I had apparently solved the dragon problem, as Ansae had more or less flopped over into the padded bed area I’d made without a trace of dignity and gone to sleep, and hadn’t budged since. But Shayma’s group was having...issues.

So far the only magic I’d seen was the Flame Knight and Ansae’s transformation, if I didn’t count my own stuff, which I really didn’t. I could do things but not cast spells. On the other hand, what was going on with Shayma’s caravan was definitely spell-related.

I couldn’t track the origin, but every once in a while a ball of some color – sometimes grey, sometimes red, sometimes green – would come arching in from behind them. Some missed, and landed out in the trees and scrub. A few would smash against an invisible barrier, sending streaks and drops of its particular color out from the impact point. I tried turning on mana sight but then felt like an idiot, since these were Shayma’s eyes, not mine, and it did nothing but make it hard to focus. If it was mana-sight, it was hers, and I couldn’t change it.

They seemed to be holding their own for the moment, but there was a certain tension among the refugees, even if there was no panic. I wanted to help them, but they were still some fifty kilometers out and, of course, I couldn’t move.

Sort of.

I was actually pretty large by that point, having expanded out several kilometers in each direction, but I’d stopped really bothering once I could expand into Ansae’s tunnels instead. With my upgraded skills, though, I wondered how fast I could move. Already my boring tendrils were effectively as fast as the beetles, which had been benched for some time, and if I pushed mana into the process…

It was actually kind of scary how fast I could tunnel. I didn’t know if I could do fifty kilometers, or if there was some sort of built-in limit, but I could probably get close. And then...do something. I wasn’t sure what, yet.