Part 1

On the final day of the siege of Tellap, a glowing white figure sat at the front lines of horseback. Strangely enough, the horse was standing on empty air, 50 metres above the top of the wall.

Broken ladders, armoured corpses and bloodied weapons. The base of the town walls were littered with the filth of battle.

Screams of fear and fierce battle cries created a loud racket which was almost deafening. Crow, vultures and other scavengers circled the battlefield. Although their motives were different, they were doing the same thing as he was.

Not attacking anyone. And yet not helping anyone either.

An impartial observer. Or that was what he tried to be.

Elemental Lord of Light Candidate, Knite.

Earlier that day he had met up with the leader of the monster army to see if he had any information about the destruction of the Lost Temple of Lou.

Sadly, after wasting more than half a day to see if any of the monsters had been marked by Lou as the culprit, he could only conclude that the monsters were not involved with his mission.

Although he thought of himself as a patient person , half a day of listening to that cowardly narcissistic monster leader brag about their chances of victory was enough to put even him on the edge.

Monster tribes usually had brave fighters among them. This army was no exception. However the way that they were being used was completely wrong. After watching for half a day, Knite would only just barely stop himself from pointing out all the monster leader’s mistakes.

It wouldn’t do for him to interfere too much with the mortal realm after all.

Nevertheless, Knite was fond of strong fighters. The more strong people there were the more people he could enjoy a good fight with.

Well, that was until he becomes forced to ascend as the Elemental Lord and look after the Elemental Realm.

Being only a candidate, Knite did not have that many obligations at the moment. That meant that he was usually free to do whatever he wanted liked. Even if he did have work to do, he could normally leave it for the other Elemental Lord Candidate, Castor, to do.

When he ascended as the Elemental Lord he would be have to merge with Castor anyway. Considering the fact that memories were merged in a permanent Elemental Fusion it would be better if one of them had been having fun, right?

Otherwise they would just end up sharing memories of doing nothing but work.

Fundamentally, Knite was far from a diligent person. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to call him the direct opposite of a workaholic. That sort of stuff just didn’t pipe his interest.

Normally anyway.

If he ever did anything diligently, then there could only be two reasons for that.

The first would be if it was a direct order from the Elemental Lord.

Whenever the Elemental Lord gave an order, it must be obeyed.

After all, Knite didn’t want the Elemental Lord to die randomly whilst doing a task that Knite refused to do. That would mean he would have less time to procrastinate and laze around the Elemental Realm watching the happenings of the Mortal Realm.

It also meant that he would have to merge with Castor and inherit… Castor’s unfortunate workaholic tendencies and memories of working.

Just contemplating the horrific future awaiting him was enough to rouse Knite’s motivation to enjoy the present and do everything he could to prolong his time of fun.

Thus to prolong the amount of time he could slack off before he had to ascend as the Elemental Lord of Light, Knite obeyed the orders of the Elemental Lord of Light.

Aside from that there was only one other reason that he did some properly.

To put it simply, if it involved strong opponents his motivation to complete the task who soar the max.

In the Realm of Light, the only beings that dared to fight him were the Elemental Lord himself, and the other Elemental Lord Candidate, Castor.

However, considering the fact that the Elemental Lord was busy most of the time and that Castor had a very annoying fighting style, Knite still found himself bored for most of the time in the Elemental Realm.

Thus, since he finally had the chance to go to the mortal realm after a long time, he thought this would be a chance to look for some strong fighters.

After all, the state of the ruins of Lou’s temple was not something anyone could have done. The whole place practically screamed that a huge battle had taken place.

Castor’s analysis had been that a powerful attack had been launched at the temple, reacting with the Divine Gem in the temple and forcing it to overflow the area with mana and divine power thus causing an explosion.

The additional information he had gotten from Lou was that there were two culprits responsible for the destruction of the Temple. One of them had perished in the blast caused by the explosion and had been taken to the Elemental Realm of Darkness where Lou couldn’t touch him.

The other one had managed to survive. Lou had said that the survivor had changed after doing the deed. Lous had alos said that he had branded the culprit with a symbol of light which could only be seen by beings with exceedingly high light affinity. He also said something about the one who died being very powerful…

Knite racked him brain to try and remember what else Lou had said. Knite had a bad habit of remembering only the things he deemed important.

Thus since he couldn’t remember anything else, it mustn’t have been important.

The only thing important was that the culprit who died was very strong. That meant that the one who survived, in other words the victor of the fight must be even stronger as well.

A task which had managed to fulfil other his requirements for motivation. Who would have know such a task existed.

Knite could tell that he was going to have a good time.

But with the siege going, it was really hard to tell what was going on. Even after questioning the monsters he could gain little information on where his target could be, or even if his target was currently in the besieged town.

Thus, all that was left was to go to the battlefield personally and single out every individual that seemed promising and check if they had Lou’s branding.

“What are you doing?!!! Attack them!”

The monsters spotted Knite simply observing the battle yelled at him to do something. He ignored them without paying much attention.

Knite had tried this method on the 3 other walls of the town siege. But to no avail. Although, the town had many strong fighters, none of them had Lou’s branding. It was the same with the current wall that he was observing as well.

