They were in the marshes now, travelling much like Zalia and her family had when coming to the Astar town in the first place. Across the past two days, she had figured out which other ritual she wanted imbued into her armour and had also created a version of the anti-teleportation ritual that would allow her to use her own abilities still.
The final ritual had been something new. Herbal Magic gave her the ability to combine two herbs to create a new base element and this was something she rarely ever used, finding it easier to create differences in the ritual formation itself that gave her the effect she wanted. Now though, she had combined Flame-root and Zephyr which had the Fire and Air elements to create a powder with the element of Movement. She combined this new powder and Adastem to create an effect that gave her adaptive movement, meaning it could help her run faster or be more streamlined for quicker flight or swimming. Whichever it did, it would grant her increased mobility while wearing the armour which was never a bad thing.
Everything had been running smoothly up to this point, the force of humans well-fed and in relatively high spirits. They hadn’t even been attacked by any wild creatures, nothing quite stupid enough to attack such a strong group of people.
It had been great, up until a hundred or so Astar appeared in the sky.
The travelling group reacted quickly, the mages and hunters amongst them throwing magic and shooting arrows into the sky. Zalia’s own bow appeared next to her and let off arrow after arrow. The Astar began casting a ritual, all of them working on a single power. Zalia knew what was coming, the people with her knew what was coming.
Unfortunately for the Astar, Zalia had been ready for something like this. She had given each and every one of the people in the group the one-use bracelets that protected against spatial magic. As well as that, she had all the herbs stored in her vault ready for a group-wide protective ritual against the very same thing, which she immediately began to cast upon seeing the Astar.
Her ritual snapped into place moments before theirs went off and while the air warped a little, the people within its area felt nothing other than a slight tug on their bodies.
Chaos reigned as the Astar panicked.
They were obviously not trained soldiers, more used to the abduction of people than the fighting of them. Perhaps they were not used to anyone countering their magic either.
The group of freed slaves were not trained soldiers for the most part either, however.
While many of them stood their ground and shot up at the Astar, the ones who were less used to fighting ran away, scattering in different directions.
Wearing her armour, Zalia felt invincible to the Astar. She teleported up into the sky with them, the wings that gave her flight active as always. Having just appeared in the air, she had to swerve to the side to avoid a hammer flying end over end, barely missing her and slamming into an Astar’s face with a crunch. Her bow released a final arrow before it was transformed into a sword already held in Zalia’s hand. She slashed in a wide arc and a blade of wind swept forward.
Only the closest Astar was hit, its arm severed. The few behind that managed to dodge out of the way while another destroyed the arc of wind with magic just moments before a ball of fire exploded on their chest, engulfing them.
While they were focusing on the first attack, Zalia had already swept her sword in three more quick, small arcs that eviscerated two of them. She dashed between more Astar, avoiding magic and arrows blasting by from below, marking ten of them with Hunter’s Mark. She grabbed one of the marked Astar in a headlock to hold it still while she performed a ritual on it.
Water Lily and Bitterbalm floated about it before the ritual took place. All ten marked Astar slowly died as the water was pulled from their bodies into ten floating spheres. Zalia froze the water which then dropped down to the ground below.
An Astar wielding twin lithe blades appeared next to her, swinging. She used Fight of Flight, time slowing to her eyes as she reacted, parrying one blade hard enough that the strike from the other blade was put off enough for her to dodge out of the way. By the time she recovered, the first blade was already swinging in her direction again as the Astar attacked in a flurry of beautifully methodical strikes.
Taken aback by the nature of this Astar’s attacks, Zalia barely held her own, feeling Boreal approaching her position. She took a single moment to look down and saw her bounding up into the sky using the balls of ice as platforms, controlling them with her magic.
Zalia parried another blow, then had to deflect the other blade with her bracer. She kicked out at that moment, making contact with the Astar’s chest and flinging them away from her and straight into Boreal’s path. She used the Astar as her final stepping stone into the sky, her jaws clamping shut on their skull with a crunching sound. They immediately began to drop from the sky as the sword-wielding Astar died but Zalia cast a flight ritual on her friend, applying another anti-teleportation ritual to her.
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A quick check of her mana saw that it was depleting extremely fast. Maintaining the anti-spatial magic ritual for her allies down below was draining it too fast.
Looking around at how many Astar still stood, Zalia realised that it would run out before they killed them all. They would have casualties soon.
