Anton asked his father what time it was and was told by Anders that it was already five in the afternoon. His father also mentioned that they should arrive at the next village at around seven in the evening.
While they were moving forward, they heard a huge commotion in the forest to their left. Anders stopped the cart.
“Prepare for battle.” Anders whispered to his son and daughter.
The farmer took a sword from the cart and Anton remembered his father saying that he was part of a mercenary band before. Anna was holding a knife while he was empty-handed, although he did have the staff with a plus two to Fire Ball and plus one to Fire Bolt in the game. Its stats would reflect in the real world but once this situation ends, it would be best if he searched for a staff from the forest that he could use in the real world as well.
It was getting dark, so Anton summoned a ball of fire using the Fire Bolt spell and let it hover above his hands. He tried to move the ball of fire to where the commotion was, and it worked. The ball of fire floated slowly forward where the movement was. The good thing about the spell was the mana spent was the initial cost of casting the spell only and moving and controlling the spell only took Anton tremendous focus.
Anton and his family then saw a ghastly creature fighting a wolf pack.
“That’s a ghoul!” His father whispered fiercely.
“If we kill it, will the wolves attack us?” Anton asked his father.
“Usually during this season wolves will not attack people since there’s plenty of food in the forest. I don’t know why they were fighting the ghoul though so if you kill the ghoul please get ready to be attacked by the wolves as well.”
The ghoul looked like a dried-up naked corpse but the way it moved was more animal-like. It moved using its four limbs and was using its hands like an animal would, like claws. He saw that there were a couple of wolves already dead at its feet but four more were fighting it.
While the ball of fire was still hovering above, Anton tried to check if he could cast another spell, and to his happiness, he could. Practicing mana manipulation did its work and he was glad that he took the time to study and practice his spells outside the Rogue Encampment.
Anton cast the spell Ice Blast. He still didn’t want to use fire spells since he didn’t want to cause a forest fire. The ghoul was focused on the wolves, so it didn’t notice the spell that was about to hit it. The Ice Blast hit the ghoul and it froze. He knew that Ice Blast would be a very powerful spell in the real world due to its freezing effect. Anton followed the Ice Blast spell with two more Ice Blast until the ghoul shattered.
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Anton then turned to the wolves to see how they would react to the demise of their enemy, ready to cast spells if necessary to defend himself and his family but the four wolves just howled, looked at their dead comrades, and left. For a moment he felt sad when he saw the wolves' reaction. They looked like warriors who mourned their fallen comrade.
Anders walked to the corpses of the wolves and the ghoul followed by his son and his daughter. After examining the corpse of the ghoul for a couple of minutes, Anton asked what they should do with the wolf's corpse.
“The ghoul’s corpse shattered into pieces?” Anders asked his son.
“Yes father,” Anton replied.
Using the ball of fire for light, Anton examined the place to see if there were any traces of the ghoul’s corpse but when the ice melted, it was totally gone. His father then asked him to keep the wolf’s corpses in his magical space.
“Do we eat wolves? Aren’t they infected by the ghoul already?” Anton’s father laughed for a second when he heard that question.
“No, we don’t eat wolves. I will skin them and sell them. During normal times I would respect their corpses as warriors who slew a monster, but we need coins for our travels and their skin would provide us with coins. We will bury the rest once I’m done skinning them.”
Anton obeyed his father and kept the wolves' corpses in his inventory. The ball of fire was still lighting up the area so when he dismissed it, it was dark already. He summoned it again since the dark scared him a bit. It invoked his imagination that monsters were waiting in the dark and in this new world, sometimes they do wait in the dark.
Anders asked Anna to get the lamp and she did from somewhere inside the cart. She then tried to light it up using some sort of flint, but Anton summoned a tiny flame on top of his fingers using the Fire Bolt spell and used it to light up the lamp. When the lamp was lit, he dismissed his hovering Fire Bolt, and even with the lamp, it was darker, it would do since they didn’t want to invoke questions from people who might see the floating ball of fire.
It was truly dark when they arrived in the next village but unfortunately for Anton and his family, its local inn was full of people already, so they went outside to a field somewhere near the village to camp and saw that there were others already there camping.
Anders and Anna took some camping material from one of the boxes in the cart and taught Anton how to set up a tent. They set up a couple of tents since one of them would be awake during the night for guard duty. Anton’s father told them it was a good habit to start, and they should learn as soon as possible, and the siblings just obeyed their father.
After the tents were set up, Anders taught his son how to set up a campfire and he followed his father’s instructions closely. Once the fire was going, Anna surreptitiously asked Anton to take out one of the boxes with a pot full of food and since it was still warm inside his inventory, they didn’t need to warm it on the fire. Once they took bowls of food, Anton looked around and when he saw that nobody was looking at them, kept the box with the food inside his inventory.
Their dinner was good. A stew that Anna cooked earlier that was still hot and fresh, some bread, and water. His father then told them that one good thing about camping was, that they didn’t need to spend their coins.