Chapter 186: A Challenging Summer
Monsters everywhere. Not a day passing where the knights and apprentices didn’t face them.
Their summer felt like one of survival. It wasn’t meant to actually be the reason they went through the duchy, but it quickly became that.
The idea that they would pleasantly travel and be able to find traces of the Duchess was only in the backs of their minds. Only when they subdued the monsters did they tiredly see if anyone had seen her travel through.
Considering her unusual appearance, she wasn’t someone who went unnoticed for very long.
Even though there were a few monsters through each day, the travelers felt strangely luck that it hadn’t escalated to what they saw in the village northwest of the Duke’s Tower or at the full expanse of what they dealt with when Samson died.
They even went to check on his village and were pleased to see strong evidence of rebuild after such an awful even.
Their trail led them first southeast then along the outer edge of the duchy. They occasionally brought their trail inward if there were known villages or townships further into the duchy. When their direction turned to the north, they found themselves near Earl Auden’s lands which didn’t need protection so they left it to his knights—they were already plenty busy with the monsters they were dealing with.
This then took them west after two months and they found a couple more small villages with monsters in between.
By that point, the sight hardly affected them. Rather than looking to the knights for instruction, the apprentices merely pulled out their weapons and braced themselves. They would get rid of their horses and face the goblins on foot.