A bright light from below zipped up into the sky, the ball of starlight resolving into the form of Lumen as they savaged an Astar, changing into a ball of starlight immediately after and dashing over to another target. They were letting off a bright light and powerful heat that blinded Zalia’s heat vision so much she had to turn it off. Ethereal fire coated the wolf, little sparks of starlight flickering off to land on Astar, lighting them up as well.
The three of them killed many of the Astar before Zalia’s mana dropped low enough that a deep headache throbbed in her skull. She dropped the large ritual below, only barely able to maintain Boreal’s flight. The Astar obviously saw this happen as she heard screams and grunts of pain from below.
She swept toward another enemy, missing her strike as they teleported away. It only took seconds for her to reach them again, yet another strike missed as they vanished once more. Strike, teleport, strike, teleport. Growing frustrated, she stopped and switched back to her bow, intending to shoot the Astar before an arrow from below hit it in the head.
Some of the Astar began to retreat, vanishing from the battlefield and not returning. Once a few had gone, the rest began to follow quickly. Within half a minute, all the Astar were either gone or dead.
Zalia went down below to see how the rest of the group was doing and found that they were all in good health. Ember had been down here the whole time, healing as much as possible. That wasn’t to say that they came out of the battle unscathed.
Many of the people were missing chunks of clothing where limbs had been destroyed. She saw a few expressions of shock, the memory of pain obviously not yet faded. Once the craftsmen and traders that had run away came back, she also realised that a few members of their group were just… missing.
She should have expected it, considering what the Astar had tried to do at the start of the fight.
It took a good half hour for everyone to collect weapons and calm down enough for them to continue on their way. Zalia collected one of the Astar bodies during that time, putting it in her vault.
They had lost fifteen people during the fight, not a large number but it still had an impact that was felt by the whole group. They couldn’t afford to lose more people this way.
Zalia was already back to making more anti-teleportation bracelets for the group, knowing that they had saved them from a potentially crippling fight.
She was concerned about that twin sword fighter that had attacked her. They had been different to the rest of the Astar, obviously well-trained with the weapons. Was it possible that the Astar they had been fighting so far were not actually the warriors of their race? What if they were just slave traders, not warriors or powerful mages of any kind? Normal, day-to-day people, so to speak.
It would make sense, as they were much too easy to kill. Looking at the fight they had just had, she could see that. There was no way these were the strongest of their race.
Their journey back to Endaria continued, days filled with muddling their way through the swamp. They were attacked twice more in their time during the swamp, each attack with less Astar and holding a sense of… desperation to them. They lost another eleven members during those two fights, bringing the total number of people in their group to one hundred and thirty-one.
Once they made it out of the swamps, they were able to relax just a bit. That wasn’t to say that they let their guard down but they were now within the borders of Endaria. It was Zalia’s intention to bring the group straight to the capital but after talking with them over the course of the next few days about what they wanted to do, it came up that Zalia kind of… owned a town. A town that held anti-teleportation measures over the entire thing. The group came to the decision that they would rather head there first.
Zalia didn’t want to take their freedom of choice from them and neither would she turn down a good number of high-ranked soldiers, mages, craftsmen and merchants. The ones that she could see were hard-working and powerful people.
As the members of the group grew more accustomed to each other, they also opened up more about their experiences. Zalia learnt a lot about the Astar during that time, how they lived and what they were like as a people. Much like her experiences of them so far, they were a cold and calculating people, with members of their race that showed compassion or strong emotion often being exiled. That surprised Zalia, as it meant that they weren’t that way naturally. Rather, it was an enforced coldness.
She spoke to the member of their group who had been to another Astar city about the Astar there and learnt that as she thought, the twin sword-wielding Astar hadn’t been an outlier by any means. He told Zalia that while the majority of the Astar were Bronze rank with few that ascended to Silver, there were of course the powerful few that made it to higher ranks. He had seen a few Emerald rank Astar and a single Diamond rank one over the many years spent in that bigger Astar city.
Zalia wondered then if the real reason the Astar took higher-ranked Endarians was to make sure they didn’t grow too powerful. Did the majority of the Astar just not bother ranking up?
They weren’t attacked again after entering Endaria’s borders and the day soon came that they arrived at Nature’s Reclaim. Everything looked to be at peace in the town and Zalia revelled in the expressions of joy and relief on the faces of the group she led into the half-forest, half-town. She might have started a war doing what she had done but it was more than worth it for the people that they had saved.