“Huh. We’re out, I guess.” Claud looked back at the city gates.
“Of the city, I might add.” Lily looked around. “Come on, let’s make for the south before it gets too dark. I want to reach a town before dark.”
“We’ll need to avoid the warzones too.” Claud pulled out the map that he had drawn with the RECON’s help. “Most of the fighting happens in fixed areas, and there’s a high chance that they won’t attack the two of us, but it’s better not to take any risks. We’ll circle to the west side, and then fly through the mountains here.”
“Normally?” Lily asked.
“Normally, yes.” Claud patted his pocket, where a certain black card was stored, before making a circle with his fingers. “It’ll be a bit of a pain, but considering that I’m a penta-folder, we should be able to make it to Vacuos before nightfall. If we push the boundaries of safety and continue flying, we can make it to Monsville and stay overnight there.”
“Hmm.” Lily looked at the refugees, who were busy building more elaborate buildings and other things. “I think we can push it a little and head towards Monsville tonight. It’ll be nice to settle into our home, anyway.”
“It’s more of a holiday home, though…” Claud muttered, before holding onto Lily. “Ready?”
“Whenever you are.”
Casting one last look at the city, he took out a skillstrip and tore it into two, before taking to the skies. Within seconds, the walls of Lostfon and the palace within it turned into dots, and the two of them tore through clouds, tearing them into clumps.
As they soared through the blue firmament, Claud caught his first glance of the war. He hadn’t seen it for himself in person, but the area around Vacuos County and the dukedom capital had been divided up finely into three areas — contested territory and fortifications from both sides. It was hard to imagine that this place used to be an idyllic territory that had learning and scholars as the main theme.
“Lots of defences and fortifications,” Lily muttered. “Right, if the Moons were conscripting mana-users, does that mean that the Moon Lords are on the frontlines now?”
“Yeah. Probably.” Claud looked around. “But there’s also a good chance that they’re actually still in Moon Mansion or something. It’s hard to tell.”
“Mhm. There’s a substantial chance that the others would have left, though. What are we going to do if that’s the case?”
“Hide and continue to bide our time,” Claud replied. “We can also investigate where they went to. From there…we can plan our next moves in advance.”
He looked downwards, where multiple troop formations were moving around and attempting to carry out whatever strategic move they had in mind. Claud, who didn’t have anything resembling a military background, had no idea what both sides were up to, but he felt like he could learn something from all this.
Probably, anyway.
It was quite easy to tell the master of each formation, given that the overt colour coding employed by the Dark and the Moons. The latter, in particular, had three colours, to represent the different Moons neatly. Unfortunately, the forces that represented the Dark made no distinction between Lesser Half and Greater Half; Claud, for the life of him, just couldn’t see any differences.
The formations moved around, retreating back and forth like a Moon Phase game. They weren’t just randomly moving either; formations would retreat from their current spot, just in time to avoid a devastating blast of tri-coloured light, and then move to blanket the area in front of them with shadowy mist.
“It’s like a game...” Lily muttered.
“Yeah…” Claud slowed down slightly. “We’ll take a detour. I don’t want to risk anything, even if the ground troops don’t seem to be capable of flight. Their elites might be fighting the airspace above this battlefield, and—”
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A thunderclap drowned out his words as a cloud burst apart, sundered by surging waves of shadow and light. The origin of this explosion were two twisting figures, who were slamming their weapons at each other and knocking each other back.
Lily conjured a barrier of mana as Claud retreated away from the two clashing sithouettes, but they weren’t alone either. Further away, Claud could spot multiple such battles going on, and he intuitively realised that this was the battleground for elites capable of flying.
“I wonder how they’re flying,” Claud muttered, putting as much distance as possible. “It’s like Flight isn’t a skill to them or something.”
“Do these beings even have skills and other things like a status?” Lily questioned. “We never did ask that question.”
“Crap, I forgot.” Claud shrugged. “Never mind. We can ask with that card, after all. Lesser Half did implicitly inform us that it doesn’t have any range limitation…we can chat to him even in Istrel.”
