“Hey Xaden, do you really think it’s even out here? Maybe the bounty monster just left for the swamplands or something.”
“No way, Togi! Boss is never wrong! He said he smelled it! It’s out here, we just have to keep looking!”
Two voices chat back and forth, with slow and almost goofy-sounding mannerisms. But a rougher and more focused voice cuts through their lazy words.
“Shut up. I can hear you. We’re certainly not going to find it with you two making all this noise…”
This, and four sets of footsteps coming toward us, is what I hear.
Ava has sensed them for quite a while but didn’t think they were a threat, sending me a telepathic message now once she sees my eyes perk up.
“Three 3rd Class Lords, and one 5th Class. Nothing special, but I guess they are the first intelligent life we’ve found out here.”
“Right, maybe they know how far away the safe zone is.”
We walk forward in silence as the party of adventurers appears in my vision through the thick trees about half a minute later.
Three pairs of three crowns hovering above heads hit my vision first.
Two of the Lords have one of their crowns full, while the taller and larger one behind them has two out of three in bright white.
Without even making out their races, I can tell that the one in the back has had a physical ranked-up transformation like Ava, meaning it’s most likely over level 10,000. It even has a True Core in its chest, while the other two do not.
The corners of my lips curl up once they notice we’re here too, and their leader yells out in a loud and commanding voice.
“This is the Eden Forest! You’re trespassing on my hunting ground. Kneel or die!”
I roll my eyes and keep walking forward at a steady pace, getting a good view of what this hunting party really looks like.
They’re wolfmen.
Extremely strong and vicious-looking, actually.
I’ve fought some werewolf creatures as mutants from wolf dungeons in the past, but the sight before me makes things look so real…
They have the heads of wolves, with sharp eyes, white teeth, pointed ears, and grey-silver fur, yet their bodies are muscular like a hairy berserker.
The two smaller wolfmen that clearly follow their leader are about four meters tall—one holds a spear, and the other a massive heavy axe.
Their leader stands over seven meters tall, close to Ava’s height, and has half a dozen long black blades strapped all over his body. His left eye is cut out, with an old white ether wound glowing in its place.
All of them have lightweight dark black armor covering their vitals, though their boss doesn’t draw his weapon.
He stands confidently with his arms crossed and yells out again once he sees we aren’t stopping.
“Come on, we have three 3rd Class, and you have one. Making things difficult here is only going to end badly for you. Empty your storage systems of their loot and kneel to say you’re sorry, and I’ll let you pass to the safezone…”
He shows more of his sharp white teeth, but neither of us budges again.
Though, my eyebrow does raise once I see what the fourth member of their crew looks like.
It’s a 5th Class Lord, with five bright white full crowns above its head.
When I look their way, we’re at eye level, as this adventurer seems to be human and slightly shorter than me.
However, I’m having trouble believing it’s really a human. With white eyes, pale skin, and white hair that is cut short at its shoulders—this is certainly not the features of any normal human I’ve come across lately.
Its thin and frail stature, slightly covered up with standard green basic-grade armor, does not accentuate any muscle mass or show any curves for me to even make any assumptions about its gender.
The being’s facial features look feminine, but at the same time, this could just be a young boy.
It gives me a docile glance, but I feel much more wisdom behind its eyes than it’s showing on the surface.
We both look away from each other, and my focus shifts back onto the wolfman yelling orders at us.
Ava and I come to a halt about forty meters in front of the group, beneath the cover of large trees on all our sides, but with nothing in between us but a few boulders and small shrubs. It’s basically an open clearing compared to the dense forest terrain we’ve been moving through for almost an hour.
“No way! We were dropped here from the outside a few hours ago without an explanation or any direction. It’s not like we wandered into your forest on purpose. We’re off to the nearest safe zone—either tell me where it’s at, or get out of my way before you regret it,” Ava replies, matching the arrogant wolf’s tone with a grin.
I can hear the wolfman’s teeth grinding as he points forward. If there wasn’t fur covering his face, it’d be red as he yells.
“Kill her, boys! I gave you a chance, but you do not know how to respect the king of these woods!”
