The battle ended soon. If you could call it a battle. Really, it had devolved into more of a skirmish/siege after the illusion had been dispelled.
But no matter what the correct term for the thing was, the aftermath looked devastating enough for Jaune. The place where the Grimm had congregated was filled with blood. Human blood. The corpses had been removed while Jaune had been recovering from slight mana exhaustion, but the sight had been burned into his mind. Approximately twenty corpses lying on the ground in different states of macabre deadness.
The bodies of the enemies were long gone, having dissipated into the wind. The achievement of the men, the slain Grimm, was becoming a memory, a statistic in a report. The smell remained though. Iron, shit, and death.
The deceased were luckier than some of the survivors, in Jaune's opinion. Had losing limbs always been so easy? One bite and a shake of the head and the appendage was gone. Jaune had wanted a dog in his youth, and still liked the animal due to their normally friendly nature. He was unsure if he would ever be able to look at one the same way ever again.
Jaune put the thoughts of dogs out of his mind as he noticed Sun waving him over. Amid reverent looks and whispered words of how he'd 'annihilated' that Nevermore, there were mumblings of his new title among the soldiers, Lightbreaker, given to him for the way he had 'banished' the monster.
The information that most of the Grimm were an illusion had spread quickly after the fight, but so did the information that Jaune had discovered the illusionist creating them and convinced the old archer to shoot the person down.
How that continued to grant him a grand title like Lightbreaker was a mystery to Jaune. The imagery of him breaking apart a creature of Grimm big enough to kill many soldiers with just one spell must have been visually impressive enough that the soldiers didn't care about it being not real.
"How fare you, Breaker of Light?" Sun asked as Jaune joined him.
"The title sounds good. I just wish I had earned it," Jaune replied as the two of them started making their way towards Zedong's room. The old man had to lay down due to exhaustion, and his granddaughter was taking care of him.
"I think you deserve a title, even if Illusionbane would have been more appropriate," Sun said more seriously than he usually uttered anything.
"Do I?"
"If you think you don't, change yourself to someone deserving of a title like that," Sun said brusquely.
And that was that.
"How is he?" Jaune asked May as they entered the room. Zedong was laying down, sweating slightly but otherwise looking mightily fine for an old man who'd participated in a fight.
"Grandpa used a skill he shouldn't at his age," May said, glaring accusingly at the man. "He will be fine, but shouldn't do anything strenuous for a few days." Zedong grumbled something, earning another sharp glare from his granddaughter.
Jaune was just about to suggest that they maneuver into a quiet corner and share everything they had been able to ascertain about the fight, when he was rudely interrupted by a knock on the door.
Might as well get it over with. Jaune opened his mouth to beckon the knocker in, only for the door to open before he had the chance. Targson entered, his usually immaculate appeared marred by a sling around his right arm and specks of blood on his face.
The heroes occupying the room stared at him.
Targson coughed and adjusted the collar of his uniform. "We had someone interrogating the spy while the battle was going on, in case she knew anything important."
"The poison was a rage-inducing one or something, wasn't it," Jaune more stated than asked. It made sense really. The illusions dispersed on a few hits and didn't actually possess any combat ability. If the poison had been something that simply killed or crippled the soldiers, there would have been no need for the illusionist in the first place.
All that the Grimm horde had been was a representation of a threat big enough to kill everyone in the garrison; it hadn't actually been all that dangerous, all things considered. But what if everyone in the base had been affected by a mental effect, like for example, anger? It would have led to a mutiny.
"Yes," Targson acknowledged. "Not as much rage-inducing as it would have lowered everyone's inhibitions and shattered their moral compass."
Zedong growled, earning a curious look from May. Jaune knew in which direction the old man's thoughts had gone, and by the grimace marring Sun's face he had come to the same conclusion about what would have probably happened to most females in the garrison, outnumbered by men who thought they were about to die and lacking any restraint.
Even Targson cringed as he interpreted the looks on their faces and looked at May.
