By the next morning, Nathan was feeling much better. The current medicines were advanced enough to heal most of the small wounds in one night.
He still had a few larger open wounds, which he covered with bandages. Otherwise, he felt a little lethargic from the blood loss, which was impossible to recover from in one night, but it was something.
On the whole, all the cadets looked better, with only a few injuries serious enough to keep them lying down.
They had all eaten breakfast, so all they could do was sit around and talk about what they were going to do next.
Maya, who looked the best, took the lead, and began to speak.
"Our mission doesn't change, we have to get the relic and escape. We don't care about anything else"
The young woman stood in silence for a second, watching the reactions of the others, then continued.
"The special category calamity is already dead, so our mission is simplified. Now we'll just have to deal with more tribal calamities like yesterday" Maya shot a quick glance at Nathan as she said this.
The other cadets paled slightly but remained calm.
If what Syril had said was true, and there were nearly a thousand of calamities in the village, then surely there were still more than half of them left. Counting the dozens of scouts, they'd killed on the road and the many more they'd killed yesterday.
Nathan hadn't bothered to count them, but the cadets had mentioned that there were at least 60 of them.
So, at worst, they had barely killed a fraction of them. The advantage he had was that with the special category dead, their bizarre and too-smart-for-harm tactics were back to normal.
The plan was simple, approach the outskirts of the village again and eliminate as many of the calamities as possible before considering entering the village.
They also took into account the fact that the agents sent by the government had not yet encountered them. The skeleton they found in the cave might have been one of them, but they really did not know if they were out there in the swamp somewhere, or if they had died. Maybe even the skeleton had been there longer than they thought.
"Understand?" asked Maya looking at the other cadets.
"Yes!" they all answered in unison.
Then Maya looked at Nathan, who just nodded his head. The young woman understood his message and turned away without saying anything.
With that, they all left the cave a few hours later. Nathan had a sheathed sword in his hand, but he was holding a bow and had a concentrated look on his face.
Now, instead of being hunted, they would be the hunters. Nathan planned to take advantage of this opportunity and use his bow while he recovered from his wounds.
As time passed and evening approached, the party had now hunted close to a hundred calamities throughout the day. Compared to the previous days, the Calamities were much more scattered and their tactics much worse than before.
The lack of an intelligent leader had affected them, so they had little trouble dealing with them.
Nathan leaned against the trunk of a tree, pointing at a couple of Calamities who were talking to each other in a strange language he did not understand.
He waited patiently for his companions to approach the calamities as slowly and carefully as possible, and when he saw that they were ready, he released the string.
The arrow flew quickly and struck the chest of one of the calamities, wounding it and probably incapacitating it for life.
It was not an instant death, Nathan still didn't have the aim to hit it in the head or a vital spot, so he limited himself to incapacitating it.
Seeing that Nathan's attack had hit the target, the other cadets went out and began to destroy the calamities.
A few minutes later, everyone was back together again, their spirits a little better than before as they saw that everything was going well, and they were finishing off the calamities at a steady pace.
Maya looked up at the roof of branches and leaves, then at the others.
"Let's keep going for another hour, we'll be back before nightfall"
They all nodded, and Nathan had no objections to such a decision, so they continued hunting for calamities. If they continued at this rate, they would be able to infiltrate the village in a few days.
***
In a dark place and with a very unpleasant smell, a young woman with blood covering her pale face slowly opened her tired eyes and looked around in confusion.
'Where...?'
Syril realized that her wrists were bound to something, so she could only move her legs.
As he poured what little essence he had left into his eyes, the pupils changed from pale blue to grey, but the glow seemed much dimmer than usual.
Syril blinked a few times to get used to the light and looked around again.
Managing to see in the darkness, Syril realized that she seemed to be in some sort of dungeon, with the other cadets chained close to her.
There were also a number of other people chained nearby in uniforms other than the ones they were wearing.
'Government agents...'
Syril had always wondered why she had seen no sign of them, and now she realized. They had been captured too.
'Shit...'
With pain coursing through her body, Syril turned her head to the side and opened her eyes in surprise.
'No...'
Chained to the wall were a pair of arms in a uniform similar to hers, but slightly different.
They were the arms of the soldier who had accompanied her. Syril remembered how they had been ambushed, then bit her lips in frustration.
'It wasn't a special category... there were two of them'
Syril was worried, she didn't know what had happened to the other group, but she had no way of knowing. The only thing she regretted was not being able to tell them that the information they had been given was wrong.
'At least I'm still alive... and it seems to be night'
Syril stopped using the essence on her eyes and closed them as soon as everything went dark again. She didn't know what would happen from now on, but she needed to recover as much as possible and save as much essence as she could.