As much as those girls could be cheeky, they didn’t want to go that far on the job. That was part of the reason Irlan and Zelos were there. In the end, while the whole group stayed on guard while the prisoner was finishing his business on the other side of a bush, nothing happened. He behaved well and just looked exhausted, but Zelos could tell his eyes were moving suspiciously…

The prisoner was smart, and he wouldn’t try anything so drastic so soon. He would rather wait and see and let everyone get used to that and to nothing happening along the way…

After three days, the group was starting to get used to the journey and the people around it, to the point that they began to strike up conversations with each other. Mainly Edea with the others since Elmer was mostly so dizzy that he didn’t have the energy to say a single thing.

“... I heard that Hei welcomed some former slave kids to his group after the last battle. Is he one among them?”

Zelos was working on his club and making it a bit heavier, so Edea decided to ask that. She knew that everyone had their own methods of training their traits, but she still couldn’t help but think that Zelos’s method was pretty unusual.

“That kind of information spreads like wildfire, huh? Well, that is right, but don’t call him a slave. He is sensitive about that.”

“I am not. I just respond accordingly to the way people talk to me. Besides, she called me a former slave, not slave boy.”

“I see…”

Edea studied Zelos for a while, but then she decided to stay quiet. It was better not to talk too much when the prisoner was around since he could use any information against them. Still, sometimes, the silence was just too hard to deal with.

Once he had repaired the club’s weight, Zelos began to swing it once again. Still, he soon found a problem. While he was adjusting his strength, the handle suddenly cracked, and the rest of the club went flying into the distance. It didn’t hit anyone, but if he had been facing the wrong distance, a twenty-kilogram club could have caused some disaster.

“I guess we will finally have some peace and quiet here. What happened?”

“The handle was just too used… I guess I will just add the weights on an iron sword or something.”

Heirina went to check the handle that Zelos threw away and it was pretty thick. Zelos couldn’t hold it properly with a single hand, but that should have lasted for a while… that only showed that he had been training hard for quite some time and nonstop. In any case, Zelos decided to dismantle the parts to use them later. In the end, he contented himself in doing muscle training with the stones while doing handstands.

“Just when I thought that we would get some peace…”

“I am not making any noise.”

“That is hardly the problem.”

Zelos decided to ignore her, and Heirina knew that she couldn’t complain that much. People had to do what they had to in order to improve themselves and survive in that world. For someone like Zelos, who was born a slave, it was clear that he didn’t have good traits… unlike someone like Heirina, who was blessed with being born from a good lineage, he had to try extra hard in order to not depend on anyone. She was a bit on the edge since she couldn’t train or spar without making a lot of noise… making it would be risky when they had to guard a prisoner and be wary of night attacks.

“We are close to the border, and from now on, we will be on territory where bandits work quite a lot. To avoid problems, we will split the watch in pairs. Whom do you guys want to work with on the night turns? I think it would be better if one guy and a girl were to work together.”

“You sure are being roundabout about this.”

“Because we will relax too much if we split into groups according to our gender.”

That was true… Kaitrine liked Heirina a lot for some reason, so she probably would try to strike up a lot of conversations while they were alone. As for Zelos and Irlan, one was too quiet, but he didn’t ignore the other, and the other was pretty much a chatterbox. Edea didn’t offer to help since she was always tired. Her trait was exhausting, so it was very likely that she wouldn’t stay awake during the whole guard duty.

“I guess I am screwed either way,”

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Kaitrine kept glaring at Zelos, almost as if she were trying to make a hole in him with her eyes, while things were too awkward with Zelos and Heirina. Regardless, that was how the pairings ended up. Irlan and Kaitrine would sleep first and take the last turn off the guard.

Once they began to sleep on their tents, Zelos stopped doing his handstands and just moved the rocks that he had with his arms alternating between. He also moved around the camp so that he wouldn’t get used to the surroundings that much and would stay alert to any kind of sound. After a while, Heirina took his place.

“I will do that for the time being to keep myself alert.”

“All right.”

Zelos sat close to the bonfire and then kept his exercise and then closed his eyes. At first, Heirina thought that he had fallen asleep while his arms were moving, but could someone fall asleep while doing muscle training? She had heard from her father that Zelos looked like someone who was mentally broken for whatever reason… his behavior sure made him look like that, but his sharp remarks begged to differ.

