Eli POV

_____________________________________________________

The next morning I headed out to Salamedes home to pick up my travel meals and shop for some needed supplies

Coming up to her house I noticed several of the peasants remarking on the solid and reliable stone that now made up their roads. I stood for a moment looking at the people in the slight fog of the early morning skip over the stones with a certain glee.

"I tell ya' it's just like being in the capital, only some stones there wiggle when you step on them," I heard a passing man mention to his fellow.

I suppressed a smile at the appreciation of my work as I came up to the two-story house.

After a knock, Salamede came to the door.

"Ah, good. I got your meals. They're some granola bars and some hard nut candies with certain spices. I also made some hard crackers mixed with dried onions and garlic." She said as she retreated back into her home. Coming back out, she handed me a small basket. After handing it over she pulled me into a hug.

"Stay safe." She said through the spirit connection.

"I will" I replied as I returned the hug with a pat on the shoulder. Then I broke the contact and went back home. Dropping off my food in a bag of holding in the workshop I made specifically for this trip, I had to head back towards the classroom center. It was more of the typical mean side glares and dismissive scoffs in my direction as I moved through the forest in my group until I got there then I dashed through to my destination. A few still tried to spit at me, but I managed to get by most of them untouched.

For the next hour, I listened to a long-winded course on general troop movements and attack patterns based on magical combat in a classroom on the third floor. After the lecture, I came up to the teacher as the rest of the class shuffled out.

"I have a trip I need to take for the next couple of days. Could I take my textbook to look over my needed course work?" I asked the mid 30's man with green eyes and a beard.

"Yeah, I think it's best if you darken my classroom as little as possible," He said before shuffling out the door. I stood there for a moment in the now empty classroom before taking a deep breath and heading out. The other big item of the day was rounding out my caster spell knowledge.

My other teachers expressed similar.... support for my at-home study initiative.

Fortunately, this also provided me an opportunity to go over the caster books without having to hide them. After all, knowing what magical spells can be used is critical for the tactics class.

Unfortunately, the one set of spells I needed the most wasn't available. Apparently, the healing spells to change hair and eye color were considered 'unfit' for academic pursuit so that means my next few nights will have to be camping out in the woods. I spent the rest of the morning going over various spells and memorizing their constructs.

The prospect of waiting in the cafeteria was unbearable so I just snatched a few rolls for a skimpy lunch. Then I took out several books to be rented over a span of several days. After finishing everything I came to the classrooms to do, I headed home. Back in my workshop, I used my piston to create a metal box.

As great as the prospect of sleeping in a cold hole in the ground and eating raw berries with the occasional granola bar was, I felt the need for a stable heat supply was needed for both cooking and warmth. This iron box was about two feet tall and one foot wide, with several plates of copper inside to act as a heater when hooked up to my mobile generator or as a grill plate when the enlarged iron top was flowing with electricity.

I didn't have any new ideas for science-based weapons, well explosive powders were still an option, but that was a pretty big time investment and I would only really consider it for a more long term campaign. Who knows maybe the gang will have a few leaders all concentrated in a small area for me to kill. A few quick shots from my gun, a few spells and I could put this all behind me as the people who made the decision to target me lay dead.

If they were more powerful than that or the leadership more numerous, then I'll just have to deal with the situation when I get there.

I got a late afternoon nap in preparation, but when the stars finally beat out the glow of the sun, I put my heater in the bag of holding and headed out. Going through the hallway in my basement, I walked on for a good while until I came onto my destination. The 'door' was a slab of stone that took a good amount of mana to move even just enough for me to shimmy through.

My immediate surroundings after squeezing out was a large number of sharp slabs of stone and molded slate. The various stone bits were haphazardly strewn about and provided a stone jungle as the stone slabs jutted into the sky. This was just one of many abandoned troll nests and it made an ideal location to provide a secret exit.

After a moment's pause to listen for anything that might be nearby and hearing nothing but the ever so soft whirl of the generator in my hands, I started with putting on my desk skull helmet and vine suit once finished I slung the bag of holding over my shoulder and used my booster to move quickly through the treetops.

Making my way through the humongous elders of this land, I started my trek back to Dunwich, or at least near it. This trip took me several days the last time I took it but now with my leaps bounding near flying speeds through the soft glow of the moonlight, I had made half the trip in several hours before I needed to rest.

