Seven men and the red-haired woman approached us, while the girl that had been stuck under the tree was now flanking us along with the boy and their supposed mother.

The more I thought about our predicament, the more I panicked. The woman had just fallen on me and my protective orb had done nothing to prevent it.

“No, no, no!” I whispered, and I immediately chanter a quick protection spell.

I was certain that I had performed the somatic components and the incantation perfectly, but nothing happened. I tried again even faster but again, nothing changed. I had started casting a different spell by the time they reached us.

Kai kicked and screamed at them for grabbing hold of him, while I simply stared, not moving at all, as they tied me up. Mana nullifiers. That’s what those collars were. They blocked the circulation of divine mana in us.

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted, once they had tied my legs together and a big man had picked me up. “We were only trying to help!”

“You did help us a lot, girl,” replied the woman who trapped me. “You brought yourselves to us. Two birds with one stone.”

“And what a bird this one is…” remarked another of the men. “A golden one! I’ve never seen one of these. Do you think it will be worth more?”

“Gold usually is, isn’t it?” she replied, an awful smile painted on her face.

I screamed for help, but the man carrying me merely flinched. He immediately set me to the ground without a word and gagged me with a piece of cloth he had in his pocket. I felt sick just at the foul smell of it but controlled myself and tried to focus on finding Kai.

As the man threw me once again over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes, I quickly looked around for him. Kai was also gagged but still squirming violently, even though he seemed to be tied much tighter than I was.

The man who was carrying him though had no trouble at all, only using one hand to hold him on his side, as one would carry a small rolled carpet.

“Good catch, Merin,” said the man that was carrying me. “Who would have thought that you could actually scout?”

“Aren’t you a funny dumbass,” replied the woman that just moments ago had been begging me to free her child. “I told you that it was worth following them and that they would fall for that set-up. If we’d listened to you, we would be crossing the sea with no mana product at all.”

Mana product? Oh no, no, no. This was even worse than I thought. Up until this point I had been under the impression that we had fallen victim to highway thieves, but these people had just talked about taking us across the sea… and that meant that they must have been pirates.

I had only heard stories of them before, but not a single one had complimented their virtues. They were manaless savages that would attack merchants and sell magic items on the other side of the Endless Sea. To make matters worse, they referred to us as mana product which could only mean one thing. They were the worst kind of pirates, the ones that old people still talked about when they wanted to scare children.

The slavers are going to steal you.

The slavers will take you away and sell you.

The slavers will eat you.

Those were the things I had heard growing up, but I could not tell truth from tale and there was absolutely nothing in the stories I had heard about how to fight these monsters. My breathing became shallower and I felt the restraints on my hands tighten as I automatically tried to bring them to my face and pull my hair as I normally would in stressful situations.

We were thrown into the back of a two-horse carriage that was hidden behind a cluster of high and thick bushes. I wasn’t sure if they had discovered the functionality of our chest since it only contained regular travel items in its mundane form, but I guessed that they had not, given that it was casually thrown in next to us.

We were soon stripped of any protective items and our summoning artifacts. Kai was put opposite me, and I could see that he had now calmed down a little, but was still searching for a way to escape. To our disappointment, these people seemed to be professional criminals.

We had no way to free ourselves, and could not even communicate with each other apart from nodding. I tried to wear my most calming expression and nodded at Kai as if to say that everything would be ok. I was not sure whether he really understood what I wanted to say, but I did see his shoulders drop a little bit.

I heard voices before the cart started moving and realized that there were far more people than we had initially seen. I tried to gather any piece of information I could from listening to them as we moved, since the cart was covered tightly and we couldn’t even see where we were headed.

After some time riding, I noticed a pattern. I heard a noise coming from the direction we were heading as if a cart’s wheel went over a bump but we didn’t feel the actual bounce until a couple of seconds later.

What’s more, I heard the same noise but from behind us a couple of seconds later. This meant that we were the middle carriage in a procession that consisted of at least three. Even if I somehow managed to untie myself and get Kai to safety in the chest, we wouldn’t be able to get out of the cart without those behind us noticing.

I wondered how the chest would react if the mana nullifier entered its magically enhanced space. The device was strong enough to dispel my skin color metamorphosis spell, after all.

I shifted my eyes to Kai again. He was now hunched over with his eyes closed. The return of his golden skin disturbed me and I was sure it had the same effect on him too, though he didn’t show it at all.

After what seemed like several hours, we stopped moving. I heard people talking to each other and managed to figure out that they were setting up camp. I realized how hungry I felt, and I bet that Kai was too.

“They have to feed us something.” I tried to say, but all that came out was muffled nonsense.

***

I kept my eyes on the canvas flap that served as an entrance to our moving cage, but nobody came. That is, nobody came while I was awake. Kai’s muffled shouts woke me up just in time to feel a man’s backhand slap.

It seemed like he did not put much force into the hit, judging by how close to my face his hand stopped after hitting me, but his fat fingers almost sent me back to sleep. It felt more like a punch than any slap I had ever received.

“Good, you’re awake,” the man said, smiling. “I’m going to take your gags off and you can eat and drink. Don’t bother screaming. We’re deep in the forest and shouting will just cost your dinner.”

I studied the man as he untied the knot at the back of my head and removed my gag. His skin was tanned and rough and his hair was cut short. He had short facial hair and his breath stank of alcohol.

“Bathroom,” I said. I was so thirsty and yet full of water.

“This here, girl…” The man grabbed my chin with his left hand and pointed to the cart’s floor with his right. “This is your bathroom. This is your dining room and your bedroom.”

He pushed my chin back and proceeded to untie Kai’s gag. He then exited the cart and threw in a wooden slab with what seemed like a bowl of mud and a hard loaf of bread on it.

“Our hands!” I shouted. “How are we supposed to eat?”

“Hells if I care.” I heard the man’s voice as he walked away.

“Food,” Kai whispered.

“Are you ok?” I wormed my way toward him.

“I am,” he replied hastily, and fell on his knees to start eating.

“Don’t worry, Kai,” I told him, my heart breaking as I watched him lay on his stomach, trying to take bites of the rock-hard loaf. “We’ll find a way out.”

I fell down on my knees and tried to hold one side of the bread with my chin so that Kai could get a bite without pushing it away. We tried the bowl that was filled with what looked like a soup made of mud, and it tasted almost as bad as it looked.

Soaking the bread in it so that it would become softer, we hoped that the taste would become bearable. After trying so hard just to eat, I felt tired beyond reason and wanted nothing more than to lay back and close my eyes, but my bladder was so full that it was now painful.

Kai, on the other hand, was resting on his side and had closed his eyes. It was at that moment that I realized he had soiled himself while we were eating. Despite everything that we were going through, he did not let his emotions get the best of him. He actually hadn’t shown any at all, which started worrying me even more.

I need to get us out of here.

I let some time go by, anxious to make sure that Kai was fast asleep. I could hear music and voices coming from outside, the occasional laughter of children reminding me of all we had lost. There was no hope here. We were just merchandise to them. Livestock.

We need to escape somehow.

As quietly as I could, I moved toward the opposite end of the cart from where Kai was sleeping and relieved myself in silent shame.