“Klaws, are you sure you want to do this? She might not be as strong as the others. I can probably just fight her head on.” Mia said from on top of Onyx as they moved through the maze.

“It will be alright. We have Shishen here too.” Klaws answered.

“If this was anyone else I would have said it was a really bad idea.” Shishen said, almost disproving of the plan.

“But it isn’t, now shut it and keep moving.” Mathias said, clearly irritated with the situation.

The plan was very simple. They would all walk towards an area just near enough the center that Mia had a shot at Karin but far enough they would have a way to run. The first problem was walking to the place. They had to remove lots of trees to make room for them to continue. The second problem was that some of the flora was mutating into monsters so they had to deal with them. It wasn’t really hard. A simple stomp did the job most of the time but it weighed on their mind that they could only deal with what they found. The last problem was that they couldn’t just burn the thorns or they would explode. So any ideas of using fire went out of the window. Mia's strongest element was just cut out of their plan of attack.

As for the problem that Mathias personally had, he was tripping every minute or so and it was becoming old too fast to be funny anymore. He was pretty sure that Karin was tripping him on purpose.

“No need to get angry. We are almost there.” Kaki said, trying to calm down his friend as he put a hand on his shoulder. It helped a little.

“Klaws, you need to remember this. It will hurt a lot. And the moment you feel something tighten around your chest you have to stop touching it.” Katia said.

“You said it so many times that even I am starting to get tired of it my dear Katia.” Shishen said, strangely annoyed.

“Shishen, I understand that you are a really good healer, but I can guarantee that if these things really are Suria Thorns like I think they are, we need to be very careful about them. In my country, these things are the equivalent of the Castle and city walls in Azuria.”

“I get it. It’s some nasty poison.”

“Yeah. It’s illegal to have the extracted poison almost everywhere. Not that you can easily get it. It takes too much work for too little gain.”

“How much work?” Cassandra asked.

“Let’s say you have a good batch of thorns, fresh ones. You need a special flask made out of those thorns to store the poison and about a month of non stop work in a specific extraction process that is done exclusively via magic to get about half a teacup worth of poison. Some luck may be necessary because the poison just evaporates outside the thorns.”

“How do you know about all that?”

“If you are convicted of corruption in my country you have to drink a cup of that poison so pretty much everyone knows more or less how the poison is produced. Not that anyone is dumb enough to try to do it. I don’t think even Mia could do it alone if she knew how.”

“I don’t like poison.” Mia said absentmindedly.

“You have nothing to worry about Mia. Just stay calm and ready to do your part.” Narissa said, trying to distract Mia a little. She knew something was going on with Mia and was trying her best to not rock the boat too much.

“We are here. Let's all get into position. The hourglass’s sand is almost done going down.” Kaki said.

Everyone nodded and took their positions.

Stolen novel; please report.

Shishen used a spell to preemptively cure Klaws of any poisonous or venomous substance or increase his resistance to said substances if you looked at it from another angle.

Klaws positioned himself in front of one of the walls of thorns and got ready to just grab and remove it from where it was. These thorns weren’t specially sturdy against anything stronger than the wind so it was really easy to just pick them up if you could resist the poison.

Kaki, Moon, Mathias were ready to grab Klaws, the girls, minus Mia, and run in case things went wrong.

Luminus was on throwing stuff duty as he could actually grab stuff with his psychic powers without the risk of maybe touching a thorn.

Mia was mounted on Onyx. Both battle-ready. It was somewhat chilling for the rest of the special class to see Mia like that. They knew how she was when fighting but this was different. It was like there wasn’t something she wouldn’t do to win this fight with everyone still alive.

As for what Mia herself thought of the situation, she was coldly calculating how to kill someone with the least amount of mana possible. The first idea was to throw fire at the problem but it could backfire spectacularly so this option was out of the window. The second option was to throw a tornado at the enemy but Mia got the impression that a long range attack wouldn’t quite finish the woman in one go. So that left the last option. Mia was going to ride Onyx, go straight towards the woman and hit her with a point blank spell. The spell of choice was a compressed version of her air bubble she used while in the dungeon. Once she let go of the spell, she was sure that the things would just expand and cut anything in the way.

Once everyone was ready, Narissa gave a hand signal and everyone did their thing.

Klaws, now semi-protected by a spell, grabbed the thorns and the moment he did he felt a lot of pain. He didn’t know much but there was no way that the poison wasn’t magical in some way. He just touched the thing and he felt it in his entire body. He felt like he was putting his hands on really hot water. His head was buzzing and it felt like he was spinning in place. He almost fell down when his legs suddenly got numb but he managed to just throw the chunk of thorns he grabbed to the side, opening the way for Mia.

Once the way was clear, Luminus threw a few chunks of earth at Karin, which Mia followed immediately behind. They were quickly dispersed by what looked like to be Karin’s own psychic powers but that only cleared the way for Mia.

Mia had the spell ready in her hand. A small ball of compressed wind whirled itself there, barely visible to the naked eye. Mia didn’t shout, screamed or did anything similar. Once Onyx got near Karin she just dropped the ball and launched herself and Onyx back to where they came from to not get hit by the spell.

As for Karin, she didn’t see any of this coming. She was happily drinking tea in the center of the maze when suddenly two chunks of dirt flew in her direction. Using her psychic powers she dispersed it only to see the little girl her leader wanted dash towards her on the top of a wolf.

As she got ready to use a spell of her own and just deal with the girl, she suddenly was throw back in the direction she had come from. A small whistle was the last thing she heard before everything went dark and her entire body was shredded by countless blades of wind.

A few hundred meters outside the maze – Forest

“Leader, they took out Karin. Are you sure we shouldn’t just deal with them together?” Peddle asked his leader.

“Out of all of us I thought you would understand why we are doing this even if I could just deal with all of them myself.” Zignus answered.

“Because they are a bunch of battle hungry idiots?”

“That too now that you brought it up. But the thing is that they forgot what it is like to be weak. They are getting weaker because they are not being challenged anymore and I don’t want to train another squad if possible. This will be a good experience for them. They were acting too arrogant away from my presence”

“I’m pretty sure Karin is actually dead, sir. Her original signal is pretty weak. I don’t know if she will learn much from that if that really is the case. And nobody can be more arrogant than you, they should just give up trying on that front.”

“Puddle, you are lucky we are alone or I would be beating you up for talking so casually to me.”

“I live to serve you sir and like anyone who works under someone I need to jab my superior once in a while to not lose myself.”

“Yeah, yeah. Once we get the legacy we will challenge the 15th step. That bitch will get what is coming to her.”

“Just a question. Do I have to go too? Well, if Null and Morgana also lose.”

“Of course! You get no special treatment.”

“Let’s hope that null uses his head for once and just finishes this. I don’t like this body.”

“It suits you.”

“That’s why, my liege.”