“Numbers might be useful, but it’s pointless when it’s a lion set loose in the midst of a pack of sheep.” - Saying commonly attributed to Xaliburnus the Conqueror, First Emperor of the Elmaiya Empire.

Elfriede’s wind-sense generally could detect things as far away as twenty-five to thirty paces from her, if she did not care much for details. In combat situations, however, she habitually kept it to a distance of twenty paces in order to perceive things in greater detail instead. It was responsible for how she often reacted to her opponents’ moves even as they were just starting the motion, as she sensed their movements in great detail as if she was directly touching them.

It was the same with magic, as while her senses were based on wind and they weren’t particularly good at detecting the passage of magical things that moved rapidly, the wind in question was infused with her mana, and that sort of widely diffused mana acted as a natural detector to any other mana-rich objects in its range. It was how Elfriede often noticed magic spells going off before they became noticeable otherwise.

Naturally, she had her drawbacks, like the limited range of her sense. A Light affinity mage who struck from far away could likely get her before she could react as light traveled far too fast for her to do much about, for example. Such mages were fortunately rare, though, and most other affinities usually had some sort of telltale sign that allowed her to notice and react to them before they even entered her sensing range.

It seemed that there were only two combat mages amongst the bodyguards of the Marquis, one Wind affinity and one Earth affinity mage. Both seemed skilled, judged from the speed with which they manipulated mana, but neither was that powerful. A truly powerful war mage could annihilate hundreds to even thousands of people at one go.

Of course, most mages were also just as fragile as any regular person, so any such mage present were always the primary target for murder and assassination in any battle.

The rest of the bodyguards were pretty much as Elfriede expected, fit, strong men and women mounted on their horses with well-crafted weapons and armor led by a middle-aged man she wasn’t sure was a general or just head of the guards. Some of those bodyguards turned towards her, but it was primarily the two mages who were actively trying to deal with her.

They were on horseback, but with the tight squeeze of people all around them, that wasn’t much of an advantage. The Free Lances’ charge had pushed the Podovnian soldiers one way, while the Caromans did the same in the other way, which made for a congestion around where the Marquis was. It was a boon since it prevented him from escaping easily.

Elfriede was deep in the enemy lines, practically on her own – even if a good chunk of the enemies around her were distracted by the mercenaries bearing down on them from the front – with enemies who were now aware of her presence. There were only two choices in such a situation, namely to fight or to die, and she was never a quitter.

With another kick of her legs she rushed towards the nearest of the mages, the Earth affinity one, who by now had three of the guards by his side as well. The enemy soldiers with the misfortune of being between her and her target met swift ends by her blades, the cramped quarters and absurdly close range more beneficial to her with her twin blades than to them with their long spears.

She slipped between and weaved amongst the enemy soldiers, aware of the position of every single one of the people around her at a distance of up to twenty paces thanks to her magical wind-sense. Many only began to react when she suddenly appeared before them, and they often died before they could even finish reacting to her presence.

Her twin blades, mithril edges keen and shining, tore through her enemies’ flesh and bone with equal ease, and even the chainmail a few of the soldiers wore parted before the blades as if they were made of wet clay. All too often, by the time blood spilled out from the cuts in their flesh, Elfriede had moved past the soldier and went for her next victim.

It took her seconds to work her way towards the mage she aimed for, avoiding a few more magical projectiles that hit more of the enemy’s own soldiers than giving her any sort of real threat along the way. The moment she got close enough to the mage on horseback, she reached out and swung the blade on her left hand in a narrow arc.

Elfriede wasn’t aiming for the mage himself, which rendered the stone plates the man conjured to act as a shield before him not only useless, but even detrimental as they blocked his vision of her for that brief moment. Instead, her target was the left foreleg of the mage’s horse, and her blade sheared right through the poor animal’s knee joint without even the slightest hitch.

The horse whinnied and collapsed on the spot, throwing the surprised mage on its back in Elfriede’s direction. His concentration clearly wavered at that moment as one of the stone plates he conjured just fell down while another flew towards the back instead of staying where they were relative to his position in order to shield him.

Not like it mattered that much before a weapon with keen mithril-edged blades, as Elfriede swung her other blade and sliced directly through four of the stone plates as well as the mage’s throat in the same movement.

It took her some effort to slice through the stone plates, but with the right edge alignment and force, her blade slid through their structure as if it was merely dealing with loose sand. That left her the other mage and the now alerted guards to deal with for her immediate problems.