Zalcon quickly awoke from his stupor and ordered his underlings.
"Everyone cast attack (cough) magic on him! If we all hit him at the same (cough) time, he will surely die! The one before was probably (cough) an illusion, but we clearly saw him kill (cough) Belmont, so this time he's real!"
Like everyone else, Zalcon was under the wrongful assumption that Arvell's [warp] was an illusion spell. After all, there were no mages who could simply jump through space itself.
Arvell lightly chuckled to himself.
[Time Manipulation]
After training for five months Arvell found out that his time manipulation had a much weaker effect on those stronger than him, so while he could not freeze time around him, he could slow down the flow of time for his enemies.
After slowing them down, he would simply create a more concentrated time manipulation that would encompass only his body and then accelerate time.
This would effectively work to slow down time for everyone else while speeding up the flow of time for himself.
As the barrage of spells headed his way, they seemed to slow down in speed for Arvell.
He calmly walked around the spells as they whizzed past his face and arrived in front of another bandit.
To the bandit, it seemed like Arvell suddenly sped up and came in front of him like a blur, but before he could question what Arvell even did, his entire world went upside down.
He saw a headless corpse before him that looked awfully familiar.
'Huh? Isn't that my body…"
His decapitated head hit the floor with a thud, and the bandit's eyes glazed over.
The remaining bandits looked at Arvell like they were looking at a god of death.
"He can use augmentation magic to make himself faster! Everyone prepare magic barriers around yourselves! He can't hit you if your protected, no matter how fast he is!"
Arvell clicked his tongue in frustration
'They finally started using their brains, huh? I wanted to pick off a few more of them before they started coming up with strategies to counter me.'
However his lips curved into a maniacal smile.
'Well this is good too~ I can have a proper fight now!'
Lykos's voice rang out in his head.
'While they appear to be your stereotypical dumb bandit, their boss is another story. While he seems to misunderstand your abilities, deploying the barriers would still inhibit you to an extent.'
Arvell turned to the only one that hadn't used barrier magic.
Zalcon returned Arvell's maniacal smile with a cold gaze, as he slowly approached him.
"Since you didn't use a barrier, do you mean to use yourself as bait? Quite a bold leader if I do say so myself," Arvell calmly spoke.
"As the strongest one here, I'm (cough) the only one who can hope to match you in speed. Needless to say, if it wasn't for the (cough) poison that we have been administered, you (cough) would have been long dead."
Arvell raised an eyebrow at Zalcon's statement, catching the blatant hypocrisy in his proclamation.
"You speak as if your kind fights fairly?"
Zalcon momentarily looked at Arvell with surprise, before laughing amidst his coughing spree.
"Heh, your (cough) right kid! I guess we can only call it our bad for getting poisoned (cough). In a fight to the death, anything goes."
Arvell's smiled wider, showing his toothy smile.
"It's good we see eye to eye."
Readying his sword, he took a combat posture.
"Hmm… I've never seen swordsmanship like that before. I've fought my fair share of swordsmen before, but never before have I seen anyone use that combat posture. Are you from a distant continent?"
"A man who is going to die soon doesn't need to know who or what I am," Arvell calmly responded.
His 5-month training with Lykos had hardened his nerves and Lykos had drilled into him the principles of combat.
He taught Arvell how to stay calm in a fight to the death as well as the mentality of a warrior.
Unfortunately, Arvell learned that he liked fighting… A little too much.
A feature that Lykos sincerely regretting administering into him
"Let's see how long you can keep that smug attitude of yours!"
Zalcon rushed at Arvell and stabbed at him, but instead of blocking it, Arvell calmly let the sword impale itself in his gut.
Zalcon looked at Arvell with surprise.
The bandits around cheered loudly and began praising their boss for 'killing' Arvell.
"As expected of (cough) our boss! A kid like him stood no chance!"
"The brat probably ran out of mana and (cough) exhausted himself! Serves him right"
"Hey! The fewer people we have the (cough) more money we make when delivering the cargo! We should thank (cough) that brat instead!"
"We just need to (cough) find an antidote to the poison and we can resume drinking!"
However, unlike his companions, Zalcon knew something was wrong.
'Why did he let me kill him so easily? Something is definitely wrong…'
Arvell kept the same expression as he did before, however, a stream of blood escaped his mouth and ran down his chin, before dripping slowly onto the ground.
Zalcon tried pulling his sword out of Arvell's gut, but he soon realized that the sword was stuck.
