They should have realized it sooner, really. The mist they had all looked at the previous evening had obviously been thicker than usual, but in their defence, the Ronaheim forest had always been misty. Now, it seemed like that mist had never been natural in the first place…

  Entering the forest was a risky choice with their new knowledge, but Pieter was the leader, so the expedition obeyed his order to continue their mission regardless. It was by no means an unanimous choice, as Valar heard many adventurers grumbling about the decision, but no one mutinied or escaped. They had joined the expedition, and so they would also finish it, damn the consequences.

  Valar had never entered the Ronaheim forest. Sure, he had crossed it through the trade road between Lyndale and the capital, but he had never actually entered the forest. That was made abundantly clear very very quickly.

  “I can’t see shit!” Arthur groaned. “How are we even supposed to defend ourselves here?”

  “Keep your senses sharp,” Rodrick said. “If we get attacked, Joanna will disperse the mist immediately.”

  As it had turned out, the enemy mage was a silver ranker after all. Joanna, their resident wind mage, had experienced that firsthand when she had attempted to disperse the mist for longer than half a minute. It had not worked well.

  The mist had returned with renewed ferocity, and after that it felt much more controlled. Wherever they went, the thick mist followed and their visibility was essentially reduced to zero.

  “Whatever happens, don’t wander off,” Rodrick warned his teammates. “We will stay as a team until the end. That goes for you too, Ciel…”

  “What? Why would I wander off?” Ciel asked with clear confusion colouring her voice. “I never do that.”

  “You always wander off…” Rodrick grunted. “There hasn’t been a single mission where you stayed with the team for the whole time.”

  “He’s right,” Carla said.

  “Definitely,” Arthur nodded.

  “I’ve been in the team for just over a week, and even I know that’s true,” Valar joined in.

  Ciel took on a thoughtful expression, clearly thinking about what her teammates had just said. “Yeah… I think you’re right. I’ll try to stay close by this time.”

  “Good.. good,” Rodrick nodded. “Now stay vigilant. We could be attacked at any moment.”

  As it turned out, there were no attacks forthcoming just yet. Instead, the expedition wandered around the forest for hours on end, covered by thick mist and constantly on edge.

  “They’re trying to tire us out!” Troy yelled. “Stay on guard and don’t lose focus! The forest isn’t that big!”

  Still, however long they walked, the mist never dispersed. Valar heard grumbling from other adventurers, and he was recognizing the same issues with himself. This is dragging on for too long… Something needs to change.

  And change it did…

  Suddenly and without warning, arrows flew from the mist. They were soon matched by the twang of bowstrings, and the pandemonium started once more.

  While they had been taken by surprise, the situation wasn’t as favourable for the bandits as Valar would have expected. The bandits seemed to be as affected by the mist as everybody else, and that was reflected in the amount of clean hits they scored. There weren’t many.

  Still, some adventurers cried out in pain, their armour insufficient to block the random attacks of their enemies. Those like Perfect Strike’s Phonis and Valar’s team’s Rodrick were fine, however. Their armour more than enough to stop the paltry attacks of the bandits.

  But that wasn’t all, was it? The Crimson Talon wouldn’t let a golden opportunity like this one pass by, and attacked. Tens of bandits, all of them bronze rankers, broke out from the thick mist in a run with grins on their faces and manic glee in their eyes. For once, they would be the ones hunting adventurers and not the opposite.

  The first wave of bandit attackers arrived in only a few seconds, and the expedition was forced to defend immediately. The adventurers, while significantly more experienced in fighting than the bandits, were outnumbered and surrounded, so their only option was to just focus on surviving for now.

  “Defensive…” Rodrick started before he had to parry one bandit’s mace. “Formation! Now!”

  The rest of his shouts were drowned out as the bandit and his allies began striking at the warrior with increasing ferocity.

  Similar scenes were playing out across the area, with multiple bandits focusing their attacks on the frontline fighters of the expedition. Backline fighters like Carla, Valar and Arthur were targeted too, but those attacks never reached their marks. The reason?

  Ciel.

  The pale dark mage became a terrifying blur around their team, cutting down any enemies that dared even approach their backline, giggling like a maniac. Dark purple runes danced across her skin like an ever-changing tapestry, shifting between a couple different spells at a ridiculous speed.

  Valar could just barely follow her movements. Her wicked blades ripped and shredded one bandit after another, but that was not the problem… They are forcing our individual groups to split up!

  Valar’s group was being driven away from the others meter by meter, and so was everyone else.

