"Anyone have any ideas?" I asked as our party gathered to discuss our options.

Erik's expression shifted to concern. "While I don’t think they will attack again, there's no way for us to take the fight to them."

"How many survived?" I inquired.

"Maybe 70 or so, excluding us. The rest are wounded, and Elara is more of a part-time healer," Erik explained, glancing at the others. "They are in no shape to mount an assault; they would be slaughtered."

"Then maybe we can try to make a break for it and get to the next village," Mara suggested.

"They will see us leaving. I’m sure they have scouts watching this place," Erik retorted.

"Perhaps a messenger to another village to get help," Malvina suggested.

"They might capture him, and we would lose valuable time," Erik pointed out, playing the role of the guy who finds holes in plans.

"This is getting us nowhere," I interjected. "We’ve established we can’t stay, and we can’t attack, so we have to leave. The question is where and how?"

"We have to create a diversion," Alira suggested.

"Diversion is my middle name," I added with a laugh, but the others looked confused.

"I'm assuming you don’t have last names?" I observed. Now that I thought about it, none of them had introduced themselves with both names.

"You don’t either," Alira replied. "Why are you surprised by this?"

"On my world, everybody has a first and last name," I explained.

"We're getting off track," I said, gesturing to indicate it was my fault. "The idea was, I can create a diversion."

"What kind of diversion are we talking about?" Elara wondered.

"The most effective kind: I'll attack their compound at night, leading them to believe that others might also attack," I explained. "The best defense is a good offense, and all that."

"What about the scouts?" Alira asked.

"Alira and I will need to track them down and neutralize them," Erik said.

Mara turned to me. "I’ll draw you a map of the road we will take. Since you’ll be alone and we’ll have injured people, you should have no problem catching up with us."

"Thank you."

There was some moonlight tonight, which helped me see where I was going. Alira and Erik had left before me to seek out their targets. I had tried the rest of the day to speed up my icelance, but I could only reduce its cast time to five seconds, which made it pretty much unusable. But I could manipulate energy and perhaps even matter. Sure, they came with some caveats, but the future looked bright, if I didn’t do anything stupid tonight, that is.

Bypassing the village took a while, but the big villa should be right up the hill. From the description given to me, it had a few houses in the center with a courtyard and buildings surrounding them that acted like walls.

The climb was harder than I thought since I couldn’t use the road, but eventually I could see a wall in front of me. After a few minutes of rest, there was no point in delaying the inevitable.

I figured I had a minute or so until the alarm would be raised, so I found a section of the wall with enough wood and unleashed as many Lightning Bolts as I could muster into the same part of the building, hoping the charred wood would not be easily put out.

It worked better than I had hoped. Within a minute, a fire was already spreading. It wasn’t much yet, but it should keep some people busy.

Now that the alarm was raised and people could be heard shouting, I moved to a different section of the wall and started repeating my plan.

This time, the response was after half a minute. Since the light gave my position away, I was assaulted by projectiles, so I was forced to relocate yet again. No one came out after me, probably expecting a trap, so I managed to start a third fire.

On my way to the fourth location, my luck ran out as I was suddenly hit by a projectile. The problem was, since my shield protected me, I couldn’t really tell the direction from where I was hit, so I had to keep moving. They seemed to see in the dark, as I could not shake them.

With every hit, I started to notice there seemed to be a growing weight to the shield. They were doing something—maybe some poisons. Clearly, being in the dark was only favoring them, so I changed direction toward the compound.

By now, the fire had spread, so there was enough light even though I was only near an outside wall.

My pursuers finally stepped out from the shadows, there were three of them. Immediately, I fired a Bolt at one of them, but incredibly, he dodged it. This was not good.

I followed it up with some more Bolts, but nothing connected. They were extremely agile, but they didn’t advance, probably because they figured a mage must have more tricks up his sleeve. I knew being a one-trick pony would come back to bite me.

One of them tentatively started moving forward, then dashed or teleported to me and hit me a couple of times. He immediately sidestepped my Bolt. The others saw it as an encouraging sign and moved as well.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The hits were now coming faster and faster, and I was starting to feel the weight of whatever they were doing to my shield, so I had to improvise fast. Discovering a new spell would be impossible in the time frame I had, so maybe I could modify the Lightning Bolt. My first idea was a Lightning Chain spell of sorts, but it didn’t work, and I felt I was running out of time.

So, if the trick was visualization, I remembered seeing a video of an arc in a power station, so I focused lightning on both my palms but didn’t let them go. After holding them for a few seconds, I closed the distance between my hands, and an arc formed between them.

They immediately stopped the attacks and tried backing off, but it was too late for two of them, as I brought my hands facing forward, and the arc expanded in a circle. It didn’t have a lot of range, but there was no way for them to dodge it. On tried jumping over it, and the other under. They were both caught by the wave next to them. The third was behind me at the time and was in the blind spot; he retreated to a safe distance, but I could still feel the weight on the shield.

I could let the shield drop, but would that transfer the afflictions or dots to me? If I got out of this, I would really need to go to a mage tower to learn more about the classes and the spells and how they worked.

The assassin was keeping his distance, but I couldn’t retreat in that direction, so I fired a few bolts at the stone wall to make some places to climb. The wall was perhaps twice my height, so I reached the top quickly. There was a small pathway leading through the buildings that intersected with the wall. The fire had kept people busy, and I was able to sneak without much difficulty, trying to find another spot to make my escape.