"What?" she asked. Her face scrunched up cutely in concentration before she flatly uttered an "Oh."
"Thank you for bringing this to our attention. It will help us make a clearer picture of the situation and better anticipate any future attempts," Jaune said, nobody else in his group seemingly wanting to speak.
Targson gave a short nod directed at Jaune and left briskly.
Jaune felt a modicum of empathy and sadness for the man. Losing so many soldiers under his command, people he had probably known for years and definitely felt responsible for... Jaune could only be glad he hadn't lost anyone from his group. He put an arm around Sun and half-hugged him.
Sun shrugged him off with an elbow jab and called him a faggot.
-/-
Jaune finished writing all the information available to them on a small piece of paper, and then turned to Sun and May, who were looking over his shoulder.
"Anything?" Jaune asked as he handed over the scribblings.
May sighed while Sun squinted at the paper. "I can't make out anything but the word poison, and that's only because it's hard to make the letter o too small to read," he commented.
"What's the point of taking notes if we can't can read them? We'll be gone from here soon and there's paper in Brorusalem. You don't need to scrounge it," May said.
"I can process through written things better." Jaune said, trying to ignore their complaints.
"To sum it up, there were orders from high to send soldiers on a patrol, someone tried to poison us with a substance that would degrade morals, and one spy escaped through the tunnel and collapsed it. Meanwhile Grimm were led here, their numbers bolstered by an illusionist who, by the way, is still unaccounted for." Jaune finished and looked at his compatriots.
May was filing an arrowhead while Sun was trying to read his note upside down.
"I give up, your handwriting is way too bad," Sun muttered and put the note as far away from him as possible without standing up, as if it was carrying some infectious disease.
The sound of glass breaking rushed through Jaune's head, signalling the final nail in the coffin for his patience. His body acted before his mind could process the decision, head already mid-movement before he even noticed that he was doing something.
Jaune headbutted Sun to the ground and shouted at him, "Shut the fuck up you piece of shit monkey and learn how to read!"
-/-
Joanne balefully stared down at the letter lying on her work desk. The handwriting of her son stared back at her. It had somehow gotten worse. It turned from an illegible chickenscratch to a minimized impossible-to-read-without-a-magnifying-glass chickenscratch.
The date on the upper left corner was readable at least. It showed that it had been sent almost a year ago, several months after Jaune's disappearance. Which meant that he had been alive for at least that time period afterwards.
She tapped her fingers on the soft brown mahogany, squinting at the words and hoping that something had changed either about her perception or the letter itself that would make her capable of reading it.
No such luck.
Goddamnit Jaune.
-/-
"The question I'm asking myself," May started slowly, " is why they used the poison they used. If you get access to the food supply, why not just put something deadly inside it?"
Jaune paused mid-thought. That was a good question really.
"Good question." Sun seemed to think so as well.
A few minutes later they hadn't come any closer to the answer, and just as Jaune was about to suggest they go onto the next possible topic, Zedong's voice rasped up from his position on the bed.
"Negativity, bad emotions, Grimm are drawn to them." That remained his only contribution to the investigative effort of their group.
Everything else could be derived from that.
"So they were trying to gather a true horde, but for what purpose?" Jaune left out the obvious about how the treachery between comrades that the poison would have caused, would have produced more negativity than simply dying together. "Instability. There's not really much else that you can use a Grimm horde for." Jaune concluded shortly, before the others could come to the same conclusion.
Who would have been able to profit from it though?
Adventurers would have been hired to stop the horde, heroes and soldiers would have come, trade would have taken a small hit in the region. Or a boost... Jaune didn't know the effect chaos had on regional economics. Infighting between military officials, trade wars, and family grudges due to Targson's slight nobility were all a possibility. Too many options, too little information.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The direction he was thinking in was wrong. It didn't matter who caused this. What mattered was what they, as a group, could do to prepare themselves for any future attacks.
Training, preparation, and constant vigilance!
Jaune peeked out from under his hair at his teammates. May was chewing on her purple hair, and Sun was playing with his tail. "All we can do is be ready," Jaune said, receiving nods.
