Johanna undressed her clothes and slowly walked into the river since she wanted to relax after using all her magical power to heal up the mentor of the teenagers. Once the mentor also got in the river and sat down, Johanna asked her for her name.
"My name is Leony; may I ask for your name?"
"Im Johanna, so did you become the mentor of these kids?"
"That's a long and unbelievable story, but I will explain it to you. I grew up in a small, unimportant village not far from the royal capital. I was supposed to inherit the farm from my parents together with my older brother; I should sell the crops at the market while he did the farming, but due to our unfortune, the house caught on fire, and since our well was running low on water from a drought, the whole thing burned down, including our fields and everything. So we had to move into the village, and we were given refuge by a family friend who had some connections to nobles. Since my father couldn't find a job and the family friend couldn't feed us and give us refuge through the whole winter without receiving anything in return, we had to offer him something. The original plan would have been to send my father to one of the nobles he had connections with to serve in his army, but my father and brother both received some serious burn wounds from the fire and were unable to really work. Since my father didn't want neither my mother nor me to work as prostitutes, we had to find another way to earn money, so they sent me instead of my dad to the noble. I willingly agreed to it so that I could help out my family, so I began my training in the army, and I guess because I had some serious talent with the sword, I climbed through the army ranks, and since I wasn't an incompetent leader, I was promoted until I became his castle guard captain. At that point, I was just 20 years old, so that was still 16 years ago, and my family, with my financial support, is living in the town now without any more problems. But let's get back to the story. The Lord at some point had his first son, who, as you might know, is the black-haired swordsman in the group you saved, and the Lord appointed me as the swordsman guard and sword teacher. I quickly realised how arrogant and foolish he was getting. I hope this experience has taught him at least something. Anyway, I taught him swordsmanship and watched him grow up, but at some point he had the absolutely brilliant idea to become an adventurer and let his life as a noble be behind him. At the beginning, I thought I could finally return to the army or the guards, but it turns out that even though his father acted furious, he still cared for his son, so I had to follow him into the job of an adventurer. He thinks I quit my work for his father and wanted to follow him into the battle, but he doesn't need to know that I was protecting him under his father's command. After that, he started an adventurer's party where he recruited other children from the lower nobility who had no real future as nobles and recruited the archer girl, who was a homeless girl they picked up from the street. I taught them how to hunt down monsters and tried to teach them the basics with easy monsters first. I still knew all the tactics from the army, but he decided it would be better to start with stronger monsters since they could learn faster that way. I tried to stop him, but you know it was still my order to protect him, so I did. I followed them into this forest, and we got attacked after travelling through it for a few days after finding nothing, so I got them to rescue themselves and stayed behind, and the rest is history."
Johanna listened closely to her story and could now fill in gaps, like how the swordsman was even able to become the leader of this group, which had way more potential under it if it had the right leadership. After that, Johanna washed herself off and dried herself off after stepping out of the river. Leony said that she would stay a bit longer to calm down even more before starting the long walk through the whole forest. But Johanna knew that they wouldn't make it back in time if they were to walk through the whole forest, since if she estimated right, it would take them at least ten hours to get back to Johanna's house, and simply speaking, she also didn't have the willpower to do that now, so she slowly started transforming into a griffon in front of Leony's eyes as she saw that she let out a high-pitched scream, which made Johanna turn around once she was done transforming.
"Don't worry, it's me. Did you really think I was a regular human after seeing the destruction I had caused? I will sleep here until you are done, and if you are finished, just wake me up, and we can fly back to my house. But you have to keep this ability a secret, okay?"
"Ok"