Affinity:Chaos

"Everyone, be careful," The leader of the expedition said to the group.

The wolves had already made eye contact with them, and they were already preparing to attack. The wolf pack numbered around twenty-five or so. What made these wolves difficult to handle was their speed.

Whoosh!

The wolves were the first to attack, sending out multiple wind blades towards the group.

This wasn't the first time Grey was encountering wind wolves, but these ones were the strongest.

Grey and the others were able to easily dodge the attacks, but they were met with more attacks from the wolves.

After the wolves first two elemental attacks yielded no results, they charged at the group with their monstrous speed.

Boom!

Bang!

The group soon started a brawl with the wolves.

Grey mostly focused on dodging, while keeping an eye out for Reynolds. If he sees that he's in any type of danger, then he would immediately step in to help resolve it.

While the group was fighting against the wind wolves, the second group who entered the forest after them could be seen heading towards that area.

When they saw the group fighting against the wolves, they stopped about a hundred and fifty meters away from where the battle was going on.

They watched on for a minute or so, before taking another route.

The last group also came along, but just like the previous one, they followed another route, so as not to get involved with the current ongoing battle.

But the sudden change in the position of the wind wolves showed them they couldn't use the previous knowledge they had of this place. Currently, there's a chance that any of the groups might just encounter an Overlord Plane magical beast out of its usual territory.

After the group fought against the wolves for almost twenty minutes, they managed to kill over half of them, without suffering any deaths from their ranks. Although some of them were injured, it was just small superficial wounds.

Awoo!

The leader of the wind wolves called out to the others, retreating.

It was fighting against the leader of the expedition, and it had been suppressed throughout the battle.

Reynolds was part of the few people who were injured. He had a gash on his right thigh, but it had already stopped bleeding for a while now.

"Can you walk properly with that?" Grey asked when he came close to him.

"Yeah, just a little scratch," Reynolds nodded.

"You call that a scratch?" Grey looked at him strangely.

"Haha, don't worry about it. It'll take more than this to keep me down," Reynolds laughed.

Grey shrugged before looking at the wolf corpses around the area.

"We should leave," The leader said, stepping over the wolf corpse in front of him.

The others nodded and continued heading into the forest. They noticed the two other groups while they were fighting, so they knew they had to hurry up, or the expedition would be a waste of time.

Grey stayed close to Reynolds, only when he noticed the wound had slowly started healing did he focus on the road ahead.

He was making some slight changes to the map as they walked deeper, to make it more accurate, in case the couple wanted to come in here again.

As they walked deeper, they saw signs of battles in different places. But there weren't any corpses of people or magical beasts.

The group tensed up as they followed the route the group ahead of them was using. Being behind them meant that they wouldn't need to worry about what was in front since the group would've already cleared it.

One hour later.

They saw the two groups who passed them while they were fighting against the wind wolves. From how quickly they got here, it looked like they didn't encounter any horde of beasts.

The two groups were standing, looking in front of them.

Grey's group soon got to where they were standing. On getting there, Grey looked ahead of him.

In front of them was a barren-looking land. It looked like a place that was burnt a long time ago. Grey guessed it was probably caused by the constant lightning strikes.

But the land wasn't what caught his attention, it was the small glowing tree that he could see from where he was standing. Even from such distances, he could sense the essence inside.

The tree was located on top of a hill, when Grey looked below the hill, he was surprised by the sheer number of magical beasts that were roaming around the hill.

He could tell they were all lightning attribute beasts. The beasts were using the bits of essence that the tree was constantly releasing to improve themselves, this was almost like holy ground for these beasts.

'This would be great for Rey! If only there was one more, then I'd break through to the Seventh stage in a matter of minutes,' He thought while shifting his attention back to the lightning tree.

"Hey bud, how confident are you in acquiring it?" Reynolds asked silently.

"Before today, I'd say sixty percent. But now, I'm a hundred percent certain," Grey said confidently.

A few people around them overheard his statement.

"Heh! Such arrogance," A man scoffed.

"There's a difference between confidence and arrogance," Grey replied calmly.

He was unperturbed by the looks the people were giving him because he had been able to successfully learn the Great Void technique the previous night. He hadn't perfected it, but the little level of mastery he had of it gave him the confidence in being able to acquire the lightning tree.

Grey could confidently say he was the fastest person in this place if he were boosted with his lightning, wind, and physical prowess. Now with the inclusion of the Great Void technique, he didn't think any of these people in the Origin Plane would be able to stop him if he wanted to escape.

The only thing he had to figure out is how Reynolds would escape.