The forces were completely exhausted from the forest. They could only sit there and recover for another two hours. By the time, they moved from that spot it is actually afternoon.
Noah is still having a bad time with the failure of her grand preparation.
Sam couldn't take it anymore and ask.
"Just what is wrong with you. Just tell me what you planned, then I will think of a solution. You cannot be sulky just because your trap didn't work as well as you wanted it to be. You are acting like an immature little girl."
Noah just gave him a side-eyed glance and spoke.
"There is nothing wrong with the trap. It is his reaction that was at fault."
"Okay, what part of the reaction is at fault?"
"He was way too cautious. He didn't react fast enough. If this was him before, he would have just burned that stupid dog up as soon as he saw the vines coiling around it. If he did, the rest of the vines would have reacted at the same time. Instead, he first went after the vines surrounding them instead of going after the immediate attack.
How stupidly cautious one has to be to do something like that?"
Sam couldn't believe what he was hearing at all.
"Of course, he would be cautious. Your badass boyfriend just killed one-third of their bunch in three minutes. What do you expect him to do? Just walk around in the forest and just attack whatever that comes across. That would be the stupid thing to do. He did what he was supposed to do."
"No, he didn't. He did something stupid and didn't attack the vines instantly. My plan failed that is it and I am going to beat him up after he comes here."
Sam looked at Kumar. Because at this moment, his attention was captured by the non-reaction of Noah towards the fact that she didn't deny him calling Kumar her boyfriend.
Noah left the room without noticing her mistake and Sam looked at Kumar with a grin.
"You must be a real charmer. Noah? Really? How did you manage to do that?"
Kumar just rolled his eyes and turned around, but he didn't deny anything.
While Sam is having his fun, the forces are not having any of it.
They reached the last trap set up Sam used. The large rocky canyon.
The remaining people are extremely cautious and they don't know what danger they would be facing, but they know that this place is the perfect place to set up another trap.
This time, the team leader went to investigate himself along with the scout group.
He tapped every place that could be used as trigger for the trap to the best of his knowledge. He threw the attacks around just to see if any traps would be triggered by that. He searched the whole canyon for an hour.
But he didn't find anything.
The canyon is as small as it could be and some beasts that take that up as their residence died just for their paranoia.
The leader is a bit relieved. Even though he is still cautious while leading them inside, he still felt like they are relatively safer.
After all, they already lost almost half of the troops before they even reached the city. Any more, and they might as well not go and wait for the reinforcements to come.
But as soon as they entered the canyon together, he understood how wrong he was to feel relieved.
As soon as every single person and beast are within the canyon confines, the trap is triggered.
The trap that made everyone feel like they are being stared at by death itself.
The first curse that triggered was obviously the curse he created with earth elemental energy, the gravity increase.
The people felt the struggle to move forward and before they could think of what the reason might be, they subconsciously started feeling thirsty. They felt parched all of a sudden and the sunlight felt like it could burn them and just evaporate them into nothing.
And this is a problem, the cultivators generally don't carry things like water and such as they are confident they could find some source and they can live for days and weeks without water, but now they felt the desperate need to drink water.
Since they couldn't find any, they took the next best thing, the Wine.
The more liquor they drank, the more they started feeling thirsty, they couldn't control themselves at all. Even the team leader who was vigilant in the first two traps couldn't find this anomaly as something harmful, because another curse is playing a game and messing his brain up without him knowing.
Sam and Kumar saw as the people drank liters of wine, gulping it down like water and there is even small friction within the soldiers as they tried to grab other people's wines.
In this process, they didn't bother using their spiritual energy to keep themselves away from the intoxication which made them slightly numb in the head.
Soon, they started feeling itchy all over their bodies and started scratching without knowing it, their arms felt numb no matter how much they scratched and the itch didn't go away. One of the soldiers couldn't tolerate the itch and scratched it too hard making it bleed.
Many of such things happen to different soldiers in different parts of their bodies.
When one of the soldiers noticed the bleeding, he yelled.
"What the fuck?"
He looked at his shoulder which is bleeding and removed his clothes to apply for some medicine as he stopped. The leader looked at him and the rest of the soldiers.
He felt a little tipsy as he couldn't think of what the reason for the blood is and said.
"Guys, I told you to recover properly at the forest, see, now you are bleeding like this. Everyone let us camp here and recover."
For some reason, he didn't find anything wrong with what he said and just sat there waiting for his soldiers to recover.
As they applied medicine to each other, they suddenly felt hungry.
*Grrr…*
Stomach grumbles could be heard all over the camp and everyone was surprised. Generally, after reaching a certain level, they wouldn't feel hunger or thirst. Their spiritual energy would be supplementing all their biological and metabolic needs to keep them moving.
Only if they are deprived of energy to a great extent, would be their body show the reactions of hunger and thirst.
The leader looked at the soldiers in a daze.
"Seems like we are traveling for a long time, we need to recover properly and also try to find some food while we are at it. It has been a long time since we had a proper meal. The potions and pills can only bring us so long."
He said and everyone looked around to hunt.
Even though the canyon only has a range of rocks, they have a lot of wildlife. Like the stone lizards and such.
They looked for them, as for leaving the canyon, for some reason they couldn't think of such thing, it is as if going out of the canyon is something extremely bad in their opinion and they shouldn't be doing it at all.
After finding some food, they started acting, at first, they at least managed to cook it, but soon their patience ran out and they started eating the raw flesh of the beasts.
But soon they ran out. They couldn't find enough supply for all of them.
They started eating into their pill and potion reserves. They couldn't think of doing anything but eating them up.
Some people ran out of those too and then started eating bones of the beasts they just finished eating and then resorted to eating sand and rocks.
They felt that something is wrong for doing something like that, but they didn't know what is wrong with it and felt like they should just continue.
Kumar looked at the scene and flinched.
"Dude, what the hell did you do to them? Why are they behaving like this?"
"It is a curse. It large curse is a result of setting a number of curses into an array. It is actually an experiment on how it would work and it is working perfectly fine."
"But it is too nasty. Are you sure they wouldn't get out of it?"
"No, they wouldn't get out of it. If they are anymore unprepared, they would all just die there."
As he explained, they noticed that everyone stopped their actions and looked into the sky in a daze.
"What happened now?"
"Hallucinations. They are currently looking at the person who they are close to but did something extremely guilty."
"What?"
"A friend they betrayed, a soldier they abandoned, a companion they killed, the kid they couldn't be with. All the things they felt guilty for and the one they felt most guilty for will be haunting them for the rest of the time they are in the canyon."
