Aethan dealt with three Wraiths swiftly, but let the last two continue to attack him.
He allowed them to adapt, giving them the chance to pose a challenge to him.
His goal was quite simple; allow them to get strong enough, then use Blood Essence Extraction to extract the Essence within the glass-like pebble acting as their Cores.
Aethan wasn't so sure it was going to work. Blood Essence Extraction was called that because it worked on beings with blood—at least that's what his father had said.
But as the inheritor of the bloodline, he understood its intricacies better and more intricately than anyone else did.
Blood Essence Extraction didn't only work on blood. It worked on anything having Aether and Life Force. That wasn't to say that he could extract Aether from anything using Blood Essence Extraction though.
Instead, what it implied was that he could sense the Essence of a being rooted deeply within them and pull at it, thus taking their Aether and Life Force.
These Wraiths obviously didn't have blood—or what anyone considered blood—but Aethan strongly believed that he could use Blood Essence Extraction on them for a simple reason:
He could sense Life Force and Aether from them—which was basically what Essence was, the combination of a person's Aether, Life Force, and some other things he couldn't quite grasp yet.
All he needed to do was just to make them strong enough, so that extracting their Blood Essence, Life Force and snippets of their memories of Wind Elemental Magic, would be worthwhile.
He was basically fattening up cows for his later consumption.
The Wraiths attacked with purpose and clear intent.
Over time, they began to release ranged attacks more often, trying to bridge the gap in power by assaulting him with a barrage of wind attacks and overwhelming him.
They realized that they were not able to deal with Aethan by mindlessly going after him again and again, throwing hands without planning beforehand.
At some point they even began to incorporate feints and underhanded tactics, luring Aethan into attacking them by leaving themselves wide open.
Unfortunately, Aethan wasn't tricked by such. They were still too inexperienced to know what he was planning and adapt to it.
The situation became tough sooner than expected, though, and Aethan found himself moving more than he would have wanted to.
He had triggered more traps and faced more Wraiths, but had dispatched them easily, focusing only on the two who seemed to have grown powerful enough.
"About time," Aethan muttered as two drills of wind slammed into the ground.
He pressed his feet firmly against the ground, letting his boots sink into it a little.
He timed his attack carefully, slipping by a wind scythe and shooting forward with a sudden burst of speed just as the second Wind Wraith geared up for a follow up attack.
Aethan's palm slammed into the first Wind Wraith, but it didn't react at all to pain, not that it could feel any. His momentum was slowed by a margin, but still carried enough power to tear into the body of the Wraith, and grasp the pebble within it.
At the same time, a wind spear reached his head a split second later, coming at him with such speed that he could practically hear the Wind rotating fiercely.
BOOM!
The spear landed with a thunderous impact, releasing an avalanche of spinning wind blades and bullets in all directions.
The walls exploded, more spikes shooting off it or getting destroyed from the impact.
Dust and smoke rose, blocking Aethan's vision and what little oxygen that existed in the space.
Aethan's vision was obscured by the veil of dust, but the Wraiths could 'see' him perfectly, and he seemed to be… perfectly okay.
A sharp sound, barely perceptible to the ears, tore through the air, followed by the explosion of Aether as the second Wraith's Core cracked.
How it had happened, it didn't know, but it had seen a thin, grey, metallic object eject from the dust and tear into it, cracking its Core. What the wraith could put together with the little intelligence it had in its last moments though, was that they had been played to death.
The Wind Wraith dispersed, exploding with force and shattering more of the spikes on the wall.
More dust billowed into the damp atmosphere, blocking the normal sight. However, if someone was there at the moment, they would have been able to make out the eerie glow of a pair of piercing red eyes within the dust.
A deafening silence permeated the tunnel, reigning supreme as if the world itself had paused.
Aethan felt it before he saw it… the Wraiths were hesitating and didn't outright attack him. He had successfully extracted the Essence of the first Wind Wraith, gaining its memories and understanding of Wind too.
Aethan had used a technique he had been taught by his father, when he just began cultivation, and created a skin of Aether over his body, protecting it from the wind spear and its aftereffects.
None of the Wraiths could have guessed that he would survive the sneak attack, but he did anyway, and that was the second Wraith's undoing.
Silent Fang did a good job of cutting through the air with its unmatched sharpness, and cracking the second Wraith's Core—which he then extracted its Essence from.
More memories and understanding flooded his mind, elevating his affinity for… Gale?
Aethan paused and looked at the newly born Wraiths.
He could feel them cowering, unable to come forward to attack him.
It seemed that attacking wasn't the only thing they knew how to do, or rather, programmed to do. They now saw Aethan as a superior being with a stronger affinity for Wind than them, so if he willed it, he could just disperse their bodies with a wave of his arms, rendering them all useless.
Aethan figured this out after the memories, Aether and 'Life Force' of the Wraiths were absorbed.
Suddenly the previous fights became like child's play in his eyes.
He had done so much just to deal with the Wraiths, when he could have just forcefully taken control of their bodies and prevented the fight from ever happening.
But, therein laid the problem. He wouldn't have been able to do that had he not taken this path to make the Wraiths stronger, and help him boost his affinity for the Gale aspect of Galethunder.
"Gale," Aethan mumbled, feeling like he was onto something. "It's not mere breezes and currents, but the fury of the storm!"