A slight splash of fear spilt into my mind as I looked at the armored man. At least, I assumed he was a man since I couldn’t really see any of his features under the armor. Why was he here? They weren’t supposed to show up for another two years, right? Then why was there a [Revenant] here? Was it just a coincidence that he had the same symbol? Putting aside the questions, I motioned for Illway to wait behind me. No matter who he was, I still needed to follow my mission and get the elf out of here.

The man, seeing me turn around, took his hand off of my shoulder and bowed deeply before me, surprising me slightly, before speaking excitedly. “I didn't mean to alarm you my lady, but I couldn’t help but notice that you were without a guard in this trying time.” Almost as if to accentuate his point, a splash of blood from one of Randal’s appearances hit his armor, dying the previously gray red.

To keep up appearances and not draw suspicions, I replied how a noble would towards a knight, “Yes sir knight, my guard is up ahead pulling around the carriage so we can escape this horrid place.”

“Then allow me to accompany you until that time! I wouldn’t want sucha a beauty to get harmed!” The [Revenant] said excitedly as he pounded his fist to his chest.

“Thank you for your gracious words, but I don’t think you should help me sir knight. I wouldn’t want to keep you away from your duties.” I saw Illway out of the corner of my eye start to fidget nervously. I felt exactly how she did for more or less the same reason, but my training kept me from acting nervous too and helped me keep a cool head. Hopefully, the [Revenant] wouldn’t find her fidgeting suspicious.

Illway took up the acting and nervously said to me, “My l-lady, we need to get going. Your father would be terribly angry if you died since you didn’t leave a party when it went south.”

Unfortunately, the knight found her nervousness anything but suspicious as proved by his next words, “I have no duties since I don’t serve anyone in this country. I can see from your beautiful maid’s nervousness that she isn’t sure of your chances without a guard! Fear not! I will protect you my lady! I see from the unharmed appearance of your maid that you aren’t like the rest of the nobles here! You are more nobler! It would be a shame to let you come to harm!”

What the hell was this guy, some kind of simp?! Who would keep insisting to protect us even after we both rejected him repeatedly WHILE people around us were getting killed left and right?! “Really, it isn’t needed! We were just about to leave!” Damn! Now he had gotten me punctuating my words with his infectious excitement. What was this sorcery I had never heard of before?!

The knightly [Revenant] froze for a second in apparent confusion before nodding his head like he understood perfectly, “I see! My armored appearance has frightened the little miss! I shall remedy that so you won’t be frightened by me and allow me to protect you fair maidens!” He reached up and took off his helmet, revealing his face.

Looking at him verified a rumour that I had heard from Terry: most [Revenants] were beautiful/handsome. Without his helmet, I could see that he was a human male, like I had thought. He had rugged dirty-blonde hair that seemed to be freshly brushed by the wind itself. His blue eyes shined brightly in the party's torchlight, reflecting my appearance back at me. Almost as if to further his rugged handsomeness, firestars started to explode behind him, dazzling me. For a second, I had forgotten about the end of Randal’s master plan: explosions.

“I really must-” before I could finish asking him to leave me alone again, Randal appeared directly behind him for the save of the day. Right as I was about to utter a word of warning, though to whom I was still indecisive on since one would die while the other would have a vengeful immortal after him, Randal sank his blades into the now helmetless head of the knightly [Revenant], executing him instantly. His head blew open like the red firestars behind him. Then, just as quickly as he appeared, Randal vanished back into the crowd of nobles leaving only a corpse behind as evidence.

Taking the hint from the elvish assassin, I quickly led the startled Illway out of the party grounds and into the forest surrounding the manor which was easy without anyone stopping us.

Illway and I waited at the first rendezvous point further into the forest from the manor. The original plan was for Randal to meet us here and then we would head towards the waiting rowboat. From there, we would float down the river tributary and towards the major river that connected Serias to the ocean. At the entrance of where the tributary connected to the river would be a small naval squadron to extract us.

As we waited in the micro-clearing, I stared up at the moon. I don’t exactly know why, but ever since my resurrection I had been entranced by the moon the few times that I had seen it. It was just so… perfect. The moon on this planet was just a little smaller than the sun in the sky and gave off a blood-red glow. As I stared at it more and more, I felt the sudden urge to howl start to build up in me. The feeling was peculiar since I felt like I had to howl, but at the same time knew that nothing would happen if I didn’t.

Thankfully, my indecision on howling didn’t last for long as Randal walked out of the forest. He was looking a little rugged, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed. Most of the blood coating him looked like it belonged to other people. As soon as Illway saw him, she jumped towards and deeply embraced him, ignoring the bloody squelch as his clothes compressed. The sounds of tears and blood splashing against the ground ricocheted around the micro clearing.