The cool air became chilling as it stripped any sense of warmth from my skin. It was right at that razor edge where it wasn't cold enough that I had to stop and fix it, but it was cold enough to make the trip hard. Not to mention the occasional moth splattering against my chest or helmet.

As I rested on a tree branch overlooking the forest from a height that made the few passersby or guards traveling on the roads this late look like ants meandering below the canopy of treetops, I pulled out a spellbook and went over the contents. The battles ahead would demand the use of every tool at my disposal, including magic.

One interesting tidbit that I found when going over the dual element books is that combining elements wasn't something that students learned unless taught under a skilled master. I knew that summoning fire inside water or stone would heat it, but there might be other combinations with... interesting results.

I used a flame spell to make a small candlelight in my palm then combined it with a wind spell. The small flame then grew blazing hot as it shot up nearly doubling its height before I cut the mana off from the spell construct. The desire to try other combinations was strong but I was sitting here to rest, not get even more tired trying to maintain spell constructs. After a good 10 minutes of taking in the scenery, I resumed my journey.

It was well past midnight when I came upon Dunwich. The large palisade and big square houses were the same as the first time I came through. But this time I have a destination away from this town. The signpost by the meeting of the road and several others was close enough to the forest that I could make out the town names on the arrows without being seen.

I knew that I would probably be here for a while so I had to rough out a general idea of where everything was. Traveling through the treetops for several more minutes before I came upon what I assumed was Bushwhackers. It was a messy place with many of the shops and houses being haphazardly strewn about as the road shot down the middle of the town with smaller paths flowing in between the various buildings of the surprisingly large town.

That said, their construction, at least from what I could make out in the dim night, seemed sturdier than the academy towns. Their thick wooden beams and brick foundations seemed to reflect more of the Dunwich style of design rather than the more shoddy construction elsewhere. Even so, the dilapidated roofs and shambling windows, combined with the lack of sanitation if the bits of dung in the streets were anything to go by, proved that it did not hold the same associations with its neighbor.

Deciding that it was late enough in the night, I quickly sashed my vine suit into a kind of hammock amongst the trees. The soft breeze coming over the treetops slowly rocked me back and forth while the thick vines shielded me from the worst of the cold. A quick few hours of sleep and I was up with the morning. The late-night travel still wore on me so I stuck to just scouting out a good place to set up camp and getting a general lay of the land. As I looked through the forest nearer to the mountains I came upon a rather large cave formed from the erosion of a creek in the steep hillside.

It was a dark and drab affair going on back far enough that I had to summon a flame to get light, but the end of the cave only lead through a smaller series of holes in hard stone that the water trickled through. It was sturdy enough that no orc or Frojan could get through so it was as safe as a cave could be, at least on the inside. I thought about making some traps and claiming this little hole in the dirt as my own but that would just draw attention from passing parties who perused it while I was gone and could potentially get some innocent bystander killed.

The solution was to carve out a mini-room in one of the bends in the cave and cover its door entrance with a rock cover, well designed to seamlessly blend into the surrounding stone. I put in some holes in the bottom that did an S shape between the open air of the cave and my little sanctuary to allow airflow while also preventing any light from shining through.

My mini sanctuary now secured, I thought about how to go about getting information about my quarry. Hiding in the crowd wasn't an option, I decided as I twirled some of my silver bangs. But that may not be the preferred option. The nobles after me don't know that I can use magic nor the extent of my craft's abilities.

If my unique features were spotted in Bushwhackers, then they might send a gang out to get me. That would provide an excellent source of intel, unlike the former member I had kept in my basement. But that could also compromise my element of surprise, as they were sure to know that my presence there meant I was on to them, which could create another set of problems even when they don't know of my true abilities.

Having discarded that option, I had a lot more to work with here but scoping out this valley where their base was located was the first step. After snacking on some of the onion crackers, I headed out along some of the roads leading out of Bushwhackers, most just lead to dead-end villages in the middle of no-where and this split in the road at the end of the town didn't even have any signposts to help me narrow down my choices.

As I zipped through the woods and villages, I took special notice of the people in the towns and on the roads. The people here seemed a bit rougher. Weapons, be they swords, clubs, daggers, or even bows, were the norm rather than the exception. The local law, if you could call it that, seemed more of a suggestion when it came to the gangs roaming about. The guards came down on anything in the town proper but the roads were basically a free for all as the bandits basically owned the rights to travel, dealing out punishments for the slightest perceived disrespect but they kept the violence and intimidation to a level that didn't threaten any one's life and if they were raping the peasants, I hadn't seen any indication of it.

