The group was less than pleased to discover that we had somehow managed to run into a battle between the Vernese and coalition armies. Somehow, we had ended up right next to the very armies we had been trying to avoid, and worse, we were now at the edge of an active battlefield where thousands of people were fighting. I seriously doubted this was an important front of the war - it appeared to just be an offshoot of the real armies. And I also had no idea why they were fighting in this area at all. But running into two armies was terrible news.
“So after all of this, we still ran into them,” said Old Mo, with a grimace. He turned towards me, before he caught himself and turned towards Felix instead.
“Since your mental ability extends to illusions, how many people do you think you can trick at once? How exactly does your illusion ability work?” Old Mo asked.
Felix twitched, and then quickly messaged me through the friendship bracelet.
Felix repeated my answer to Old Mo, who eyed me from the corner of his eyes before nodding.
“I thought so. In that case… our options are a bit limited,” said Old Mo. “We have no way of knowing which soldiers are ability users without getting close to them, and if they catch sight of us, it will be a disaster. On the other side of the mountains there’s only ocean, and I don’t particularly fancy taking a swim in the frigid waters of the ocean. Healing ability or no, I doubt we would survive the hypothermia that would follow.
“But we also can’t exit the mountains and cut through the area. If we do, we’re going to be surrounded by plains on all sides, which means no cover to make it past any other armies we see - and we’ll also probably be heading towards the main armies. If there’s a large group of soldiers from each army over here, I imagine the main armies are fighting nearby - we’re close enough to Fort Branzo that the Vernese are probably trying to establish a new chokepoint somewhere near the Betten river, and that’s not too far from here. It’s an ideal position to set up a new chokepoint if the Vernese are trying to remain on the defensive. In my opinion, weaving through the Vernese army in the mountains and then continuing forward is our best plan. It’s a bit risky, since we’ll be traipsing through a live battlefield - but with any luck, neither side will notice our presence before we leave. As long as we move through the area before they finish fighting each other, they won’t have the scouts or forces ready to hurt us, even if they do spot us.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? What if we just wait for the two armies to stop fighting?” asked Sallia’s father, frowning.
Old Mo simply sighed. “Honestly, nothing is certain here. If we stay here, whichever side wins might leave afterwards - but if they establish a fort or an outpost here, we’ll be trapped in Verne. I was pretty convinced that the Vernese and Coalition armies would avoid the mountains like the plague, because the cannons are nigh-impossible to transport through this area and the logistical difficulties will make any action here a nightmare. And yet, here they are. So I don’t know why they’re here, or what they might do once they win. That means I’m doing a lot of guessing. But their armies wouldn’t be fighting in this area for no reason.” Old Mo’s face seemed to grow heavier for a moment, as he looked in the direction of the fighting armies. “On the bright side, this should be the last difficult stretch of the road. Once we get through this area, we’ll be past the border region where Fort Branzo fell. The other country we’ll be traveling through is part of the coalition, but the fighting has never encroached on their land - most of it is happening between Verne and Ennalia. So they probably won’t have too many soldiers to avoid. It’ll be much less risky than this region.” said Old Mo.
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I could see Sallia’s father and Anise’s parents sigh in relief at that statement, while my own mother simply retained her usual glassy-eyed, dazed expression. Sallia’s mother tightened her lips and stared in the direction of the battlefield.
“So we still have to creep through an active battlefield?” she asked.
“We do,” said Old Mo.
Sallia’s mother grimaced and then sighed, before nodding. “I understand,” she said.
I sighed, looked at the soldiers fighting in the mountains, and then tried not to frown. We just had to keep moving and hope for the best. This would be something I couldn’t just rely on my abilities for. Illusions wouldn’t help much if scouts from either side picked up our tracks and started hunting us down, since there was a range limitation on my illusions, and if we got caught, we would face a force that we had no way of fighting. My abilities didn’t lend themselves to this situation as well as they usually did.
Our group spent a few moments mentally preparing ourselves for what would hopefully be the final danger of our journey, and then we got moving again.
I carefully trained my ears to our surroundings, putting my enhanced senses to the best possible use I could, and I also occasionally activated my dimensional eyesight to try to get a handle on whether we were close to anyone.
Twice, I saw scouts in the distance, which I steered our group away from. We also did our best to cover any tracks our group made, to prevent either army from noticing our presence. Luckily, they seemed mostly focused on each other, and whether by skill or luck, they didn’t notice us. We walked for an hour. And then we walked for another. The snow, trees, and the strange beating of the old essence machinery left in the mountains was the only company our group had. We even avoided talking, to make sure that we didn’t accidentally alert any scouts nearby - although as we skirted around the battlefield between the two armies, the sound of gunfire started to become clearer and easier to notice. When the others could hear the sound of the battle, even without my exceptional hearing, I knew that we were getting close to the battlefield, and heightened my wariness even further.
Each of my nerves felt like they were being pared away with a knife. If something went wrong right now, we would be in a catastrophically bad situation.
I often used my spatial eyesight to look at the battlefield, and from what I could see, the Vernese soldiers were mostly resorting to guerilla warfare, since the coalition troops had cannons and they did not. Luckily, nobody noticed our presence as we shuffled around the armies, as far away from either side as the terrain allowed. I also used my illusions to help direct the rest of the group, making sure that everyone knew where to walk and where potential threats were. I think that helped calm down the parents.
And then, after two hours of tense wading through the mountainous terrain, we finished skirting around the battlefield. The army started to grow further away from us, and I stopped spotting quite so many Vernese soldiers hiding in bushes and trees and preparing to snipe the coalition troops through my spatial eyesight.
I felt the urge to let out a sigh of relief as we started to creep further away from the battlefield. But I still maintained my state of tension and wariness - just because we were past the most difficult part of our journey didn’t mean that we were out of the woods yet. If a scout from either side started to track us down, they could still kill us.
Another hour of slowly creeping away from the battlefield passed before the cannonfire stopped. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the two armies had stopped fighting. One side had probably won the battle. I had no idea which army had won, and frankly didn’t care. The fact that they weren’t distracted meant that they would probably have more time and energy to chase down potential survivors from the enemy army - and if we were unlucky we would end up directly in the middle of their search.
After I informed Old Mo of this occurrence, he strongly encouraged us to speed up, just in case. Speed was probably more important than stealth, now that we were already a few hours of walking away from the battle. We just needed to put as much distance between us and the winning army as possible.
At least, that was what both Old Mo and I thought, before the strange essence machinery in the area started to rattle and shake, almost as though a magical earthquake was going through the area. Whatever the Old Zelyr had been trying to do with their pocket dimension, for the first time in centuries, it seemed to be either activating or imploding. And I had no idea which it was, or what it meant for our group.