"What are you talking about?" He asked. Then he dashed towards one of them, grabbing the horns and dragging the creature down to the ground.
The head scooped the ground and the body of the Shiloi flipped over, crashing down with a loud thud. This made the other Shiloi scatter and make a U-turn into the forest, but there were two still heading my direction and I didn't know where to run or hide.
"Nobody dies in the Arena!" He exclaimed, striking the head of the creature. "Use your energy powers, or you're gonna fall off the cliff!"
I watched as the Shiloi he had struck turned into green broken pixels, then he raised his hand up and opened the fist he was making. Immediately he did that, the pixels converged into his palm like he was sucking it with a hose.
The Shilois were already very close. I raised my fingers up like a blaster gun, pointing at one of them. I hadn't used this power ever since I went berserk in the manga store. What if I blew up half the forest, taking Ezekiel with it? My hands shook as I struggled to make a decision whether or not to shoot, my ears could hear the hooves galloping closer and closer but my arms couldn't stay still.
"FIRE for Pete's sake!" My father yelled.
With that instant trigger I closed my eyes and shot without precision and proper aim. A giant bolt of energy swooshed through the middle of the creatures, taking half of each their bodies. The energy bolt didn't stop there, the shot decimated half the forest, creating a large expanse in the middle of the forest with a length as far as the eyes could see.
Ezekiel's jaw fell. We watched as hundreds of green pixels emerged from the clearing, joining the pixels that had emerged from the two Shilois next to me.
"Quick boy!" Ezekiel yelled, "raise your arm up and collect the power stones!"
I immediately did as told, widening my hand as the pixels came at me with full force. The impact they made was forceful but also felt soft and fluffy like the feathers of a pillow. I felt a tingling in my body the moment all the pixels had entered my body. Ezekiel laughed out loud, walking up to me with a grin.
"That was your first try and look what you did," he said. "Quick, let's see how much power stones you made."
I was curious to know that as well. Judging by the amount of pixels that I just collected, I assumed it was going to be alot of power stones, and if it was a lot, then getting those fifty thousand power stones to unlock the hound manipulation ability would be a breeze. We could find my mom by winter!
"System activate," I said.
But nothing happened. At that instant I remembered what happened when I tried to activate the system in front of Lemon. Perhaps my system was glitching, I thought. I repeated the words once more, waiting for the screen to appear. The my dad finally decided to help me.
"You don't have to say, 'system activate' when you're in the Arena," he said. "All you gotta do is swipe the air with your palm and your Training Arena screen would appear."
The nerve of the man knowing all that and still watching me struggle with the activation. I followed his instructions, swiping my right palm up in the air, and just like that the blue holographic screen appeared. I tapped on the training arena icon and an extra page covering the original blue screen appeared, displaying stats I had never seen before.
[TRAINING ARENA]:
[PIXELS]
[New Pixels Acquired]
Origin; Shiloi, Caslasta Trees
Amount; 10 000pixels
Power Stone Equivalence; 1000 power stones
[Total Amount of Pixels]: 10 000
[LEVEL]:
[New Level Acquired]
Level; 2
Level Status; Beginner Premium
[MAP]: Tap to unfold
[SKILLS]
[New Skills Acquired]
0
[Total Amount of Skills]: 0
[PURCHASE]; Tap to Purchase Ability
All that fuss just to get only one thousand power stones? And what the hell was Beginner premium? I stared at the screen, wondering how many pixels I had to get in order to achieve that fifty thousand power stones. My glare almost broke the holographic screen. Meanwhile Ezekiel was standing there with his mouth wide open.
"You got one thousand power stones and you have even been here for less than a minute," he folded his arms looking up. "I knew that the guardians were on another level but I didn't know it was this much."
"What are talking about?" I asked, "one thousand power points isn't that much, is it?"
He turned to me, with a brow raised up. "Let me put it simply, you gained in one try, what four hundred knights would struggle to gain even if working together."
"No way."
"Better believe it," he replied turning back to the screen. "Even the rumours about the other guardians' first pixel achievement isn't as impressive as what I'm seeing here."
I won't lie, that felt good to hear. Still, the doting issue remained.
"But it's not enough," I replied. "How many times do I have to defeat Shilois before I get to fifty thousand pixels?"
He exhaled, staring at the map icon on the screen. "Shilois are just the tip of the iceberg Ezra. There are alot of tougher challenges ahead and it's not gonna be easy defeating them like it was now. It took me years to get the amount of power stones I have."
"Years?!"
"Yeah," he replied looking at me. "I had to fight monsters beyond your imagination and yet I couldn't pass 10,000 power stones."
"But we need to find mom now, we can't wait for years."
"True," he said with a stern, caressing his beards. "We're going to need the help of a party."
"A party," I asked, looking around. "What does throwing a party have to do with anything?"
"Not that kind of party," he replied, hitting the back of my head. "Open the map, we're going to Xaion."
"You say that like I'm supposed to know what it is."
"It's a place where all visitors of the arena meet. The Guild of the Knights."
"Hmm," I replied pressing the Map icon. "Sounds like the title of a fantasy novel."
He chuckled as we watched the map appear. A three dimensional holographic map that could be minimized or maximized. It had mountains, building and forests protruding from it. He told me to enlarge it a little then he pointed eastward.
"There it is, we're going there. This is us right here," he pointed at a blue dot several meters away from the location he pointed, southeast.
"Cool," I replied. "So how do we get there?"