The Sect Leader System

Chapter 364: A Vow Honored

With fleeing no longer an option, Benton had to figure out the best way to fight a battle against the fifteen Nascent Souls preparing to attack him—well, fourteen, anyway. The idiot who made the inferior formation didn’t appear to be an active participant.

His first step was to activate all his defenses. Even as a Nascent Soul, his Aura Defense technique wasn’t useless. It still worked to diminish Auras being used against him. Next, he activated Clone and Invisibility. Finally, he fired a massive Earth Shot coated in an inferno of flames high into the air. If that didn’t signal “help” to the Poison Claw Sect, he didn’t know what would.

Typically, he would have been pretty confident in his countermeasures. Since no one could detect him with their spiritual sense, the combination of his invisibility and clone made him almost impossible to fight. They couldn’t hit or defend against him if they couldn’t even see him.

The strategy worked the first time he fought Nascent Souls, after all, and he’d only been a Golden Core. There were two problems he currently had that his previous self didn’t, though.

One, his sect members were in a much more vulnerable position. They only had his pylons to defend them—admittedly a lot of pylons stacked—and those were only meant to hold up as a temporary measure that would hopefully last long enough for him to figure something out. And, two, he was almost out of qi.

Not that he hadn’t experienced that last issue in the other fight, but back then, he’d been able to disappear into a prepared position to replenish his pool while relying on his defenses to protect his sect members. If he stayed out of sight for too long in the current fight, he had to believe that his enemies were competent enough to take hostages.

Which he absolutely couldn’t allow.

On the plus side, he’d have at least four allies joining him soon. Probably in less than a minute. Which was approximately an eternity considering the realm of his opponents.

Benton did the only thing he could do—activated Time Manipulation to the greatest extent that he could, pushing it so that his bubble ran twenty times faster than objective time, and stuffed greater spirit coins in his mouth.

Zou Tian suspected he might have made an enormous mistake. Time had been of the essence, and as Master always said, it was almost always better to make a suboptimal choice fast than to make the best choice too late.

The problem was that he expected Master’s initial strike to be much more effective, killing multiple Nascent Souls and sowing chaos in the ranks of his enemies. But only one had died. And the rest prepared to fight back.

The hope had been that Master would keep the enemy force engaged until reinforcements arrived, and Zou Tian and his sect mates would only engage at a crucial point if they were needed.

They were not, obviously, strong enough for a battle between cultivators so much higher realmed than them. Their reaction times were too slow, their bodies too weak, and their techniques incapable of holding enough qi. If they only had their own power to rely upon, they’d be worthless.

That was why they were solely using borrowed power—their Master’s. The pylons could withstand a tremendous amount of punishment before they failed, and even Senior Brother Yuan Yaozu believed their talismans could damage, and perhaps even kill, a Nascent Soul. And they all kept a Teleport talisman at the ready to retreat before the pylons gave out.

Zou Tian put himself in the mind of his opponents. He and his sect mates all wore the robes of the Rising Tide Sect and were clearly juniors. Since they’d willingly entered the combat zone, they were valid targets.

An aggressive, arrogant cultivator would see them as tempting prey. Anyone with sense would see them as obvious bait for a trap. He needed them, as a group, to exercise caution due to the second but ultimately devote some resources to draw them away from Master.

The talismans would only work once. After the first attack, the enemy would expect it and determine counter measures. Zou Tian just had to be smart enough somehow to goad them into acting exactly as he needed them to.

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He looked out over the square. Hundreds of images of Master had appeared in the sky and on the ground. They were everywhere.

Intense pride welled up in Zou Tian’s chest. Master would show them that the Rising Tide Sect couldn’t be messed with.

Fifteen against one was a tough fight for anyone, though. Luckily, Master didn’t have to fight alone. Several seconds had passed since Zou Tian had announced that the plan was active. That was long enough for—

A figure Teleported onto the roof. Senior Brother Yuan Yaozu! Right on time.