Shadow bloomed once, and the two combatants closest to Claud and Lily broke apart from their melee. The Moonlit elite had been blasted back by an earthshaking punch, and as she spun uncontrollably through the air, her opponent gathered a dense bank of shadow and sent it hurtling at her.
Red light flared, a blinding radiance that forced Claud and Lily to look away, but that was swiftly drowned out by the ongoing flood of darkness. The stream of darkness plowed through the ground a few seconds later, but the Moonlit One that had been struck had ceased to exist.
Claud trembled at that visceral display of power, and then pulled away from the battlefield. That battle wasn’t just any spar; it was the real deal, and…
“I’m pathetic,” Claud muttered. “I’ve done it before, but I still feel for them.”
“That’s because you’re human,” Lily replied. “That’s all.”
“With all the contradictions inherent implied thus, I suppose.” Claud looked at the increasingly distant battlefield, feeling a bit sick the whole time. The ground troops were now fully engaged, with giant flowers of light and shadow enveloping entire formations and leaving nothing behind.
Both sides were now giving it their all to kill the enemy.
“But that’s what make people…people, right?” Lily asked.
Claud nodded. “I know. And the worst of it all is that I can’t do anything to stop this. It was a lot easier when I thought both sides were just mindless, killer automatons whose job was to brutalise everything in sight. This is a lot harder to accept.”
“You haven’t brought up the mana-users yet, though.”
“Yeah. I haven’t.” Claud looked at the distant battlefield, and then tore a Flight skillstrip to refresh its duration. “I don’t want to. What happens if something happened to Schwarz and the others? I…I’m beginning to understand what Lesser Half meant earlier. Even if we didn’t hate each other initially, if people we care about die…we’ll end up cursing each other.”
Claud lowered his head. “I hate this.”
“We’re all being dragged into this calamity,” Lily muttered.
He tightened his hug slightly. Was it for Lily? Or was it for himself? Claud wasn’t sure, but at least, the warmth of her body was enough to calm his emotions and thoughts, even if it was only for a moment.
They continued to wheel through the sky. The frontlines of the ongoing battle seemed to be quite disparate; instead of a steady, unbroken line in which people hurled themselves to their deaths, the whole thing felt more like multiple, smaller frontlines that were very vulnerable to flanking by both sides. There were areas where the Moons had been pushed back, and others where the fortifications were uncomfortably close to Vacuos vertically.
It didn’t make sense to Claud, personally, but he was no expert. Occasionally, more balls of light or other, similarly deadly, attacks would sweep through the area, but Claud had managed to close his heart.
As they whizzed past a bunch of mountains, Lily said, “You don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine. At least I didn’t do any of this.” Claud shook his head and surveyed his surroundings. “Do you spot anything dangerous?”
“Nothing for now,” Lily replied. “It seems that both sides are not particularly mindful about very long sneaky movements like what we’re doing now.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Claud asked.
“Maybe there’s something in play that we aren’t certain about,” Lily replied. “Or both the Moons and the Dark aren’t military experts.”
“I doubt that last one, at least. I mean, the battles we saw earlier were pretty much both sides reading each other like a book, right?” Claud asked. “The latter bits notwithstanding, of course.”
“…Okay, but it’s safe. On the surface, anyway. Are we still going to fly on ahead?” Lily asked.
Claud pulled out a bunch of artefacts. “Naturally. We’ll forge onto Monsville by today. It should be fine after the frontlines, after. I don’t believe that there are battles happening all over Vacuos County. That’s just ridiculous.”
After a few minutes of pinning on one artefact after another, the two of them continued southwards again, swinging wide of the flat plains to avoid the battles as much as possible. Wheeling across the sky, the two of them soared past the City of Learning itself, and then headed straight on southwards after escaping the conflict zone.
The Moons was shining down in their gibbous glory when the two of them finally arrived at Monsville.