Chapter 652 Cursed Creatures Attack!

From the very first few seconds when she was left alone to protect the castle, Adhara has been hoping that nothing would happen while the others were gone. Being tasked with something like this, it's the first time for her and she can't help but feel nervous.

Rex is inside the red gate portal, Flunra and Kyran are out, and Gistella is still sick in her room.

Nobody can help her if there something happened while the others were occupied with their own things, and now what she feared the most has come to fruition. Poking her head out of the big window, she looks to the left and saw poigant creatures emerging from the western part of the Humming Damned Forest.

Upon seeing these creatures, Adhara's blood runs cold and she can't help but gulp harshly.

Inching out from the cover of the dense forest were creatures that looks like people, but they are clearly not. Each of them is covered with a dark aura that doesn't feel right, and some of them emit more of this dark aura than others.

Walking slowly like Zombies, these creatures expose themselves to the moonlight.

Adhara squinted her eyes and finds that these creatures are varying from each other in their body appearance, the clothes or armor they are wearing, and even the weapons they are holding. But they all have the same dark aura.

Due to the ancient rune from Flunra, Adhara instantly recognizes these horrid abominations.

Cursed Creatures!

"Why in the world are they all heading this way..."

Realizing that these cursed creatures are the ones that she saw before when she was clearing the cursed creatures in the western part of the forest alongside Kyran, she can't help but frown as if they should be roaming in a circle.

But they seem to be attracted to the castle. Not just one, but all of them.

Even though most of the cursed creatures are below the fifth epiphany, there are some that are in the fifth epiphany realm or higher. Flunra has specifically said that they shouldn't engage with the ones above the fifth epiphany, he didn't specify why but he seems to be serious about it.

From looking at the cursed creatures that are approaching the castle, Adhara saw three of them.

Out of the supposed dozens of cursed creatures that are heading towards the castle, there are three cursed creatures that are at the very least in the fifth epiphany rank, Adhara can feel her senses giving her danger signals from the three of them.

Located at the center of the cursed creatures, there are two hunchback creatures with long limbs.

As if they were creatures straight from horror movies, their bodies are covered with very lean white skin that sticks directly to their small bones and their limbs are also very thin almost like a stick. Their jaws are hanging unnaturally low, and their eyes are completely lifeless white.

Glowing on their chests was somekind of symbol, one is glowing red while the other is green.

From their appearance alone it seems they have a similar kind of curse as their source of power, but Adhara is not an expert on curses so she doesn't know what curses these two creatures have. But they are definitely in the fifth epiphany or higher.

While the other one that gives off a threatening presence is located at the right back.

Standing on four paws the cursed creature takes the form of an overgrown cat that is at least the size of a tank. Monstrously built and it also has an outstretched tongue that coils around its body and is also equipped with bones that are sticking from both edges.

If the two creatures at the center are bizarre, this one surpassed that completely.

Pondering for a good amount of time, Adhara instantly heads over to her own bed chamber before she takes the Dual Daggers of Bifrons. Gripping both daggers tightly, she instantly heads outside and stood above the western wall of the castle.

"Are they attracted here because of the energy coming from the red gate portal...?"

Since the energy from the red gate portal is quite hazardous and it leaked outside of the castle due to Kyran opening the entrance earlier, Adhara finds that is the only plausible answer as to why these cursed creatures are heading this way.

But that doesn't explain why they are heading to the castle right now in the middle of the night.

Kyran and the leakage of the energy from the red gate portal happened during the day, and nothing happened from the castle ever since the both of them left. So that makes the answer still doubtful, but she didn't have the time to ponder the reason why these cursed creatures are heading this way.

Counting the cursed creatures, there are 27 of them in total.

Although Rex said that the castle can hold pretty much anything except bombardment from ninth-rank realm entities, she hasn't really seen the defensive mechanism of the castle comes to play. Because of that, this still worries her.

With the confirmation from Rex, she can just let these cursed creatures try to break into the barrier.

But that's a stupid idea for short-sighted people, if there's a possibility that these cursed creatures can break the barrier then she needs to stop them at all costs. Maybe the barrier is all-powerful and can block them, but that doesn't mean Adahra would let them try.

Harnessing her wind element, Adhara uses the wind to levitate both of her daggers.

Since she now can control her wind element better, she's strong enough to use the wind to wield the two daggers and control them freely. "I need to reduce their numbers, the weaker ones should be taken out before they can reach the barrier"

Nodding to herself, Adhara controls the daggers and shoots them toward the cursed creatures.

From the incident she had when she and the others meet with the cursed creature that has the Curse of Ugliness empowering it, she now knows that it's best to take out weak cursed creatures at a range and don't reply or think nothing of what they are saying.

Without knowing what curse they have, it'll be foolish for her to think of anything against them.

Swish!

Piercing the air swiftly, the two daggers quickly shoot toward the cursed creatures that already reach halfway through the open field surrounding the castle. Adhara focuses her fire element before she quickly burns one of the flying daggers.

Instead of attacking the cursed creatures, she decided to create a burning line to block them.

Against cursed creatures it's best to not make any contact with them, diverting their advance is the best option but she expected that the three strong cursed creatures wouldn't turn around just from a line of fire to block their way.