Jaune sighed and threw himself onto his back. The exhaustion was catching up to him. He had been able to avoid it by working his brain for the past several hours, but it didn't look like that strategy would surmount the weariness once again.
The ceiling turned foggy all of a sudden before everything turned incomprehensibly blurry, even the darkness behind his eyelids.
-/-
Sun's staff spun in the air and hit the ground behind him as he raised his hands in surrender, sword pointed at his throat. Jaune lowered it and fist-bumped the monkey. Respect crossed from one to the other through the gesture.
"You're off your game today," Jaune commented as they wandered towards a patch of shade and sat down, taking out a waterskin each.
Jaune's eyes wandered and he found himself watching the soldiers as they sparred with each other, while he, the best swordsman present, wasn't welcome anymore.
Or maybe the issue was that he was too welcome. Lightbreaker, a lofty title. It had manifested as an equipable title recently. Jaune could add it to the display above his head, which already read Mage and Jaune Arc.
But he hadn't, and Jaune didn't think he ever would. What use were such accessories when so many had died or been crippled? It was a consolation prize at best, and a harsh insult to everyone else who had fought that day at worst. A reminder that no matter how brave they were, how valiantly they fought, they had simply been born with the wrong class. They weren't heroes. Some roads were so hard for them to tread they might have as well been inaccessible.
The soldier class in itself was a joke. A blacksmith could attempt to become the best one in the world. The same applied for every other NPC caste class. But a soldier, no matter how hard he worked, how talented he was, would be bested by a hero who had only worked half as hard as the soldier did.
The experience gap could be closed if the soldier in question went out to hunt for Grimm like heroes did, but the lack of useful skills in their tree was simply too big a hurdle for all but the most prodigious.
"I'm tired, more than anything, Sun said, slightly scaring Jaune. He'd forgotten he'd asked the boy anything, as sunken in his thoughts as he was.
"I was expecting another grand plot that could potentially end all our lives. I've been vigilant for the entire month, but nothing went down." Sun looked down at his waterskin forlornly. "Being on edge all the time, it's exhausting."
Jaune nodded as he did one of his routine sweeps over the plains surrounding the garrison. The skill was active the whole time and he would feel it if any quick movements took place, but doing it manually was still better.
"I miss civilization," Sun quietly admitted, as if he was ashamed of it.
"I miss the library." Jaune tagged his own opinion onto Sun's, making the monkey snort in laughter before he abruptly stopped.
"Me too, now that I actually think about it."
"It's probably time to go back soon."
"Yeah, I hope so."
Jaune wasn't one to judge, but Sun did not sound particularly hopeful.
He wondered if he should just tell Sun that they would be returning within a week, to clear up his doubts and give him something to look forward in this boring place. But then Jaune remembered that when he had asked Sun which stat he should put his free point in, he'd been told to put it into agility, so he could run away from any real fight faster.
Sun might have been a bit peeved at the time since it had been the first one where Jaune had beaten him in a purely physical spar. Especially because the way he had done so had been slightly dishonourable.
Running away from someone until their stamina was exhausted was a legitimate strategy. Just not a very sportsmanlike one.
"You're remembering that joke of a fight right now, aren't you?" Sun muttered, earning a surprised glance from Jaune.
"How could you tell?"
"The stupid grin on your face."
-/-
Jaune had put the free point into agility in the end. It was the most useful stat other than dexterity for a swordsman and his mana-influencing stats were already being raised automatically.
He wondered if he would ever be able to get to a point where he could just run away from people indefinitely while hurling arcane bolts behind him every time his mana regened (which he'd have to do because his reserves were too much on the pathetic side to really make a mind-numbing initial barrage).
"What're you thinking about?" May asked.
Jaune raised an eyebrow, "Why do you ask?" To which the girl rolled her eyes and flipped her short hair.
"You have that stupid grin on your face, whenever you're thinking of something dumb, or unfeasible, or you're proud of yourself." She sighed. "Always the same expression."
