CHAPTER 131 TACTICAL RETURN

I groaned softly as I lay against the wall. I could feel my injuries slowly fading away from my healing, I focused more on my legs and chest so I’d be able to stand. I could deal with my cracked skull later.

The bandit boss slowly walked over to me, “Well, I have to say I’m surprised. I expected a heroic sacrifice from one of you, I just didn’t expect it to actually work. If you had been any slower I would have been able to chase after them.”

He spoke in a confident tone, which was understandable given our current situation.

I opened my mouth to speak and instead ended up hacking out a glob of blood. Had one of my ribs pierced my lung? I didn’t seem to be struggling to breathe that badly, so it didn’t seem to be an issue. My healing should handle it regardless.

I opened my mouth again and spoke, my voice coming out in a wheezing rasp, “How… did you even detect us in the first place?” I managed to get out.

He shrugged, “I’ll admit, you happening to be in just the right spot to see some of our members leaving was a surprise, but did you really think we didn’t have methods to detect when people enter and leave the facility?”

Huh, I honestly didn’t. I didn’t know there was something that sophisticated, but I guess I should’ve known that. Magic allowed for some crazy things to happen, maybe you had to have a special tattoo or something to not trip the alarm system when you entered.

I felt my bones slowly shifting as my body healed and they went back to their normal shapes and positions. Good, progress.

“That’s honestly,” I let out a hacking cough, “more impressive than I thought. I guess it should’ve been obvious there was something like that when I realized the base was hidden to magical forms of observation.”

Two of the best ways to distract people are compliments and the sharing of knowledge. Getting people to talk about how great they are is always a good tactic, and if you share little tidbits of secrets about yourself, especially when it looks like an accident. I make it seem like I let it slip that I have abilities to see things beyond my eyes.

The normal assumption would be that I have some form of clairvoyance. I didn’t want to spill all my abilities if I could help it, but I couldn’t afford to be stingy here. Better to let them know too much about me and then escape rather than know too little and get killed.

His eyes narrowed slightly, “A clairvoyant, huh? I guess that makes sense with how well you avoided our patrols and managed to avoid getting trapped on your way back here.”

Hook, line, and sinker. I hadn’t exactly bothered to hide the lilies, but at the same time, they weren’t exactly flashy. They also didn’t really feed anything noticeable back to me in a way that said I was using them for any sort of observation. They did glow with a slight yellow magical aura if you looked at them with [Magic Sense] but that in and of itself doesn’t really mean anything without context.

I nodded slowly, trying to avoid hurting myself. I was slowly trickling the little bit of mana I was receiving into more healing. It was slow going, but I was getting closer and closer to my goal. Looking at Jazz and Lea I could see them still making their way away from the base.

Good, just a little farther.

The bandit boss came to a stop in front of me and looked down at me as I lay against the wall, still breathing heavily.

“Well, I guess I better go after your friends before they get too far away. Can’t have them escaping after learning where our base is after all.”

I just snickered, causing him to stop as he turned around and looked at me incredulously. Half of it was in slight relief that he was planning on killing me, at least not yet. But that would be irrelevant because if he didn’t kill me right now, it wasn’t happening later.

My snickering turned into a full-body laugh that wracked me with pain that I just ignored.

“Why are you laughing?” He asked, looking at me like I had lost my sanity. Which, I didn’t blame him. I was nearly dead from his perspective and all of a sudden I had started laughing. Which was very unnerving I’m sure.

My chest finally healed enough and I had enough mana to cast a few spells. I continued laughing as I slowly pushed myself to my feet, his eyes narrowed at me as he watched me rise.

“You’re a healer as well then? Natural regeneration shouldn’t have gotten you that far in this amount of time.”

I smiled mischievously, “Got it in one.”

He just scoffed, “That doesn’t change anything, you’re still not strong enough to fight me and I can easily kill you with a single attack.”

I started laughing again, much to his annoyance, “Why are you still laughing?”

I let out a long-winded sigh, trying to catch my breath before I looked at him and smirked, “Of course, you can still kill me with a single attack. I didn’t expect this to make me capable of fighting you. A little bit of healing isn’t going to change that.”

