Around half of their number were injured with four dead. Teal somehow managed to escape without injuries. When Me’dun called for the counterattack, Teal was among the first into the fray. She helped in taking two of the ambushers down and sustained only a graze along her arm and thigh.

The two men who acted as decoys survived. The arrows missed their vitals by inches according to Belen who was the group’s healer. Among the ambushers, they killed six. Blood trails led deeper into the woods, shrubbery and other plants were marked with them. If they wanted to, they could pursue, but they had neither the energy nor the men.

After tending to the wounded, Me’dun set up another watch. As the prince and leader, he didn’t have a shift. It left him both relieved and guilty.

“Are you alright?” Teal asked him. Although they were small, she still didn’t bandage or heal her cuts.

“I’m not hurt,” he said. “Go and patch yourself up with everyone else.”

She hesitated. Her over sensitivity and concern annoyed him. He wanted to say more but he ended up just waving her away. Teal got the hint and left.

Me’dun saw the opportunity and approached. He said, “If it weren’t for your northern-blood attendant, we would have lost a great many more warriors.” His hands were stained red with the blood of the wounded.

“Her Flow is pretty useful I guess,” Kieran responded. When he obtained more freedom around his thirteenth birthday, he’d sometimes see Teal through the windows as she practiced near the royal guards.

“Certainly but I meant her warnings ever since we chose this path.”

“What do you mean?”

Me’dun wiped the blood from his hands, “After it was decided that we continue through part of the evening, she pulled me aside and warned of a possible ambush. When the warriors went to refill their waterskins, I had someone scout the area. He found nothing to confirm her worries but I decided to trust her intuition despite it.”

He glanced at Teal, “Well, she’s always been the type to overly worry about things. I guess she was right this time… What is it?” Again, Me’dun was looking at him as if he had something he wanted to say.

“Nothing, Your Highness. You should rest now. Belen and I will tend to the wounded and move the dead.”

Inside his tent, he removed his armor. Alexandra also came in to check on him. “Do you have any wounds?”

Kieran sighed, “I just told Teal the same thing.”

“It is best to always check.”

“Yeah,” he said while thinking back on the hectic battle. If it weren’t for Alexandra, he might’ve gotten an arrow through his gut. “Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, defeat them all by yourself?”

I mean, I’ve seen how you fight. You can beat the crap out of someone a whole room away with only your hand.

Her eyes somehow turned colder, “As long as I am your attendant, my duties are to protect you and you only. As it stands, there is no reason for me to oust my identity and eliminate them.”

“What about the soldiers who died then?! Did they not matter? Were they not a good enough reason?” Maybe it was because it was his first time experiencing death that he felt this way.

“They are warriors” she answered curtly. “While they have no wings, while their gifts are but meagre defenses, they bare their horns and claws knowingly. As warriors, their lives do not take precedence over yours.”

“But my life was in danger too.”

“As you have said, you were not harmed. I will not always be around to protect you, Young Master. Neither will Teal. Someday, you will be alone without either of us. I will protect you until that day but when that day comes, you must protect yourself. Therefore, I will not fight your battles for you.”

The night passed without any more incidents. They began their journey a little after dawn with wounded and injured soldiers riding in the back of the supply carts. Their able-bodied men were stretched thin trying to fill in the gaps in their defenses. Lack of sleep contributed to their half-dazed state and the general anxiety that hung in the air.

Teal maintained her detection barrier while Alexandra led her horse by the reins. A little after noon, they passed over the last slope and saw a camp not far off.

The outpost lay under the overhang of a large hill with the stone underside having been partly cleaned out of sharpened, jagged rocks. It used the hill as a natural wall and built palisades out from there. The wooden stakes at the end looked sturdy and mostly untouched while the ones near the gate were riddled with arrows draped in burnt cloth. Some stakes were chipped or had entire chunks taken out of them, either from constant blasts of Essence or from being hacked away at. Fire Essence would seem like a good counter to the defenses but while it did spread and burn, it burned out much faster and easier than actual fire. Though, he heard there were exceptions.

The gate was a mess of holes and rotten wood patched up by sticks and leaves. Inside, they were met with tired looks of relief. The camp could probably house a few hundred soldiers by Kieran’s rookie guess. A few men came to take the carts and lead the injured into their hospital tents. Teal assisted with the wounded. Alexandra stayed close to him.

Me’dun stopped one of the soldiers and asked, “Where’s the leader of this outpost?”

The man, barely older than Kieran, with an arm wrapped in dirty cloth said, “He died a few days ago. We were rebuilding part of the defenses when they suddenly attacked. We managed to hold on but the leader was killed when a man in a green cloak with a black bow shot him through the head.”

Was it him? Was it the one sniping from the trees? It had to be. The green cloak matched.

“I heard the leader here was skilled with barriers,” Belen said, peering at the soldier. “I find it difficult to believe he would be killed so easily.”

“We’ve fought with them before. They rarely use Essence but their leader in the green cloak always seems to have his arrows imbued with them. Our leader thought that he might have a vaear bow.”

Belen jotted the information down in a piece of parchment he kept on him, Me’dun shook his head, and Alexandra’s eyes turned to Kieran. Vaear… he heard the term in his studies before.

Vaear… Vaear… Vanvaearta!

Vanvaearta. ‘To bind to’ or ‘to devote to’. Vanvaearta was when Flow became bound to something, usually an item. Teal told him how some things of sentimental value, like a pendant, could become vaear items due to their owner’s feelings toward it.

In rare cases, Vanvaearta applied to living things as well. Like from a parent to a child.

