When he came back home, the first thing Gerald noticed was a whole field of corpses scattered around the tower. Most of them were Orcs, predictably, but there were also two much larger ones belonging to an Ogre, and even a corpse of a Giant.
[The hell happened here?] He asked. The corpses were still far from reaching the base, but they came closer than usual.
"Oh, it's nothing." John waved his hand. "There was a large army of these freaks, and your little soldiers ran out of energy, cutting them to pieces. A few managed to get through before we noticed. No harm done."
The rest of the team was on cleaning duty, busy dismembering and disintegrating the corpses while collecting pitiful amounts of Essence.
[Was there nobody on guard?]
"Not really." John shrugged. "Against these weaklings? There is no point."
[I guess… I see you fought a Giant.] Gerald changed the topic and gestured at the massive body that someone split down the middle. All the internal organs spilled out and soaked into the ground, making for a nasty proliferation of smells.
"Oh, yeah… This guy. A disappointment, really." John sighed. "He was slightly stronger than your average Golden Core, but not by much. Anything interesting on your part?"
Gerald made a so-so gesture. [Some bounty hunters came after me from the Flaming Chicken Empire. They nearly pissed themselves when I transformed, so I sent them back with just a warning.]
John chuckled. "I bet they did. But that's so unlike you. What were they, peak Spirit Realm?"
[Yeah. Weak ones. Apparently, Hei Yu hired them in secret.] Gerald shook his head. [I don't know what he was thinking. I simply used my Domain and they crumpled like paper tigers.]
"Oh, damn! You can use a Domain already?!"
[It's… a work in progress. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it and what to put in it.]
"What concepts did you have in mind?" John wondered curiously.
[I was taking inspiration from you, actually. Just instead of gravity, I used general pressure, squeezing them from all sides.]
"Nice… But why just the pressure? I thought you would-"
Gerald was not finished. [I also tried adding a general feeling of doom through the mental component, and lastly, I added my Killing Intent.] He said, explaining how they surrendered so quickly. [Oh, and I continuously disrupted their magic in my Domain so they couldn't even retaliate. That seemed to do the trick.]
"Damn, a mix of four concepts?" John nodded. "Yep, that would do it."
Domains usually work by embodying a concept or two deeply, and then shifting reality around it. For example, John's Domain concepts were gravity and space, so his ability was being able to isolate a chunk of the world, with him and his enemies or allies inside it. That was on top of drastically increased gravity for anyone he considered an enemy.
It was quite a good concept he chose. Theoretically, he speculated, his space Domain could safeguard him from harm coming from the outside world for as long as he kept it active. He was not there yet, and a powerful enough Cultivator could simply shatter his Domain, but against those of a similar power level, he was untouchable. Theoretically.
Hei Yu, the Sky Realm Cultivator Gerald fought against, had a completely different Domain. In some sense, it was much better, in another, much worse.
With a glimpse into his mind, Gerald gathered approximately what his power was.
The man was a swordsman and quite a strong one at that. Inside his Domain, his strikes could not miss or be deflected. They could still be blocked by a greater power, but that was it. Ironically, at the beginning of the fight, Gerald shattered his sword, so his Domain became entirely useless. Without a weapon, he was weak. And as his power focused exclusively on attack, he really had no hope of defending himself against an undying juggernaut.
While, as a swordsman, he obviously had other weapons, those were spares in case his main sword was unavailable. While that should theoretically allow him to keep fighting, the reality was that all his spares were inferior to his main weapon. And if his praised possession broke before even blocking a single strike, what chance did the others have? Even his incredibly thick defensive relic was destroyed, so a thin sword stood no chance.
It was simply a bad matchup.
***
Gerald lent a hand cleaning up the mess around the tower. The massive stone structure was getting stronger by the day, courtesy of Thener and his brilliant upgrades. The stone tower was already half covered by thick metal plating, enchanted with various reinforcing Runes, and more layers of armor were getting added all the time.
Their base was turning into a fortress, and Gerald suspected its defenses could soon rival those of some old and powerful Sects. Quality over quantity. They had only a relatively small area to protect, so they could afford to use the best materials for the job, even if they were extremely expensive.
The corpses painting the desert red all around the tower were many, numbering in the thousands, yet the gains, be it in terms of Souls or Essence, were still laughably small.
After cleaning up they returned to the base, getting ready for the next attack. And then they waited. And waited. And waited…
The expected assault never came. After just a few short weeks of Orcs rampaging across the land, they disappeared, vanishing as quickly as they came.
Only a handful of monsters ever came close enough to consider it an attack. An Orc here, a Goblin there, maybe a few raptor-looking creatures... The dinosaur kind, not the bird, and they rarely came in groups bigger than three.
Actually, it happened only once, and they were killed before they could even do any damage. The golems were ordered to kill anything that moved, and by that, it meant anything. Even if the opponent was just a poor Mortal creature. Or just a step above it.
The latter half of spring went by like that, with nothing much of interest happening. That didn't mean the Brotherhood was slacking off, of course. Quite the opposite. Under John's watchful eye, the team improved. They trained often, and with the safeguard of Gerald's potent healing magic, they didn't have to worry about being too rough.
Not everyone could fight like a rabid animal like Gerald, unconcerned about taking damage, but as they sparred with each other, they picked up many tricks from each other, adding to the library of knowledge the long decades of training already gathered.
As time went on, Thener even made extra equipment for them from the remaining material, each of the members receiving a shield much like the one he first made as a prototype in the Ashen Wastes. The Abyssal Ward. It was a fantastic tool for blocking energy attacks, and even if it could be saturated quickly, thus losing its effectiveness, more protection was always welcome, and nobody complained.
Then, one day, the bizarrely peaceful atmosphere changed.
First, the sun failed to show itself in the morning. Dark clouds covered the sky, something extremely unusual for the desert climate, but as time went on, it didn't even rain. The clouds simply remained there without dispersing, hanging in the sky, growing more oppressive by the moment, if anything.
Truthfully, it took them way too long to notice anything was wrong. By then, everyone gathered at the top of the tower, looking into the distance, across the empty wasteland. They could barely see anything, the clouds nearly making it as dark as night.
"I have a bad feeling about this..." Alexandra murmured.