“You god damn useless…”

“What the hell is that thing? Shoot it down!!!”

The yelling of the monsters caused him to also attract the attention of the town defenders. Noticing him, they started to launch their attacks at him. Knite didn’t blame them.

Power glows.

Power floats.

Being a person who fulfilled both these tropes obviously meant that he was powerful.

And if something powerful was near you wouldn’t you want to try and attack it?

It was the “let’s stab this sleeping super-powerful ancient dragon in the eyeball to see if it felt it” sort of logic.

Anyway, Knite was pretty sure that the culprit was in the town.

He could sense a type of aura that didn’t belong to the mortal realm. However, with in confusion of the battlefield, he couldn’t quite pinpoint its location.

Knite signed, this was turning out more difficult than he thought it would.

Suddenly a great epiphany struck him.

If you can’t pinpoint aura because of all the combatants, why don’t you just decrease the number of combatants until you can pinpoint aura?

“That’s it! I’m a genius.”

Hitting the palm of his hand with the side of his fist, Knite took the time to admire this utter brilliance.

To find a needle in a hay stack just light a match and pray to the gods that the needle was fireproof. Creating some detailed plan took more effort than it had to. Being the slacker- no energy efficient person that he was, Knite was simply just going to brute force a solution.

“That’s it boy. We’re going to battle as well!”

Stroking the fiery mane of his horse, Knite yelled out in high spirits.

NEIGH!!!!

With a cry the horse’s glowing body flashed and changed shape, becoming longer and forming a sharp curve at one end.

A glowing white scythe. White fire flickered occasionally around the blade.

Having lost his support, Knite’s body entered a state of freefall and fell straight into the midst of the monsters.

Despite the large fall, Knite landed perfectly fine.

“…”

Both monsters and defenders stared at him in a moment of obvious surprise. Knite grabbed his horse… no, scythe and spun it around a few time experimentally. Then with obvious joy he said:

“Sorry. But all of you will have to sleep for a bit~”

Without giving the monsters close to him any chance to react, Knite swung his scythe.

A monster fell. Aside from the light elemental seal placed on it, it was perfectly fine.

That was a given after all, Knite couldn’t do anything that would upset the Elemental Realm too much.

The Elemental Realms were both an afterlife and a home for elementals.

If he were to kill all these monsters and defenders then the Elemental Realm would be flooded with newly departed souls.

This meant more complaints from the other Elemental Lords.

This led to more work for him to do.

More work meant less time to laze around.

Less time = bad.

Therefore, killing in mortal realm = bad.

To avoid this tragedy, Knite had placed the monster in a coma which would lift was soon as Knite left the immediate surroundings.

Marvelling sarcastically at his own foresight, Knite swung at another monster.

And another one.

And another.

“Kill him!”

“Focus fire!”

The monsters screamed and retaliated as he attacked them.

Bombardment of spells and arrows raced towards him, fired by monsters and defenders alike.

However, he the time they reached him, he had already moved to another location.

Darting around faster than they could react, Knite felled the monsters one by one.

A group of armoured monsters tried to surround him. His scythe flashed, bypassing the armour, flesh and blood, allowing his strike to seal all monsters at once.

Knite wasn’t fighting just monsters through.

Occasionally, he jumped to the top of the town wall with a single acrobatic leap and sealed the defenders as well.

Thus, alternating between the defenders and monsters, Knite carried out his “carefully thought out” plan.

Some attacks moved faster than he expected, some he couldn’t dodge.

In the face of these, Knite, hardened his aura to form a protective layer around him which protected him for the worst of even these attacks.

In Royal Road, aura was something like a hidden resource.

It was like an invisible stat or a easter egg which had many small effects that one might not notice at first.

It wasn’t as though the players weren’t aware of it either.

It had always been well debated about how attacks with the “killing intent” would seem to do more damage than “normal” attacks. And there had always been much speculation about what the baseline aura stat, “Fighting Spirit” did.

However, aside from those small things, not many players paid much attention to using or finding out more about how to use aura.

The reason was simple.

Of all the unlocked races so far, none of them had the ability to manipulate aura to a sufficient degree without intense training or a special class.

There were two ways in which aura could be controlled. The first was through emotions. The second was through the use of spells and skills.

Being able to manipulate aura to the extent of being able to use it in battle was something that almost exclusively available to only the ascended and divine races.

Thus, being an Ultimate level elemental as well as a Candidate for the position of the next Elemental Lord, Knite was fully aware of how to control and use his aura.

Hardening your aura could form a protective shell around yourself.

Releasing your aura could temporarily give you a large boost in power.

Focusing your aura could give attacks more penetrative force.

Resonating your aura with your surroundings allowed you to sense the aura of others.

These were basics of the basics.

For elementals, a lot of their physical condition could be deduced from the intensity of their glow. Factors like remaining Health, Mana, and overall power were all reflected by how brightly they glowed.

And aura. The state of their aura could also been deduced visually.

Unlike most skills, using aura techniques did not have to consume mana. Practitioners more adept with magic and arcane abilities were able to use mana as a substitute fuel for these techniques but in general, aura was fuelled by stamina.

Thus, completely decimating both sides, Knite began to narrow down the place where the strange aura was.

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Word Count: ~2200 words

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