As Illway started to cry, she sniffled out, “Uncle R-randal! Y-you came to save me…”

Randal-who was her uncle?-hugged her back and slowly stroked her hair. It was a brave sacrifice since I knew that almost nobody wanted to be cried on. “Of course Princess, I wouldn’t leave you to the savage Serians.”

As I watched, Randal continued to comfort her, and likely would’ve for the entire night if I hadn’t I spoke up, “Randal, we don’t have much time left. Let’s escape first, then you can comfort her all you want. We aren’t out of the woods yet.”

Randal froze, though I didn’t know if it was at my awful pun or my warning, for the briefest of seconds before letting go of Illway and nodding, “You are right. Alright Illway, follow us towards our extraction point. We need to finish the plan to get out of here.”

The female elf, now seemingly to me more comfortable since she knew who her saviours were, dried her tears and steadied herself, “Which way are we going?”

Before Randal could say anything, a bright flash of green flames spewed through the lights of the trees. The bright flash brought a jolly smile to my face and a confused frown to Randals. It wasn’t long before his confusion turned to shock and he questioned me, “You used the dwarven fire on the manor?!

That’s right, the bright flash was the jar of dwarven fire going off. It was the item that I had rigged to fall out once the safe’s door in the judge’s room opened. It was a sure fire way to slowly kill someone. Basically, dwarven fire was the dwarves' attempt at making dragon fire, which could burn infinitely unless put out by a dragon. Their attempt both succeeded and failed.

On one paw, the fire would burn through anything except for a special kind of glass, dragons, and magic embedded materials. On the other, the fire could only be put out by dragons or after a couple of hours had passed. Anything that it touched would burn, though it was an extremely slow burn. A drop of it could incinerate a human, but it would take at least forty-five minutes before it burned enough to actually kill. Because of its cons, the fire was used for mining, especially in their adamantium mines, by the dwarves and to break into vaults, but not anything else.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Yeah,” I answered him in an icy voice that offered no room for argument, “but if you saw what I saw in that bastards bedroom, you would’ve used it too.” From off in the distance, horrified screams entered the clearing. They were screams of pure agony and they brought joy to my heart.

For his part, Randal just accepted what I said without too much more question, though I think it was more for Ilway than anything. I could definitely see the horrified curiosity in his eyes as he occasionally glanced back towards the manor. Luckily, it seemed like her hearing wasn’t as good as ours so she couldn’t hear the screams faintly echoing around the forest.

“What are you talking about?” Asked Illway with a frown. Her question reinforced my belief that she couldn’t hear the sweet screams coming from far away.

“Nothing Princess, don’t worry about it. The escape route is this way,” Randal distracted her with a more pressing matter: escape.

Without further adieu, Randal led us towards the waiting rowboat. It was barely a twenty minute run before we arrived at our location. The boat was in a small clearing near the river. When we first arrived, I thought it was just another clearing until Randle walked to a bush and pulled it off. That’s right, he pulled the entire bush up. Hidden underneath was the rowboat that seemed like it could barely hold five people.

“Come over here and help me Kali.” The elf ordered me. I quickly followed his orders and lifted up on the rowboat. It should be pointed out that I was basically a child, so we were pretty slow in moving. Sure I had fourteen strength but stats were more of a multiplicative thing.

For instance, say that in a world without stats, I could lift one hundred pounds. Now say I had fifteen strength, which was one more than I actually had. That would allow me to lift one hundred and fifty pounds. Think about it like this, fifteen strength was equal to a multiplicative score of 1.5. For example, a super buff guy with only 15 strength would defeat a super lithe person with 40 strength. Sure the lithe guy had a 4 time multiplier, but 3 * 4 is only twelve while 15 * 1.5 is 22.5.

My carry strength wasn’t all that much when you thought of it that way. Since I was still basically a child, I didn’t have much muscle mass and could maybe lift 30 pounds using my full body if I really tried. That multiplied by my strength equaled a bad time to lift heavy things. It took way longer than we thought it would before we had the boat near the water.

Thankfully, nobody rushed into the clearing at the final second like what would be seen in the movies. Instead, me and Randal slowly lowered the boat into the water nice and smoothly without any hiccups. It was boarding the boat that we had a problem.

Randal jumped on nice and smoothly to the floating apparatus, but as soon as Illway got on, I heard noises from the brush around the clearing. Randal, also having heard them, slowly moved his hands to the hilts of his blades, ready at a moment’s notice. He whispered to me “Hurry up Kali.”

Illway was glancing in fear all around her, which gave me the idea that she didn’t know what was going on, but was picking up on the mood. This was most likely because she wasn’t as developed in her senses as me or Randal, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

I decided to follow his orders and quickly jumped onto the boat. Picking up one of the two paddles, I started to push off from the river bank and put us into the river. It was at that point that a hulking figure clade in armor How burst into the clearing.

