Chapter 130: The Battlefield
Wouldn't that mean they could reach the Golden Apple already?
Xiaoshuang, I'm starting to wonder if Professor Damire's group simply wandered into the half-plane where the temple sits. They were headed southwest of the Sacred Lake of Life — could that be where the entrance to the half-plane lies?
Mm. That actually makes sense, lich. Could they have gotten the Golden Apple already?
No need to worry about that. A god is a god, fallen or not.
The two of them carried on their exchange silently through the mental link, while Jessica and Amos traded stories about their respective customs aloud. Jessica had grown genuinely curious about beastman traditions, and though the two cultures differed sharply, she was finding that theirs stood no lower in sophistication than anything back in Tyrenese.
They pushed on toward the southwest, leaving the Sacred Lake of Life behind, though not by much — barely two miles out, they came upon a shallow stream feeding into the lake, no more than a cubit or two wide, easily crossed with a single long stride. The dry season had thinned it down to little more than a trickle across an exposed streambed.
They followed the stream upward and soon found signs of passage — not old, by the look of them. Then the ground ahead turned to chaos: broken staffs, shattered weapons, bloodstains scattered across the earth, though no bodies anywhere. Whether they'd been carried off or dragged away by scavengers in the days since, Evan couldn't say — though he leaned toward the former.
Evan raised a hand, signaling the group, and they split into pairs to search the surrounding area. He didn't move, and neither did Amos — the shaman had no stake in whoever had died here, and if anything, some quiet part of him likely hoped they had. Evan narrowed his eyes and drew on his particular gift, using scent to try tracing what had happened that day.
He let the sense stretch outward, but three days had already passed, and even his heightened senses couldn't reconstruct a clear picture from what remained. In short — nothing useful came of it.
Not entirely nothing, though. A faint, unpleasant smell reached him, and something flickered at the edge of his awareness. He drifted slowly off to one side, Xiaoshuang lifting into the air alongside him, and followed the scent leftward, further and further, until he'd covered more than a hundred cubits and came to a stop.
The smell came from above. He looked up to find an owl's corpse wedged between two branches, an arrow buried in its body. He rose into the air — three days in a tropical rainforest had already left the carcass badly decayed — and left the body undisturbed, focusing instead on the arrow itself. Finely made, the arrowhead driven clean through the bird's body, gleaming faintly, etched with a sigil traced in mithril. A Bane Arrow — no ordinary shaft could bring down a trained magical messenger bird so easily.
Jessica and Emma arrived, spotted Evan hovering in the air, and rose to join him. Seeing what he'd found, understanding settled over them at once — that explained why, of the many owls sent out, only one had made it through.
Evan reached out, and the arrow drifted free into his hand. "A Bane Arrow. So they were ambushed. By whom, I wonder?"
Emma studied the arrow closely, then took it from him, examining it with her own senses for a good while before speaking. "This isn't our academy's craftsmanship. There's impurity in the mithril, and the shaft isn't cedar — the fletching comes from some kind of magical fowl we don't have back in Norse. This should be from eastern Tyrenese. And the arrowhead's refined steel carries a fair amount of sulfur — eastern iron ore tends to run high in sulfur content. Taking it all together, I'd say this Bane Arrow comes from the eastern regions of Tyrenese."
"Let's discuss this on the ground. Miss Emma, you're certain this came from eastern Tyrenese?" Evan asked once they'd all landed. He found himself genuinely impressed — he'd known Emma worked in the school's Magic Items Management Department, essentially the general logistics office, but he hadn't realized her expertise ran this deep, that she could size up an object at a glance and place its origin with such confidence. Hollingburton's reputation, it seemed, was well earned — every member of its staff carried some hidden depth of skill.
"Professor Wang, I won't claim expertise in much, but when it comes to magical items, I trust my own judgment completely," Emma said, arching an eyebrow with confidence.
Amos hadn't moved through any of this. He'd only agreed to guide them here — whatever happened beyond that wasn't his concern. But events rarely stayed that predictable. Two beastman warriors came stumbling out of the trees, drenched in blood, and the moment they spotted the group, their eyes flooded red. One let out a roar and drove his spear straight at Duva. Duva had been paired with Barbara, searching the area, and neither had thought much of the two beastmen approaching — Amos's presence had lulled them into assuming friendly intent. The attack caught Duva off guard, no time to chant a spell — he was only fourth tier, nowhere near fast enough to cast instantly. In the same instant, red light flared around Barbara — she'd triggered a magical item, a bracelet that formed a half-dome shield the moment she poured mental power into it, enclosing both of them.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from NovelFire. Please report it.
