I tried fighting back and nothing worked. She just keeps dodging my attacks. I tried fighting fire with fire and also used my speed, but, her reaction speed was superior and I only got beaten worse.
All this is just because I tried stealing a Phoenix egg. I was sure she wasn't home but who would've thought that someone fought her before so she installed a trap here. A magic array made with phoenix fire.
I accidentally stepped next to it and it automatically turned on. Such luck to have...
2 times, I couldn't get what I wanted for two turns and my time is running out. The women started noticing that their lifespans were reduced by hundreds of years and the clan leader ordered all of the clansmen and women to rise and go to war.
I do not have any save points, so if I die then I remain dead. I cannot allow such a thing.
I look up and see her preparing to kill me. Such a fate is normal for a thief. A fair result for the man who tried to snatch her eggs...
However, the world isn't fair. I stretched my hand and an egg immediately floated toward it. In less than a millisecond I was munching on the egg and then proceeding to swallow a pill. The pill helped me digest the Phoenix blood faster and absorb it more efficiently.
This evidently angered the mother, which was now starting to scream and use all her power to drown me in the fire. Unfortunately for her, my race allowed me to absorb some of the creature's abilities from their blood. So the fire drowned me but didn't do anything more. I was well enough to walk through it and pick the creature by the throat.
...
After dealing with that problem I went back to the clan. That Phoenix helped me achieve 1 000 ES. And so I was ready to enlist in the war.
...
After the procedures were done I went back to my room and started planning my next moves. Ideally, I would need to collect as many elven corpses as possible to make my advancements faster. Right now the conflict wasn't so bad and if someone found out that a vampire was basically humiliating the elven race, then the real war would break and only mutual destruction would await.
That didn't concern me one bit, I was more focused on powering up than anything else. If they ended up destroying each other then I might as well do something to speed that up.
I went out of my room and go to the library. There, the librarian was a middle-aged woman with thick glasses. Her body was covered by a long robe and her eyes had black bags, showing that sleep wasn't exactly her priority.
-Hello miss, can you recommend me a technique mainly combat based? I am going to the frontlines very soon and I am searching to perfect my combat prowess.
She lifted her eyes from the book she was reading and looked at me for a second. I couldn't see through those thick lenses but I could guess she was trying to gauge my total power.
I pretended to look embarrassed and looked elsewhere. This seemed to amuse her a bit and she pointed me to a far shelf with a paper that wrote exactly the location.
As I was walking I was thinking about the library lady. After a deadly confrontation, she lost her ability to speak and instead of going to battle again she chose to stay in this library till the last of her days. Quite an emotional story, a warrior forced to retire and work a boring job.
I got close to the shelves and picked up the scroll. After I paid the lady for the scroll I went out into the halls.
While walking I was thinking of one thing. The boring days will be over, I hope you haven't got rusty after so many years. Getting my mind off the librarian I entered my room and started studying the technique.
...
1 week passed and I finally joined the combat. The fighting was mostly done in squads of 6 people. There was 1 person In command of every mission and other must absolutely follow their every decision.
I ended up in a squad composed of people with 400 ES, with the leader having 600 ES. A middle-tier force. We would be able to slaughter villages and cities but the capital was too hard.
Our mission was to stall the enemy at a certain location until the others came to install a teleporting array. Such a tool was used for the transport of a big quantity of goods and people.
The road was relatively clear if you didn't count the occasional corpse we had to burn. Overall the journey was short and after 2 days we arrived at the place. There were already some people stationed there and some were even fighting.
As the reinforcement team, we directly went into combat. And as expected the elves had no chance and were wiped out. However, new troops were continuously coming and fighting with us so taking a break was not a choice we could have.
3 days was the amount of time we had to wait until the array was successfully installed. Even though the average time of installing it was 10 days, some steps were skipped for a faster installation.