Chapter 469

Despite witnessing the brutal execution of their leaders, the eight surviving mercenaries did not break and run. They knew that fleeing from a powerful mage was a death sentence, so they chose to make their final stand.In a way, Nick could respect it. He would have preferred not to have to massacre them at all, but that had gone out the window the moment the attack started without a single word being exchanged.

“Up and at them, boys! Lock the circle!" a spearman bellowed, taking command.

The men slammed their shields together, forming an interlocking ring of steel. They braced their boots in the freezing mud, spears jutting like the quills of a cornered beast. Their auras, though individually unremarkable, synchronized into a humming barrier that felt far more resilient.

Still, they hadn’t learned anything if they thought he would allow them to dictate the pace.

"Break their footing," Nick ordered calmly, stepping aside to open a firing lane.

Rhea was already moving. Purple powder erupted from her sleeves, billowing into a cloud.

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen as the compound failed to penetrate the defensive skill, but then she threw a glass sphere into it, which shattered directly above the shield ring's center.

Suddenly, the mist rained down as droplets and began to eat away at the barrier. The construct flickered and groaned despite the men’s best efforts to reinforce it.

Not waiting for the skill to fail, Gaelen blurred forward and hurled two daggers with pinpoint accuracy, aiming at the narrow slits of the mercenaries' visors. The moment the weapons reached the barrier, they vanished in a burst of shadows, only to reappear behind it.

One blade found its mark, sinking into an eye socket. The soldier crumpled, and the shield wall faltered.

Nick suppressed a snort at Rhea’s annoyed expression. He was sure she’d have complained to her brother about wasting her potions if they hadn’t been in the middle of a fight to the death.

Since there was no need to prolong this any longer, he summoned wind pressure directly at the center of the faltering formation, creating a violent pull. The mercenaries were jerked forward, their armor betraying them as they stumbled off balance.

Gaelen capitalized instantly. His cursed blade flashed, and a dark crescent sheared through exposed necks and unarmored joints. He kept jumping all over the place, relying on Nick’s wind manipulation to deflect the desperate thrusts of the dying men. Within thirty seconds, the last spearman fell, his throat opened in a final smile.

Nick sighed, but he hadn’t put much effort into that either. The entire ambush hadn’t lasted more than five minutes, and when your opponents were strong, you couldn’t easily offer mercy without risking taking damage yourself.

Then there was the fact that Gaelen’s emotional range was quite unstable whenever he wielded his cursed blade. Holding back wasn’t really possible for him, yet Nick couldn’t quite summon the will to tell him to stop using it.

A look at the shorn armor was all he needed to stay silent. It was enchanted steel, and the dagger had cut through it like tissue paper. For the moment, its usefulness outweighed its dangers.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have participated in the defeat of x12

You have participated in the defeat of Jamil,

You have defeated Tarrik,

+425,200 Exp

Nick could feel the threshold of level ninety looming just out of reach, as an anticipatory pressure built within his soul. He was close, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Once, such a fight would have earned him several levels, and now he was reduced to biding his time, waiting for the next chance to gain a single level.

Gaelen wiped his cursed blade on a fallen tabard, then slammed it back into its scabbard. He hissed through his teeth, dropping to one knee as the dark steel exacted its toll. Thick, black veins pulsed angrily up his forearm as the corruption devoured his vitality.

Rhea was beside him immediately. She uncorked a vial of soothing, mint-scented salve and applied it generously to the corrupted flesh, muttering a quiet incantation to speed the alchemical healing. The dark veins slowed, then began to recede.

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Standing amidst the bodies, Nick looked at their dead horses and saw that the javelins had ruined the saddles and crushed their travel packs. Fortunately, they all kept the important stuff in their spatial artifacts, but it was still annoying.

“Let’s salvage whatever provisions we can," he instructed, keeping his voice steady despite the sadness over the poor animals’ fate. "We should also strip the commanders of anything identifiable. We are on foot from here, and whoever sent this group will eventually realize they never reported back.”

For a moment, he considered flying up to look for the camp these people had come from, but two things stopped him. First, the mercenaries were all high enough level to cover dozens of miles in their patrols, and it might take him hours to find it. Second, he really didn’t like how they’d gone for the kill without asking questions. The sooner they reached Toneburg and got some answers, the better.

"They were tough bastards," Gaelen grunted, accepting a water skin from his sister and getting back to his feet. "If they had caught us by surprise, that first attack would have been a problem.”

"Which is why we should always keep our senses peeled," Nick replied with a shrug. Gaelen was better than he at tracking the traditional way, but as this episode had shown, his own sensory abilities were very useful. If one of those javelins had struck him directly, he would have been grievously injured, and the battle would have been much harder.

They gathered the unspoiled cured meats and travel bread, stowing the supplies in Nick’s spatial ring. Leaving the ruined gorge behind, they trekked through the freezing mud and up the rising elevation for another two hours until they reached the coordinates on One-Ear’s map.

