CHAPTER 356: THERE’S NO TIME FOR EXPLANATIONS. HOP ON! (2/2)

My precious daughter had no choice but to constantly hop from golem to golem, her panicked crying stabbing into my heart each time she called out to me. It was as if there was a hand gripping my heart right now, clutching down on it with every syllable she spoke.

‘B*stard!’ All it took was an instant for me to lose my cool. Yet just as I was about to rush off to save my daughter, a pair of soft hands held me back.

“Don’t go… those two Nightmare Steeds are still watching you…”

The one who stopped me was Jeerah. This had to be the first time she had ever seen me angry as well. While I had no way of knowing how terrifying I must have looked, judging from the way she shrank back immediately, I could tell how bad it must have been.

Still, her reminder had worked. My exploding temper began to slowly cool down.

Like what she said, Warsight and Shade were still eyeing me from a corner of their eyes. Their target wasn’t just Mo Na. It was me as well.

‘I should’ve expected nothing less from these Nightmare Steeds -they can even coordinate so well with each other without saying a word. They probably communicated their strategies through telepathy.’

Shadowfall’s deliberate attack on Mo Na wasn’t just to help the Warhorses. What he really wanted was to lure me away from my golems, else Mo Na would have been dead in that first attack already. A Eight-star ambushing a Four-star… clearly, there was no way that Four-star could ever survive.

However, there was still one thing I didn’t understand -that black flame which even I wasn’t confident about surviving against. If he could use that flame to force Mo Na to dodge around like that, why didn’t he just do that from the beginning?

That answer would soon become apparent.

After spitting out a field’s worth of black flames, his speed had noticeably dropped. Not only did his flame-spitting slow down, even his movement speed had decreased. When faced with my golems’ attacks, he barely avoided them, even coming close to getting hit at times. Each time that happened, the bulky fingers of my golems would barely graze the once deft Nightmare Steed, painting a stark contrast to when he could nimbly weave in between multiple golems.

‘So breathing those flames caused some sort of feedback onto them? That has to be it… wait, if that was the case, it still wouldn’t explain why they didn’t just do that from the start against me. Why go through the trouble of chasing Mo Na around just to force my hand?’

‘Are they afraid of something else?’

‘Forget it. What’s more important now is rescuing Mo Na.’

“Alright, alright. I get it. I won’t act rashly.” Having figured out the nuances, I turned my worried head towards Jeerah and nodded, completely ignoring the lost look she had on right now. I grabbed the Gem of Authority hanging around my neck with my right hand. With my left, I grabbed Jeerah’s waist and drew her closer towards me. As her body came tumbling in, her strong scent only got stronger, leaving me lightly muddle headed in the process. My left hand instinctively grabbed her harder.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing!?”

Her reaction was visibly agitated. She wanted to push me away but my strength was too much for her.

“Stop messing around, I’m just trying to protect you.”

“Protect me? When did protecting me include hugging me? You said you were a male, right… let go!”

‘Was she always this pure…’

“Hey, don’t forget you’re still a Lust Demon. A little skinship won’t kill you.”

“But you just said you are a male! Even though I don’t see anything male about you…”

‘Did you have to add in that last bit… we could’ve been friends….’

However, I had no time for jibes right now. Explaining my actions would only waste more time, and time was something I didn’t have right now. Thus, I turned my single arm hug into a double armed one. My left hand was still wrapped around her waist, but my right had gone around her neck before grabbing onto the Gem of Authority.

“There’s no time for explanations. Hop on!”

“I just said not to hug me… And what does hop on even mean?”

“Whatever the word means, of course.”