Amon showed his masterchief skills and made the monster he killed to their meal. As Bruna saw how Amon cooked the meat with no single mistake, she wondered how many Amon had already turned into food for being this good at it.
Amon put the meat on a stone skewer he made himself. And hangs it over the campfire created with magic; the campfire burns and begins to slowly roast the meat.
"Bruna, you will stay here and rest. Look at the meat and plan your route. We will go once we are done with our rest. I plan to stay here for about an hour."
Leon used a huge amount of mana in the previous two fights and needed to refill his manasea, and this would take time. Leon never had a huge manasea from birth, which was also one of the reasons why he prevented every fight possible.
Amon had the upper hand in this regard; he could use as many skills as he wanted to. Since he only used a resource that would exist forever, the only thing that could prevent him from fighting was his will and physical condition. In front of Bruna, however, the two had to pretend that Amon had used up his mana in these two fights.
"Alright, if you need something, call for me. Stay, you two guards, for the moment I am here."
Amon and Leon nodded at the same time and walked far away from Bruna to talk everything out that needed to be said.
Amon and Leon stood on a wall and said nothing for a short period of time, as Leon was the first to talk.
"Amon I have a question: during the whole fight, you nearly never called out your attack's name. You once said that you needed to call out the name of your skills in order to better imagine the way you should band the Qi. Why wasn't it this time the case?"
Amon leaned with his arms crossed against the cave wall, looked up at the ceiling he could not even see, and gave his answer, "To be honest, I have no idea; usually if I am not able to call the name of the skill, I think of it in my head, but this time I did not even need to do so."
Amon's gaze changed from the ceiling to the floor and continued.
"It was not even a feeling as if my body needed to do it; it was as if the Qi itself needed it, in which case they should bend themselves, but to be honest, I am thankful for whatever triggered this; otherwise, I would have died in the fight against him."
All the times Leon needed to save Amon appeared in his head; they repeated over and over again. Until he forbids himself from thinking about all this, he shows a grin and changes the topic.
"However, this does not matter now; go and rest you too. I am sure that you are out of Mana; I will stay on guard over there."
Before Leon could give Amon an answer or point out his opinion, Amon walked away, sat on the ground, and went into the lotus position.
However, as Leon looked on the ground, he discovered something: "What the, a feather?"
Time flew by faster than everyone would want to; the one hour felt as if it had been 10 minutes, but staying was no option in this situation. They needed to get out of this cave as fast as possible.
Everyone did their job perfectly. Bruna looked all the time at the map to see which way they should go next. The rest of the meat they did not eat right at the moment was stored in a black sphere he created himself. The sphere blocked the cent of the meat; their greatest weapon was the moment of surprise.
Leon planned each step, analyzed the monsters they met, and found important information about them. He searched for monsters that only lived in a special area, or minerals, but there was nothing to be found. All the monsters in this cave could either be found in every cave on this continent or be unknown to him.
Amon was in a similar situation; the monsters were either unknown to him or monsters he fought multiple times in many different kingdoms of this continent.
For him, there were only two possibilities in the search: number one was that he was in a kingdom or the empire; after all, there were still some kingdoms that he had not yet traveled, and the only empire that existed on this continent was the Lunasol Empire, and in this he had been only three times, and in all three times he had not stayed longer than five days there.
These were the only possibilities for him, but where they were was secondary; first, he had to find out how they would get out of here.
They screamed through, meter by meter, but in the end found almost nothing—only monsters, more branches, and now and then a few bones that could not be located. The bones were so badly damaged that it was impossible to trace them back to anything.
But at one moment, something very interesting and yet surprising happened.
As they wanted to pass, they threw another branching point into the cave. A stone statue fell from the in-dark painted ceiling and blocked the three from getting in the way.
The statue was gigantic. The area they were in seemed to be a perfect fit for the statue to move around however they wanted.
The statue was made of minerals, which looked much more robust than normal stone; the stone was covered by a strange orange glowing layer, which led to a point where the orange energy formed a node of orange energy; the statue had the body of a humanoid; his head, however, was different. The eyes of the statue shine in the same shade of orange as the energy layer that enveloped it.
Two razor-sharp ears, a rectangular nose pointing forward, the jaw of the statue hung wide open, and the teeth were ground down as if he were a human who had not brushed his teeth for years.
The statue was four meters high and carried a hammer in both of its hands—a 2-meter-long hammer. The hammer was also surrounded by an orangish layer.
The statue moved its jaws and spoke to Amon, Leon, and Bruna, "Turn back travelers; everything that comes after this is not for outsiders."
"What do you mean by outsiders? Who is not an outsider?" Leon asked.
"Not you, and now get out or die, because the prisoner must never leave his cell."
BAM!
With tremendous speed, the hammer hit one meter in front of Amon, and it was clear to everyone, even without further words from the statue, that this was the last warning.
But would they turn back and ignore the passage that was in front of them? No, and so a new fight broke out.