I blocked another bone spear thrust and shot a bolt of metal qi between the legs of the chimpanzee. Normally I wouldn’t resort to such a cheap move, but this was the seventh level three stone chimpanzee to attack me and I was starting to run out of stamina from pushing myself so much. I had fought in battle against bandits, but even then the spread of the units and fact that they were below me in level meant that I didn’t need to put everything I had into finishing opponents as quickly as possible.

  With the first chimpanzee attacker I had fought the man normally, exchanging over a dozen moves before cutting off his arm and stabbing him through the heart to finish him off. Then another attacked, and I tried to do the same, but exploited a weakness in his technique several moves sooner. With each new attacker I was willing to put less effort into fighting each one, turning it from a duel into a proper battle. With the last one I had realized that, while they had leather armor similar to hoplite armor, bracers, and simple greaves on their lower legs, they only had a simple leather loincloth protecting their manhood. So I took advantage of it after only one swing.

  The enemy dropped his guard as he grimaced in pain and I swung at his neck. While the fact that we were fighting at the proper range for a spear meant that I didn’t have the reach to decapitate him, the tip of my sword did hit his throat and he dropped his spear to grab it, blood pouring out between his fingers. I looked over to see the Ambassador manage to get behind his opponent and grab its head before jerking it to the side, snapping its neck. His martial arts training was much better than mine, but also far more brutal.

  So far the chimps had stuck to standard cultivator battle etiquette, with cultivators only fighting those at the same major realm if available, so I had managed to kill all of my opponents so far. They probably didn’t do it out of tradition, but because they wanted to conserve their strength by sending the weakest person with a good chance at success. If one of the level four troops attacked me, I knew that I would have a hard time challenging them, only being saved by my shield, but they had a much larger ratio of level four to level three warriors than the city defenders, so I would likely need to fight one soon.

  With the Ambassador and I having a pause in the fighting I walked over to him. “Are you okay, sir? Do you need medical attention?”

  He shook his head, then pointed to where a group of stone chimpanzees floated on a large stone above the field outside the wall, quickly approaching us. The group consisted of four level fours, all with spears, though two seemed to be in the Early stage and one was in the initial stage. It seemed that they had run out of level threes to throw at us and were now sending their elites.

  I sighed and the Ambassador reached his hand towards it before slightly closing the hand. Large cracks started to form in the rock and the Late level four chimpanzee that was controlling it started to struggle a bit. He likely hadn’t used his powers like this before, and only learned it as a way to bypass the walls of the city, so compared to the Ambassador who had likely trained by crushing rocks he was at a bit of a disadvantage. The Ambassador started moving his arm side to side and the stone started to rapidly change directions, almost throwing them off every time he rapidly changed directions. They managed to hold on, though, and when the stone got close enough to the city the apes jumped at the wall, releasing the stone. The Ambassador rapidly pulled the rock towards him but slightly down and it hit two of the apes just after they grabbed onto the wall, one of the early level fours getting his chest crushed, and the late level four losing an arm.

  As the dead chimp fell from the wall the two uninjured chimps reached the top of the wall and leapt at the two of us. They had been forced to drop their spears, but in hand to hand fights chimpanzees generally had an advantage over humans, who were often less used to physical movement and had refined their bodies less. Even with his military training the Ambassador likely had less experience in acrobatics and dodging than the chimp he was facing, as they had been practicing daily since birth.

  I swung at my opponent but he easily managed to dodge, being far more dexterous than me. This combat was like fighting a body cultivator, and I knew I lacked the experience to take him in a proper fight. The Ambassador seemed to be doing much better, however, as he had drawn a combat knife and was swinging it at his opponent, but barely missing. The natural advantages of having a level four body over a level three body were showing themselves in this encounter.

  With him being able to dodge my attacks unless I got in a lucky hit, I could only think of two ways to hit him. The first was to use area effect attacks which couldn’t be easily dodged, though at level three they would likely be too weak to do more than superficial damage. The second way was to hit him with something that was fast which he wouldn’t expect. Though I lacked a level four attack like the Stone Spike I had used in the hidden realm, I did have one type of fast attack talisman that hit harder than a level three attack normally would. I had even used a similar technique to injure the level four tea shop owner, so there was a good chance it would seriously injure him if it hit.

  I surrounded myself in a fire barrier so that the heat would make him weary of attacking me with his hands and pulled out four Targeted Tribulation talismans. He had lost his spear when he was forced to abandon the flying rock, so he would have to resort to hand-to-hand or Earth based qi techniques to hit me, and they hadn’t used many such techniques in the battle so far. They likely used their Earth qi primarily to cultivate and not to move stone, then. With everyone in their society sharing a spirit root and having similar if not identical natural qi techniques, they likely trained in bulk using identical cultivation methods, and were therefore almost identical in skill. They had even all trained with a spear, so their martial arts skills were likely similar as well, only varying with talent and amount of practice time.

