Jax's spell failed.
"Shit!" Jax cried out as he barely dodged the bear's onslaught. He rolled along the side and hit his back against a tree. The breath left him at that mont, leaving him gasping for air.
"Your Sea of Navi is empty!" Gemma said urgently.
Jax had realized that as well. He had used up his Navi to get away from the moth, so he had none of it remaining for his spell.
He still gasped for breath, but his lungs refused to open up. As he slowly tried to get air into his lungs, the bear was back.
"Use the stone!" Gemma's voice ca. "You can use the stone to power your spell. Use it!"
For half a second, through the chaos of his own sensations, he failed to understand what Gemma was trying to say. But upon understanding what she ant by 'stone,' he tightened the grip on his left hand, where he still clutched a white Navi stone—the opal stone.
'Draw it in,' Jax told himself. As he did, he felt the power slowly pour into his body. A trendous amount of power.
The power began to wreak havoc on his body, trying to destroy it from the inside. The power was like a flood, looking for a way out lest it destroyed everything.
Jax needed to show it the way.
The way was his spell.
The bear was just a foot away when the spell activated.
Jax used Divine Threads.
Imdiately, wind-elental threads—invisible threads that only Jax could see—appeared all around the bear's body. There were hundreds of different wraps of the threads, going all around the bear's body as Jax used up all the power in the opal stone.
The bear fell and skidded down the ground, stopping barely inches away from where Jax was. It was completely immobile.
The bear was wrapped so many tis that even with how strong it was, it could not get away from it. It growled next to Jax, the hot breath caressing Jax's ankles, but it could do nothing else.
Jax finally sat down, leaning against the tree. He could finally breathe.
He was finally safe.
He opened his left palm, letting the opal stone fall from it, but there was nothing left in his palm. He had used up everything.
Jax grunted in pain. While his mind was clear, that only served to make him understand in greater intensity the status of his own pain.
The cut on his right palm from when he brought out the weapon stung him. He was hurt on his left shoulder when he had struck while trying to run away from the moth. He was hurt on the back from getting slamd onto the tree just monts ago.
Those were nothing compared to the pain that flared from his chest, making him feel like he was dying.
And yet, sohow, the pain that Jax felt the most was inside his body, along the route where the energy from the opal stone had traveled to his mind, letting him use the spell.
It was as though the power had to burn a pathway to get there and had left ruin in its wake. It was so painful.
"There should be no danger now," Gemma's words ca. "Rest for now. The others should arrive soon."
"Where did you go?" Jax asked.
"What?"
"You were gone. Where did you go?"
"Nowhere," Gemma said. "I was here the whole ti."
"Then why didn't you answer ? You didn't help ." He waited for Gemma to answer.
"I'm sorry," Gemma said. "I would've explained if you got into this situation normally, but I didn't get the chance. I cannot help you in battle at all. I cannot tell you the weakness of your enemies or alert you of their arrival."
"I can help you with a lot of things, but the main thing I can't do is help you in battles. You will have to rely entirely on yourself for that."
"Normally, I would've had the chance to let my Settler know that, but you were attacked so suddenly that I didn't have the ti to alert you. I'm sorry."
Jax slowly breathed in and out, trying to ignore the pain in his body. He was angry at Gemma, but her explanation at least made sense. He couldn't be angry at that.
"What's happening to ? Why do my insides hurt?" Jax asked.
"It was the Navi stone. You are too weak to have used it," Gemma said.
"You were the one who suggested it."
"I wouldn't have if you weren't about to die."
Jax found that rather funny. He laughed, but the pain made him grimace again, so he stopped. "I thought you couldn't help in battle."
"Ehh... that was a gray area. I was rely giving you a piece of information that I would to any other individual I was a helper to. It was normal."
Jax breathed.
"Don't die on , please. You're the first Ascendant I had. If you... if you die this soon... it'll look really bad on my report."
Jax laughed out loud this ti, regardless of the pain. The situation was too strange for him not to laugh.
He pushed himself up after that, disregarding Gemma's insistence that he rest. "If I'm going to die of blood loss, I'm going to die anyway," he said. "Let at least kill this bear if I am to die."
Jax first walked over to the remains of the moth and found the two opal stones lying around on the ground. He placed them into his inventory and walked back toward the bear.
He found his dagger after a bit of searching and arrived back before the bear. The bear, while immobile, was fully alive. It glared at Jax with its massive head.
Looking closer, Jax saw its large eyes, almost as large as his fist. It was just that the bear's body was so much larger that one thought of the eyes as being smaller.
"You can glare at all you want," Jax said slowly. "But I won."
He gripped the dagger as tightly as he could and stabbed the bear in the eye.
Reviews
All reviews (0)