The entrance to the smuggler's pass was hard to find, even when one knew where it should be, which explained how it had gone unnoticed by the regular patrols. But Nick thought the mercenaries had at least an inkling of its existence, given their position.

It turned out to be a narrow tear in the mountain range, barely wide enough for a man to pass through, and entirely invisible from the outside, as another rock covered its entrance. The wind howled through the narrow corridor, producing a low, mournful whistle that echoed off the high stone walls. The path was steep, treacherous, and blanketed in thick snow.

All in all, it was easy to see why it had gone unnoticed.

They moved through it with even greater care, eyeing the walls around them with caution. An attack from there would be difficult to coordinate, but they would be sitting ducks, especially if the enemy had a mage to counter Nick’s flight.

After a few hours, Gaelen stopped and knelt, brushing away a layer of fresh powder to reveal deep depressions in the frost.

"Rock Trolls," he said with a displeased expression, scanning the steep cliffs above them. "This pass must be their hunting ground, which would explain why it is so desolate.”

"Trolls have absurd regeneration," Rhea noted, swapping several vials from her belt for new ones from her spatial pouch. "If you don't destroy the heart or the brain in a single strike, their flesh knits back together in seconds. If we find any, we should try to kill them on the spot. Their bodies make wonderful potion ingredients, but it’s not worth the effort.”

Nick nodded slowly. He’d encountered several of their kind, though never Rock Trolls, and given their luck so far, he suspected he’d get more subjects for his experimental magics sooner rather than later.

They followed the path for a while longer until it stepped into the mountain's shadows, beginning a long climb.

Even with the aid of an enhanced physique and warming charms, the journey through the pass was a grueling test of endurance. The incline was unforgiving, the air grew thinner with each hour, and the biting cold sought to seep into their bones. Nick expanded his magic to keep frostbite at bay, but the environment’s sheer hostility demanded constant upkeep.

That night, they huddled together, kept from freezing only because Nick could warm the air with his fire affinity, which meant he couldn’t go to sleep.

Not that he would have, considering how tense he was getting with each hour that passed without anything happening.

On the afternoon of their second day in the pass, the wait ended as the predators struck.

He sensed their approach from a distance, but it was only because he was looking that he noticed the thinnest concentration of hunger and killing intent. Focusing on those presences, he managed to make out several trolls stalking the pass, moving like ghosts, with nary a whisper in the ether to mark their passage.

It wasn’t long before three towering figures dropped from the camouflaged ledges above, cracking the icy path. The Rock Trolls were terrifying brutes, standing nine feet tall, their thick hides composed of dense, hardened cartilage that looked like gray stone. They wielded crude clubs, and their small, black eyes burned with primal hunger.

As planned, Gaelen and Rhea immediately fell back, securing the flanks and drawing their weapons.

A troll roared as it charged, swinging its colossal club in a downward blow meant to crush Nick into the snow. Low cunning gleamed in its eyes, and given how close it was, Nick could tell the monster knew how dangerous magic could be, which meant it had killed more than one group containing casters.

With much greater ease now that he had practiced the spell, he drew threads of fire and water, feeding them into a matrix, using his untainted mana as the fulcrum. He then commanded them to orbit, balancing the concepts of consumption and quenching, and the ring of steam stabilized.

By then, the troll was upon him, and Nick snapped the fulcrum, channeling the released energy forward, doing his best to keep it contained without adding a third elemental component he wasn’t sure he could manage.

A beam of superheated vapor lashed out, thinner than a blade of grass yet carrying the heat of a furnace. It sliced cleanly through the descending club, bisecting the thick wood without slowing, then struck the troll’s chest, instantly vaporizing the stone-like hide, the ribcage, and the heart.

The intense heat perfectly cauterized the wound, leaving a wide, glowing hole that completely bypassed the creature's regeneration.

The beast stood frozen for a heartbeat before toppling backward, dead.

The remaining two trolls hesitated, primal instincts warring with hunger as they registered their packmate's inexplicable death.

“Nice shot," Gaelen muttered in appreciation.

Nick repeated the process, anchoring another fulcrum. This time, he blended wind and kinetic force, creating a spiraling vacuum that sheared the head off the second troll with a deafening crack of displaced air. Rhea dispatched the final beast, burying an alchemical dart into its roaring mouth, blowing its skull apart from the inside.

CONGRATULATIONS!

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+127,500 Exp

The minor influx of experience brought Nick another step closer to the threshold. The spells were demanding, severely taxing his mental stamina, yet their efficiency was undeniable. He was forging a new tier of combat magic, preparing himself for the inevitable clash with Ultimer’s forces, and he had to seize every chance to develop it further.

Still, he’d expected more from the trolls, given how tense Gaelen had been.

His emotions must have shown on his face, because the older man shook his head. “These had to be runts. The traces I found were from a group of at least a dozen. Don’t lower your guard now.”

Nick grunted.