ACT IIITHE BAKRANS

  CHAPTER 51A SCARRED MAN“Hope can be a tricky thing, little one. I’ve had enough to know how tragic it feels when your hopes turn to vanity.” Zilong reminded.

  “Man, this is disappointing, just how negative this person is. I thought Deli’s father would be more like…Deli. So much for expectations— ah! He is right, the irony. Hope really is a stupid thing,” thought Hans. Sighing, he put a question before Zilong. “So, you’ll accept dying like a miserable existence these people have reduced you to?”

  “Hmm” Zilong scoffed, “you don’t need to get me all riled up, little one. I’m just taking some precautions. The thing you want… no, the thing I have to do, to get rid of these invisible chains is exactly what you want—

  “I see a ‘BUT’ coming..” Hans gestured to eborate.

  “I could, no. Everyone here could die in the process.” Zilong felt sombre and it unusually influenced Hans too.

  However, Hans always had made a mission of getting whatever he id his eyes on and he wasn’t eager to change that norm. “I’ll do something about it. I can’t promise everyone’s life and it would be hypocrisy— But I do promise, Anfaleen would die by our attack.”

  “You seem confident. Do you have any pn—”

  “It’s a work in progress.” Hans interrupted.

  Though Zilong was getting unrivalled confidence from Hans, he presented a proposal, “Do not tell Aredhel or my daughter about me. As I’ve told you—”

  “If you are so unsure of your victory then you’ll die Mr Zilong. The attitude matters the most in any battles. You are diving with a mindset of losing then you better not involve yourself with me.” Warned Hans, “It will be just a burden to your allies.”

  “It seems you not only inherited the face but the same awful tongue too.” Zilong commented.

  “I can’t help it. For a man… Long… or Tall, whatever. With that much power is behaving like a scared cat—”

  “I’m entertaining your words, that doesn’t mean you have to keep mocking me, child. I’ve lived long enough, far longer than your kind itself. And learned the hard way that arrogance always has a bad end. I’ve lost my world because my kind was too arrogant to understand what was happening then. Here I’m, the st of my kind, trying to survive like a rat in a gutter. So don’t talk about behaving like a scared feline, because it is the situation to act like one. Red demons are just a precursor. You’ve no idea what’s in the store for your world.”

  Hans kept silent and listened carefully to Zilong’s venting. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand Zilong’s standing. All the stories he had heard about the northern sea monster were that he was an incredibly powerful entity that helped stabilise Genas in the red demon invasion and that his world succumbed to the very invasion before.

  However, he didn’t need Zilong to fight Anfaleen. All he needed was the incredible number of people that the hidden vilge held. Almost everyone of them reached grade sixty or was a fifth-circle mage, but they weren’t going to follow Hans even if he had saved them from turning red demons, but Zilong’s words were different.

  “Arat once said, to live in the past is a job for the senile, to worry about the future is for rulers. And warriors, people like us, we should live in the present. That’s all that matters.” He paused, staring him right in the eye, “But if it eases your mind, Professor and Deli had waited for a long time, two or three years won’t matter much to them.”

  “Thank you—”

  “But I do need a scale of yours.” Hans interrupted with a shameless grin, prompting Zilong to question him with his eyes. So he expined, “Deli… I kinda lost what you left for her because of me. One of the reasons I came here… anyway, can you give me one too?”

  Zilong remained sceptical, giving away a scale would be proof of his existence and that is what he asked Hans to avoid. So, seeing him remain puzzled, Hans added, “You have my discretion. I promised not to speak of you and I pn to follow. I swear on my Parvian name.”

  “Fine, just keep your mouth shut or else this vilge will die before you can even hatch a pn on Anfaleen.” Zilong warned.

  Hans nodded and came closer to the 10-foot giant, surprising him further. “Now what?” Zilong asked.

  “Nothing, just trying to see how much of a goner you are.” Hans answered nonchantly, his eyes glowing as he summoned a thin yer of nature’s mana covering his pupils. His mana vision was like a yer above his eyes that saw what others could not.

  “Can I try something on you?” He asked, but his body didn’t wait for permission. His hand stretched, touching the hard exoskeleton of the mutated Zilong. “Hmm..hmm.. you really aren’t from this pce… and definitely different from Deli. She is more like an elf—”

  “Hey, little Parvian. I’m starting to be bothered by you uttering my daughter’s name that frequently.”

  “You didn’t even know you had a daughter a while ago, mister. Don’t go ‘DAD’ on me— found it.” Hans excimed.

  Zilong wanted to ask what he found but couldn’t, since Hans quickly grasped the Bakran’s essence inside Zilong with his surgical mana control. “I’m getting started—”

  “Wait..wait..— ugh.” Zilong started screaming in agony, but Hans was full-on curious mode. An anatomy he had never seen and it was even mutated with a red demon.

  His pupil dited and he spoke like he was some sort of sadist, “This is fascinating—”

  “Fascinating my ass….ugh… stop you son of a…ugh…argh.” Zilong kept screaming, the people kept watching, and Hans kept grinning like a wicked man.

  This continued for quite a while, and after a bit, Hans let go of the control and finally took a good look at Zilong’s much clearer face. “Darn it. I hate handsome faces.” He cursed aloud, disturbing Zilong’s struggle to stabilise.

  His face was much cleaner; the antler-like horns protruded from his forehead, simir to what Delimira had shown upon partial transformation. Even his height was shrunk to normal human stature, but the strong feeling he carried multiplied severalfold.

  Zilong, finally feeling himself again, clenched his hand to see if his motor reflexes were in his control, and they were. He was not totally a hundred percent but had regressed to the early condition of his mutations.

  He heaved a long breath, focusing his sight on Hans. He asked, “Didn’t you say you needed the day… you needed the sun—”

  “That is for healing, not for treatment. You obviously seem like a big boy who can handle pretty much everything.” Hans teased.

  “I’m feeling an itch to beat you.” Zilong held himself back and asked further, “Is that how others feel around you?”

  “Yeah, that means you are starting to like me, mister.” Hans didn’t wait around for Zilong to come up with something and left him with his loneliness. There were many questions he needed answers to, but now the present mattered the most.

  Before the mishap with Reina, he thought of using the civil war as the means to end Anfaleen and his goons once and for all, but now he was pissed at Reina. He was never this close to dying before, even when Samson resurfaced as the undead king.

  He was in a dilemma about what to do, but one thing was clear: Reina rose to number one in his target list before Anfaleen and Xandor. Where Anfaleen was backed up with Ancient and the mighty force of a Node, the people who hunted these formidable red demons on a daily basis, Xandor had his rebel force, an undead army of previous powerhouses, not to mention his undead father.

  But his new or more of a destined enemy held a country of mages on her fingertips. “Man, I sure love the turbulent waves; nothing is tranquil in my life.”

  Meanwhile, as Hans freely loitered among the infected people, Hera ravaged the Deadnds in her search for him. The matter itself was kept secret from Concordia since she heard the sighting of her sister in this forsaken pce, and as she came to the battle site, she confirmed Hans’s sunfield sanctuary and her sister’s Maximacre Skill, which left grave wounds in the nd itself.

  “Fear the karma, Reina. What did you do to him?” She murmured while bsting off a four-hands Red demon’s head effortlessly. The pce was littered with the bodies, as if anyone who stood in her way would know why she was the leader of the most feared squad in the world, the Blood Monks.