Flames climb high as the burning daggers slash the ground and create a burning line.

On top of the burning line, the other flying daggers that are imbued with her wind element also slash the burning line which amplifies the fire to become even stronger. The flame that already reaches high burns even higher.

Darkness from the night got instantly pushed away due to the powerful violet flame.

A fine burning line that stretches for at least a hundred meters was created, blocking the entire cursed creatures that are heading towards the castle. With the tall violet fire that burns majestically, Adhara can't see the cursed creatures behind the fire anymore.

Waiting for a minute, she frowned again seeing that her attempt failed.

But it didn't completely fail with some of the weaker cursed creatures getting burned and roaring before falling to the ground, the violet fire still burns its body brightly which fixated its death. Realizing that only a few died from that, she takes out the fire before the strong cursed creatures can even cross it.

Since some of the weaker ones didn't die, then the stronger ones definitely wouldn't die.

Now that it has come to this, Adhara sent her two daggers to attack the cursed creatures, wanting to take them down from a distance. Garnering more mana into the daggers, both of the daggers' movement becomes even faster.

Adhara aimed for the weaker ones first, letting the stronger ones be the last when she can focus.

Just as the two daggers were about to decapitate the weaker cursed creatures, the symbol on the two strong cursed creatures at the center glowed brightly which struck the two daggers instantly. It caught Adahra by surprise as she didn't expect this.

But her surprise increased when her eyes saw two streaks of red and green heads towards her.

Swish!

The two streaks bypass the barrier of the castle and instantly hits her and pushed her back, off of the castle's wall. Adhara falls to the rough big cobblestone ground with a grunt, she looks at her chest and finds that she didn't sustain any injury.

It confuses her as that was completely unexpected, but out of nowhere pain struck her.

"M-My insides! It's burning!!", Adhara shouted as she started to roll on the ground in pain, she suddenly feels the inside of her body heating up and boiling to the point of absolute pain. The sensation is akin to someone creating a bonfire inside her chest.

As if that was not enough, Adhara grabs her neck while her eyes slowly widen in horror.

While her insides are being burned from the inside, her neck suddenly feels like it was being choked by something invisible and she also can't take a breath. Not due to the choke, but it was like there was no air for her to breathe in.

Under the torturous sensation, Adhara can only whimper as her eyes slowly turn bloodshot.

In reflex, she turned into her Werewolf form to try and be stronger physically, but that doesn't help at all as the pain didn't lessen even for a little bit. Slowly her face is turning blue due to lack of air, and steam started to seep out of her skin.

Although the feeling was literal, the source of pain comes from other sources, not literal.

Definitely, due to the two streaks of red and green that were sent by the two cursed creatures at the center, she got hit by them and now she's in this state. Adhara feels her consciousness fading away, she's slowly overwhelmed by the pain.

Nobody is going to help her, the others are in not here or occupied by something.

Just as she was about to completely succumb to the pain, Adhara suddenly blinks her eyes a couple of times and gasp a very deep breath when the burning and choking sensation suddenly vanished completely.

Adhara sits up while breathing rapidly, trying to take in as much air as possible.

"I-It's gone...? Just what on earth happened to me?", Adhara thought before she slowly regains back control over her body, she stands up while still leaning on the wall as the sensations feel so real but they suddenly disappeared as if it was only inside her head.

Until she feels that she has recovered completely, she jumped back up to the wall.

Looking at the cursed creatures, they are already near the barrier and would take a brief moment before they finally made contact with the barrier. Now Adhara develops a new sense of fear of the cursed creatures at the center.

What she felt earlier was like a nightmare, she almost died because of that.

If it weren't for the burning and choking sensation suddenly disappearing completely, she would probably die there without anyone able to help. Even if Gistella came from the inside and saw her in the state she was in earlier, there was nothing she can do.

Flunra and Rex are probably the only ones that can help her overcome that state from earlier.

But as the remaining cursed creatures closed in, Adhara saw the symbols on the two strong cursed creatures that got their curses triggered by her earlier for some reason. Now that she can see it clearly, the shape of the symbols is comprehensible.

Soon enough Adhara widened her eyes realizing what the two symbols meant.

"They are Elemental Curses! Oh my god, how can they be here?!", Adhara exclaimed realizing that the two creatures has Elemental Curses, which explains why their curses got triggered by her daggers earlier.

Turns out they were empowered by the Elemental Curses.

Flunra has told them about the few curses that they need to be wary of, one of them being the Elemental Curse. Cursed Creatures that are empowered by the Elemental Curse have a certain effect on entities that uses elements like Awakened for example.

Although he didn't explain in detail, he did say one important thing.

The epiphany of the said cursed creature that is empowered by the Elemental Curse determined the severity of the effect, and some are powerful enough to literally evaporate the entities that harness the elements in their presence.

Knowing that Adhara realized that if the creatures were any stronger then she would be gone.

Raising her hand to touch her chest while sucking in a cold breath, Adhara gazes at the two strong cursed creatures at the center, "I-I should've been more careful, I literally almost died there...", she mutters softly.