“What the fuck?!” I heard Randal exclaim from beside me as soon as his eyes dropped onto the person.

I would’ve probably said something along the same lines if it was my first time seeing someone come back to life, but it wasn’t. Standing in the middle of the clearing was the knightly [Revenant] that stopped me at the party. He was standing in all his glory without a single hint of a wound. In fact, he was completely clean without even a speck of blood anywhere on his armor. That should’ve been impossible considering his head got split open like a melon and blood spewed out like a fountain.

“Fear not beautiful maidens, I shall save you!” He cried out as soon as he spotted us on the boat. It seemed like he was under the impression that we were captured by Randal which was odd considering I was definitely the one paddlin. In fact, neither one of us looked even close to having been captured by Randal, but the idiot [Revenant] seemed to have looked past reality to see his own ‘righteous’ mision to protect me and Illway.

Speaking of, we were now in the middle of the river, slowly being pulled downstream. I was paddling by myself as Randal sat there ready to defend us if need be.

“Oi! Get back here coward! I swear by my name, Taxon Nassaroff, I will save you! Even if I have to cross the oceans!” The [Revenant] collapsed to his knees by the river side like he had just faced the greatest injustice in the galaxy. His blue eyes, peaking out from the slit on his helmet, stared in righteous indignation at us as we slowly drifted down the river.

Now that we were far enough away, Randal helped me paddle towards our next location. The ride down the river was nice and peaceful. Nobody spoke a word allowing nature to fill in the silence. Listening around us to the crickets chirping and the owls whooing, I cast my gaze to the sky. Up far above us, thousands of stars twinkled against the black backdrop. Framed perfectly by the dazzling stars, the moon hovered in its reddish glow.

With the two of us paddling it was only a couple hours of rowing downstream before we arrived at our desired location right where the tributary we were on led into the major river that connected Series to the ocean. In front of us was what Randal called a “small naval squadron”. Yeah… he lied. What laid before my eyes was more of a fleet than anything.

At least thirty ‘merchant’ ships sat in front of where the tributary led into the major river connecting to the ocean. They were all big enough to fit at least thirty people, easily in fact. Every single one of the ships looked impressive and had to have cost thousands to make. They were all fairly uniform in their positioning, showing off the captains’ skills as they arranged their ships to form a micro blockade in front of the tributary.

While the fleet was awe inspiring to see, there were two things that caught my eye above everything else. The first thing was the flagship of the fleet. It was easily two times as big as the other ships, possibly even being three times. It stood out of the water like a leviathan staring down its prey. The entire ship was made out of a gorgeous gray wood that looked brand new, but I knew it wasn’t since the fleet had come from the elven continent which was at least a two month journey. Sitting at the bow, the front of the ship, was a massive black painted figurehead of a stretched bow.

Second was the slight shimmer over each of the boats. An untrained eye would’ve missed it, but I was trained to see what was difficult to see. It was illusion magic and it looked extremely strong considering the shimmers were almost non-existent.

Why was I trained to look for magic even though I was in space? That was a fairly good and valid question. Sure magic users were rarer in space, but that didn’t mean they weren’t around at all. In fact, since they were more rare, I had to train even more to see through their complicated spells and weaves so I was never caught off guard.

I couldn’t tell exactly what kind of magic was being used from this distance, but I knew it was definitely some kind of illusion magic. Across the many different magics and ways to use them there were two main illusion magic types: mind-altering and vision-impairing. They were both fairly self explanatory. The first was more difficult and powerful since it directly altered the viewer's perception while the second was easier and weaker since basically all it did was put up a smokescreen over an area or item and change how it looked from the outside.

[Ding! XP Gained!]

The system of the Records announced into my head. It took me a minute to realize why I had gotten the notification. I guess the judgemental bastard had finally died. Opening up the more notification for more details, I was extremely dissapointed when I found out that the judge was only level eleven. Instead of getting a couple levels like I was hoping, I only got half of a bar due to his level and the fact that I used dwarven fire which was manufactured by a level sixty smith.

Next to me, saying the first thing since we boarded the rowboat, Illway spoke up, “Mom really sent a lot of ships. Is Captain Raven here?”

“Yes, he should be on the flagship. Big sis wouldn’t send anyone less to get you out..“ Randal informed her as we kept rowing towards the fleet in front of us.

His statement set up dozens of red flags in my head. I knew he was backed by someone powerful because of the rewards and resources he had, but now I knew that his backer was his sister and she had to be at least on the scale of a monarch or dictator. Also, he called Illway a princess. At that time I thought it was just a nickname, but now I was thinking it was more literal than that. She might actually be a princess, which would be… something else. I couldn’t quite tell if me stumbling upon this rescue was a lucky thing or not. It all came down to how they treated me after all was said and done which, by my calculations of the distance between us and the flagship, would be in the next five minutes...