He just frowned as he looked at me, confused about where I was going with this. If I wasn’t expecting to win against him then what could I possibly be planning?

I slowly stretched, noticing him tense as I moved. I propped my neck and loosened up my shoulder joints and knees. I let out long groans as I twisted my back, feeling it pop as I did so.

“Ahhh, much better,” I said, satisfied now that my body felt loose and limber again. The pain from his punch faded into a dull ache in my chest that was dwindling even further as I continued to heal it.

“Now, I think you said something about going after my friends?”

He sighed and shook his head, “Fine, if you want to die first I’ll oblige then.”

I chuckled, “Oh no, you must be mistaken. I don’t plan to fight you. You’d easily win, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. Instead, I plan to do this.”

His eyes widened as he felt my mana surge and a tendril appeared near where Jazz and Lea had last been within my range. They had cleared it a while ago and hopefully kept running.

The bandit boss lunged for me, and I jumped through a spell disappearing from his sight as I heard him let out a yell.

I appeared on the surface, information blooming into my mind as my location shifted from being deep underground to being above the surface. Off in the distance, I could see Jazz and Lea running at full tilt, they were small specs in the distance on a hill.

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I activated [Wings of Lightning] and took off after them at my full speed. I didn’t have time to dally, the bandit boss could still catch up with us. Especially if he was faster than the speed of sound. I didn’t want to be around when he caught up, he wasn’t going to underestimate me like that again.

Lea and Jazz were fast, but when flying I was significantly faster than my own running speed which was already above theirs. So I managed to catch up to them fairly quickly.

As I got close to them Lea spun around quickly, swinging her sword in a decapitating strike. I dodged it and quickly grabbed both her and Jazz and held them in my arms before shooting straight up into the sky. It was difficult to hold them, but I dealt with it for the moment.

I quickly ate up the distance, putting us over five hundred feet into the sky. If he could fly we were done for anyway, and I didn’t want to be too close to the ground in case he had some ability to jump that high and be able to grab us.

“Alex? What happ-”

“Not now!” I interrupted, “He’s after us, and he’s fucking fast as hell. I want to put as much distance between us as possible. Maybe if we go far enough he won’t follow.”

Lea closed her mouth and nodded as I shot off to the west. My goal was Lustirne, it was the nearest city that had the highest likelihood of being able to at least keep us safe for a short time so we could recover.

The only problem with this plan was that even at my speed while carrying everyone, it would take us nearly thirty minutes to get there. A trip that would normally only take me about twenty.

We didn’t have time to bitch about that though. I pushed everything I had into going as fast as I could, and yet it still didn’t seem fast enough.

“Uhh, Alex?” Lea had to yell over the wind to be heard, but I did manage to hear her.

“What?” I yelled back.

“He’s catching up.”

What?

I snapped my head back while I continued to fly in a straight line. And sure enough there he was, kicking up a storm as he sped across the grasslands to catch up to us. The fact that he could see that we were this high and he hadn’t decided to give up made me concerned.

I changed direction from going in a straight line to at an angle, headed upwards at about a 75-degree angle. It didn’t take him much longer from when he appeared to make it almost directly underneath us, he slowed down and started to keep pace.

After a few short seconds, there was an explosion of sound and heavy winds buffeted us. At first, I thought it was an attack, but it died down just as quickly as it showed up.

“The hell was that?” Jazz asked, his head snapping around from his position under my arm, trying to determine if it would happen again.

“That,” I answered, “was him breaking the sound barrier.”

“The what?”

I looked over at Lea, and she seemed thoughtful more than confused. I guess they didn’t have a word or description for super-sonic speeds then. Now that I think about it, I don’t know that anyone else had really described anything as super-sonic.

“Sound travels through the air at a set speed. When you break that speed it causes air pressure that in turn creates a shockwave which creates a big explosive wave of wind, like we just experienced.”

I kept my eyes focused on the guy underneath us as I continued to fly higher and higher.

2000 feet.

