What was the greatest strategy when one was overwhelmed?

Run.

It worked every time.... Well, almost every time, but Adrian wasn’t running because he planned on getting away from the beasts.

He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, since the wind and lightning bulls were fast enough to keep up and his damn cat would just ping his location.

No,

His goal was to get them as far away from the leader as he could.

Why? might you ask?

Well, it was quite simple actually. Whilst dodging attacks from the bulls, his glasses had picked up something strange about their mana.

Unlike the mana of most beasts or even spirits, which remained mostly wrapped around them.

The mana of these bulls all led towards a single point, their leader.

At first, he thought of it as some sort of hive mind that allowed the leader to command its pack,

And although he hadn’t completely discarded that idea, he was certain that it was more than that.

It seemed the beasts were all being supplied mana by the leader, almost in a way similar to Adrian’s clones.

But unlike his, these didn’t seem like clones, they seemed like normal beasts feeding off the leader’s mana.

Was that the reason why it wasn’t moving even after he had dragged its head this far off?

If that were the case, then that meant one thing,

The elements coating the bulls, the flames, the lightning, the wind, they weren’t truly theirs.

They were being bestowed upon them, and the leader was the bestower.

And the further he dragged them away, the thinner those connections became.

Adrian briefly glanced behind him.

The leader was still there in the distance and just as expected, it wasn’t moving, but the lines of mana connecting it to its pack were getting stretched by the second.

He immediately ducked under a streak of lightning causing it to graze past him as he switched places with a shadow left behind.

A moment later,

BOOM!

The spot he had just occupied exploded under a combined strike of wind and fire.

He didn’t stop moving, though.

Instead, he disappeared again, switching places with a shadow just before a lightning strike landed where he had been just a second before.

Now that he had figured out how they worked, his plan was simple, he was going to herd them.

"Come on," he muttered, just loud enough for the beasts to hear as he kicked off the ground again.

"Let’s just hope I’m right about this."

***

It took Adrian a few minutes of running and constantly dodging elements to finally prove his hypothesis correctly.

They had reached a certain part of the forest where the mana connecting the herd with their leader was so thin that it was barely visible.

And that’s when weaknesses started showing.

As if on cue, all the beast’s elements suddenly dimmed, looking a lot weaker than they previously were.

Adrian looked at the pack of ten, which were now hesitant to move any farther as they had also finally realized that something was wrong.

But it was too late, because the next second,

BOOM!

A cloud of dust was kicked up, and when it cleared up, Adrian was revealed with a shadow in the shape of a spear in his hand.

The spear was cleanly going through the head of the bull with the fire mana, and it was very obviously now dead.

He looked at the remaining nine beasts and said with a smile, "Now’s the part where the hunter becomes the hunted."

With that, he disappeared again.

BOOM!

The bull with gravity mana suddenly launched an attack towards the direction he reappeared, launching him into a tree.

"You’re annoying," the next second, Adrian’s voice came from beside the bull and before it could turn around, he encased it in its own shadow.

"That’s two down," he said, looking at the other beasts that were now wary of him, "eight more to go."

The massive earth bull suddenly lifted its hooves and stomped, creating a large crack that originated from its feet.

The crack got wider as it approached Adrian, but it was too slow, and by the time it reached him, he was long gone.

He reappeared next to the earth bull, but just before he could take it out, a blast of wind slammed into him and launched him backwards.

What followed was a massive bolt of lightning crashing where he stood, but he quickly moved out of the way.

Adrian quickly formed something akin to a shield in front of him the moment he dodged the lightning attack, and just a second later, a massive [Earth Pillar] slammed into it, launching him backwards again.

But the bulls were far from done, and the moment another stomped, the roots from the tree behind him suddenly launched towards him, but instead of an attack, they firmly wrapped around him, keeping him in place.

Seeing that the little pest was finally restrained, two bulls immediately charged at him, the ground trembling at their approach.

They got closer and closer with the intention of impaling this pest, but just before they reached him, they stopped in their tracks.

They stayed frozen for a few seconds before falling over, revealing a shadow spike going straight through their underbellies.

"That’s four," Adrian’s voice came from above the beasts instead of where he was previously restrained.

The shadow clone he had switched places with was suddenly dismissed and he hopped back down to the ground.

"Six more."

The beasts’ sudden coordination had truly caught him off guard since he was sure that the leader wasn’t close enough to give commands.

Seems it was wrong, the leader only affected their mana types and they absorbed mana to make it stronger,

No hive mind involved.

Another thing he had observed was the fact that with each beast he eliminated, the mana threads to the others suddenly increased.

Which meant that the leader was diverting the man’s it supplied the dead beast to the ones that remained, making them a bit stronger.

Which meant that he needed to move them farther away before taking care of the last one, else, he’d just be dealing with a headache.

"Alright then," he said to the now angry beasts, "let’s go deeper into the forest, shall we?"

With that, he turned around and started running again, and the herd, blinded by a need to tear that pest apart, 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Followed.