I could see it in his body language and what little of his observable face I could view. Funny enough, the one emotion I could see on his face was Fear, which I hadn’t expected to find in a being as old as him.
You’d figure that once you got to the Purple-Haired Elder Fae’s age, you would have seen all the world could offer and would no longer be affected by the going ons of the "mortal world"…Arkadia aside because that was an outlier.
From what I knew of the Older members of the Myriad Races, they all appeared otherworldly and unfeeling, yet the reaction I got out of the Purple-Haired Elder Fae was beyond my expectations.
I could tell that the Fear he was feeling only scratched the surface, masking multiple layers of concern and something akin to parental affection toward the younglings, which, to me, bumped up his danger level significantly because I knew that he would throw caution to the wind in order to protect them.
Out of the corner of my eye, my thoughts were further confirmed when I caught sight of him grabbing hold of several younglings and tossing them in the opposite direction of me before barking out orders.
"BACK, EVERYONE, BACK! GET AWAY FROM THIS MONSTER AND MOVE TOWARD THE ELDERS! ELDERS PROTECT THE YOUNGLINGS; PUT YOUR LIVES ON THE LINE IF YOU MUST!" The Elder Fae howled, but it was too late because the moment I saw his mouth open to speak, my blade danced across the soft flesh of my captive, severing muscles and arteries and, in turn, triggering a fountain of blood to gush forward, drenching the Elder in the syrupy golden fluid.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Fae don’t have red blood like humans; no, theirs is somewhat special, with the consistency of molasses and a deep, shiny golden color.
Apart from their Wing Scales, yep Scales, a Fae’s Blood, was a highly coveted material in many things, which constantly caused their race to live life on edge, on guard against anyone not of their species.
In my head, I was already calculating my gains because after seeing how slowly the younglings and even the Purple-Haired Elder moved, I knew I massively outclassed them when it came to physical strength.
Unfortunately, without the presence of particles radiating off the bodies of the Fae, I had no idea what their true strength was, so my eyes flicked around, monitoring their movement speed and anything that could give me an idea of what their potential stats would be if they had access to Arkadia.
With my past experiences as a reference to go off of, I knew their builds leaned heavily toward the Meta Physical Stats and Intellect.
That conclusion, combined with seeing how slow their movements were, gave me the feeling that the advantage was mine, even as a wave of arrows tore through the air, looking to reap my life.
"Foolish Fae, your first mistake was thinking me to be one of those you have seen time and time again; I am so much more than a lowly Basic Human." Tossing the dying Fae to the side, I exploded forward, heading straight for the youngling who had started all the talk of turning me into dinner.
"NOOOO!" I heard the Elder scream as I felt the faint tremors brought about by him pushing off the ground to meet me, but he was too late.
Without hesitation, I twirled my dagger and buried it into Flyte’s chest, penetrating his heart and killing him instantly.
"That’s two," I growled loudly enough for all to hear.
With the death of the second Fae, it finally dawned on the others that I was stronger than anything they had ever dealt with, along with the fact that I had no problem killing and that in itself was more than enough probable cause to make the youngling Fae lose their minds.
Not one of them had ever seen real combat outside of training, and with each life I took, that became more and more apparent. Instead of doing the typical route I had come up against in the Origin Timeline, which amounted to a full frontal assault on all sides, these young sheltered beings could only cower in Fear and run the opposite direction without even attempting to defend themselves.
In my eyes, they were lambs coming to the slaughter, and slaughter them I did.
One after another, the corpses began piling up as the grassy island was filled with screams and the golden blood of young Fae.
At some point, the other Elders gave up hiding their presence, and instead of joining the fight, they started gathering as many younglings as possible in an attempt to protect and save them from my actions.
To anyone else, this selfless action probably could have been considered valiant, but I knew better than that. I didn’t doubt for a second that once they had gathered as many of the younglings as possible, they would first try to evacuate them to a safe distance before forming up and meeting me on the field of battle.
Still, I didn’t ignore the idea of them cutting their losses before turning tail and fleeing; that was why I pushed my body, picking up speed and bouncing around to kill off as many younglings as possible, although they wouldn’t net me any XP their blood and wing scales could be crafted into valuable resources that I could use to strengthen myself and family.
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Moving around as fast as my augmented legs would carry, each slash or stab of my dagger signaled another life was lost. Before long, I had cleaned up all the members of the flock who were too far away from Elders, IE, the stragglers, before turning my sights on one of the now in-plain sight five Old Fae.
Keeping on the move, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing as I watched the petrified younglings climbing over each other to get as far from me as possible, and it wasn’t until I had wiped out any stragglers and moved for the groups that I noticed there were SIGNIFICANTLY more youngling Fae than I initially thought.