The man with the arming sword came at Tahir first, charging at him with an overhead swing while the one with the warhammer recovered. Tahir brought his own sword up to block, and upon impact he barely budged. He could feel aura behind the strike, but between Tahir’s own aura strengthening, his aura shield, and the increased weight from the earth spirit, anyone with less than the average platinum Redcloud member’s aura would consider him an immovable object.

Of course. Tahir thought, shoving the man away. He went in for a kick to the man’s ribs that sent him sprawling a few feet back. I managed to block Ester of all people, no way I’m gonna lose to a bandit.

The other man recovered and came in for a swing with his warhammer. Tahir dodged to the side, and pulled aura into his fist for a swift jab, aiming for the ribs again. The man cried out, and Tahir thought he heard a crunch. The bandit dropped his warhammer and stumbled backward. A cry from one of the others on the opposite side drew Tahir’s attention. One of the three on the other side ran back toward the grass, covered in burns, and still on fire in several spots. As Tahir ran around to get an angle on the other side, he saw Meti dodging away from one who tried to swipe at her with a sword, and heard him cry out and stop in his tracks as a light cut appeared on his shoulder.

Next to him, Hasio materialized out of nowhere - or at least seemed to. He swiftly pulled the dagger back and swept the bandit’s legs, causing the man to bump his head against the carriage before hitting the ground. The last one standing hadn’t approached, but after seeing what had just happened, didn’t look like he wanted to.

“Now, gentlemen, do you still think we’re up for your charity?” Murabi asked. The bandit leading the group stood several feet away from him, one arm bleeding and hanging limp. “We’ll give you another chance to walk away while you still can, how about you go ahead and take it?”

“Much obliged.” The leader called “It was our mistake, certainly, and one we won’t forget. We’ll just be off.” He backpedaled, slowly, keeping everyone in the carriage in view as he made to retreat into the grass. Tahir watched the others do the same, clutching wounds and injuries they’d sustained. Even if they’d go on to try to rob someone else after this, it probably wouldn’t be for a while.

Tahir had relaxed, watching them leave, and thought that they’d be able to settle this with little bloodshed. He didn’t know if they had a bounty on them, but they were a good ways off from the nearest settlement with a Redcloud board, and had their own destination. These bandits also didn’t seem like they’d be more than a silver mission, either.

As his thoughts drifted, his danger senses flared up as he heard shuffling behind him. One of the bandits had lunged, grabbing for Tahir, and his hands closed around the blade as he tried to wrench it from Tahir and hold it close to his chest. Instinctively, Tahir strengthened his grip with aura and pulled his blade back, his eyes widening as he realized what just happened.

The man stood for barely a second more, a deep cut going from his left shoulder to right hip, before he collapsed, blood pooling beneath his corpse. Tahir took several steps back, as the other bandits abandoned any pretense of easing back and ran for their lives into the grass.

Everyone else crowded around the body, while Tahir looked between it and his bloodstained sword. “I-fuck, he tried to-” Tahir’s mind raced, he couldn’t get the words out.

“Deep breaths, Tahir. We saw.” Hasio spoke. “Damned fool. Trying to make off with something when he knew he was outmatched. Probably thought he could grab it and then lose us in the grass.”

Trying to follow Hasio’s advice, Tahir took in several deep breaths, and glanced toward Murabi as he made his way around the carriage to them. “This your first time taking someone’s life?” He asked. In a neutral tone, but his face showed more concern than his voice.

“No.” Tahir answered, when he felt sure he could speak. “Bandits are a pretty common silver request. When they get desperate enough it becomes a situation of ‘me or them,’ but this-” He stopped, once again at a loss for words, before he managed to sum up his thoughts. “It was pointless.”

“Are you gonna be alright?” Theo asked.

“I think so. I won’t be having any nightmares or anything, but it still just bothers me.” He let the bonds of his spirits fade, thanking them mentally as he did. With a spell, he conjured a small, swirling ball of water and ran his sword through it to wash off the blood.

“Well, that’s probably a good thing you’re not used to killing people.” Murabi put a reassuring hand on Tahir’s shoulder. “That’d be your conscience, and hanging onto it will keep you from going down a road that leads nowhere good. I don’t think I need to tell you this, but make sure it doesn’t keep you from doing what needs to be done.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” Tahir had the general apprehension of killing another living thing drilled out of him before he reached silver rank. If he hadn’t he certainly wouldn’t have made it into gold. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to killing another human, unless they did something irredeemable like Zorhe and his soul magic.

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Another thing that weighed heavy on his mind as he looked down at the corpse was his trial with Ester. If anything had gone wrong, or he misjudged her power for that first swing, that could have easily happened to him.

“Should we bury him?” Theo asked, to no one in particular.