‘Vanvaearta is a reflection of our Essence. It is our Flow acting without us knowing,’ Teal had said.

Vanvaearta wasn’t a technique a blacksmith could force onto an item. They could pour Essence into it over and over but it wouldn’t become a vaear weapon. It was the unconscious Flow that determined what it would bind to, meaning it almost never did.

“Who is the current leader of this outpost?” Kieran asked.

The man’s eyes widened upon seeing the emblem on his chest piece, “Y-Your Highness! T-There hasn’t been a new leader officially but a Low Demon named Felmur has been keeping order. He left earlier with a group to see if he could track down the humans that attacked us. He should be back soon.” Me’dun nodded and they dismissed the soldier.

Charred piles of wood were left in the middle of the outpost smoke still rising from it. The iron tip of an arrow stuck out of the mess. Further in they went, the more fires they saw that ravaged the shelter’s infrastructure and destroyed its supplies.

Multiple men and women were in the infirmary being tended to. Dirty bandages, simple old rags stained with dry blood, were switched for new ones. Their wounds tended to be on the upper part of the torso like the shoulders. If they waited a few more days for reinforcements, then maybe there would have been no outpost to deliver to.

Crude wooden structures stood rather unscathed in the middle and deeper parts of the outpost. They were few and far between but it was where he would rest for the time being. Space between tents was scarce, two to three people wide at most. It was so the two main pathways were large enough to accommodate carts as the supply stockpile was in the back.

Word quickly spread that they arrived and that the fifth prince led the new group. Soldiers he’d previously seen with their blessings out retracted them. The general sense of weariness he felt from the people faded. Before the leader of the place, Felmur, returned, it felt as if more than half the outpost’s troops had come to thank him.

Felmur carried a bow, a weapon Kieran saw few people carrying other than the ambushers from last night, and was around the same height as him. “Your Highness, I am Felmur. A Low Demon who has somehow found myself as the leader of this outpost.”

“You’ve done well,” Kieran said. It was as well as anyone could’ve done given the circumstances. “I am the fifth prince, Kieran Reyteour. My men and I have delivered the supplies.”

“Yes, Your Highness. Thank you very much for coming to lead us!” Felmur bowed, revealing the skinned right side of his head. “We have been waiting for your arrival so we may assault the human’s fortress in Tidal Valley.”

Kieran’s eyes darted over to Alexandra who didn’t return his look. There wasn’t anything in the letter mentioning taking out a whole freaking fortress!

Felmur and his tracking party turned their gazes up at him. He cleared his throat and almost choked. “R-Right… um, have you heard if there will be any more reinforcements?”

Felmur shook his head, “From our communication crystal, His Highness, Crown Prince Drastan, informed us that once you arrived, we would have all we needed for the assault.”

“Uh, how many men do we have?”

“Excluding your number, Your Highness, there are currently fifty warriors in this outpost.”

“And uh, how many people are in the fortress? Do you know?”

“I do not know for sure but their numbers should be similar in size to ours. Should we prepare for attack, Your Highness? I can have everyone ready in an hour.”

“No, no,” Kieran waved his hand. “There’s no need to rush things right now. Do you by chance still have that communication crystal?”

“Yes, Your Highness. It is in the central cabin,” he said pointing to the building behind them. “Your cabin now.”

“Great. Treat yourself to some food or something.”

Kieran rushed inside, making the others wait by the door. When he found the crystal, he infused it with Essence. He sat down on an uneven chair as he tapped his finger against the shoddy desk and his leg bounced on a creaking floorboard. The crystal started to glow.

“Metallic wings,” said the voice that came through.

“Will fall to our claws,” he answered. “This is Prince Kieran Reyteour. Give the crystal to my brother.”

It was likely a tethered crystal, meaning it connected to only one recipient. Despite having seen better crystals, like the ones in Melak Castle, he knew they weren’t cheap. Ones like these could run a person up to a gold coin.

“Hello Kieran,” his brother’s snotty voice transmitted through the crystal. “What have you called me for? The war rages most heavily in the Haald Plains and I have little time for chitchat.”

“Oh dearest eldest brother,” sarcasm dripped from his voice. “How the hell do you expect me to take over the Tidal Valley fortress with sixty men?”

From what he learned of siege warfare, which was admittedly little since Alexandra prioritized combat skills, he would need two to three times as many troops as the defenders to win. Of course, that wasn’t always the case but he didn’t want to be on equal numbers with them. They already had the defenders advantage.

“Sixty men? How do you have so few?”

“I don’t know? Maybe because the other group never came? Maybe because nobody told us that the outpost has been under attack for literal weeks and that there are ambushes waiting for us? All that would have been great to know but you probably didn’t have any way to communicate with anyone so that can’t be your fault at all.”

“Hm… It is your first mission regardless. I expect great results. As for your reinforcements, Overlord Kaal’un’s men should have arrived. I will contact him about this.”

“Hey, wait-!”

The crystal stopped glowing. He palmed it and considered throwing it across the room. He would have done it too if it weren't his only way of communication. Kieran wasn’t a commander or anything, so he didn’t get his own crystal.

That fucking asshole! How the hell can you ‘expect’ great results? I bet you couldn’t even do this. If you were in my shoes you’d be complaining!

“Young Master, are you alright?” Alexandra said as she burst through the door.

“What the heck? Don’t just break the door down,” he sighed. “Round the leaders up. We’re gonna come up with a plan.”

“There is no time for that right now. We’re under attack.”

Ah shit.