RAY VAN CAMARO
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Most beastfolk villages were completely secluded and their only inhabitants were beast people. The town of Lalatina was a mix of the other races, though beast people were still the majority. It was probably because this place was right by the river and business was always high wherever there was water.
Once we got off the ship, we dropped by the Adventurer’s Guild to request for any number of jynxists to accompany us to wherever this rune was. We would be paying each jynxist ten silver coins.
The teleportation spell was something we still had little understanding of. We needed to experiment with how it worked.
As we walked around town, I noticed a group of people chopping wood and preparing meals at a nearby tavern. They were Gilead villagers that were found nearby. They had been working to earn enough money to travel back home.
“Colonel Camaro has come to bring us back to Gilead!” they cheered when they saw us.
“I’m glad you’re all safe,” I said as I received heartwarming embraces. “We’ll escort you back home soon, just sit tight for now.”
The reassurance that people who got teleported were safe filled me with a sense of hope I had been drained of ever since I walked into my empty village.
We arrived at Chris’ family’s place and they were kind enough to let all twelve of us and Tank stay at their home. After some much-needed rest on solid ground, we gathered at the guild the next morning and found thirty-three jynxists waiting for us. We didn’t put a cap on how many could come and we put a warning stating that any jynxist that showed up must perform a spell that would temporarily paralyze them for a couple of days.
Despite all the prerequisites and warnings, many still came in attendance. Ten silver coins was something one on the road couldn’t just ignore.
Some of the jynxists were familiar with Chris. Surprisingly, some had taken the State Jynxist Exam with her.
Our expedition hiked for a couple of hours until we found the area the rune was supposed to be in. However, nothing was there except an open field. The closest sort of foliage was a league away.
This time, everyone knew better than to say this was a dead end. We split up and searched the area to look for whatever this rune could be. Some of the jynxists that could hover even went up as high as they could to get a bird’s eye view of the place.
All that to find nothing.
Then while warming up lunch, Chris came upon a thought.
“When I took this year’s exam, I made it to the final phase,” she went on. “The last phase involved a one-on-one fight. I lost to an idiot kid who got disqualified right after.”
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“What does this have to do with anything?” Czeslaw asked. He was wearing a hooded cloak and a mask to hide his identity.
“Shush! That was the hook to my statement which is—the idiot kid beat me because he turned the ground into quagmire and hid inside the ground. What I’m saying is maybe the thing we’re looking for is inside the ground as well.”
“Chris, you genius,” Rudolf congratulated before sneezing violently.
Sadly, none of us predicted that what we would be looking for was going to be underground. No shovels were brought. The earth mages did most of the labour by digging with jynx while the others and my dolls were digging with what they could. Chris was bent over with her protracted claws scratching away at the dirt.
It didn’t take long to find something hidden in the ground. We turned the surrounding ground into quagmire and had jynxists levitate the foreign object as much as they could. We tied it with a rope and attached it to Tank, who was pulling with all his might while the regular people and my dolls helped pull on the rope.
The object turned out to be a monolith. Carved into it was the familiar rune on the map.
“I have a feeling that I know exactly what this thing is for,” Czeslaw said. “Let’s start the experiments.”
We each had the thirty-three jynxists that came with us use the incantation circle to summon a beam of light onto one of my dolls. One out of five times, the dolls would be transported near the rune rock, which glowed blue every time the spell was cast. The rest of the dolls were nowhere to be found the other four times.
The size of the beam was about five meters in diameter. We then had jynxists summon the spell in synchrony and what we discover was that the spell stacked. If five jynxists were to summon the beam of light, the beam would be five times as big as opposed to if one summoned it.
When the experiment concluded, we headed back to Lalatina and dropped the jynxists off at their inns with instructions to the inn workers that they’d be paralyzed for the next couple of days.
Our party gathered back at Chris’ place where we made sure no one was hearing our conversation.
“They’re waypoints,” Czeslaw pointed out. “Every time that beam of light engulfs a living thing, it teleports them there. The runes on the map are where the waypoints are, so those other runes are where your other dolls must be teleporting to. I can’t believe waypoints actually exist. I thought they were legends.”
I nodded. “The question is, why are the villagers of Gilead being found everywhere but these waypoints.”
“We also have to talk about the fact the spell increases in size when more jynxists perform it,” Hendrik said. “To consume Gilead, there would have to have been at least two hundred and fifty jynxists using this circle.”
“That’s a lot,” Czeslaw said. “But why? If they wanted to take over Gilead, two hundred and fifty jynxists would’ve been more than enough.”
“Maybe they were trying to mask this as some sort of mana incident,” Doria suggested. “I mean, Colonel, you thought that too.”
Nodding my head, I took a sip of tea. “Yeah. It’s a good mask.”
“Maybe whoever is behind this thing didn’t want to anger a certain someone. If General Clegane were to find out that a group of jynxists were attacking Gilead, how do you think the Warden of the West would react? A leader so fierce that the entire western region is more loyal to him than the king. A region of soldiers nicknamed the Bad Company for the way they acted separately from the rest of the country. General Clegane would start a war over something like this, won’t he?”
“A conspiracy has been unmasked,” I told them. “Questions will lead to answers. Those answers will lead to more questions. But in the end, we will find out the truth behind all of this.”