Still, a few almost forced my intervention when they threatened some poor old woman or got an exorbitant toll from a starving peasant trying to get his meager goods to market. I made a mental note of the ones who needed to disappear when I completed my task here.

It took me all day but a few hours before sunset, I found the road I was looking for. Down one of the trails I ghosted through the trees, I eventually came upon a sign with the gaping jaw plastered over a wooden signpost. The only problem was going a bit past that, the land became an ocean of severed trees and another unpleasant sight greeted me as I latched to a particularly large tree with my vine suit.

Past the fields of stumps lay what looked like a pretty decent fortress. The distance was great enough that I couldn't make out all of it but the large fortress of grey stone with three levels each higher than the last in the middle of the valley was hard to miss. As was the distinctive white lines in the walls stone making it look like rows upon rows of teeth in the jutting walls. The whole place was in the dead-end of a mini valley with several smaller buildings of wood out on the plain in front of the fort. but most concerning of all was the sea of people milling about the place.

Even from this distance, I could see the workings of what looked like an army moving goods, training, and worst of all the occasional spell going off. The mages stood distinctly apart from the rest on the field, which wasn't hard as they only numbered between 35 to 50. As small as their mini pocket off to the left was, it was still an impressive force.

Ah fuck.

There was no way I was going to just stroll in and out of that place. I looked back towards the woods as I went over my options. If I wanted to get in there I would have to bleed them dry. Digging underneath the place was a terrible idea considering all the problems with getting a tunnel through such a long field without being noticed.

It would be easy enough to kill them in a series of ambushes by myself, aside from the mages maybe, but the bigger issue was alerting them to a new malevolent presence. Killing too many of them too quickly with no explanation would likely lead them to turtle up in the safety of the stone fort as they tried to gather intel on this new threat.

But the orcs would elicit a different response. I hadn't seen any on my way here but I also wasn't looking for them either. If there were a fair number of them in this area my attacks could just be seen as the orcs ratcheting up the pressure, the response to which would be to fortify their positions with more bodies lest they permanently lose their territory. Which would only work if the orcs were active enough in this area for them to assume their guilt in the coming attacks.

I started some more scouting to get a better lay of the land and look for activity from my soon-to-be scapegoats in the few fleeting hours of sunlight left. I got a good lay of the local landscape and even managed to catch a rabbit in passing through one of the many groves. The meat was a welcome addition to my dinner that night.

I hadn't had any more luck the next morning, so a few hours before suppertime, I went to one of the more solitary bandit gangs in the more mountainous region, comprised of about only 6 men who were only capable of robbing withered grannies and children.

My attack was simple yet no less effective. When one man went to take a leak overlooking a cliff, he got a nice bullet to the head making him fall over the mountainside. When two of his companions went to check on their missing companion, a stone spell summoned and launched a bar of stone that slammed into their backs and helped them find their lost friend.

The last three barely had time to register that they were under attack before two of their skulls had split open with stone bullets. As the last man cowered in fear, I knocked him out. After going through their pockets for any scraps of information, I threw the other two corpses over the cliff. I brought the last surviving member back to the cliffside as I waited for him to wake up. Going through all of the scraps of paper and bits of bobbles, I waited until the heavily black-bearded man jostled awake to find himself dangling over a cliff by a tree branch curling around his leg.

Our conversation, short and productive, confirmed my scouting and fears. The orcs weren't active in this area as the occasional rumblings from the dwarves, as close by as any human could get without being in their territory, would collapse the tunnels they relied on for their hit and run attacks. Which meant my hopes for making this a quick and dirty operation were officially dashed. After the last bandit joined his fellows' bits and pieces on the cliffside, I went back towards my personal cave.

As I jumped through the treetops, I slowly came to terms with the fact that this operation was probably going to be a few weeks or even months longer than I had originally hoped for. I brooded on this new reality and all of the many changes I would be making until my trip was interrupted.

It was near the fading of the sun as night took the reigns from its eternal foe that I heard a cry near one of the roads. Coming near the source, I saw a group of big wolves attacking a small carriage with the screams of little girls inside.