His attack before at the cage might have awakened the black fox spirit, but it didn't show any sign of being alive so far. It just helped to crack open the cage, and still didn't move an inch from there.
William didn't know for how long that spirit would keep playing dead, and he couldn't risk it as it might take much longer than he expected.
So he made sure to focus on evasion, not fighting and killing. Even if he ended up with lots of wounds, he was sure the moment of the high-end monsters to appear would be delayed as long as possible.
But hours passed, and that fox spirit didn't wake up. "Don't tell me I need to go up there in person to wake it up!" he rolled his eyes while noticing the appearance of many middle-stage dark gold monsters.
They weren't that threatening yet, but if they grew up in number, they'd pose a threat to him. He'd be forced to shift gears and start mass killing, ending up facing the high-stage monsters fast.
He didn't delay and started to dash up and over the backs of flying monsters. This time he didn't need to stack any technique and just adjusted the trajectory of his dashes to adapt to the monsters' fast and swift responses.
It took him half an hour to arrive high enough to reach the cage. And when he dashed up there, he had to slash against a few flying monsters which came to take a bite off him while being in midair.
The first jump failed, and then he tried again. This time he slowly bid his time, spending one more hour in doing so. He kept luring many flying monsters around, then dashed over their backs until he reached the right spot, and then did all this again.
But flying monsters didn't let him board their backs and wait there peacefully or without resisting. On many occasions, the flying monster kept rotating, diving up and down, trying to throw him off its back. But using his claws and tails, he managed to survive this.
On other occasions, the flying monster would simply dive deep towards the ground, aiming to take him back there. He had to abandon ship anytime such a thing happened, and that delayed him even further.
In the end, he finally arrived at the cage. He was fuming with rage, planning to slap that fox in the face. Yet when he arrived there and saw how bad that spirit was, sounding like it was dying or something, he instantly panicked.
"Damn! Don't die on me, or else I'm screwed," he hurried over to the gigantic body of that fox monster, who didn't know what to do. The fox suffered from tons of wounds, and there was a black pool of blood filling the base of that cage.
He didn't care about that sticky blood that reached almost to his waist! Even if he looked massive in his spirit form, he was still looking small compared to the size of that fox spirit, or the entire cage.
As he arrived at the black fox's side, he felt at a loss. The fox had a very huge body, and he didn't know where to start or what to do.
"Healing elixirs won't do," he muttered to himself, "they work on humans, not over anything else… Plus spirits are much different than humans… Wait… They are formed entirely of spirit power… Doesn't that mean these elixirs can help?"
He took out healing elixir bottles at first, before swapping them with another type of bottle. They were the spirit regeneration elixirs. He looked at the fox's body and could tell using just a few wouldn't work.
"Screw it!" He took out enough of these bottles to form a small hill next to him. And without hesitating, he struggled to open the mouth of that fox, using his tails and weapons, ending up adding little wounds here and there.
He didn't care about that. The moment a small gap appeared, he instantly started to grab batches of the elixir bottles, smashing them against the fox's huge teeth. Doing so ended up releasing tons of elixirs inside the fox mouth, alongside many glass shards.
He was sure these shards wouldn't do anything to such a formidable spirit, but the main problem still was in how long it'd take to wake up, how many elixirs it'd need to open its eyes and get on its feet.
After the passage of half an hour, and consuming tons of his precious elixirs, William started to lose hope. He thought he mistook things here, and this method wouldn't work.
Just before he'd stop, the fox jolted its body, slowly opened its eyes, and looked at him. For a long minute, the two kept looking at each other, one fox lying on the ground of the cage, in the middle of a pool of its blood, with a human opening its mouth with his tails and weapons, while with his claws he was holding elixir bottles, prepared to smash them into its mouth.
Without saying anything, William felt the blood pool retracted and got lower in level. He looked around, and made sure this wasn't an illusion or something.
The fox was taking back its blood, and that meant it was getting better.
"You do know you gave me a lot of headaches and trouble, right?" The first thing the black fox said was this, even before it retracted all the blood, even if it didn't stand up.
"I saved your as*, killed the enemy which did that to you, and released a scary predator at the end, and this is your thank you to me?" William rolled his eyes, couldn't believe the first thing that black fox said wasn't an expression of gratitude, but a statement of his resentment!
"Oh, tell me everything then…" It felt like this fox wasn't acting normal, not on his usual attitude that was arrogant and haughty. But William knew this was because it didn't fully wake it, and didn't heal properly yet.
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