Extra's Guide to Surviving a Dark Fantasy World-Chapter 59: Betrayal-3

"He and I are the only ones who can read Khravaen and thus also the only ones who can control this thing."

Now this was surprising, I quietly raised my eyebrows looking at this new development. Never in a million lifetimes would I have guessed Aria to stand up for me.

"You could have said all of this before she cut off my leg." I tried to complain but stopped after seeing Tess’s glare.

"This is not time to be unreasonable." Tess slowly began walking over to Aria, trying to convince her. "This might very well be the thing that affects your chances for the throne."

"I don’t need my mother’s approval to reach the throne; if she is unwilling, then I’ll simply take it from her."

Hearing the two of them fight, I silently turned my head towards the broken gate, slowly gazing towards the black sky.

The sun had long already set; if it were any other day, I would have already offered to prepare our dinner and clean our utensils.

Just a couple more minutes.

"It is time that both she and you-" Aria suddenly paused, confusion seeping into her eyes.

"Whhhhaatat izzz-" Her voice slurred as she tried to touch her face, only to have her eyes widen realizing she couldn’t move her hand.

"Aria, are you okay?" Tess questioned Aria, noticing her odd behavior.

"I-" Aria tried to speak but suddenly her legs gave out, making her collapse on the ground.

"Aria!" Tess shouted while trying to catch a falling Aria, only to realize her limbs weren’t working as well. With eyes widening in shock, she too fell face first on the floor, right beside Aria.

"Finally," I murmured, looking at their collapsed figures. Any longer and this would have happened on the ship.

Checking my bandaged leg to see if I was no longer bleeding, I forced my body up and began crawling in their direction. Thankfully, I had had quite a while to rest, giving me enough energy to at least do this.

It took me a couple of minutes, but I did eventually reach their paralyzed bodies; I saw both of them, especially Tess, glaring at me with rage and fear in her eyes.

Looking at them, seething in rage, I couldn’t help but let out a smile. "It’s even more insulting that you thought I already hadn’t made a plan to deal with you," I spoke, taking out Tess’s blade from her blade.

I had long begun suspecting Tess’s strange behavior ever since we left the city of Lashira; there, on our journey during the sandstorm, I had also begun to realize that if it came to a fair fight, I was going to be much of a match against her. That’s when I came up with my plan. On the third day of the storm, I threw away the bags filled with most of our water and medical supplies under the guise of the storm.

After that, during my shift at night, I began taking out our supplies of leftover sandweavers, giving them to duskwraith, and sending them far away so he wouldn’t be seen.

There I would remotely control him to experiment on the sandweaver’s corpses. Sandweavers were known for living in large colonies where they would use paralytic poison to immobalising their prey before devouring it.

This was the same reason why one could only eat their legs; the rest of their upper bodies were filled with this poison; the legs, however, were edible because the forward set of legs contained glands that neutralized this poison.

Funny thing was Aria had been the one to explain it to me during the days we had spent hunting before the sandstorm.

For weeks I had been extracting this poison and testing the volume it would need to immobilize an awakened at the level of Tess; at the same time, I also worked on an antidote made from the legs of handweavers, once again using myself as the test subject.

Once all of my preparations were done, I secretly began throwing our water away, nudging Aria to make some using her ice spells. From there, I began mixing the antidote in our water supply, easily masking the odd taste as water made from Tess’s ice while at the same time ensuring there was a limited supply of antidote-filled water under my control.

I wasn’t her match; I knew that. But I also knew if it came to it, even though I was fairly confident, she wouldn’t kill me either to use my scouting ability or to extract my bloodline. I was still sure I would be able to wound her at least. I had already made a scarcity of healing medicines, ensuring we didn’t use those supplies after every small skirmish with the sand weavers, instead only using them after big fights where we would receive serious injuries, thus reducing the chance of any mistakes.

Besides, we were already able to avoid most of these fights we were already mostly able to avoid thanks to my scouting abilities.

I then proceeded to mix the poison with our healing supplies, putting in our bandages and healing salves. Of course, I kept the antidote bottle with me at all times, offering it to my companions on the rare chance we did get injured during a fight.

And it worked spectacularly. I made her drop her guard by ambushing her with my doomed-to-fail assassination plan, followed by pathetically trying to escape on my last drops of mana.

After that I simply waited for her to settle down and bandage their wounds from the last fight. To make sure I wasn’t poisoned from the supplies I made sure to drink all of the antidote water.

The poison was going to take a while to work on the awakened bodies, so I waited quietly. Thankfully, it didn’t disappoint.

"Howw?" Tess somehow managed to crock through her frozen mouth.

"You know I would love to explain how I did it into detail while making sure to gloat as much as I can, but someone told me it’s a bad habit so." I spoke while crawling towards her wooden leg and forcefully yanking it out.