The Whamei Group remained at a serious disadvantage till the other group from Whamei happened to pass by. Seeing the situation, the group spontaneously decided to help their own clans members, thus joining hands to fend off the Ye Tracking Group.
"Oh! They have a Fire and Light element user! It will now be difficult for the Shadow Assassins to keep holding their grounds!"
One of the members of the second Whamei Team was quickly shifted to the center of the group, and he started chanting and gesturing. Through the illusory screen, Rihanna couldn't make out the chanting's, but the gestures were sharp.
A thick stream of fire surged from his palms, slashing at all the shadows in their vicinity. Simultaneously, the light particles started falling like a heavy downpour, immediately separating the fake shadows from the real, while the fire burned the light absorbing materials. Though the number of shadow assassins were more, the single fire and light user was at a higher stage of cultivation, thus bringing the fight back into equilibrium.
Having lost their advantage, the shadow assassins had already realized that this fight would lead to more loss than gain. As soon as the fire hit their light absorbing materials, the Ye Group gathered together, and fled the area. A volley of attacks followed them from behind, causing quite a bit of injury, but that could not break their momentum.
Watching the disappearing backs of the Ye Trackers Group, the Whamei Group finally stopped with their retaliation. The first group was rather spent out, and now that the foreign group had gone, the temporary alliance started breaking down as the members started separating from each other warily. However, the second group perhaps did not wish to entangle with their own Clans mate for the time being, and the two groups left separately for their respective teams.
As Rihanna zoomed out, she noticed movements in some of the other parts of the map.
Oh! Some of the teams were really lucky...or maybe unlucky! Since they entered the Mystic Lands, they had been teleported to or near the area where a resource chest was hidden. So now some of the teams already had one or two resource chests in their hands, while the others were still hunting. And this was chaos to break out in various areas of the Mystic Lands.
Those with resource chests were either trying to find suitable hiding spots to wait out the looting and killing, or they had divided the entire resource pack amidst their members and separated into smaller groups. Smaller groups had more chances of passing through undetected, and they could meet up in another pre-specified area.
The teams without any resource pack were the ones who were laying the ambushes. And these smaller groups and Tracking Teams were bearing the brunt of all these random but deadly ambushes. Hidden weapons, Pseudo Guiding Weapons, Poison.....all kinds of small to almost invisible but lethal attacks were skimming over the frozen surface. At places, the silver-white ice had turned into large splotches of black and dark green as poison and toxic miasma burned through the frozen layers.
"What are those black dots up there?"
These were not black dots in the map. The three had zoomed in on one of the ambushes to spectate the moves more clearly, when a large horde of black dots emerged in the sky from behind a line of frozen hills.
"The first wave of ice beasts. Some pitiful team must have messed with a nest of flying ice beasts in that area."
"They look very annoyed by this disturbance....Whoa! They are really fast!"
As they were watching, the change in scene had attracted many spectators, and many people started zooming-in to the area. The birds were not very big, but their wings spread out over a large area, and the force behind each flap of these wings was enough to generate a storm over the areas they were flying through.
"But they look like bats.....hmmm?"
Rihanna zoomed-in, surprised to see the similarity between these bat-birds and the pterodactyl images she had seen back on earth. The shape of the face and body was very similar to the virtual-reconstructions often done. But the wings...they had feathers like that of birds. Or rather, they were formed by layers of jagged icicles, which gave the same feel as the layers of feathers in the wings of birds. And the space in between each layer, was what was propagating massive air elements, creating the storms as they flapped their wings.
Initially the teams did not take them very seriously. These birds were not very strong individually, and could be taken down if two or more people ganged up upon them. However, that soon turned into their biggest mistakes.
Because the sheer number of these small Bat-Birds were many, many times more than all the members of all the teams together.
"Why is the sky turning black? Is it an incoming snowstorm?"
"No! Look carefully....they are black dots.....just too many of black dots....which have completely covered the sky!"
"What the...! Are all of those Ice Bat-Birds!! How did so many of them survive in the Mystic Lands? Just how large is the Mystic Lands?!"
"Don't know.....but I think the different Mystic Lands which open up every time have different sizes. This one which opened up this year seems to be very large!"
There are too many of those creatures! Their flapping is creating a blizzard all around! Even I can't see anything.....can the contestants see anything?"
"Even if they can't see, they can sense the vibration of the wings. But the problem is that there are just too many of them! How will they evade these predators?!"
Through the illusory screen, they could only see a storm of dust and broken icicles swirling around, making it impossible to see. And amidst that blizzard, shrieks and screams rose from all direction. If one looked closely, they could see splatters of blood merging into the mix of ice, dust and icicles, making a ominously beautiful sight of swirling silver-white with streaks of blood-red.
However, all the screams were not from humans, as quite a large number of these Bat-birds were also torn apart by their prey. In fact, predators and prey could barely be distinguished....whoever killed became the predator, and whoever was killed became a prey. And as the number of Bat-birds started going down, the blizzard too significantly lost its force.
The teams which had remained at the peripheries of the Mystic Lands, had managed to evade the radar of these Bat-birds. Those who couldn't skip the radar, tried to hide their auras beneath thickets, behind boulders, some even climbing down crevasses and pits and cracks on the ground.
But many weren't lucky, and as the storm lost some of its power, the frozen grounds could be seen bathed in blood and flesh, the red making a stark contrast on the white of the ice.
The blizzard had caught them by surprise, and left their teams unguarded. Realizing the importance of survival, many of the scattered and beaten down teams immediately joined forces, attacking the Bat-birds with arrays and formations.
The sudden barrage of systematic attacks from all directions put the bat-birds in a frenzy, scattering their dense numbers, and more and more of these flying beasts succumbed to the attacks. As more birds died, the blizzard too reduced significantly. The remaining scattered Bat-birds fled off in different directions.
Slowly the blizzard came to a stop, and the clear and bright sky emerged from behind the haze of ice and dust in the air. Remnants of a fast bur furious battle was left behind on the icy terrain, a reminder that the Challengers and their teams could not afford to be careless. The teams gathered together once more, going through quick but thorough checks - members dead or grievously injured, members still able to continue and those who needed rest to recuperate, resources remaining and that which was lost.
As the sudden attack ended, the guarded alertness against each other returned, and the teams which had come together to fight against the foreign beasts, now once again separated. They were now back to the moment before the Bat-birds attacked - hiding or hunting, the game was back on.
The teams who had resources were trying to find safe areas to build Protected Spaces. These were like temporary camps, since the teams would be staying in the Mystic Land for a few more days, till they fulfilled their tasks or they ran out of stipulated time or they chose to leave due to insurmountable dangers.....whichever came last.
This was like watching a 36 hours*10 days Reality Show. Rihanna had even given it a name - Surviving The Frozen Chaos Of Lost Times....well other than her, none of the others found the name very enticing, but that absolutely didn't hinder her. What was more troublesome was actually sitting and watching this non-ending show! Especially since after a rounds of looting and stealing of resources, all the teams suddenly disappeared from the scene. Though the spectators could see them teams through the colored marks on the Illusory Map, but it was terribly silent all around.
The teams were currently busy building advanced tools and weapons and armors, making special medicines and poisons and also making various arrays and attacking barriers around their Protected Spaces.
It wasn't till the end of the third day that a few smaller groups from two of the teams stared moving again.