Chapter 184 - 175

Hunting down whoever had discarded her family's work seemed to ignite a fire beneath Rhea's feet. She urged them to keep pushing into the night, following the subtle tracks Elia had discovered. Fortunately, it hadn't rained in some time, so they never lost the trail. However, the group they were following was still ahead, which meant they had to quickly deal with any monsters that got in their way. Nick didn't mind much, as he needed new targets to test his [Emakimono]. What had initially started as carefully painted tags capable of subtle effects had developed into a real threat over time. Explosions echoed around them, and flashes of light illuminated the night as they continued marching, ignoring the screeches of the family of goblins that had stupidly chosen to ambush them in the dark. Nick could have easily crushed them with his wind magic, but instead quickly prepared a few stones with Uruz and Thurisaz burned into their surface. Technically, his new spell originated from the much more delicate Taoist school of magic, but Nick found that Elder Futhark worked just as effectively, and as long as he infused enough meaning into the carving, the results were impressive. "A bit brutal, isn't it?" Elia asked as she looked at the mangled remains of the goblins. Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight, and Nick had the distinct impression that she could see every gory detail. Shrugging, he bent down to pick up another flat stone. "Using lightning magic would have been just as violent, and it's not like tearing them apart with wind blades would have been much cleaner. At least they have a use this way." He'd quickly abandoned the tedious and much more delicate painting of parchment. Not because it didn't work, as he was sure he could produce intricate effects that his current rough style couldn't hope to replicate, but because the current test was meant to provide him with faster deployment. He didn't miss the finesse, and he was slowly realizing that while runes and glyphs helped, intent was equally, if not more, important. I almost feel like I'm missing something. I'm getting the results I want, and yet… CONGRATULATIONS! You have defeated [Grassland Goblin] x6 [Lv. 16-23] +9.200 Exp The last green hominoid was straggling to crawl away, and Nick sent a [Wind Blast] at its head to pulp it, pocketing the stone he'd been about to use. Explosion scripts work very well in crowds, but they are hard to control… This might be a consequence of using just two Norse runes. If I could remember a proper poem, I'm sure I would achieve a cleaner result, but this works. It takes just a second to prepare, which is very valuable. "How far do you think they are?" Rhea abruptly interrupted. Elia hummed, sniffing the air and immediately making a disgusted face. "Ugh, goblin guts." She swiftly moved away, covering a hundred feet in just three steps, as light as a gazelle. It was fascinating to observe all the subtle changes that had occurred after her power-up. She didn't seem to notice most of them herself, which only made Nick more certain that she had gained more than just a few fragmented memories from the previous miko. The integration was simply too smooth. There had been no testing of her limits, no adjustment period. It was as if she had been born with three tails. While some of it might be explained by being a racial trait, Nick was still keeping tabs on the changes. He had obtained proof that she wasn't possessed, but that didn't mean there couldn't be other issues. "I think they might be half a day ahead of us, but if we stop for the night now, we'll have to wait until tomorrow evening to catch up," Elia finally said. "We can keep going," Rhea immediately replied. She turned to them with blazing eyes, and Nick knew there would be no convincing her otherwise. Neither Elia nor I truly need sleep every night. She's the one who risks collapsing. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Wisely, he didn't voice his thoughts, merely nodding calmly. "I'm fine to keep going. We might get to them by dawn if we're only half a day behind." Rhea rounded on Elia, who raised her hands in mock surrender. "We'll go, no need to look at me like that." Nodding resolutely, the older girl quickly resumed her march, leaving behind the goblin corpses without even giving them a passing glance. The fact that she was ignoring possibly valuable ingredients told Nick just how rattled she was by this whole situation. After a few minutes of walking, Rhea sighed, slowing slightly. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be so wound up, but this… This is really important to me." Nick and Elia exchanged a silent look despite the relative darkness, urging each other to speak. Eventually, Nick sighed and nodded, prompting Elia to fist pump. Rhea turned to her with a quizzical look, lacking the same level of night vision or mystical senses. "What is it?" Though he felt tempted to let Elia defend herself, Nick intervened, "I understand that seeing your family's work destroyed could be frustrating, but what do you expect to find when we catch them? I doubt it is one of your family's rivals that left it behind." Something was wrong with the grassland, that much was clear. Still, he didn't believe it was the work of a noble house of artificers from Toneburg. Rhea exhaled through her nose, looking up at the clear night sky. "I just want to see who it is. It's true that my family's products were sold for cheap as a last mockery, but to throw the handle away when it could have been sold for several silvers… It reeks of someone with a grudge. Maybe it's just an idiot who couldn't see what he had and threw a broken dagger away, but something tells me it was deliberate." A moment of silence fell as the three considered the implications. What could they even do if they found someone who harbored such resentment towards Rhea's family that they would go to the trouble of burying their work in the middle of nowhere? Nick