On the second day of travelling with the caravan Charles decided to work on his runes again, if he could cut through people easily with his simple skill than other people probably could too. In order to be safe Charles needed a defensive skill to protect himself from their attacks, after all he was probably going into more combat in the future.

He decided to use similar runes to the force construct rune, it would scan him to detect if he was wearing any armour then deploy his mana in a reinforcement rune. If he was wearing no armour it would reinforce his skin, less protective but helpful nonetheless. In addition to reinforcing what’s already there when struck in would redirect the force hopefully deflecting the weapon and forcing the welder to overextend.

The rune was a simple remake of the force construct rune but it still took quite a bit of energy and time to make. After finishing Charles needed a break so he decided to go and talk to a few of the other caravan members.

The farmers were mostly simple people although Old man June seemed to know more than he let on, Maxime and Lester (the young couple) were responsible for finding out what everyone in the city needed from Thame and they went with the caravan to get it. Their son Larson was an ambitious young man who wanted to grow up to become adventurer, he explained to Charles what adventurers and mercenaries were in this world.

“mercenaries pretty much just do all sorts of assorted tasks for the people, but adventurers are sponsored by rich noble, a single adventurer can change the tide of and entire conflict.” He said.

Larson went on to gush about all of the popular adventurers, to sum it up mercenaries were the adventurers from earth's fiction getting quests to kill goblins and such, while adventurers were like celebrities and powerful warriors that could represent an entire kingdom.

Charles had a much better time talking to the merchant's daughter Anne, she was well educated and seemed to idolise him a bit. Charles talked to her for the next few days about assorted topics, it gave his a pretty clear picture of the country. This country called Grantham was currently trapped in a war and was being constantly raided from another side, Orson had memories of fighting people wearing random clothing and wielding weapons with no cohesive theme. It seemed like because of this the kingdom was in trouble and was forced to move all funding to the army and guard, the economy looked like it was heading into a depression and the kingdom's allies were being shifty. Charles was basically trapped in a volatile country that was on the verge of collapse, heaped on top of that the king was becoming more and more cruel with his methods starting to randomly detain people in the major cities he saw as problematic.

Charles added leave the country to his list of objectives, Charles huffed the stakes were shaping up fast and Charles was not excited to see what would happen next.

On the seventh day with the caravan a new problem arose, things were disappearing in the night, mostly food products. This slowly escalated more and more things were going missing, Charles started trying to place alarm runes around the camo when they were heading off to bed but they were always broken when he woke up.

The food stores were getting dangerously low so Charles decided to stay awake all night with alarm runes and runes designed to go off when the alarm runes were disabled. Charles kept completely still and pretended to be asleep while he waited, late in the night the moon lit up and interloper on the clearing they were set up in. A person wearing a crude camo walked out of the tree line and easily disarmed his double rune alarm. Charles cursed, in order to do that they had to be skilled in magic, he had no idea what the application of magic was like in this world they would be able to surprise him easily.

Charles decided to make the first move, while they were rummaging around with the food Charles lit up his sword and dashed forward with a wild swing. The camo clad person summoned a tiny magic shield and deflected the sword before running as fast as they could to the forest. Charles fired his Flamethrower and manage to severely injure them before they made it to the forest disappearing into the darkness.

Charles cursed, someone out there wanted this caravan out of here and if their saboteur was almost as strong as he was then they could probably wipe the floor with him. Charles informed Briant of the danger in the morning and went straight to work on improving his runes.