew his own limits perfectly well, pretending to be combat-ineffective was far easier than pretending to still be in the prime of seven hundred years ago.
Sure enough, as he deliberately displayed flagging stamina and deteriorating coordination, the figure cloaked in black stirred.
It was a leak of aura—the aura of one who had finally settled his fighting intent and was preparing to step in and face him head-on. Out of the corner of his eye, Gao You saw the Shadow Cultist's black robe twitch, the arm hidden beneath the robe lifting toward him, and with it a distinct surge of magical power gathering in his hand.
Gao Yang had long been waiting for this moment, yet he did not attack. Instead, he feigned being thrown off balance by the corrupted treant, stumbling slightly a few steps toward the cultist. He had closed the distance—but to his opponent, it looked exactly like delivering his body into spell range.
The mutated, obscure druidic spell took shape in an instant, and a ball of gray-green light imbued with the power of decay flew out from beneath the black-robed cultist's robe. Gao Yang had already locked onto its trajectory completely. He did not dodge or evade at all; instead, at the instant the orb struck him, he raised the knight's protective aura and simultaneously activated Charge!
The "Orb of Corrosion" traced a silent arc through the air and slammed squarely into Gao Song's pauldron—but a ring of translucent energy rippled across the pauldron at the same moment, dissolving the orb's entire force into nothing. In the blink of an eye, Gao Yang became a streak of white light, raising his longsword to cleave down at the cultist's head!
The cultist clearly froze for a moment—but he had already fallen into the trap. Like any spellcasting class, a druid suffers a magical cooldown after casting; with his previous spell spent, his mental sea was churning violently. At this moment, facing a knight charging straight at him, he could not muster even the simplest protective spell.
But just as Gao Yang expected the cultist to tank his slash with some protective artifact on his person, he saw the fellow pull off a dazzling maneuver he had never anticipated.
The black-robed man abruptly dropped back half a step to evade the downward cut, then bent backward in a perilous iron-bridge dodge to slip past Gao Yang's follow-up horizontal slash. Without a hair's breadth to spare, he rolled in place, spinning up with one hand braced against the ground, and as he rose, his other hand darted to his waist and whipped out a gleaming one-handed sword with a shing—then with a clang, blocked Gao Song's third pursuit!
At that moment, Gao Yang's eyes nearly popped out of his head.
But he had no time to wonder, for the cultist had already evaded the most dangerous few strikes and was regrouping. And once this magic-and-blade dual practitioner truly regrouped, things might well get troublesome.
So Gao Yang channeled his knight's aura directly into the Pathfinder's Sword; the blade instantly blazed with heat approaching a thousand degrees. He pressed down hard with both hands. The cultist's block was dazzling, but the gap in rank was simply too vast—he held out less than two seconds before he had to roll away, at the cost of his left arm being wounded, from that searing blade that seemed ready to set a man alight.