2500 feet.

3000 feet.

I climbed until I sat on just the edge of my range for [OWN] which was now sitting somewhere around 4000 feet.

I could still see him down there by using the grass to look at him. He wasn’t even doing anything, just running and watching us. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to throw anything. It didn’t seem like he could fly, otherwise he would be flying right now.

So why was he still following us?

“I don’t like that he’s still following us,” Jazz said, a bit of concern creeping into his normally pompous tone.

I glanced at him, “I don’t either.”

Lea just pursed her lips in her signature expression of nervous anticipation.

He followed us all the way until Lustirne rose in the distance. Then he slowed to a stop and watched us as we flew towards the city. I angled down and slowed my forward momentum, slowly hovering downwards to be able to pull him back in range again and see what he was doing.

Before I could though, he turned around and sped off back the way we came.

I watched and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

After ten minutes I finally let out a long sigh of relief.

“He left,” Lea said anticlimactically.

I nodded, “Yeah, he did.”

“Excellent, then you can put me down on the ground. I’m tired of being carried like a sack of potatoes.”

I raised an eyebrow and smirked at him, “I’m surprised His Royal Highness knows how potatoes are carried, let alone what a potato is.”

Jazz gave me a glare that quickly mellowed off and he just shook his head. Clearly too worn down to banter.

I was of the same mind, despite my ribbing I was mentally drained. Physically as well.

“Alex, your head is bleeding?” Lea said confused, “How…”

“Ah, forgot about that,” and now that I had been reminded, my head started throbbing painfully. I started pulsing some healing through it and could feel the headache slowly abating.

“That happened during our fight, he hit me with a really solid punch and it sent me tumbling down the hallway, and ended up smacking my head against the wall. And, well… the wall won.”

Lea looked at me incredulously for a moment while Jazz snorted.

I made it to the ground and let Jazz and Lea stand under their own power.

We stood there for a moment and looked at each other, none of us said anything as we tried to internalize the last several hours of excitement and action.

Lea let out a long sigh before speaking, “We…” She started off hesitantly, getting lost in thought for a few moments before shaking her head and refocusing on what she wanted to say, “We should head back to Elendar. This is… beyond what we’re capable of handling on our own.”

I nodded, “I agree. It’s one thing if it’s a small bandit group terrorizing the countryside, it’s another thing completely when it’s a full-blown terrorist cell masquerading as a 10-man bandit group.”

“This had been my vote from the start, but you two thought we could handle it,” Jazz said imperiously.

“Because if we didn’t at least try, we would have gotten in trouble. You can’t seriously believe that they wouldn’t have been pissed at us if we came back empty-handed without even attempting to find out anything about who we were finding beyond a name.”

Jazz just shrugged unapologetically, so I decided to continue pointing out why I thought his idea was braindead.

“What if it had just been a ten-man group under their banner? What if it was just someone masquerading as them and not actually the real group? What if they had been more lazy and not nearly as protected? What if, what if. Running back to base on a ‘what if’ is the kind of thing that gets you charged with desertion of duty. But now that we’ve sufficiently tried-”, “And nearly lost our lives,” Jazz interjected, “-we can go back to HQ and tell them what we know,” I finished unperturbed.

Jazz just shook his head, “Whatever, it doesn’t matter now. I just don’t want to spend a second longer here than I have to.”

Lea tapped her lips thoughtfully as she mostly ignored our talks, “Regardless,” She said absentmindedly, catching our attention, “I wouldn’t get too comfortable with the idea of sticking around the base. If I were them, I’d send the same team right back out to the same location with extra firepower. We’re probably going to be heading right back out here to deal with the problem as soon as possible.”

Jazz let out an annoyed groan.

I agreed with him at this moment, I was not eager to come back out here again after this entire fiasco. But I couldn’t fully fault Lea’s logic either, we were just the best choice at this point to lead a full raid against them. We had firsthand experience with their fighting and the layout of their base. I also just had a good skill for navigating areas like that.

I guess we would find out what the upper brass decided when we provided them with a report.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t be another tribunal.