Jaune pouted, slightly insulted at the low-level banter but replied, "I was thinking about how I could maybe become fast enough that I would forever be able to run away from enemies, letting my mana regen and bombard them with bolts."
May stared at him flatly as she rode beside him. She steered her donkey towards him and slapped him on the back. "You can do it."
"What's that supposed to mean…?" he muttered.
-/-
The fire spewed bright orange sparks that glimmered in the air as Jaune fed it another piece of wood. It was the first day of their journey back to Brorusalem. Jaune, a month ago, would have most likely followed up on his thought of the meaning prescribed to first day, and expound the definition of it.
But he didn't. Because it didn't matter. He stared into the flames, focusing on the calming fire.
Jaune pulled his brown cloak tighter around himself, chainmail clinkering slightly. He felt May stir in her sleep. For the first time in several months, he was alone.
Only three companions to be felt, the rest of the space filled up by a small oasis, surrounded by an endless desert.
He closed his eyes and consciously tightened the range of his dimensional comprehension, making it a perfect ball form with him at the centre. He started making it shrink, smaller and smaller, until, with a pop, it minimized into nonexistence in his stomach, showing him a disconcerting view of his intestines as a farewell.
He'd never really considered the psychological effects of constantly feeling more than a human was meant to feel. It added another dimension of senses to an already strained five. The eye saw much, too much. It had to subconsciously sort everything into a hierarchy of value, determined by the person, to not provide too big of an input. Same with the ears, nose and skin.
Jaune closed his eyes. Mental state was not something he'd thought about much in the past. It had always been his body he'd been more worried about.
A mistake. The permanent usage of the skill was bad for him.
The morale skill of Targson that he had been subjected to some time ago had been high level enough to provide a cleansing effect on all things that could be considered debuffs. This he had been told after he'd noticed that he felt decisively different after the battle. It had taken him a day to realize that it was his mental state that felt different.
There really was only one thing in Jaune's life that could have caused such an effect, unless there was an invisible mind mage following him everywhere. Shared dreamscape.
The skill that had been his go to escape from nightmares for quite some of time now. Maybe the change had been gradual, maybe he'd come in contact with something that with its very presence changed him, or maybe he'd been targeted.
The skill description had warned him of the beings he would share the dreamspace with. The skill had already paid off by saving his life once. But everything after that had been solely his fault. It was always odd, having something stupid, bad, slightly horrific happen to you, and having absolutely no one else to blame.
Jaune was the only one who even knew he had the skill. If he had shared the fact that he did, everybody would have warned him off of using it. Probably. Sun would have asked if he was meeting any babes in his dreams.
The mental change hadn't been significant, which was the reason he hadn't noticed anything wrong in the first place. His thoughts were more fleeting, negative emotions bubbled up more often than they usually should. He had brushed it under the rug with the excuse of puberty. It had made sense.
It was scary that he never would have noticed were it not for Targson. Being affected mentally by something, no matter how trivial in comparison to a full-on mind break, was not a good feeling.
But it was a not-so-good feeling he could turn into motivation. Motivation to learn how to protect his mind. Even if he never encountered another situation that would require the capacity for defence, closing off an entire avenue of attack against him would be quite the self-confidence booster.
Shared dreamspace also did bring him to the most beautiful places...
-/-
Jaune had done it. He'd perfected the move that had been occupying his mind for the last day.
His legs gripped the area right behind the horse's neck haphazardly, and Jaune let his head rest on the thing's rear end. He let his arms hang and swayed with the gait of his mount.
It was a much more relaxing posture than the usual upright sitting, useless for anything but a trot, but they weren't in a hurry.
He grew slightly bored with his elation, so he pulled his sword free where he had it sheathed at his side, rather than in his inventory, and dropped it onto the ground.
...After activating dimensional comprehension to check that there was no one behind him, of course.
Then he summoned the sword back to his hand, where the leather-bound hilt hit with a smack. He released his grip on his sensing skill, then a few seconds later the sword.
