Evan wriggled his fingers as he looked down at the bloodied strings wrapped around them with a calm expression. He then put his hands down, revealing the pile of corpses before him. Aside from three who had been tied up and knocked out, all the bodies before him at the moment were in pieces, the unluckiest ones having been reduced to mere cubes of meat. As he kicked a loose eyeball aside, he looked up at the great black dome beside the forest he was in. He was currently roughly a few kilometers away from it, yet he could see it ever so clearly, a testament to the colossal size of it that could rival entire mountain ranges.
He then jumped up out of the shade of the canopy trees he was under while dragging the three tied up bodies with him out of the shadows of the forest and exposing them to the stars of the night sky. The three bodies only had their noses left uncovered to allow for breathing as strings tightly bound around the rest them to form a canvas on which a message had been engraved.
Evan darted to two nearby trees that were slightly taller than the other canopy trees, and rapidly wove his strings between the two. He then jumped to the center of the taut string and leaned his back against it. He then extended another string from himself, to reach another tree behind him, and began to pull.
After he pulled to the point where the string he had his back to was at its breaking point,
‘First Circle - Red Flare!’
With that, he let go. His makeshift slingshot instantly rocketed him into the skies with a sonic boom, his rapidly made cone of hardened string he constructed before him supplementing his speed with its significant reduction to air resistance. In just a mere dozen seconds, even the great black dome was reduced to a mere speck behind him.
A few seconds later, a very exhausted, clearly overexerted member of the teleporter squad showed up, read the message on the three bodies on top of the trees, and took them back with a disgruntled expression on his face.
While Evan shot through the stratosphere, he pondered on the message he had received from Noah roughly thirty minutes ago, right after the black dome that had separated the two of them had been erected. His surprise at the lack of the expected impact from the gigantic dragon falling from the sky had been second only to the erection of the dome.
“Evan, I don’t know the limits of this talisman she’s given me, so I’ll keep it brief. I don’t know what’s going on with this barrier either, but I reckon I'll live. It seems that some people are trying to be smartasses. I was prepared to take some losses to settle this after this war if I survived it, but this forced separation is perfect. Even though we’ve been separated, there’s still a bright side. My warehouse off the coast of Eldoria. For the sake of emergency long distance communication, I had made Tyril the most basic form of vampiric thrall, such that I’ll notice when he feels himself to be in fatal danger. I received a notice right after we began to clash with the dragon. The six nations are involved here. You figure out the rest. Peace.”
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Evan had been able to come to several conclusions off of what Noah had told him.
‘So he's trying to tell me that the warehouse raid is by either a member of, or by a coalition force from, the major six nations, then? In order to know the timing that we were occupied, the six nations had placed a strike team in the Demonic Forest as informants, then used that chance to raid the warehouse. These same people that had been placed had also likely been tasked with executing a decapitation strike on us if we survived and beat the dragon, judging by their level of stealth that even we couldn't detect. No, wait. That doesn't make sense. Once we had been eliminated, the six nations would be able to freely raid the warehouse. There's no need to hurry to do it now. Maybe this news had been leaked to some third party, and they had raided the warehouse before we had been eliminated by the plan of the six nations? Hmm. Rather, its more likely that a few within the hidden strike team had those of the third party hidden among them.‘
'This third party is taking this chance to steal some of the leviathan goods in the warehouse while also framing the six nations for it at the same time. If they believe that we will not be wiped out today, they aim to weaken both us and the six nations as we fight each other. Even if we were to be wiped out, they still would have stolen some leviathan goods for themselves, and end up losing nothing.’
‘Quite the scheme. But both the third party and the six nations seem to be looking down on us. Even if Noah and I had not been separated, the worst losses we would have suffered would have been losing some warehouse goods. But with this separation, I’ve been forcibly provided a degree of freedom, and we wouldn’t even end up losing the goods, and would also be able to capture the members of the third party that would need to be hidden in the decapitation strike team the six nations had sent. Well, that's if I got lucky enough to capture one of the few moles hidden within the team when I indiscriminately spared a few for interrogation.’
‘I must say, though. Though I do speak ill of their underestimation of us, they’re definitely not a group to be played around with. They had infiltrated themselves well. It's astonishing that neither Noah nor I had been able to detect the assassins. I had subjugated them so easily only because I knew they had to be there, but what if we hadn’t known? Without a SSS-rank trump card to keep us safe, they really might have had our heads after we had been weakened following an intense dragon fight. I suppose the six nations decided to send actual assassins instead of powerhouses like Eldoria did, since they would not be confronting a full-strength version of us, so assassins with stealth would be more effective than archmages or high circle Lord ranked warriors. Its even more of a feat for the third party to be able to infiltrate such a skilled team. It looks like this coming fight would be a bit of a hassle.’
Evan sighed as he landed in a mountainous region, and prepared another catapult. He had traveled over a hundred kilometers with just one launch so far, so he had roughly fifteen more jumps to go. Luckily, he was traveling a linear path, so he would arrive in just roughly over ten minutes.