  I used the first of the talismans in front of the enemy’s location as he rolled to dodge another sword swing, and saw his eyes go wide as he sensed the qi leaving the area. He turned his roll into a leap as he moved to avoid the inrush of qi, but was still caught by the attack on his left calf and foot. The pain caused him to mess up his landing and he rolled sideways, almost falling off the wall. The combination of the wound and poor positioning slowed his movement and a second lightning bolt hit him in the back as he started to get up, causing him to collapse to the ground.

  While he had likely survived the attack, a second chimpanzee, the late level four with the missing arm, reached the top of the wall and leapt at me in anger, hitting me and causing the two of us to start rolling. My barrier prevented the impact from doing more than pushing the air from my lungs, but we rolled several times before falling off of the inner wall. During the fall from such a height, however, we would have a few seconds where he couldn’t easily dodge, so I used the two remaining talismans as well as my own attack to target him with a triple strength tribulation as we fell.

  He rolled to the top mid air then leapt upwards, intending to cause more damage by landing on me after I impacted the ground, but just as he separated from me the lightning hit him. I knew I had gotten extremely lucky with the timing, but didn’t have time to celebrate as I impacted the cobblestone pavement a split second before having a charred, half-alive chimpanzee land on top of me. My improvised plan would have resulted in both of us taking the attack, with me relying on my barrier to not be injured, but due to his attempt to increase the damage I had only received some light tendon strain from landing on my side.

  I stood up and pushed the enemy off of me, ignoring the smell of burnt hair as he took his last few breaths. I knew that the Ambassador was still up there, fighting the approaching enemies, and that my primary job was to protect him, but so far he had done better than me at defending himself in this battle. Several enemies had made it past the defenders on the wall and were trying to make it into the city, so instead of rejoining him I flew into the air. While the last time I had impersonated Thor was in the hidden realm with a considerably higher qi density, it was the fastest way I had to deal with large numbers of enemies, so I decided to try again.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I launched ten tribulation attacks into a group of level three enemies that were swarming the gate to the inner city, thinning out their numbers, but they continued to gather, even stepping over the bodies of their allies to try and push forward. The guards at the gate had erected barricades to try and slow them down, but the barriers had already been destroyed. I sent another wave of lightning into the gathered group, then another, but every time they funneled in from elsewhere, almost replenishing their numbers. Each wave took several seconds longer to launch than the one before, so I knew that I had mostly depleted the qi in the area, and that it would take a few minutes to return to normal. I needed to keep going, however, so I flew higher and called another wave from above me.

  While I was preparing the fifth wave the outer gate exploded inwards, sending level three wood fragments flying towards the inner wall. While the outer and inner gates weren’t lined up, in order to slow any enemies that managed to enter the city, they were only one hundred meters apart. A massive boar, four meters tall at the shoulders, entered through the gate and started to turn towards the inner gate. Knowing that the level three troops that were stationed there wouldn’t be a match for this level four beast, I combined all ten lightning bolts into one and aimed for the boar’s head.

  The bolt hit his snout and pieces of bone were thrown away from the point of impact as its face exploded. The boar immediately collapsed, crushing several of his allies that were entering along with it. The barrier had completely shattered by this time, and there were several breaches in the wall, so the captain in charge of this section ordered the troops to fall back.

  The Ambassador flew up to join me as I sent a sixth wave of lightning down at the invaders, but the wall was being overrun faster than I could kill them, even with my increased slaughtering speed. The Ambassador used several rocks from the wall to repeatedly bombard the invaders from above, lifting and dropping the same rocks repeatedly, allowing our allies to fall back, but even with his help the enemy was barely slowed down.

  The large rush of soldiers and mercenaries towards the inner city had at least managed to slaughter all of the enemies that were assaulting the inner wall, so the troops there were able to take a break for a few minutes. Soon, however, the enemies stopped their rush and started launching ranged attacks at both the two of us in the air and the inner gate, and we knew it was time to fall back as well.

  A giant gorilla shoulder slammed the General above our heads, throwing him somewhere into the core of the city, and I knew that the line would soon fall. None of us would stand a chance with a level five enemy already in the city, so the battle would soon change from open warfare to guerrilla warfare. Still, we threw every attack we could at the invaders for the next hour until the explosions and sounds of battle from behind us told us that the enemy had entered from elsewhere and that we were surrounded.

  With our troops being exhausted, we wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer, so the captains started ordering the various squads to switch to urban warfare tactics. The men quickly changed their tactics. Instead of forming and holding lines, several of them started trying to find better cover. Some started using their flying swords as flying weapons, sending it away from them to attack enemies, and others drew out relics and talismans, using them to break the enemy’s moral as much as their bodies.

