Orion knew he had no chance against armed warriors when he was without a weapon, no to talk of armed warriors with the power to manipulate fire. He had been trained by his father since he could walk. By the age of nine, he was already the best swordsman under the age of fifteen. After his father's disappearance, he had continued his training under Lord Brian's command and one thing he had learned for the Lord was this. 'If you are outnumbered, make sure to reduce the numbers', and that was what he planned to do.
Using the cloud of black smoke from the explosion as cover, Orion quickly sucked underneath the tall grasses and began crawling away.
"Where did he go?" one of the four men asked.
"Hmm, it seems we have a fighter," the leader of the squad of four horsemen nodded slowly as he noticed movement in the grass.
"Split up, he is in the grass. Find him and kill him. We cannot afford the birth of the Chosen Son of Order. He must be killed," the man gave the order and the other horsemen charged into the shifting grasses.
"Only the Chosen Son of Order would be capable of trying to fight back even after chaos has won. Only he would not be overtaken by the despair of our Lord.
"If he is indeed here, I will offer his head up to you, Lord Tenebris," the leader muttered, looking up to the skies.
Orion hadn't gone far, he had just circled around the outskirts to fool them into charging into the grasses, but hearing the words of the leader, Orion knew he was in more danger than he thought.
'This man knows something the others don't. He is definitely more skilled than the rest too,' Orion thought to himself as he slowly retreated away from the leader.
Initially, he had planned to take out whichever rider didn't chase after him in the grasses, but that was when he thought they were all of the same level. But now, his plans had changed.
Crawling away from the leader of the four horsemen, Orion couldn't help but feel angered and worried.
'Why would father ask that being to bring me here if I could be killed? What in the name of all the gods was he thinking?' Orion's thoughts churned, but then he heard the sound of a horse coming his way from the right and instantly, he laid flat on the ground.
He was about to perform a highly dangerous attack that Lord Brian had told him about. It was a plan that was ten percent luck, thirty percent skill, and in Lord Brian's words, "… the remaining sixty percent belongs to the god of war and horses".
Orion quickly rolled over and waited patiently, muttering a quick prayer to the god of war and horses, as the galloping horse drew closer.
The risk here was that if one's position was ill timed, the horse could crush them under its hooves as it ran past them, but the god of war and horses must have been smiling at Orion as the horses hooves missed his arm by mere inches as it jumped over him.
Reacting quickly, Orion sent a powerful punch to the horse's torso, causing the horse to neigh loudly and fall over on its side, crushing the right leg of the horseman under its weight.
Not giving the horse rider any chance to recover, Orion quickly got up to his feet and rushed at the horse rider, snapping his neck before he could react to the little surprise attack Orion had cooked up.
Adepts were humans with the ability to manipulate various aspects of nature, but most of them were vulnerable to physical attacks. Only a few, like Orion's father possessed supernatural strength and durability, and Orion was lucky enough to have inherited those traits from his father. That was the only reason why a fifteen year old boy like him could topple a horse over with a single punch and effortlessly snap the neck of an experienced warrior.
"There is someone over there!" one of the other riders shouted, immediately he noticed that their comrade had suddenly vanished. He kicked his horse, sending it charging towards the man Orion had just killed.
Orion knew that once he took one down, it'll give away his location, so he quickly grabbed what he wanted, the dead man's weapons. The man had three daggers in his belt and a spiked mace hanging from the side of his now unconscious horse.
He pocketed two of the daggers and ran for the cover of the tall grasses once more as the other horsemen charged after him, but just as he had expected, the grasses weren't tall enough to fully cover him, and even if they were, they would have been of little use to him as the horsemen had started hurling fireballs into the grasses, burning up the green grasses like they were dried hay.
The explosions from the fireballs landing all around him made him stagger and almost fall a couple of times, but Orion kept on running, trying to figure out his next course of action.
He hadn't turned back once to look at the horse riders, but his keen ears told him that only two were chasing after him, and they were both closing in on him from two directions, and with the way the exploding fireballs were getting closer and closer to him, he could tell that they were starting to see him much clearly and were already drawing closer to him.
'If I keep running randomly, it won't be long before one of their fireballs accidentally lands in the same place I am running to,' he thought to himself.
'Hold… Hold…. Hold…' he kept muttering to himself as though he was the commander of a team of archers. Paying attention to the galloping sounds of the horses, Orion suddenly jumped off the ground, high above the grasses and turned around mid air, and before the shocked horseman could hurt another fireball at him, Orion deftly threw a dagger at the horseman that was directly in a straight line path away from him.
The dagger flew through the air and in merely a second, it hit its target, lodging itself in the horse rider's head, right between his eyes.
The horse rider lost control but he launched his fireball, hoping to at least kill the fleeing boy before he dies, but force of the dagger had already changed his body's direction, and his fireball went straight at the other horseman, blowing off the legs of his horse, and launching the horse rider flying in the air, till he landed in the peaceful stream, hitting his back on a rock in the stream, instantly getting paralyzed.
Orion had landed skillfully on lush grass with another dagger already in his left hand. He was planning to use the dagger to kill the second horseman, but his plan had worked better than he had imagined.
He rushed over to the stream, clenching tightly to the mace, ready to attack the horse rider that was sent flying, only to see the man bleeding from his mouth, unable to move.
Orion watched for a moment as tears flowed down the man's eyes. He didn't understand it at first, until he noticed that the man was saying something, and although he didn't hear everything, he figured out that he was saying…
"Lord of Darkness, accept my soul. Engulf me in the fire of your darkness,".
Orion was confused, but his eyes widened as he noticed that the man's body was starting to glow slowly.
'IT WAS A SUICIDE PRAYER!' Orion screamed in his thoughts as he realized that the man was about to self-destruct.
Knowing there was a chance he would not leave the blast radius in time, Orion quickly charged at the glowing man and with a loud battle cry, he swung the mace in his hand, smashing the weapon into the man's face with all his might.
The force of his strike was so much that the water parted for a split second, and the rock behind the man's head cracked.
Orion wasn't sure of what he was doing, but his instincts told him that if he was able to destroy the man's brain, then self-destruction action would be forced to end, and he wasn't wrong, as the horseman's body stopped glowing.
Orion couldn't help but sigh in relief.
"I guess the god of war really did smile on me today," he said and heaved another sigh of relief, but his ears suddenly picked up a piercing sound and giving in to his instincts, Orion jumped out of the way, and immediately after, an explosion occurred as a fireball struck the corpse of the dead horseman.
The force of the explosion flung Orion into the middle of the stream, but even the water couldn't help much as he slammed hard into the rocky waterbed of the stream.
Orion's ears rang from the sound of the explosion and his vision was blurry as he tried to get a hold of himself. He looked up and a few meters away from him, the leader of the horsemen was seated on his horse, with his hands burning with that unnatural flame.
"There are no gods, there is only Chaos and Death," the man said with a cold and unforgiving look on his face.