Chapter 5

Although his 'Dark Sphere' was nowhere as destructive as the 'Fireball' spell, it was nevertheless deadly. If a person managed to survive the Dark Sphere spell, it would be hard for him to survive against the dark elements that got infused into his body. The Dark Elements speciality was that it could easily infuse into the surroundings, in which case if it infused inside an enemy mage it would restraint his elements and if the mage was weak, it wouldn't be an hassle for the dark elements to rot and destroy his body from the inside. This was why dark mages were always a target for annihilation by major powers but this was a fact not known by Jaime.

Other than hunting beasts to collect fur and practicing his magic spells daily, Jaime had another daily task: observe other mages' battles. In a 'medium-difficulty' forest, there were a lot of mages coming to hone their magic spells, watching their battles only served to enlighten Jaime upon the use and application of magic.

As Jaime busied himself to track some mages, he felt some elemental fluctuations below the hill on which he resided.

"Looks like I get to watch some mage battles early today.", Jaime spoke to himself as he proceeded out of his abode and towards the foot of the hill like a silent assassin.

Anssa Roy and her group of mages had spend almost three months in the dense lumberry forests and still couldn't find even a trace of the supposed 'evil creature'. They had also encountered their fair share of difficulties in their quest, and one such difficulty was now infront of them: a grey stallion horse, this was one of the aggressive carnivorous breed of horses. Although it was called a 'horse', it was strong enough to hunt and eat an adult male tiger.

Anssa Roy and her group resorted to escaping rather than fighting the beast head-on, but luck wasn't on their side as they ended up cornered by the foot of a hill by the beast.

"Looks like we cannot escape from this fight.", Anssa Roy gritted her teeth and led her mages on a full-on assault against the beast. Water, fire and earth spells were casted time and again onto the beast, and as time passed their victory was achieved but losses were not negligible.

Aryan Hawthorne, a young genius of the Hawthorne family and a two-tier mage casted a spell of self-immolation and perished with the stallion horse. He knew that although his group seemed to have the upper-hand in the fight, they didn't have much stamina left to keep using more magic spells as the mental strain accompanied with each spell had almost reached the maximum of what they could handle.

Anssa Roy and the remaining members of the group teared up as they recounted Aryan's heroic smile before casting the self-immolation spell and glancing at his body which was now in ashes, the group felt endless sorrow. Although they were a rag-tag bunch assembled together, they were all young and excellent mages in their own right and their future was bound to be bright. After being together for three months the group had thoroughly integrated themselves with each other and considered each other as best friends.

"We cannot allow Aryan's death go waste, we will complete this task that we have been assigned!", Anssa spoke as she calmed the others and reminded them of their original objective.

Just as she was in the process of doing so, she saw from the corner of her eyes what seemed to be a skeleton draped in white fur nimbly making his way up the hill in a sneaky manner.

Her face was aghast as she finally witnessed the 'evil creature' with her own two-eyes.