Grimm and Shade had already spent a great deal of mana hunting for the village today while I worked construction without them but they still carried me fore several hours through the night over the treetops lower down the mountain.
I finally came to a stop in the early hours of morning on a broad stretch of roadway where I used and the mountain find out what road I was on. This turned out to be a commonly used branch of the highway heading northwest around the greater body of the short mountain range. Following the advice my parents had given Gryn and his team, I decided to follow the highway for a while.
Travel was smooth and mostly linear thanks to the simplistic highway design and the steady twenty miles per hour my wisps were maintaining. I reached not only a small farming settlement but also a larger military outpost village in the same day I got on the highway. These locations were only measured tens of miles apart but would usually take a day of hard riding a horse from one to the other.
My first camp ended up being made a few miles out from the wooden walled village because I had to travel on foot to, through, and out of the outpost. Not for any legal or checkpoint reasons, but just as a courtesy because of general views of dark elemental magic. Like my wisps.
I spent the next days of travel riding on a grass golem formed into a large deer, running its core dry in only two days of shifting between breakneck and casual speed around settlements. After I made camp once again where the road become a low wooden bridge to cross a tributary I spent ten hours asleep before waking up to ride my wisps.
I still had some lost time and distance to make up for so I could not even take the time to work out until I reached my next destination. I ate and drank as necessary to support my growing body and for an hour every morning and night I let my wisps out to roam while riding a golem, but all of my other time was spent on the move. Now, I even intended to sleep on my hoverboard.
After taking the time to skirt around a small town by flying through the neighboring valleys for privacy, I found myself briefly paused upon finding a large encampment of roughly a hundred men and women in poor quality armor with weapons in poor condition. They were all dirty and looked more than just rough around the edges.
Among the encampment were a series of open and closed pavilions. In the open pavilions were long logs to which eleven different people overall were tied to while more people could be seen moving around behind the linen curtains of the pavilions. The wisps had brought me to a sudden stop that almost through me to the ground from my sitting position just outside the shallow valley of people and fur tents.
Not far from where I found myself sitting were three men in stretched fur padded armor sitting at a table. On this table sat the cards and coins they had been playing with while reaching for their crossbows. My instinctive response was to raise my hands as a show of unarmed surrender.
Only one man proceeded to raise his crossbow while ordering a 'Murt' and 'Gorn' on his sides to come check my weapons. While they were getting up from the table with nothing but large daggers still sheathed on their belts, I saw my first activity from the pavilions.
Previously, I was unsure what cheaply armed group of mercenaries I had chanced upon three miles outside of a large local settlement and figured all I would need to do was identify myself with some documents.
Currently, I saw two mean leading a young boy and girl only a few years older than me out of the pavilion. Both of them had some bruising on their faces and their clothes were torn in random places.
"What the fuck, guys," I say more to my wisps than to the bandit brigade in front of me while charging up faintly crackling electricity in my hands. By the time recognition flashed in the first of three pairs of eyes two bolts of lightning where discharged from either hand into Murt and Gorn before both bolts jumps and stayed within their officer.
The two lackeys were dead from thoroughly fried nervous systems and the man with the crossbow actually fired his bolt off to the side upon being struck.
As the light and sounds from the brief exchange finally attracted attention to my blurred arrival I picked up the two crossbows still on the table with magic. "Grimm, Shade," I say in time with the release of bolts fired at the bandits escorting the children. "Anyone with high enough power levels to be a leader only needs to get the boot, go secure the prisoners."
The hoverboard split into two ethereal bodies that immediately took off into the encampment. Every person or fire or tent that they 'passed' through was either blown outward from the inside or simply separated. I simply used more lightning with high enough consumption to produce thunder to maintain aggro on me while deafening everything with ears.
More than ten people in my immediate area were either charred bodies or raining pieces after three seconds of ten-percent-per-second mana consumption. Once I had more than ten yards of space between the next person and myself I picked up the daggers from the first dead bandits with magic while drawing a pair of stiletto styles shortswords from my waist. Grimm and Shade had already split up between freeing people outside the pavilions and dealing with those inside.
High pitched whistles marked the sound of daggers flying through the air near the speed of sound as I lunged forward across the distance to the closest bodies. My swords were completely silent and hard to trace as they whipped through the air across one person's face and slide between another one's ribs. The passage of a whistling dagger claimed the first man's life when he exposed his neck while holding his nose and eyes.
The other two daggers were punching straight through neighboring bodies as they tried to close in on me. Their speeds were far exceeding what my Strength in this outfit could permit and thus drained my mana down to fifty percent with only five or six bodies. These swords, meant for high-speed punctures into a passing animal's body, would not fair well in prolonged conflicts.
Channeling a single percent of mana into my body for three minutes of only moderately boosted stats, I lunge forward while sending the daggers out for the last time. While the three daggers were finally stopped by three different bodies, my swords flicked out to slice the tendons at the back of one man's armpit in the same stroke before turning to face the next man and slashing back the other way.
Then they were both suddenly buried in the same large and burly chest in either lung.
I was cursing my familiars at the point, calling their names and intentionally swearing at them in English while ducking and dodging around swords and spears. I was forced to draw new weapons at random from my purse only to throw whatever I came up with and did not want to use.
A bronze warhammer flew straight into a man's chest to simply sweep him flying backward off of his feet. A woman with an ax was impaled by a flying claymore through the side. A man with a short but broad two-handed sword took an ax to the face.
I ended up finally settling on a twisted metal staff that I immediately named Fuck All and proceeded to yell its name as I literally staved off the remaining fifty-plus enemies.
By now the boost to my stats was wearing down but my mana was most of the way replenished, allowing me to immediately convert ten percent of my mana into a boost of one hundred Agility and Strength. The first person to get struck by my staff after increasing my strength to weight ratio by a thousand pounds simply turned into a rag doll. Their arms, legs, and head limply stretched forward as their torsos were crushed and sent flying backward.
The remaining numbers had finally managed to encircle me so the few magic users in the group could try launching whatever attacks they could. I simply stayed in place and condensed my aura of mana into a thick shell around my body.
Various elements with various degrees of power as well as various raw mana attacks struck around me and dented at my protective shell but they all inevitably washed over and away from me in all directions.
While the heat and lightning or needles of ice were kept at back, the shock of being struck by so much mana so suddenly was almost enough to make my lungs seize and cough up the taste of bleed. After a few seconds of this, there really was blood in my teeth and a dull throb in the back of my head, but the bandits either ran out of mana or stopped to check the results because the world around me suddenly calmed down.
Swirls of glassed earth covered the ground while ice dust and ashes still drifted in the air once the spells stopped flying. As soon as I could clearly see an enemy, I thrust my staff forward like a spear and unleashed a burst of kinetic energy that blew them and the people nearby flying into the air. Maintaining and extension of kinetic energy from my staff, I drain my natural mana reserves down to almost twenty percent whipping around and sweeping the kinetic staff through the crowd of bodies.
Not a single person wielding a weapon against me was left standing after that display of power but even I was left staggering sideways a bit from the sudden loss of energy. After supporting myself with the staff, I surveyed the area to be sure that my wisps had the prisoners freed and together before looking at the bodies around me. Only a few of them were still capable of moving and even then it was only to crawl with their arms.
"You two can handle it from here," I say through a tired yawn before walking away to lie on a patch of grass outside the camp and take a nap.
*