The spear struck home, red light flaring as the shield's force field caught the tip cold. By then Duva had recovered enough to level his own wand, chanting an incantation.
Amos spotted the commotion and shouted, "Stop!" raising his bone staff and rushing through an incantation of his own. A beam of pale white light shot out.
Evan saw it happening, and Jessica and Emma spotted it as well, all three rushing toward the clash.
Duva's spell finished just as the pale light arrived — an earth spike burst up from the ground, but the beam ignored it entirely, sweeping the attacking beastman off his feet instead, and the spike thrust into empty air where the man had stood a moment before.
"What's going on?" Evan asked, arriving on the scene.
"Professor, they attacked us without any warning," Duva said.
The other beastman bowed deeply. "Noble shaman, we meant no offense. Our village has come under attack. My companion saw that some of your group's clothing resembled two of the attackers, and lost himself in the moment — that's why he struck at you."
Jessica recognized him at once. "You're the one we treated — the wounded one. Why have you come back?"
"Noble shaman, I'm the one who offended you and was then healed by your hand. Our village is in crisis, and we've come to bring our shaman home. We meant no offense to any of you," he said. Evan noted, with some appreciation, that the man spoke clearly and in good order, unlike the sense.
The other beastman couldn't manage the same composure, his words a tangled rush. Amos had already caught him and was pressing for details, and though the man's account came out fast and disordered, Evan pieced it together well enough — their village had been attacked and burned, casualties heavy, and the survivors were retreating deeper into the jungle. The two men had been sent by their chief to bring their shaman home.
Amos couldn't hold himself back any longer, forgetting entirely that he was, in fact, still their captive. He let out a furious roar and bolted without another word to Evan or the others. The beastman who'd been speaking with them looked embarrassed, offered an apologetic glance, gave a quick nod, and hurried after him.
"You're just letting him go?" Emma asked.
"Better to. His mind won't rest otherwise, and he might cause trouble if we don't. Besides, we've already found our first real lead here — time to keep following it," Evan said mildly, watching them disappear into the trees.
He kept one thought to himself: who exactly had attacked this native village? Was there any connection to whoever had struck Professor Damire's expedition days earlier — or was this simply a slaving raid? Slavery had existed in this world for as long as anyone could remember, mostly confined to trade between humans. But decades ago, the discovery of a new continent had changed things — colonists sailing west from Tyrenese, across the vast expanse of the Setting Sun Ocean, had reached the continent of Eyan, which people on the Xia continent apparently called Fusang. This world had already confirmed that the land beneath their feet formed a single sphere.
As demand for labor grew, some had begun eyeing the Barbarian Continent as a source, though the beastman empire here, ancient as it was, still held real strength and wasn't a people to be trifled with lightly. Slave trading had only ever surfaced sporadically, in a handful of remote corners, often through corrupt local officials colluding with traffickers — and mages were hardly above getting drawn into it either.
Not every mage deserved the lofty reputation people assumed. Beyond those trained through the proper academies, this world had its share of self-taught mages and those raised through master-apprentice traditions, and even among academy graduates, plenty ended up scraping by far below what their training should have earned them — much like the nobility, where some fallen houses lived worse than common merchants.
"Following the vine to find the melon," Jessica said. "That's a vivid way to put it." She meant it purely as a compliment on his phrasing, nothing more, and Evan had grown used to hearing it by now.
The students trickled back one by one. Jaymes and Peter had turned up something significant — broken branches and footprints scattered across a wide stretch, suggesting a breakout in that direction.
Evan led the group along the trail Jaymes and Peter had marked, and after what might have been the span of a meal, he realized they'd actually circled back, curving toward the Sacred Lake of Life again — though the trees grew thicker here, and the ground seemed to dip downward, not so much sloping as settling into a shallow depression, modest in size.
They came to the edge of a low rise — invisible from the lake, but from here it revealed itself as a hidden basin. On the northern edge of the basin, the footprints simply vanished. Evan raised a hand to halt the group. The rise was thick with growth, though the trees and vines here twisted in strange, unnatural shapes. Something about it struck Evan as familiar. Xiaoshuang, still airborne, suddenly darted straight toward the center of it — a flash of green light, and she vanished entirely.
In the instant she disappeared, a door of green light opened where she'd been, and the trees and vines around it shifted, folding together to form a second doorway that merged seamlessly with the light. Beyond it lay a landscape of green hills and clear water.