“If you are bored again, I can walk around the camp instead.”

“How can you tell that I am bored with your eyes closed?”

“You stopped moving.”

Zelos could tell that Heirina never did anything in her life aside from working to one day help her father or inherit his position. She believed that fighting alongside him would prevent his death for at least a couple of years, and she knew that it was useless to think otherwise. The last generations of the clan’s heads barely reached forty, after all. As soon as their strength started to decline and the damage of the battles started to pile up, then the end was unavoidable.

“How did you manage to stay focused for so long?”

“It is a matter of willpower and necessity. Until you see something that truly makes you fear for the future, you won’t feel the necessity. Willpower is something that you gradually build up. You should have some, but not enough to stay still.”

She couldn’t deny that… in any case, Heirina felt that something had changed in the atmosphere. There was something or someone around… Still, when she grabbed her sword, she saw Zelos moving toward Elmer, who was sitting with his hands and legs tied up to a tree. Before long, he stopped in front of him and watched his face sleeping.

“Nice try, but you never did this before, didn’t you? This is child’s play for me since I am used to checking my surroundings in the total darkness of the night.”

The feeling weakened for Heirina, so she wondered if Zelos’s guess was right… Elmer didn’t react in any way, and that would make sense since he was always exhausted. As someone who spent ten years sleeping in those dark and cold quarters for the slave kids, Zelos knew well that he had to keep his guard up. When they left that farm, they had forty, but initially, they had more than fifty… the rest of them tried to escape and never appeared, and some of them tried to blame others to get in the good graces of the guards… with that in mind, he developed a sense to tell when someone was looking at him in those quarters.

“Keep trying hard.”

“Are you sure that it was him?”

Zelos didn’t say anything, he just pointed to his ears and then put his open hand in front of his chest. She realized that she was close enough to listen to him breathing and since the wind was helping, that should have been easier, but she couldn’t hear anything. After focusing a bit to control her breathing, she was able to hear Kaitrine, and Edea snoring a bit in the carriage… even though it was closed.

Heirina realized that when one wakes up, even if they try to hide it, their breathing changes for a moment, and Zelos probably heard that from Elmer. That was quite something, but it wasn’t a complicated skill or trait; it was something that could be done just by positioning themselves well and using the wind in their favor.

In the end, Heirina tried to learn that technique that night, and thanks to it, she was able to kill some time. Two hours after midnight, Irlan and Kaitrine got up to take guard duty, and Zelos decided to warn Irlan about Elmer.

“Keep your eyes open and always toward him. Sometimes, he wakes up and pretends to be asleep.

“Do you think that he is trying to find our habits to find the best moment to try something?”

“It could be. We don’t know enough about him to tell what he can do. It is better to be cautious and avoid falling for any kind of tricks. Also, when morning comes, check the area that he was in.

“Hey, Zelos, look at this.”

Irlan whispered after Elmer was put inside the carriage, and he pointed at the place where Elmer stayed the whole night. There was no clear message on the grass, but while looking at a certain angle, the position of his legs left a mark on the grass that pointed in the direction they were heading…

“What do you think?”

“It could be a coincidence, but it couldn’t be as well. He was awake, even though he was weakened when Edea told us where we were heading.”

“We are trying to avoid bustling places, so we will also give the chances for people to attack us and we don’t know how many there will be. We also lack real combat experience… We should inform Heirina and perhaps change our routes or something.”

“Even if we do that, our destination will be the same. Eventually, they will be able to point out where we will head.”

“Security should get better closer to the heart of the country, so I guess we could be attacked fairly soon… today we will be entering territory that doesn’t belong to any clan. They have their own military, but we can’t ask for help for free… what a bind.”

“We can slow down our traveling speed by always stopping at a village or a town, we don’t have to stop at an inn, after all. We can also increase our pace to surprise possible pursuers. Finally, we can just wait for them to come and deal with them. They won’t come with a large force, bandits can’t operate with large numbers in a place like this without being found… tell Heirina about that and let her decide, but don’t let Elmer hear or know that you are talking about something serious.”