After my magical scouting, we quickly returned to the cave the wolves had claimed as their den for our operation, while I considered what I had learned. The main thing of which I was now quite certain was that trying to openly attack the camp during the night would be difficult, with massive losses almost guaranteed. The patrols would spot an attacking force, unless it was functionally invisible, and the centaurs slept next to their weapons, allowing them to quickly muster and fight back. In addition to that, the other camps were close enough to reinforce the other camps quickly. There was no way to make that a winning proposition, not without a massive army that would be spotted on approach. No, we would have to be more sneaky to deal with them.

The next morning, we told Windpaw what I had found out and we started to make plans. We needed to test the centaurs reactions to stimulus, how fast did they strike back, did they instantly call upon the other camps if they were attacked, did they patrol at full strength at all times, how many did they leave at their camps? Those were questions we needed to answer, allowing us to strike at their weak points. But we also needed to make sure that the wolves didn’t suffer losses to acquire the answer to them.

As such, the wolves set out during the late morning, to attack one of their patrols, to see what would happen. And seeing what happened was Lenore’s job - she would, once again, fly overhead, scouting. Meanwhile, I would need to stay relatively nearby, close enough to Lenore that she was able to pass information to me, who would pass it to Sigmir, who would transfer it to Ylva, who would be with the wolves. That little game of telephone essentially gave the wolves aerial surveillance capabilities, hopefully allowing them to strike where the centaur-forces were weak.

Once the attack was done, it would be my job to summon mist, allowing the wolves to retreat without too big problems, at least that was the idea.

We were at the edge of the forest, looking out into the plains where the centaurs were camped, the wolves stalking forward, ready to break into a sudden run. Lenore appeared on my shoulder after leaving her Hallow and took wing, while I closed my eyes, using Lenore’s eyes to see. It took a little focus to keep myself on the task of focusing on my sight and reporting to Sigmir, the feeling of flying always made me a little giddy, even if only second-hand from Lenore. It was something I wanted to try at some point and I truly hoped that the next stage of my avatar-form would allow me just that.

Lenore needed a few minutes to gain sufficient altitude before she started a slow circle while letting her eyes roam across the vast, open plains. Finding the centaurs was easy, simply because they were the only organised group that moved in the open, so, shortly after seeing them, she was high above their collum. I had to admire the centaurs just a bit, they were moving in a solid formation, two centaurs quite a distance up front, maybe a hundred meters, a pair on each side, maybe fifty meters away from the column and finally, a group of four guarding their rear, some fifty meters back. All of them seemed to be armed with a spear in a saddle-skirt and a bow, which was bad news for the wolves, especially the bows.

“Sigmir, have Ylva tell the wolves that I want to try something before they attack.” I asked Sigmir, essentially tossing our previous plan to have the wolves attack directly. The centaurs were obviously ready for such an attack, and out in the open, the wolves would simply toss their lives away.

“Tell them to move with the mist and attack one of the flanking pairs.” I continued, while pulling most of my attention back into my body, while mentally asking Lenore to tell me if something changed in the centaur formation.

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It was time to earn my pay, I could see two ways to buy time for the wolves’ den, one was to kill centaurs, the other was to make them stay inside their camp, which could be accomplished by killing some of them or by making the outside so unpleasant that they decided to wait for better weather. In the real world, wars had been decided by the weather, armies wiped out by the onset of winter, fleets sunk by sudden typhoons. While I wasn’t powerful enough to create a large-scale blizzard to wipe out the centaurs, I could make their lives miserable.

Using my hands, I quickly made a magical formation made out of three ice-runes in the air before me, using it to create simple and ordinary ice, but as I created it, I simultaneously shaped it into a larger magic circle, this one containing seven runes, primarily mist-runes but combined with cold and blizzard. I was lacking Lenore’s presence to add real wind-magic into it and the blizzard-rune was overall too much of a power-drain to get a large-scale effect, which was why I mostly focused on the mist-aspect, but it was the best I could come up with in the short time I had.

Standing in the middle of my formation, I slowly started to channel Astral Power into it, remembering the day I had first felt the power of a blizzard swirl around me, the desire to move with the storm, to dance with it as it swept across the country-side.

With those memories in mind, I started dancing, only this time, I didn’t dance with the storm, I asked the storm to come and dance with me. But the wind was a capricious dance-partner, today it was a chore to get the air to move. What I was trying was the biggest weather-magic I had tried to this day, I had manipulated the weather on a smaller scale, that was easy enough, something that I had managed only weeks after coming to Mundus.

But weather-magic was a question of manipulation; the bigger the change I wanted to achieve, the harder it was. Causing snow to fall and mist to to billow was easy when the sky was thick with clouds, almost hanging low enough to touch the ground. It only required a gentle touch, just a small nudge, to cause the desired effect.

What I was trying now was the opposite, the weather was about to shift, just into the other direction and I tried not only to stall that change but to cause change in the opposite direction. And that was why I had to invest so much power and effort to cause the change I wanted.

Finally, after minutes of prodding and pushing, of Astral Power flowing into the magic circle beneath my feet, I felt the environment react as I wanted, mist billowing between the trees and, on a large front, flowing towards the area where the centaurs were. I had to keep it as wide and natural looking as possible, while trying to avoid the impression that the mist was heading towards them or they would instantly catch onto the fact that someone was using magic to target them. Hell, even without that, they might notice that the mist was heavy with magic, but that wasn’t something I could change.

Thanks to Lenore, I could catch glimpses of my effort from above and the direction the Centaurs were moving, allowing me to gently adjust the mist so that the centaurs would either have to return to camp or move into the mist, where hopefully the wolves would be able to catch a few of them, even if it might give them the idea that the wolves were working with someone directing the mists. It was a trade-off, killing a couple of centaurs and creating fear within their hearts was traded for secrecy. I felt it was worth it - at the end of the day, we didn’t need to kill them all, so if I was able to pin them inside their camp by making them think that going into the mist was the same as getting mauled by hungry wolves, that was worth quite a bit. By itself, my mist-magic was mostly harmless; sure, I could add a few nasty side-effects, but the time needed to affect serious foes was simply too long to work on an army. As such, psychological warfare was key.

And the centaurs, who had ignored the creeping mist and simply pressed on, were about to learn the first lesson about psychological warfare. I couldn’t quite feel where the wolves were, nor where the centaurs were - to accomplish that, I would have to keep the mist under my direct control, which needed a lot of power and would make it obvious that the mist was magical in nature. Instead, I had only created the mist and sent it on its way, causing it to act according to its nature, until it evaporated back into the Astral River.

Thanks to my connection to Lenore, I was able to hear the screams when the wolves demonstrated to the two centaurs on the right flank that the mist had concealed a set of sharp teeth and claws.