But I noticed the weight of the shield was dropping, so maybe the afflictions were running out. Unfortunately, that gave me bad ideas of going to the main building. I was torn between escaping and maybe... well, you only live once, right? The chaos made for a very enticing opportunity. Guess everyone can be an assassin in the right circumstances.

I found a discarded bucket, and I started running with it like everybody else, hoping I was blending into the picture. It got me past the outer yard into the inner yard, where I dropped the bucket and made my way to the main building.

There were two guards at the main door, but they didn’t react as I approached, so when I got close enough, I fired two Bolts and took them both out at the same time.

The inside was very gaudily decorated, with lots of gold, marble, furs, and drapes. For a moment, I was tempted to burn it, but a noise caught my attention.

Looking through a semi-transparent drape, I saw ten or so women in various stages of undress with a portly older man. This guy actually had a harem. Given the passion they seemed to display, they were either mind-controlled or paid handsomely.

Deciding not to creep around, I swiped the drape away and entered the alcove-like room.

Saying he was surprised would be an understatement. He managed to somewhat compose himself, locking his eyes onto mine with a gaze that seemed to pierce right through me.

It was almost amusing to watch his expression shift—from initial shock and irritation at my interruption to an eerie calm, and now, as realization dawned, a flicker of panic began to set in.

So, guess he was the empath and, by his age, the leader.

Sensing something was amiss, the women—all of them—started attacking me. So, definitely mind control, and since he was controlling ten of them at once, he must have been very powerful.

His misfortune was that the exit was located where I was, so he needed to get past me.

The cramped space limited their movements, preventing them from taking advantage of their superior numbers. The most they managed was a vine wrapping around my leg, but a swift Lightning Arc burst outward, striking them all at once. They collapsed almost simultaneously.

"I’ll give you anything you want..." he began, desperation in his voice. But I wasn’t about to listen. I unleashed a Lightning Bolt, this one meant to char rather than neutralize. The familiar red energy shield materialized around him, but he wasn’t as skilled as Mara. It shattered almost immediately, and the bolt struck his arm as he tried, too late, to dodge.

He crumpled to the ground with a brief, sharp scream. The pain must have been overwhelming, or perhaps he was simply too weak, because he quickly lost consciousness. His shoulder was burnt far beyond third degree, yet, unfortunately, he was still breathing.

I say “unfortunately” because his survival made everything more complicated. Defenseless and incapacitated, he certainly deserved it, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish him off. Technically, he was meant to be killed on sight, right? Who was I fooling? I was just wasting precious time, lost in indecision.

My fear solidified as I heard the women beginning to stir. Stunning them again was the last thing I wanted to do—getting tased multiple times couldn’t be good for anyone’s health. Besides, they were practically innocent bystanders in all of this. But to my surprise, they didn’t rush at me or flee in panic. Instead, they simply looked... bewildered.

Maybe the literal shock had jolted them free from the mind control, or perhaps incapacitating him had severed the connection. Either way, they appeared lucid, glancing around as if trying to get their bearings.

"What happened?" one of the women asked.

"I think you were mind-controlled by this guy," I said, pointing to the portly man.

That seemed to trigger something in some of them; maybe they remembered, because they lost the glazed look in their eyes and a primal rage seem to take over. They eached grabbed stuff surrounding them and rushed towards the stunned man. I had to look away as the repeated hits with metal and wooded objects on his face didn't make for a pretty sight.

They gasped for breath as they finally stopped beating the now obviously dead man. Blood covered them, and their eyes held a distant, thousand-yard stare.

As morbid as it might sound, at least it saved me the morally dubious decision of what to do about him. For that I was grateful to them.

With that settled, it was time to leave, as the risk of being discovered grew with each passing moment.

"If anyone wants to leave, get dressed and grab a weapon or something," I said firmly, trying to get them to focus. It didn’t take long for them to snap out of it and start getting ready. The exception was the woman was first to advance on to the leader and was now covered in blood. She still stood frozen in shock.

"Can any of you help her get ready? I don’t think me touching her would be a good idea," I said. What she had experienced would take years of therapy, which she probably didn’t have access to. Hopefully the closure she got would help her at least a little.

Only when exiting did I realize there was no way we could leave without drawing suspicions. We were too many.

One of them must have sensed my hesitation as we exited the main building because she said, “I can do illusions. Usually, they are not that reliable, but with the chaos, we might slip through undetected.”

"Really? That’s perfect. Please do so." I replied.

We easily reached the wall and found a section that didn't look too daunting. One of the women had the skill to bring some vines to make our descent easier.

"Where are we going?" one of them asked as we made our way to the forest.

"We are going to meet up with the other refugees from the village," I explained.

"Someone is coming," a voice was heard.

The three assassins from earlier and a few reinforcements exited the forest and moved to block our path.

"Run, I think they're only after me," I said. Handling three was already more than I could manage, but now, with reinforcements on the way... Alira was right I was not cut out for this world. If I had them killled or maimed the first time I wouldn't be back in the same sittuation. If I made it out of this, some changes would definitely be needed. What did people call it—being morally flexible?

"I’m done running," said one of the women. "I’d rather die than be captured again."

Maybe I had a chance after all.