I let out a sigh as Xaden, the spear wielder, and Togi, the axe carrying tank, charge forward with obedience in their eyes and nothing else. I confirm that the slow, goofy-sounding voices I heard before must have been them.
Ava runs forward, reaching her hand into her ether storage, and pulls out the dead soul weapon of the first troll I killed.
She uses one of the fake prebuilt pairing commands I made in her avatar casing, but in reality, she’s just pushing small amounts of her real ether into the black blade.
In the troll’s grasp, it was a sword, but in Ava’s, it’s a small dagger that glows a dim white. Though, it’s more than enough to do what she wants.
Two clashes echo through the woods, blocking and deflecting both the spear and axe’s incoming attacks pointed at her vitals.
I cross my arms, mimicking the boss wolfman behind them, amused that Ava just wants to toy with them.
The sound of her knife clanging against the axe and the spear rings over and over as the three of them brawl in the center of the clearing.
Every time the two wolfmen think they’re about to finish the fight once and for all, Ava spins out of the way or perfectly deflects what looks like a near-death shot.
This, compounded with the fact that I’m mocking him with an identical stance, makes the already mad Boss lose it.
“You think you can survive this? I already told you, I run these woods! Your 3rd Class Lord is barely keeping up with my men, and you think you can best me?”
A laugh comes out of his mouth next.
“You know what, I’m getting impatient. I’ll target your weakness and get this over with now! You can’t protect your human and keep fighting at the same time, can you?”
He pulls a black blade from his waist and turns his gaze to meet mine, then follows this line of sight with the tip of his sword.
Ava doesn’t even flinch at the fact that he’s threatening to take out her unguarded 5th Class travel partner, and this makes him even angrier.
Mana and divine threads start to cycle through his body while he charges up some kind of buff, but I keep my arms crossed and eyes on the fight between Ava and the wolfmen, looking uninterested in his threat as well.
The Boss loses any composure he still had and runs forward at me, yelling.
“New Lords never give me the respect I deserve! I’m the King of Eden Forest!”
His strides are quite fast, and his sword strike is precise.
My guess that he was over level 10,000 is certainly correct. A 5th Class Lord like myself should never stand a chance against a True Core triple-ranked-up 3rd Class Lord like this, so I have to get creative.
I decide to turn toward his sword coming down on me with just milliseconds left before it would come down on my forehead and slice a weak human lord in half.
So, I twist my body to the side and avoid the attack entirely—faster than the wolfman can see.
Though, instead of making it look like I’ve made a perfect dodge, I leave a bit of mana infused with divine threads behind and wrap it in a small veil of light magic.
What the wolfman feels and sees as he follows through with his strike is me narrowly dodging and losing my left arm.
I spread a veil of light magic over my real left arm as well, creating the illusion that it’s gone.
I do not imbue any ether into the movements, as the only ones I’m trying to fool here are the Lords around me. I’m certain the ether commands in the surrounding woods can easily see through this facade, but it needs to be believable that a 5th Class Lord could pull this off.
While having two combat magic elemental skills awakened is rare, it is still a plausible awakening for a human.
Internally, I grin, but outside, I put on the act of being in pain while stepping back from the wolfman, who lets out an even louder laugh than any of his others.
“Not bad for a human, you actually survived a single hit.”
His teeth grind with delight while peering over to Ava as she play-fights with his underlings.
“Looks like your protector can’t do a thing about it either. She doesn’t even care that you’re about to die!”
He raises his pointed snout to the sky and laughs, coming my way and lunging forward again.
I’d planned to draw this out even longer for my entertainment, but I feel the sharp gaze that was following me earlier return.
It isn’t just watching this time—it’s moving forward extremely fast and right at my back…
My heart jumps with even more excitement once it comes within my aura and I can actually get a good view of the black-scaled serpent with two bright white crowns floating above its head. It’s slithering through the tops of the trees with an open mouth and a bright red tongue waving back and forth, ready to have a meal.
With this creature coming toward my back and the wolfman’s blade plunging toward my chest, I decide to let nature finish this battle for me instead of staging my own far more statistically unlikely victory as a 5th Class Lord in disguise.
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