  I saw one cougar get hit with some sort of acid which rapidly started to melt its skin off, and several nearby cats jumped back in horror. Several more poison grenades flew into the group before our side scattered. Now that they had changed tactics, two obvious targets in the sky drew the attention of the others and multiple attacks were sent towards us. I sent the flags on me out in front of me, forming a circular barrier to block the incoming attacks, and felt the barrier lower from initial level four to peak level three. This indicated that my shield was becoming depleted, so I nodded at the Ambassador and we landed on the street inside the city, away from the gathering enemies.

  “Ji estate or beast slums?” I asked him. The Ji estate had many cultivators as well as its own defensive arrays, so it could probably hold out much better, but the beast slums would likely be a major battleground. Not only might the people in the city decide to take another opportunity at killing the them, but the enemy was sure to arrive there soon in order to try and ‘liberate’ them. They would also likely receive little assistance from the city, as they were both poor and there was considerable racism among the guards, allowing them to abandon that group of citizens in favor of the human ones.

  The Ambassador knew that I was asking him if he wanted the easier fight at the estate or the one where we would be most needed, and sighed. The slums wouldn’t hold much benefit for us, and would put us at considerable risk, whereas the Ji estate would secure an ally and business contact. After a few second, during which time we killed a swarm of rats that were attacking civilians, he nodded. “I’m going to return to the estate and rest. I used most of my qi out there, and my core isn’t fully stabilized, so if I don’t cultivate soon to recover, I might lose my new advancement. After that, I’m not sure.”

  I nodded. While I really wanted to help the people in the slums, I had to protect the Ambassador, which meant that I would need to escort him to the estate and any time he left it at a minimum. With the attack that was occurring, I would likely need to watch over him while he was inside the estate as well. I called Xiao over. He had mostly been flying around keeping an eye on the enemy since realizing that he couldn’t hurt any of them, and neither side had attacked him. Even an enemy scout wasn’t a serious threat to our side, and the invaders weren’t sure whose side he was on. I asked him to go to the slums to help them out, and told him that I would try to join him soon if I could.

  We ran back to the manor, killing several groups of various beasts on the way. The enemy was wandering the streets and attacking anyone they could find. Luckily most of the civilians had managed to reach underground shelters by now, either the official ones the city had built, one of the private ones built by a rich person or family, or a simple cellar or underground room. The enemy might find them eventually, but only the simple ones would be easy to break into. Hopefully we could defeat them before they managed to kill too many people.

  Once at the estate the Ambassador returned to his room and started meditating. While he couldn’t use the gathering array due to all non-official use of the dragon vein being banned during an invasion, he was good enough at gathering qi that he didn’t require it. I started doing the same, removing my upper robe and calling lightning to directly impact my upper body. As much as I had used Targeted Tribulation in the battle, it was no longer a real secret that I could control tribulation lightning, so I no longer needed to hide this use of it. At the moment, though, I would pretend that it could only be used to refill my reserves, keeping the cultivation seeds a secret. After all, no one really studied it well enough to know how much energy was in each bolt of tribulation lightning, nor how many would be needed to refill a person’s reserves, so I could probably convince them that this was just the best gathering technique I had.

  I drew in enough qi to fully develop all of my seeds, however, and built more seeds for everything I learned during the battle, then grew those as well. This caused my soul sea to more than double in size, and improved my cultivation to early level three, but I knew I was reaching the limit of what I could do with my current knowledge. I would need to red the book again once the battle was over to try and improve the soul sea more.

  When I opened my eyes an hour after starting, I saw that the Ambassador had just finished his meditation and was stretching. His pressure seemed to have increased again, to early level four. “How is it that you keep advancing so quickly?” I asked, puzzled. “Your body shouldn’t be able to take it. I assumed that you had just developed your foundation to its limit before we left home, but in only a month you have increased an entire major realm. Did you happen to learn a special cultivation technique or something?”

  He smiled. “Well, my situation is special, but I can’t really tell you about it at the moment. Let’s just say that my path is already laid out, and that I am merely walking it once again.”

  This changed how I was looking at the Ambassador. Was he actually just a peak level four that was recultivating from the bottom up? That would explain why he seemed so familiar with all of the common level four techniques, like slipstream. I assumed that it had merely been explained to him before we left, and he was just repeating the lesson he had received, but if he was formerly a peak level four cultivator, he would have real world experience with it. I wasn’t sure why he would recultivate at first, but then remembered how difficult advancing to level five was supposed to be, and how he seemed familiar with what doing so required. He had likely been one of the people they had tried to train to level five, but had hit a bottleneck, and recultivation was an attempt to work past that limit. It was also likely how he was so familiar with both Adams and Lindstrom, as Lindstrom would have been the one to train him, and Adams another student. Hopefully shortly after we returned to Earth the USA would have one more level five cultivator.