  “They’re trying to split us up!” Rodrick shouted. “Any ideas?”

  “Nothing from me!” Carla yelled back as she shot an ice lance toward one of the enemy archers. “Just stick as a team and defend?”

  Valar couldn’t think of any better ideas. They were scrambling inside a forest filled with magical mist and had no idea where they were going. They couldn’t just pick a direction and-.

  “Everyone, run left!” Arthur shouted at the top of his lungs.

  When your teammate yelled at you to run at the top of his lungs, the common knowledge suggested that you should maybe run. When it was Arthur who was yelling, however…

  There were two options. First, he could be pranking you. Arthur was like that at times, after all. Still, he wouldn’t joke in a situation like this, so it was the second option.

  The second option was that Arthur was actually serious. If that was true, you ran like your life depended on it, because it most certainly did… Valar, wise beyond his years, decided to believe in the latter option.

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  "I don’t want to die!" was the only thought that ran through Valar’s mind as he abandoned everything else in favor of running to the left just after Arthur’s yell. Interestingly, every single member of his team did the same.

  They were doing just the opposite of what Rodrick had ordered, running straight away from the party, but they didn’t care. They ran, and ran, and ran until…

  “Phoenix Descent!”

  Valar felt a massive force pick him up by his back and push. Shit. The following experience was reminiscent of the time he was ejected from the caravan cabin. As he flew through the air, he saw a chaotic mess of brown, green and white, unable to hear anything. The flight wasn’t destined to last long, however, as they were in a forest.

  And in a forest, there were trees. Those damned towers of the plant kingdom…

  Valar felt the last of his air leave him in an instant when a tree finally impacted his abdomen. Its flight stopped abruptly, but his head, arms and feet continued their flight. The resulting scene looked like a cat curled around its owner's leg, but the cat was Valar, and the curling wasn’t voluntary, and… Okay, it didn’t look like a curled up cat, just a very unlucky iron ranker.

  Soon, thuds all around him followed his own, followed by groans of pain. Nobody had any clue what had happened, but they were damn sure that it wasn’t good.

  Valar would have looked around if he had been able to, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t the bestest of ideas. Instead, he chanted the only spell he had had prepared, thanking all the gods that he had had the foresight to prepare Lesser Restoration before the fighting started. The spell, channeled through his body, told him quite a lot.

  First and foremost, three of his ribs were broken. That was not good, but it could be worse. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all.

  Often when a human broke their rib, the risk of death wasn’t about the bone themselves but what happened around them. Broken ribs were sharp, and they usually didn’t stay in place, so additional wounds were a big risk. Lungs, the liver, the stomach and other organs were always scary things to hit, but he had thankfully avoided all of those.

  Except his heart.

  The wound wasn’t big by any means. The information he got from the healing energy running through his body told him it was only a scratch, but when you talked about the heart, even the tiniest of scratches was a scary prospect for your continued longevity.

  What do I do? Valar’s mind raced furiously as he thought about his options. One thing was sure, and that was that his healing spell wouldn’t be enough. It simply wasn’t fast enough to heal such a wound in the couple of minutes he had before the situation became too critical. Valar ran though many different ideas, but every single one of them boiled down to a simple fact: The bleeding needed to stop.

  If he had had a healing potion, that would have probably been enough. He didn’t have a healing potion. If he had known a more targeted spell, it would have been faster. He didn’t know a spell like that. The only idea left wasn’t a good one, but it was everything he had.

  Valar needed to cauterize the wound in his own heart.

  Are there really no other options? I don’t want to… But there really are no better ideas. I guess it’s time to make use of my fire…

  The boy, although reluctant, drew. The quantity of fire he aimed to pull out would be no more than the tiniest spark, enough to burn an insignificantly small wound like the one on the surface of his heart closed. It’s now or never…

  “Drink this!”

  Valar’s eyes snapped open in shock as his mouth was forced open by thin, bony, fingers. He lost his focus completely and the fire in his soul retreated. The burning pain was quickly replaced with the sweet sensation of healing potion poured directly down his throat.

  When Valar opened his eyes, Ciel and Arthur were standing above him, breathing heavily. Arthur looked at Ciel. “He’ll live now. I'm getting a gut feeling that he’ll live.”

  “Good, that’s good,” the rogue sighed. “That was a close one, wasn’t it?”

  “The closest one in a while,” Arthur nodded. “I haven’t had a feeling that was as bad as that in a long time.”

