Others Summon Dragons, I Summon Legendary Knights

Chapter 499: You Underestimate Me

Soft golden light coalesced on a sofa, then formed flesh and clothes. It happened in a split instant. Percival’s eyelids lifted, the gleam of his irises a bright azure glow.

He went to the room. There, Lucy had just put on her clothes and was about to leave the room. Both of them stood on different sides of the door.

Percival could feel her presence behind the polished wooden door. So could she. She? He meant, whatever that thing was.

"What are you?" Percival asked.

"What am I? What kind of question is that, Percival? Are you alright?" Lucy responded lightly. She reached for the doorknob.

"I know what you are," said a chill voice, right out of Percival’s lips, directed at Lucy, who opened the door. Their eyes met.

"This is getting creepy." She took a few steps back, watching him cautiously. She? This was an it. An it!

Percival lunged at it. His feet hammering the floorboards heavily, then a fist went straight for her face.

Lucy dodged in a heartbeat. Her figure twisted and reformed into something sinister. A spindly fox. It stood on two digitigrade legs covered in orange fur. Two long arms hung on both sides, each boasting ink-coloured claws, six inches in length.

Its front torso was draped in white fur, two barely noticeable mounds at the chest, a protruding jaw set into the face, and lustrous tresses cascading down to the shoulders like the mane of a lion.

This fox, though unnaturally thin, towered a full head and chest above him. Its large, erect ears almost grazing the ceiling.

"You need help, Percival." Two voices overlapped.

Percival recoiled, evading a sweeping arm with claws that cut through the air with grievous momentum.

A savage grin appeared on the monster’s protruding mouth. "Percival," it said. "Oh, Percival. We were perfect. Why would you do this?"

’Shut up,’ he thought, taking a few steps backward. He tried using his water skill, but it didn’t work. All of a sudden, he was prohibited from calling forth water this far inland.

’Is that so? You think you can force me into a corner?’ He evaded its sweep once more, slammed his shoes into the floorboards, and exhaled.

’I am the sea, you beast. You can’t change that.’ In that moment, Percival let go of himself. There was a huge explosion. The building exploded, water flooding the debris and the streets.

Shock swept through the car owners and pedestrians on the street as they began a struggle of their own against the flood gushing downward toward the ocean.

A good portion of water formed the image of a man, his features blurred. His eyeless face watched the soaking-wet fox.

Tilting his head, Percival discovered people still couldn’t see what was happening. All they saw was the flood, but not the man made of water and the fox on two legs.

The fox leaped, scoring a claw strike. But its claws just went through Percival’s liquid body. He retaliated with the old-school water blob over the head.

He watched the fox struggle, clawing endlessly at him until its arms fell limp at both sides and it collapsed, drowned to death.

Percival regained a physical form. That took a lot out of him. A great lot. King had to remain on the sea, keep hunting. Once he was retrieved, the summon would have to make his way back to where it had once been.

This test had also taught him something else. The beast in control of this illusion could impose limitations on their skills. That was a precarious threat. For now, it seemed like it made sure he couldn’t form water from thin air, but no one knew how far this could go.

His pondering ended when some group of people began to approach him.

’Foxes.’

Percival thought. A dozen of them. No, two dozen, three doz—

He looked around. Their numbers were increasing. He shut his eyes, and a trident with relief carvings of several sea creatures manifested. He clutched it.

’Alright.’ His eyes opened. Unfortunately, the environment had changed. It wasn’t a modern town any longer, but a desert. The desert stretched farther than his eyes could follow, a wasteland of bleak dunes and weathered stone sculpted by an endless wind.

Fine grains hissed across the surface of the desert, climbing over the crests in thin veils before slipping down the opposite slopes. Every direction looked the same, as though the land had forgotten how to become anything other than sand.

Foxes, dozens, surrounded him. He stood in the center of these silent, ravenous predators, all somehow boasting the physical capacity to keep up with a demigod.

Was it the illusion helping them? What was going on in Charlestown?

There was a brain behind it all, an overwatching eye.

’You underestimate me,’ Percival said inwardly, about to transform into an endless amount of water, but then he remembered this had to be an illusion.

If he did that, Charlestown would be swept away. This was his burden. But it was either that or he would fall to these foxes.

Percival clenched his trident tight. Right, he almost forgot. With this trident, he could control the liquids in a person’s body. A skill he found too grotesque and intrusive.

Something deep within him recoiled at the thought of what that skill could do. But it was that or—

A fox leaped at him.

Percival replied with a fierce swing. The blow swept the fox to his side. Others came, ferocious, snapping their jaws and throwing their thin, long-clawed hands.

Percival danced in their midst. Fluid like the ocean. His blows with the trident were packed with power, growing more aggressive yet controlled, like the currents of a sea.

The tip of the trident cut through their fur, spurting blood onto the fine sand. Each foot movement took him inches away from the reach of a claw or a mouth full of fangs.

Sand flew erratically as chaos unfolded around one man. Foxes fell to his left, to his right, before him, and behind him.

"Percival!!"

A loud scream, filled with pain, tore deep into his eardrums. Percival froze, his trident above a fox he was about to kill.

All of a sudden, his eyes seemed to clear, and he saw himself in Charlestown once more. Foxes lay dead all around him, but so did people, four of them. A man and three women.

Another man was right below him.

But—

His eyes widened, trailing to Lucy and Adonis, who had arrived.

These people, they were foxes. They were foxes.