Chapter 415: On-The-Job Training
The giantess named Hartl stared out at the squat stone house that seemed utterly out of place existing on a mountaintop.
There was a mass of mana in there, something strong enough to produce a black aura that it had been hard to spot with the perpetual gloom of the sky. Her men hadn’t wanted to approach, but there was no place else the little wretches that got her eye could be.
At least, not if Plick, her scout, wasn’t lying his ass off about the tracks leading here. But she’d sent him and another around to look for other tracks, and both scouts agreed that there was no sign of the three.
A frustrated growl escaped her lips as she stuck a hand into the black mass of mana, only to shiver as it sent a wormy, tingling sensation into her arm.
The man she’d tried to send in was faring worse, having puked his guts out over the ridge.
All they had to do was get their hands on the angel, and then they could find a buyer in Aaru. But whatever their quarry had found was keeping her group of slavers at bay. Altogether they numbered thirty, having lost one man to the climb.
Her second, Telfair, a bullkin who had stalled halfway on his evolution into a full minotaur, huffed out a few words as he looked at her.
"No windows. Just a chimney. Think if we plug the holes we can smoke them out?"
"I want to confirm they’re in there first. Whatever this shit is, it’ll leave us vulnerable if we try to pass through. Maybe that’s why they haven’t come out either." Hartl picked up a rock and crushed it in one hand.
It wasn’t like they had any place to go. The "house" was set up near an escarpment on its east side, while the north side narrowed to a nigh-impassable rise. And of course, she’d sent a few men to the western slope, seeing if they could move underneath the flame-shaped envelope of perpetual mana.
"Looks like we might not have to," Telfair suddenly noted.