Under the critical gazes of his party, he repeated this several times before he grew tired and started hurtling the occasional arcane bolt into the sky.
His previous attempt at trying to keep dimensional comprehension up at all times was flawed. The next approach was to activate the skill in a short burst to notice anything that had changed quickly, but that was exhausting. The mental skill needed for something like that was the direct opposite of what he'd done before.
Keeping up the sense required stamina. Short bursts, on the other hand, also needed a certain quickness and explosiveness. The idea of short flickers wasn't of much use if he needed two seconds to feel anything properly.
On his next attempted flicker he noticed a small movement in the area of Suns windpipe. His larynx was setting up to vibrate, which signified he was going to attempt something speech-related.
Jaune turned off his skill and turned his head to look at Sun, who was riding to the right of him. Coincidentally, he met Sun's eyes, immediately causing the movement in Sun's throat to stop. They looked at each other for a few moments.
"What?" Jaune asked finally, breaking up the staring contest.
Sun scratched the back of his head awkwardly, tail whipping around slightly behind him. "That sword thing you did, you think you could pull me along if I was holding it?" His blue eyes sparkled slightly as he asked.
Jaune looked down, smiling. "Ah, I see you are a man of culture as well." Jaune rode closer to Sun, and held the hilt out to the monkey boy.
Sun looked at the hilt, raising a hand, "Jaune."
The mage looked back, sword still held aloft. "Sun, do it. Take it in your hand."
Almost reverently Sun pulled it out of its sheath and held it in a two handed grip, which promptly caused him to fall off of his horse… since he had abandoned his hold on the reins.
Jaune watched as Sun, at no point losing his grip, landed on his stomach. Face full of sand, unable to speak, Sun formed his tail into a thumbs up.
"Sun." Such willpower.
Zedong quickly rode by and took control of Sun's horse so it wouldn't run away while the owner was eating sand.
Jaune used his skill, slowing down for a moment. Nothing happened. Then the sword rose floating into the air, before taking off after Jaune at half the pace it usually did, dragging Sun to his feet and pulling him across the ground.
Sun spluttered, spitting out sand, then started laughing, occasionally jumping. "Hey look, I'm flying!" Sun hollered as he arced upwards. Then the boy noticed something. "Am I... accelerating?"
The sword was accelerating, Jaune thought to himself as he watched. It had become faster than his horse. The point would soon reach him.
The point. Sun was gripping the hilt, so the direction of the weapon flying towards him was inverse of what it usually was.
If Sun let go, it would fly towards him at high speed, point first. "Ah." A useful observation. He tried cancelling the skill. It didn't work. Weird, he hadn't noticed it being uninterruptible before. He spurred his horse into a gallop. "Sun, whatever you do, don't let go!" he shouted before gripping the horse tighter.
As he wasn't watching where he was going nor guiding the horse, Jaune was unprepared for the jump the animal used to vault over a small patch of cacti. His face was promptly slammed into the horse's neck, a position where he dazedly left it for now.
He quickly felt himself gain some distance from the flying missile and sighed in relief. Then he felt behind him. Sun was getting faster?
"Why would I let g-!" the words Sun wanted to say were interrupted by wind being forced into his throat as the sword, mad at the distance suddenly put between it and its master, sped up further until Sun didn't have to jump up to fly. Thankfully this also put him at sufficient elevation to avoid the cacti patch. Whereas before he probably would have sustained painful punctures all across his body, now he only lost his pants as they got caught up in the shrubs and stayed there as Sun flew on.
Jaune's horse looked back at the broken-off scream, slightly curious. Upon noticing the sex offender missile heading directly towards its butt, it accelerated as well in terror.
May watched, deadpan, as Jaune sped away at an unsustainable pace, kicking up sand along the way with a screaming, bottomless Sun following closely behind, his tears dissipating into the surrounding air creating sparkles
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
"They're out of sight," Zedong commented while scratching his grey moustache.
May hid her face behind her hands.
"At least they're going in the right direction," he finished.