We had spent the day after Rai and I had scouted the dryad’s defenses resting and experimenting, I wanted to make sure my idea would work; I believed it would, but finding out that it didn’t, right when enemies were trying to kill us, would be a bad thing. So, experimenting was necessary.

During the night, it was time to move. Part of me wanted to wait longer, wait until the moon was full and I got the maximum strength from it, but each day we waited gave Mr. Murphy a chance to screw us over, and if there was one thing I knew, it was that Murphy would get you, if you gave him a chance.

As we started moving, I realised that I was getting used to night-raids; it felt right to sneak up on our enemies, trying to catch them asleep. Part of me wanted to decry it as cowardice and evil, reminding me that I wanted to be less of a monster. But the rational part of me still reigned supreme, there was a large gap between a monster and a pragmatist. I would try to avoid needless cruelty and maybe limit the glee I was expressing when killing my foes, but I would never, ever, willfully risk my own life, the life of my companions, or even worse, the life of Sigmir, simply to satisfy some ridiculous notion of fairness or honour. Fairness was fine for the training-mat, but in a real fight, it was something to be discarded post-haste. So, if they did not realise we were coming, it was their fault, as they were not vigilant enough and their preparations were simply lacking.

Up on the crest of the hill, we stuck to the shadows and I moved to the front. I searched for a good place to move downwards, somewhere we had a chance to climb down without triggering an avalanche or a landslide or something similar. Finally, roughly at the halfway point between the mouth and the end of the valley, there was a relatively traversable area down the slope. Looking further, I saw that the slope got steeper and steeper afterwards, making it almost impossible to move downwards on.

Looking down the area I wanted to use, I was searching for their ward before starting my descent. There would be a ward somewhere around, I was certain of it. The slope down into the valley was snowed in and our descent was slow and perilous. After a few minutes of careful sneaking, interspersed with repeated glances through Lenroe’s sight, I saw the ward shimmer before me. It was quite sneaky, placed about a meter above the ground, to let small game move below it, but bigger animals, and obviously people, would trigger it, unless they crawled down a steep slope on their bellow or had some sort of magic detection. And even with magic detection, it was the question if one looked at the right time and was able to stop in time.

The simplicity of the ward made circumventing it rather easy, it was a simple ribbon of magic and breaking it would alert the caster and probably mark us. The simplest way would be to move below it, possibly combined with a diversion, breaking it at another place to divert attention. But we were lacking a diversion, so simply moving below it would have to work.

For me, it was incredibly easy, I was almost able to simply walk under it, thanks to my rather lacking body-height, but Sigmir crawling under it looked quite hilarious. It gave me funny ideas of limbo, if we ever reached a warm, sandy beach. The image of Sigmir in a bikini made that idea a glorious one, all on its own.

Involuntary comedy aside, we managed to circumvent the ward and my vigilance - one might call it paranoia - went up to eleven. What better place to place additional warding than closely behind the first, easily circumvented ward, catching those who think they are able to fool the creator of the warding-scheme?

And indeed, a bit further down the slope, there was a small, magic glimmer, suspended in a tree. At first, I only saw a single one, but there were multiple, hidden in a few trees making a rough line, like sentries. I wasn’t seeing any connection to other magic formation, so there should be no transfer of information unless the magic was triggered; no fail-safe system alerting the creator if the magic was dispelled.

Feeling the darkness around me, I created a rune formation, using the shadows as a medium to devour the magic before me. It would waste quite a bit of Astral Power on my part, as I had to use the Curse-Rune as a stand-in for a general Magic-Rune, but I only had a vague idea what the magic-rune looked like. But the magic went off without a hitch, engulfing and smothering the glimmer in shadows, before the original magic was devoured in a short deepening of the shadows around it. I got a notification that I gained something.

Skill increased You increased your skill: Darkness Rune-Mastery [60/100]

That single point made me quite happy, ever since I had gotten to skill-level fifty, the increases had been gradual, to the point of being glacial. I even had an idea which rune I would want to finalise, the rune I had just needed, the rune for Magic.

There was no visible commotion, neither to my ordinary vision nor to Lenore’s magic vision, so we headed further down, into the valley.

The trees around us were useful in concealing us, but at the same time, they concealed what was before us - at least they did, until the steepness of the slope gradually decreased and the danger of slipping and becoming an avalanche going down the slope was gone. Once we were down there, the trees were a lot bigger and had bigger distances between them, allowing for better visibility.

Now, we were seeing small, hut-like structures, molded directly out of the trees. Each single dwelling was small - probably not more than one or two people per dwelling - and from a few of them, smoke was rising and through small gaps flickering flames were visible. The vast majority had no smoke or light coming from them, hinting that they were empty, Hopefully, they were and not just filled with especially cold-resistant nymphs, or we would have a bad time.

We stayed in the trees, hiding in the shadows and skirting around the habitated areas of the valley in our search for the centre of power in the valley. The lines of power hinted at that centre being at the end of the valley, in the deepest and most protected part, which made sense.

There was no more warding magic this close to the huts; most likely their current warding-scheme was unable to exclude allies, making it problematic to filter possible responses. It was an old problem of intelligence work, something I had read about in a few books. Gathering information was often a lot easier than analysing and interpreting that information, as it was akin to searching for a few needles in a haystack, without knowing if there were any needles in the stack at all, not knowing what the needles looked like - and someone was throwing more and more hay onto the stack, as you tried to work.

The huts soon disappeared, replaced by a stretch of empty forest, at least to the mundane eye. To Lenore’s magical vision, the forest was anything but empty; it was littered with a multitude of magical traps, enough to make me check carefully for mundane traps as well. Even something as simple as a tripwire with some sort of noise-maker would be effective in the quietness of the night.

With the help of Lenore’s sight, I managed to map out a rather complex path through the forest, keeping well away from all possible spells, and had shown it to Sigmir. Once I had done what I planned, I would not have the focus left to beware of traps, so she had to lead.

The stretch worked out quite well for my plan, I had thought up something to hopefully keep the majority of nymphs away from us. When I had attacked the snowbolds, I had used mist to keep them within their burrow. Here, I might be able to slow weaker members of the village down, keeping the enemies we had to face low and hopefully keeping us from getting overwhelmed.

I had made up a few Hard-Ice Crystals, engraved with runes of mist and disorientation, before testing out if I was able to link with them to create a disorientating mist. The crystals shattered relatively quickly, but I was able to create the mist and strengthen it once it was created.

Creating a barrier would hopefully give us enough time to deal with the enemies at the centre, maybe even cover to get away. I had made up my mind that we would kill whoever tried to stop us, but part of my new compassion required me to keep the civilian casualties as low as possible. And massacring them would give little to no EXP anyway, so my gamer-sense was not revolting.

With the crystals placed and my mind linked to them, Sigmir took the lead and carefully followed the path I had shown her.