Sif could feel the giant bat breath but was pretty sure that it didn't have the power of moving itself. He scanned the area around him until he found Tong's black blade.
'Here you are...'
Moving in the darkness, the youth used his willpower to guide himself to the weapon. The blade was stained with both black and red blood. The former was from the giant bat and the latter from its past owner.
"Not bad" praised the young man weighing the knife. "There are no runes on this treasure... " Sif was pretty surprised on not finding any incision or drawing on its surface.
In fact, there were no unnecessary decorations on the weapon. It was a single chunk of black metal that was incredibly light for its dimension.
"It's so sharp that can open up easily a bronze ranked beast, but has no arrays to power it up... interesting" The youth, passed right next to the agonizing Tong and kept moving, analyzing the blade between his hands without even giving the man a second look.
Tong was dying in horrendous pain, his body being torn apart by a furious white bat. Being a Fighter, he was filled with Life Energy. This slowed down his death by several times and served only to prolong his torture.
Sif also walked past a horrified Juil, chuckling at the strong smell of urine that came from that loser. He noticed the long composite staff that the middle-aged man was still holding in his hands, but didn't stop to retrieve it.
Although he vastly preferred using a staff to a knife, what he needed now was a sharp object. His Willpower rolled out his body, and invisible waves moved towards the black puppies hidden in a corner of the cave, checking their souls.
Three males and a female. The strongest was one of the males, he was far from being exceptional like Luna, but he would be surely considered a top-notch bronze ranked beast when he matured.
In second place came the female. That wasn't surprising. Females were way stronger than males in this race.
Finally, there were the other two males. They had comparable strength and even considering both of them, they barely arrived at the same strength as the female.
"Well, I guess that a Three Guardians Core is always better than a Two Guardians one... even more... I don't think I can write down an array for a Two Guardian Core" he murmured, embarrassed. He never bothered to truly learn the Art of Arrays.
Invisible ripples touched the female and the weaker males and penetrated inside them. The beasts immediately stopped still, feeling an oppressive force surrounding them.
At the same time, Sif's perception range started to sharply fall. From being able to sense almost the entirety of the cave, he became able to sense only about ten meters around him.
Outside of this range, he could still feel the three cubs that were filled with his Willpower, but he could only tell the general direction of their position.
"So weak..." The youth felt really powerless. His Willpower was ridiculously weak. In the past, he could control an entire legion of bronze ranked creatures. Now he was already at his limit at four.
Yet, it couldn't be helped. He needed to invest some of his willpower to get more powerful.
He moved towards the large bat, ignoring the strong odor of blood and other excrements that surrounded the beast. The creature, sensing someone coming so close to her, forced her eyes open.
She looked at the young man in front of her, a gave a low growl. It wasn't a menacing sound nor an admonishment. It was the call of a mother to her cubs.
"What a stupid animal..." Sif shook his head. The bat still couldn't tell the difference between him and her cubs. Yet, it was expected. Bloodshed Bats were totally blind in the traditional sense of the word.
They could see energy sources and used echolocation to move between inanimate obstacles.
Having bound one of her cubs, Sif was filled with the latter's energy imprint. The stupid animal was so easily fooled by it. He couldn't tell the difference.
Hearing him speak, the Bloodshed Bat's eye narrowed as she began to watch better the creature before her. After a couple of moment, a threatening growl started to come out of her throat.
"Too, late sis" He knew that if the creature had heard him talk, she would have managed to understand that he wasn't her cub. This was one of the main reason he didn't talk while she was conscious and constituted a menace to his safety.
Now, however, she was too weak to even move. Let alone attack him.
A black blade passed slowly from right to left across her throat. The menacing sound became a forced gurgle while a copious amount of black blood started pouring out the beast.
"Now, to work." The youth ignored the last breaths of the dying beast and started to use his hands and her blood to draw large circular signs on the hard ground of the cave.
He worked nonstop for at least a couple of hours. When he finally finished, he was a mess: beads of sweat ran across his body and he was drenched in black blood.
The giant bat had died long ago, even before Tong. The latter had managed to persevere for at least one hour before Luna got bored and literally ate his hearth. Now the white cub was sitting next to the body of Juil, that hadn't recovered yet from all the soul energy he lost.
"Oh well, I never was that good hand drawing arrays..." Sif scanned his work with his willpower. He wasn't that much satisfied with the outcome.
He spent too much time working on it and it while it was functional, it wasn't something that he would want to use if he had an alternative choice.
The main body of the array was a large triangular shape with circles surrounded by runes at the three extremities. The circles were connected by think lines to a pentagon-shaped rune that sat in the very center of the triangle.
Sif could immediately see many imprecisions on his work. However it was too late to change it, plus he didn't have the needed material to correct the array.
"I guess I really need to put my hands on an auxiliary system..."
Auxiliary systems were incredibly valuable things: they were sentient constructs, normally integrated within the spatial treasures where Summoners kept their familiar. If he truly had an auxiliary system specializing in the Art of Arrays, the whole process would have been way faster and more precise.
Sif felt a headache coming. He recognized that he really needed one, those things were very useful... but they were also extremely expensive!
Maybe he could obtain an auxiliary system, but one that was also learned in the way of runes? No way. Inviting an actual Array Master in person would be way more convenient.
Thinking about the auxiliary system that he was used to, he sighed. There was no way that he could afford kidnapping a couple of hundred high-level Thinkers and force them to work for years to create the perfect thing. Not in the near future, at least.
"Let's get over with it..." If pushed to the back of his mind the thoughts about systems and pointed towards Luna.
"Go get them" ordered the youth, walking to the center of the pentagon.
The white bat moved rapidly, and soon the three black cubs where brought back and positioned inside the three circles at the extremities of the triangle.
After making sure that the essential parts of the formation were drawn properly, the youth ordered Luna to move away and stop anyone trying to mess with the ritual.
The black knife appeared again on Sif's hands, being pressed against his right palm to cut it. The youth let his blood fall on the formation.
"Begin!"
The moment the blood touched the black runes on the ground, a roaring sound echoed all around the cave. The black blood that the youth had used to draw the array started to seethe and in few moments, black flames emerged from it.
The flames formed three small fire whirlwinds around the black cubs. The three little creatures started immediately to scream. Their body began to disintegrate under the work of the black flames, leaving behind only a formless mass of soul energy.
Sif trembled, feeling his entire body in atrocious pain.
Inside of him, all his soul power was being gathered from every corner and cranny of his being and sent towards his lower waist. Normally a soul would naturally expand around the body that it inhabited, but now it was being forcefully guided into a single spot.
The process went on for several hours until all Sif's soul could be found inside a small ball of light in his lower waist.
The youth was at his limit. He knew that core creation was a difficult matter, but normally wouldn't be this painful or long. This was the result of trying to form a core with such a poorly drawn array.
"Come!" Sif's screamed gritting his teeth.
The masses of soul energy hovering inside the circles on the vertices of the triangle formation shook. Then they immediately darted across the thick lines that connected the extremities to the central pentagon.
"Suppress!"
The hovering blue masses plunged inside Sif's belly and immediately arrived around the sphere where his soul was being contained. They started to rotate around it for a few moments, causing it to become twice as small.
"Guard!"
Following the last command, the three masses crashed on the small luminescent sphere's surface, forming three images of bloodshed bat cubs on the little sphere.
A throbbing fit of pain passed through the entire being of the youth. He fell on the ground, breathing heavily.
'I really need to learn how to properly draw arrays...'