Arvell's smile broke as it turned into a dissatisfied frown. He opened his mouth and spat out a stream of blood at Zalcon's face.
Seeing the stream of blood coming towards him, he hurriedly swerved his head to a side and dodge the volley of blood.
"Is that all you got?" Arvell asked with a bored face.
It was as if the sword in his gut didn't even faze him.
Compared to the mind-numbing pain he experienced while refining his Nether body, Zalcon's stab felt like nothing more than an itch.
Arvell grabbed the sword out of his gut, and in one fluid motion, he spun and slashed at the disarmed Zalcon.
[Vitality Drain]
Zalcon's body started withering at a visible speed, going from a muscled man to a walking skeleton.
His current appearance closely resembled the skinny bandit from before.
Arvell touched his hand to his wound and used another skill
[Rejuvenation]
Arvell's flesh wriggled and melded back together, effectively healing the sword wound until not even a scar remained.
Zalcon looked on with fright at Arvell's display of his Nether abilities and began wondering if all of this was a nightmare.
'We…We can't kill him… What the hell even is he?'
Sadly before he could have his questions answered, Arvell calmly beheaded him with both of the swords in his hand.
Not even sparing Zalcon's body a second glance, he turned to the other bandits hungrily.
'Maybe one of them can give me a satisfying fight?'
Seeing their leader killed mercilessly before their eyes, the bandits lost their will to fight and began running, but running from Arvell who could slow down and speed up time at will was simply pointless.
Less than 5 minutes later all of the bandits had been brutally killed.
'None of them even posed a challenge…'
He sighed audibly.
'I knew I should have made the poison slightly less effective. Maybe they would have put up a stronger fight?'
He looked at the carnage he caused.
Limbs were strewn across the ground accompanied by decapitated heads showing showing the terror in the eyes in the bandits before they died.
Blood drenched the ground, making the scene look as if it was a depictation of hell itself.
Arvell calmly took a towel from his inventory and wiped some of the blood he had on his sword.
Properly taking care of his sword was important! Too much blood would result in rust, which is something he didn't want to deal with if he didn't have to.
'I wonder how those who knew me before would react if they were to see this scene?' He mused.
Arvell began pillaging all of their belongings and loot and throwing them into his inventory.
In this sense he was worse bandit than those he just killed.
However Arvell justified it by simply saying that stealing from thieves is okay, since none of it was theirs anyway.
He wasnt wrong…
The two jet black skeletons also helped him out with gathering the belongings, speeding up the process.
The two black skeletons were his summons which he had created using his 'undead summon skill'.
However, unlike normal skeleton summons that were typically white in colour, his were pitch black.
According to Lykos, Arvell had made these two skeletons using pure Nether, and unlike normal skeletons, these skeletons were never actually alive. They are just beings made up of pure death energy.
Contrary to normal skeletons which are proportionally strong to their peak when they were alive, these skeletons started off pretty weak but grew stronger over time.
It also seemed that they were capable of learning as well and could even think for themselves.
Arvell was quite surprised at this discovery and even taught the skeletons basic swordsmanship as well.
He decided to let the skeletons develop their own swordsmanship that would work with their unique physiques.
After gathering all of the belongings that the bandits owned, Arvell turned to the cage which held the person whom the bandits simply referred to as their 'cargo'.
'This seems like a pain to bring him along, but it would leave a sour taste in my mouth to just abandon him.'
Arvell walked over and cut the bars of the cage.
He entered the cage himself and took a closer look at the boy.
The boy had grey eyes and black hair that went below his eyes.
He appeared to be severely malnourished as if his captors couldn't even be bothered to properly feed him.
The boy looked up at Arvell with a dead look in his eyes, as if he had given up on the idea of living itself.
"Are you here to kill me? If so please get it over with"
Arvell looked at the boy before him with a trace of pity.
While he had slowly lost his kindness and warmth towards strangers after being abandoned and killed, he still felt some emotions after seeing a boy his age treated like a caged animal.
Arvell looked into the boy's eyes.
"I am not here to kill you. As for the bastards who locked you in the cage? They are all dead. Do you want to go home?"
The boy looked at Arvell as if he was speaking something completely incomprehensible.
"I can… go home?"
"Do you want to?"
Light slowly returned to the boy's eyes as he looked at Arvell as if he was a messiah.
"I… I want to see my family again. Father, mother, big sis Angela, everyone… Please! I want to go home"
"Good, then let's get going."