  The teenage boy at their feet, still curled up around a small tree, couldn’t focus on anything that the two adventurers were saying. Instead, he gazed inward as the healing energy of the potion—a bronze rank one based on the amount of energy—flooded his body. Tears started running down his face as he felt the energy latch on to the most critical wound in his body, and the bleeding in his heart slowed, then stopped.

  “I… I’ll live,” was the only thing he could mutter.

  If Carla were to rank the most painful moments of her life, this one would definitely pierce the top five. Hitting a tree at the insane speed she had been flying at was bad enough, but shoulder first, really? I guess I should be grateful… Rodrick and Valar are in way worse shape.

  Arthur had popped by quickly after the impact and taken one of the healing potions in her bag. The golden eyed man had been muttering about a gut feeling of his, and had rushed to help Valar with Ciel. If she understood correctly, Valar had been quite a bit more injured than even Rodrick, and Arthur had gotten a gut feeling that the boy would die if he didn’t help. Just minutes after, the archer had returned to say that his gut feeling had passed, even grabbing a second potion meant for Rodrick.

  That man and his gut feelings…

  The team had even taken Arthur to get his affinity checked once just in case the archer had an abstract affinity or something like that. The mage using the artifact had been quite sure that the values from the artifact had been well within margins for him to be affinityless. Unless the rare and expensive artifact had malfunctioned—an event that was as unlikely as to be called nearly impossible—Arthur had no affinity. He was a regular archer, as hard as that was to believe…

  Carla turned her thoughts away from the stupid archer and onto the scene around herself. She was sitting down and leaning against a tree as she waited for her shoulder to heal, but that would certainly take some time. Rodrick was in a similar situation, and Valar seemed to be out of the fight too. That left Ciel and Arthur, with Carla as possible assistance as long as she didn’t need to move.

  There were some positive things too though. First, the mist had fallen, and they could see again. That was nice. Secondly, the blast had not hit just the adventurers, but their enemies as well.

  Carla looked at the sight of destruction in front of her eyes. What had once been relatively thick forest had been flattened out, felled trees lying everywhere. She saw people lying on the ground. Based on how they looked, most were probably dead…

  The corpses strewn around were unfortunately mostly adventurers, although some bandits were dead too…

  This… I hate this job.

  Deep beneath the royal palace of Lyndale was a place very few knew of. That was by purpose.

  Those that dwelled in that place were not normal people of the city, nor were they the royals living straight above them. No, they were people that had been normal adventurers like the rest, but that had been a long while ago. Nowadays, they were known by different names.

  “Surely this incident passes the threshold!” Dervish groaned. “Fifteen badges just went dark, so either fifteen adventurers are dead or somebody took them from them! More are dying by the second too!”

  “The mere fact that adventurers die isn’t enough for us to set out, and you know it,” Bastion said, his tone calm as ever. “You would have to prove that the safety of the whole kingdom was in danger, Dervish.”

  “Although I don’t personally like it, I have to agree with Bastion here,” Blade grunted. “Meddling with lower ranked affairs is forbidden, and this incident isn’t enough to justify our action. If the threat was a gold ranker, maybe, but he has been smart enough to keep himself at silver rank. As much as we want to, we can’t rush over to Ronaheim and kill Edwin.”

  “He’s clearly trying to ascend using the cloud serpent’s core,” Dervish snapped, her tone as biting as ever.

  “And if he does something similar at gold rank, one of us will go,” Blade sighed.

  Dervish turned to Titan with pleading eyes. “You agree with me, right? You’d be the next to go anyway, so you could slay that so-called Undying Horror with your own hands! Think about it!”

  “Sorry Zoe,” Titan shook his head. “I don’t want to anger the king, and going there would do just that.”

  “You don’t know-.”

  Each one of the five fallingstar knights fell to their knees as an aura descended upon their living space. Normally, they could have maybe even held their feet under the diamond rank presence, but this particular one was different. It held the wielder’s conceptual understanding in its totality, and that wielder happened to be their king. How could they, mere onyx rankers, ever aim to resist a force mage such as he?

  “Listen to your elders, Zoe!” a booming voice carried from the palace through the king’s presence. “Baldwin is right!”

  The five stayed on their knees when the aura subsided. They simply didn’t dare to stand up.

  All five spoke the following words in complete concert. “Yes, my king. Your will shall be realized.”

  “Through the sword,” Blade muttered

  “Through the shield,” Bastion proclaimed.

  “Through the mace,” Titan grunted.

  “Through the dagger,” Dervish whispered.

  “Through me.”

  “For we are the fallingstar knights.”