Yuan Yaozu wouldn’t normally go along with a plan developed by a junior cultivator absent orders from sect elders, especially since the plan involved a reaction to a sect war, but the sect leader—His master, oddly enough. How strange life had become.—trusted those juniors. And the plan made sense.

When Yuan Yaozu got his first look at the square, though, he almost wished he’d insisted on staying behind to guard the sect.

Hundreds of Illusionary clones of the sect leader faced off against a force greater than had ever been assembled in the recorded history of the continent. Making the matchup fifteen against two didn’t do much to even the odds.

The vow Yuan Yaozu had given had gotten him to a realm that he had almost given up hope of reaching, but it looked like he wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it.

Still, he wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. The rest of the Poison Claw Sect Nascent Souls would join them soon. Fifteen against six when one of those half dozen was clearly the most powerful cultivator the continent had seen, maybe ever, wasn’t completely hopeless.

Though he’d just arrived a fraction of a second earlier, Yuan Yaozu knew he had to get moving. Standing amidst the juniors made them a more tempting target. He needed to determine who to attack and get moving.

He studied the scene. A headless corpse wearing the robes of the Jade Chameleon Sect lay bleeding out. Two Swift Blizzard Sect members were rapidly regenerating what looked like serious injuries.

Smart. The sect leader had gone after the most serious combatants first. Destroy them, and morale might collapse. Besides that, eliminating the top combatants from those two sects would be good for the Rising Tide and Poison Claw sects both regardless of how the current battle turned out.

Killing off the most injured of the two Swift Blizzards was Yuan Yaozu’s most effective tactic. He just had to get past fifteen other Nascent Souls to do so.

Wait. The one who’d been standing in front of all the others was flying off in the opposite direction, clearly fleeing the field.

Yuan Yaozu just had to get past fourteen other Nascent Souls to attack his target.

Luckily, he’d spent quite a lot of time sparring with the sect leader since ascending. Which often felt pointless considering the vast difference in their combat abilities. If he wanted to disappear, there was no way to detect him. His shield was impenetrable, and his Aura could actively suppress Yuan Yaozu’s at will.

If he had to pick the sect leader’s most annoying ability, though, it was the short range Teleport. He could literally be anywhere on the battlefield quicker than an eye could blink.

Coincidentally, the sect leader produced talismans that gave anyone just that ability. Extremely precious, valuable talismans. If even one were to be sold at auction, Yuan Yaozu wouldn’t be able to afford to buy it.

Normally, he would have felt too embarrassed to request such a valuable resource, especially in the quantities needed to make it truly useful in combat. But the sect leader gave those same talismans out to Qi Gathering brats like he was distributing candy to toddlers.

In those circumstances and with a sect war upcoming, it would have been the height of idiocy not to request the talismans, and as he’d suspected, the sect leader hadn’t held back. At all.

Yuan Yaozu quickly gathered three talismans in his hand. At the same time, he began charging his signature technique, Venomous Strike, pouring ten million qi into the attack.

As soon as it was ready, he tore a short range Teleport and appeared behind the Swift Blizzard Sect cultivator. The man’s injury was almost restored, his natural regeneration and the obvious effects of a Major Healing Pill having worked quickly. He was, however, so focused on the lingering effects of having a chunk of his chest removed by Void qi that he wasn’t paying enough attention to his surroundings.

Yuan Yaozu could almost empathize. He had, after all, been on the receiving end of Void attacks often enough, though of much lesser intensity. That element removed even enhanced Nascent Soul flesh like nothing else under the heavens.

Such was the life of a cultivator, though. One day, you were all powerful. The next, you were desperately trying to regrow a massive chunk of your flesh only to have an enemy cultivator pop into existence right behind you.

Yuan Yaozu tore another talisman, launching one of the sect leader’s Earth Shots into the man’s back. That took care of any qi shield that the Swift Blizzard had left, opening the way for Venomous Strike to land unopposed.

The next Teleport took Yuan Yaozu away from the square, just barely within the range of his spiritual sense. Thirteen Nascent Souls remained.

He sighed. That number still seemed ridiculously high, but what could he do? A vow was a vow.