“No.” Murabi answered, moving over and grabbing the corpse by the collar, then unceremoniously tossed it to the side of the path. “He made his choice, and he’s not our concern. If the rest of them cared about him at all, then they’ll come back when we’re long gone and give him a proper burial. We can’t waste our time with every bandit on the road. Before we get going though, are you going to be okay Theo? I thought I felt a good burst of heat from you.”

Theo nodded. “I’ll be fine, the aura control stuff has really been doing wonders. I can do a lot more without even risking unbalancing anything, and I have plenty of medicine ready in case I do.” Some of the more intense training did cause Theo to relapse on a couple of occasions, but she had an array of potions and the material to make at least ten more of each element in her storage bag.

Murabi gave a nod, then turned back toward the front of the carriage to climb up into the seat. “Good, if no one else has any issues, let’s get moving. The quicker we get out of this area the better.”

Once they traveled further away, Murabi considered skipping training for the day, but Tahir insisted. He definitely wanted something to take his mind off of the day’s events, and if it had proved anything to Tahir, it was that they were having a notable effect. He could draw out aura faster from following Murabi’s teachings, and everyone could control their aura better than they used to be able to. He didn’t want everyone else’s progress to stop because of him, and he didn’t want to neglect his own improvement either.

They continued into the routine they’d created for their travel until the end of the second week, where they had to sell their horse and carriage at a small town along the border of Paxoruche and the unclaimed lands. They used some of the gold to restock on food, and kept most of the supplies they could fit in their various storage bags. Tahir, Meti, and Theo tried to give the fourth one they had to Murabi, but he insisted that they pass it along to Hasio instead.

Supplies on hand, and a general route planned by Murabi, they set off on foot. They enjoyed a few days more of traveling through grass lands with little in the way to stop them, covering dozens of miles per day with their aura enhanced travel, getting about a third of the way through their route until they hit the rainforest like a wall. The dense foliage cut their mileage in half, but with the tree cover blocking the sun most of the time, they could travel for longer hours in the day to make up for it.

Especially in the unclaimed lands, getting attacked by monsters would have normally been a real possibility for the party, but Murabi’s presence kept any opportunistic creatures and even the predators away. Murabi himself said he used an ability that had him sending out his aura in waves around him, giving everything around him an idea of his strength. Murabi had trained this to be able to do it subtly, so only non-humanoid creatures would feel it on an instinctual level, but for an example he used it in a more overt way. They could all feel the pressure, one that made it slightly hard to breathe and sent their fight or flight instincts spiraling.

“Can we learn how to do that?” Tahir asked.

Murabi nodded. “You usually learn how to do it around platinum or mithral. It won’t do much until then anyway unless you’re trying to affect people without any aura or mana to begin with.”

“Why didn’t you employ this technique against the bandits back then?” Meti asked.

“It’s rather indiscriminate. It would have affected you as well as the bandits. Also, it might have worked on them, but people like that seemed inclined to think it was some kind of trick - since the kind of dread it gives can easily be mimicked with magic. In hindsight I probably would have done it immediately and apologized to you all later, but the past is the past.”

By day, they covered miles of forest with breaks in between to eat and train, and by night they slept under the stars. They stood watch in shifts, with Tahir occasionally summoning the Traveler or the White Serpent to cover a shift or two, and in a sense formally introduce them to Hasio and Murabi. On the third night that he did this, it prompted a conversation about how his magic worked. He’d given a basic rundown before, but had been asked to explain some of the particulars.

“So you give up some of your mana to basically create a body, and a smaller mana pool for that body.” Murabi summed it up.

“Basically.” Tahir answered. “The more I give, the more the spirit can do, and spirits of higher tiers require more mana to summon, but are much more powerful supposedly. The traveler for example can teleport much further if I give them more spirit energy to work with. Right now they’re able to do a jump of a few hundred feet, but if I give them more they could go much further.”

Murabi considered something, looking over Tahir with a pondering expression. “I don’t want you to tinker around with that magic too much, since even you’ve said your knowledge of it is limited, but do you know if you can convert aura into spirit energy instead of mana? Or maybe both at the same time?”

Tahir went to say ‘no,’ but stopped himself when he realized something. “All of the research I read was done by mages, they probably wouldn’t have had aura to try with, and if they did then it probably wouldn’t have been enough to risk it.” Giving too much mana opened the way to possession from the spirit, and if he could use aura then he had to imagine the same principle applied. But currently, Tahir’s aura pool eclipsed his mana pool in capacity due to Odium’s blessing and all of the focused aura-related training they’d been doing. If he could use aura instead of mana, or maybe both at the same time, that might solve a couple of problems for him, including being able to summon a tier two spirit with his current pools.

“I’ll wait until tomorrow, but I’ll have to ask you to watch over me while I do some testing.”