could picture Rhea confronting a faceless man, asking about the dagger, only to have him laugh at her. It wasn't a crime. It was an insult, true, but her family was done. It had been exiled from its city, its members scattered to the winds. There was no authority to protect her if she acted aggressively, and while this was the grassland and they were far from her family's enemies, Nick knew that she had been sent to Floria to avoid this kind of situation. "Do you think Ogden will be ok with this?" He asked eventually. He wasn't one to throw stones, given his penchant for aggressive actions, but Rhea was much weaker than he was. She relied on the alchemist's protection against anyone wanting to finish her family's eradication. He watched her lips purse, and he knew she hadn't thought about that. Eventually, she shook her head, "he'd probably tell me I'm doing something stupid, but he wouldn't stop me. The man is all about letting me figure out things on my own. Gods, he just dumped the theory of transmutation on my lap after giving me a demonstration and told me to master it! He wouldn't like it, but he'd let me do this." That sounded like the old man. Nick appreciated his laissez-faire attitude, especially when he'd first started and needed an easy source of potentially dangerous magical ingredients. However, now that he was a bit more secure, he wondered what that meant. Did Ogden just not care? Noticing that Elia had suddenly gone quiet, Nick decided it was a good time to ask something that had been bothering him for a while. "Why is every beastman so high-strung about him anyway? No one else in town seems to think of him as anything but an eccentric old man, and while I've seen him do some very advanced stuff, I never got the feeling that he was a danger." The hair on Elia's back raised, and she bit her lips, twisting her hands. It was evident she didn't want to answer, and eventually, Rhea let out a long sigh. "Ogden is a lot more dangerous than people give him credit for." Nick turned to her, silently urging her to elaborate. The Philosopher's Stone fiasco alone was enough for him to know that much, but the fear the beastmen seemed to have was deeper and more instinctive. Content sourced from MV4LEMPYR – My Virtual Library Empire. "He never really talks about his past," Rhea began, sounding more relaxed now that she wasn't being asked about family matters, "But I've put together a few things." "I don't know if we should be talking about private stuff like that," Elia interjected, "We're getting close to the end of the trail anyway. Just a few more hours and we'll have caught up." Nick gave her an unimpressed look, and she wilted. Now even more curious than before, he swung back to Rhea, who huffed. "Tell us when we're half an hour away. I'll drink a stamina potion—we have enough for all of us if you guys want them too." Nick shook his head, and Elia kept quiet, so she continued. "As I was saying, he's very private about his personal life, but living with him for years, I caught on to a few things. For example, he's always awake before dawn and never goes to sleep before me. He can smell ingredients a mile away, and while he probably has forgotten more about alchemy than I will ever know, he does most of the complex stuff by instinct. It's like he knows what's going to happen before it does, and I'm not talking about simple reactions. Even when we find new ingredients or unknown potions, he takes a look at them and gets the gist of it." "Is he really half-kobold?" Nick asked, almost bursting with curiosity. He knew that no one seemed to believe the claim, and he himself had initially dismissed it, but there was something about Ogden that made him think it might not be too far from the truth. "That's enough," Elia stated softly, her voice echoing. Her eyes were shining, and she was clearly serious this time. "We will not break the oath of silence." "What?" Rhea asked. "What?" Nick echoed. As if that would make him any less curious. An oath of silence… That means there's something he's hiding. It's probably something that happened a long time ago; otherwise, more people would know. Elia looked at Rhea in surprise, as if her confusion made no sense. "Do you really not know?" "Know what?" Shaking her head, Elia looked ahead. "No, I suppose it doesn't matter. We really shouldn't be talking about this. No matter what you think you figured out, there is a reason why Ogden has kept a low profile. Respect that, at the very least." Rhea looked taken aback, clearly unprepared for such a direct reprimand, while Nick felt that he was missing an important piece of the puzzle. It was evident that Ogden was hiding a major secret, and an agreement was in place to keep it concealed. But why would the beastmen act so cautiously around him if they had such a bond? He cannot be their secret leader. He would have been involved in the planning of the rebellion. Unfortunately, it seemed he wouldn't get anything else, as Elia had returned to staring straight ahead and Rhea was fiddling with the dagger. They pressed on like this for several hours until dawn broke, with Nick occasionally dispatching any monster that ventured too close, while an uncomfortable silence hung between them. "We're close," Elia suddenly announced, catching Nick off guard. He turned to her and noticed she was sniffing the air, her nose scrunching up. "Yeah, they must not be far. They probably fought against a monster in this area, but I can tell they kept going." Watching Rhea down a stamina potion, Nick scoured their surroundings. They were still too far for [Wind God's Third Eye] to detect their target, but he could sense signs of recent passage. To his surprise, the remains of a creature rested a few hundred feet to their right, and he started making his way over. There, he found glassy eyes staring at him from the face of what resembled a hyena. However, its body was larger and clearly bipedal. A gnoll. Damn, we need to hurry before its pack finds them first.