The Berserker Is Free

Rowan smiled at Feng, who was visibly injured and generally looked weak but it was like seeing Rowan had filled him with new vigor as he smashed his shield into the head of an ant monster that approached him looking to take advantage of the silence of the battlefield as Rowan made his appearance. The battlefield all seemed to turn to look at Rowan as everyone froze in place and each person struggled to decide what happened next. They had all frozen due to the fact that no one truthfully expected another party to show up for this, and genuine surprise had taken over the mass of bodies.

A massive silver ant was the first to break the silence as it lunged, and two massive pincers were snapping close around Rowan's throat. His hand seemed to travel in slow motion as he slowly placed it in the path of the pincer and grabbed the ant by it before hoisting it high into the air before slamming it down over and over again until nothing was left of it but a puddle of tan and green fluids and metallic bits from its exoskeleton.

Rowan scanned the crowd as they each had different reactions to this, but it also allowed him to take in the levels of the surrounding enemies. They ranged from 50 to 70, with the beings fighting in the sky were each at level 80. Infinitely close to being demigods, if rank 100 was the indication for that. Rowan finally activated storm steps and vanished from the back of the crowd and appeared next to Feng. "You would think that a support would be on the back lines somewhere." Feng could only shake his head at Rowan's comment, "Even in a situation like this, you have the time to joke and laugh around. You have changed in the time since I saw you last Rowan Raid."

Rowan nodded his head, "I have found new goals and refined my abilities to their limit for rank 50 and took a new teacher but that's a conversation for when we are done here, how about we do this the right way, you support me and I will deal with these enemies." Feng nodded and raised his shield while Rowan had four swords appear around him before they fused together into the sword of storms. The surrounding enemies took this as the signal to start the battle once more. The killing intent that the falcon above them exuded no longer was enough to keep the battlefield on pause. Feng kicked off the battle by placing his shield in the ground [Twilight bastion: Fortress of black and white] Feng's armor melted off of him and combined with his shield before becoming a protective pod that allowed him to see the battlefield.

[Dusk] Feng immediately used another spell the moment that the first one finished and it was a spell that Rowan was familiar with, as the world switched between black and white and all the closest enemies began to slow down. Finally, he released one last spell, to buff Rowan. [Twilight Enhancement: barbed armor.] Rowan could see phantasmal spikes surrounding him as he decided it was time that he started his own assault. The first spell would test their abilities.

The first thing that Rowan noticed was how much easier it was for mana to flow here as it gathered towards him en masse. He clapped his hands together and then threw them downward while Feng exclaimed from his bastion, "Holy shit, you just drained half of my remaining mana. What the hell did you just do?" It was no more than a second later, after he spoke out, that Rowan's spell took effect. [Sword storm] blasted to life, starting from behind his enemies and blasting towards him while at the same time, what neither one of them expected was the reaction with Feng's support abilities.

The swords shot towards the enemies, but they were shrouded in black and white lights that revealed themselves to be thorns of pure mana that did two things at the same time. The light mana enhanced the blades and turned what would have been a moderately damaging spell into one of a higher magnitude. The shadow element, on the other hand, allowed the sword to instead of returning like a tide like when he first used this spell. It instead sunk into several targets shadows and would appear through their real body no more than a moment later.

The outcome caused both Feng and Rowan's jaws to drop, not expecting that their skill would have such a powerful effect as they felled the majority of their enemies in one fell swoop. Genma, on the other hand, looked down and smiled at his words loud enough for the boys to hear. "A tier zero is frightening on their own for sure, but the only thing scarier is a full party, humans were never meant to operate alone and our battle prowess is the same, the class system truly highlights the fact that when different people are able to be properly put in the role most suiting to them, the resulting combination of powers is unprecedented.

Rowan smiled and nodded to the words, his master was a monster, that he had no doubt of but he was limited in the fact that there was no one capable of standing as his equal and being a true party member so he never had the pleasure of combining his spells with someone else's and therefore it was not something he could teach about but on the other hand Valentine had told him much the same. His masters first-born child had created several parties throughout his hundreds of years of life but all in all his most fearsome and the one that could challenge his master was the one that consisted of him and his siblings, he had not gotten the chance to see them fight together but according to his master when they fought together to their full extent they were able to even give him a run for his money, something his master would never willingly admit.

Very few enemies still remained, and in this case it appeared that the zombies were the weaker link here and with Feng's spell mixing with his own they had targeted the zombies with the area of effect spell so that they could remove the most targets from the field. Rowan laughed out loud as the call of the fairy king no longer needed his activation. The skill had become a passive that needed no instruction as the souls of the dead flew to him and strengthened him, for the true battle that was to come. He danced across the battlefield, a blur of platinum mana as he struck vital points and created storm points that would then use up their mana, killing a separate target and leaving him to deal with other enemies.

The last two enemies were both golden metallic ants that tried to attack him from both angles, shattering the sleeve on his arm and revealing the tribal glowing marks beneath his clothes while at the same time he struck the one with an axe kick that split its head in two on the spot. His storm sword, on the other hand, shot backward and impaled the other ant through the mouth before discharging platinum flames into its gullet and turning its insides to ash while leaving a gleaming exoskeleton on the ground next to him. Rowan stretched and let the boosted mana course through him. He had been constantly developing ever since his master started to teach him, but also at the same time he had now reached a point where he was constantly thinking of new ways to get stronger.

He knew that the secret lied in two things other than the obvious which was his cultivation which now as mana from the system in the form of exp poured into him was ready to breakthrough into the next rank, there was another option and that was the souls he gained, he knew there was other ways to use them but currently his cultivation limited what he could do. Rowan knew that it would be through that ability that he was able to stand on par with his master some day but he would need to refine it for sure. Rowan looked towards Feng and towards his master's battle in the sky as he was now accustomed to the additional mana.

His storm armament came out and wrapped around his body in its basic combat mode as he tensed his legs.

A line of black and white mana wrapped around his waist and connected to the bastion as he looked at Feng, who, while looking exhausted, shrugged all the same. "My master, no way that I don't go with you. Rowan simply nodded and then pressed off the ground as he shot into the sky with the twilight bastion in tow. The beings in the air never fathomed that the ground battle would suddenly end, so the giant silver and gold praying mantis that was battering a shield of sand that kept repairing itself was not prepared for the human shaped bullet wielding a sword that was Rowan Raid. He sliced through one of its scythe like arms like a knife through butter and just when he was ready to retaliate Rowan had breezed past him and instead Feng was there and he was standing in bastion with the top open as he slapped down with his hand shining black and white as the colors mixed on his palm and exploded outward as he slapped down turning their target to nothing more than strands of flesh. The move exhausted the rest of his mana as the entirety of the bastion began to fall back down, releasing Rowan in the process.

Rowan used storm steps and lowered himself down to Feng's master, who had released his sand shield; there were three targets left in the sky with them after killing the mantis. A zombie that had vibrant green eyes, a massive purple and black centipede and finally a massive spider creature that had a human woman's body as their upper half, or at least that's what it looked like. Rowan could feel that they each gave off powerful mana. If they had not caught the first by complete surprise thanks to Rowan's massively increased stats, then the situation would have been vastly different. Rowan was thinking about his plan of attack while on the side Genma was absolutely appalled because he had tried to look at Rowans status page and the direct result was that he would have to pay most of his current exp to speed the process up, but he had been at the apex of rank 8 for many years so it would be easy to recover so he did it and the result caused even him to tremble in shock at the young man that he had not seen in just a couple of months at this point.