Dark Claws turned out to be a species of massive owl with two cruel looking black claws. The monster's feathers were also massive, the large tail feathers nearly as long as Jun was tall. Keira's cursory examination of the monster found that the bird had died slamming headfirst into Jun's barrier, shattering its skull and half the bones in its body.
Luckily with the rest of her team awake, taking care of the creature was fast with Keira taking the lead. With a liberal application of mana, Jun was able to use her snare spells to haul the corpse over the wall and out of their camp. Following Keira, Jun and her teammates moved a few hundred feet from camp deeper into the forest where the scout had Jun set the corpse down. After that, she and Cian set to work cleaning and butchering the beast until all that was left was a bloody pile of bones and offal, the claws, feathers, meat, organs, and core all wrapped up and spread between their storage devices.
While the twins took care of the butchering, the rest had kept busy digging a large hole with Jun punching holes into the ground with her rarely used [Piercing Missile], Aya thawing the soil with flame spells, and Michael shoveling the loosened dirt away to form a large pit. Once the choice loot had been stored away, the group shoved the remains into the pit and quickly buried it. The grave was shallow and wouldn't hide the remains for long but would be enough to keep any other predators from sniffing out the blood while they slept.
Dirty work done, the group moved back to the camp, switching off watches with Cian and Keira taking over. Exhausted, dirty, and freezing, Jun gratefully sank into her thick bedroll next to Aya, barely noticing her friend's snoring as sleep quickly took her.
Useless Dark Claw, Arwen thought to himself as he laid back down in his tent. At the very least a stealth and speed focused monster should've been able to land a single blow on a Bronzer. He hadn't expected much from it, but it hadn't even drawn any blood. It just flew headfirst into a student's barrier like a stupid bird and brained itself.
How had the lowbie even noticed it in the first place? She definitely didn't have an aura sense yet. Her aura wasn't anywhere near strong enough, still thin and barely reaching more than a few feet away. All of the other students were much stronger before they even touched Iron. Aya's aura had been surprisingly strong when she was at peak Bronze, and it'd only gotten stronger once she broke into the Iron ranks. Cian, Keira, and Michael each had surprisingly strong auras as well, to the point that he'd been suspicious of all of their backgrounds.
When he dug into his students, he was surprised by all of them.
Aya was just a commoner girl, apparently the daughter of some merchant from one of the Southern port cities. No prior training listed, no records that she attended any of the schools in the South, just the pampered daughter of a merchant who was apparently a prodigy.
The twins had a much more surprising background as children of a known Diamond ranked chief from one of the Northern clans beyond the mountains. That at least explained Cian's weapons skills and Keira's speed. The Northern Clan Holds were constantly at war with monsters and each other. The children of a powerful chief would be perfect targets, so they must have been trained from a young age and sent away for their protection.
Michael's background was just as surprising. Even if Moros outlawed slavery, he hadn't expected one of the kingdom's elite academies to accept any students from the Republic of Mercy. Many of the nobles still had secret dealings with the Empire of Flesh after all, though they hid it better than those idiot nobles that lost their heads not long ago. Although it was possible that that stupid Plat prat Sean didn't notice, too wrapped up in some political game of ass kissing. The man only cared about social status and his meddling had turned away and held back more than a few promising students. Arwen fought down a spike of rage at the thought of all the potential prodigies that the man wasted with his games. Every year he considered removing the Registrar, but doing so would attract too much attention. He needed to keep his efforts to his goals, not indulge in petty disputes.
Tamping down his irritation, Arwen refocused as he tracked the students with his aura. In comparison to her teammates, Jun was lacking.
Sure she put on a good fight against them when she showed up with a cat of all things and claimed it as her familiar, nearly fighting the rest of her teammates to a standstill until Keira got out of her snares due to Jun's inattention. The way she'd captured Cian in a cage of barriers had also been surprising, keeping the far more powerful man caged up and pitting his weakness against her strength. She'd also shown a surprising grasp of tactics with how she'd used small barriers to help her familiar maneuver and hid her snares under the sand. She'd also performed adequately on the warehouse bounty, her barriers saving him some effort in disarming the arrays.
Still, impressive as she was with her barriers and snares, everything else about her was lacking. She almost won because her teammates held back too much. Her file said she had an offensive spell that was leagues ahead of the common trash nobles called basic battle magic, but she didn't use it. If the file was to be believed, she could cast hundreds of Apprentice ranked offensive spells before she ran out of mana, spells with enough power that they might even scratch him if they hit. Even if all they did was scratch him, dealing with hundreds of them would still be a threat to him, and that kind of power at Bronze rank was rare.
And that was her biggest problem, and why she was a failure. She held herself back and refused to use her power. She's too timid, too cowardly, too weak, he thought with a snarl. No killer instinct.
When the Dark Claw started circling over their camp, he'd watched closely through his aura, knowing the monster wouldn't be able to resist attacking the girl and her pet while they stood watch. Part of him hoped she would notice it unveil some killer instinct for once, while another part of him hoped the Dark Claw would take care of her stupid pet. Instead, every possible disappointment struck. The girl was too busy talking to her little cat about some nonsense, not that he cared enough to focus his aura to find out what. It took too much effort, and why would he bother listening to some empty-headed little girl talking to an equally stupid cat?
She paid so much attention to a one-sided conversation with the creature that she didn't notice the threat as it started it's attack. He'd actually been excited at the possibility of her death. It'd make for good motivation for the students with actual potential. But instead of that happening, of course the girl got lucky and decided to use her ridiculous barrier spell at the last possible moment, causing the Dark Claw to fly headfirst into a barrier and brain itself, dying instantly. Then to make matters worse, she roused the entire camp screaming about an attack even though the creature was already dead. The girl's luck infuriated him.
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Still, the expedition lasts a full week, and he'd already figured out where they were headed. A lot could happen in an Iron ranked area.
Jun woke the next morning to her body aching all over and her head feeling stuffed with cotton from lack of sleep. The lumps of earth and stone under her bedroll didn't make for the best sleeping surface even with the extra thick padding it had. Still, she got up and exited the tent past Keira's sleeping form to be greeted by the smell of cooking bacon in the light of morning. Michael looked up at her as he tended to a sizzling pan and handed her a warm plate of food and a steaming mug. Gratefully accepting the meal, Jun took a seat next to Aya and started eating, the stuffiness in her head slowly fading as she crunched on crisp bacon and sipped a warm cup of tea. It wasn't long before the rest of her team woke and joined them, even Arwen joining them and looking well rested, if more taciturn than usual.
After eating, they broke down their camp and set out in the same order as the day before, pushing deeper into the Forest. The walk was more of the same as the day before, trudging through the dark and eerily quiet forest, though Jun couldn't help but keep looking up and staring at the treetops and rare gaps in the snowcapped canopy, looking for threats from above. Despite her vigilance though, the threat came at them from below.
Keira stopped and motioned for everyone to freeze.
As Jun came to a halt, Shiori smoothly jumped out of her hood and silently landed at her feet. Jun pulsed her mana, already planning where she'd place her barriers to protect her team as she waited. A shallow dome over top would stop anything from above, while four walls would protect their front, sides, and behind. Pouring a tenth of her mana into each would leave her at half, enough to reinforce wherever the pressure was worst or maybe even capturing attackers with snares if she had mana to spare. With a plan in place, Jun concentrated on their surroundings, ears open for any hint of the threat Keira noticed.
A harsh, guttural word barked out from the darkness around them and Jun cast, her barriers coalescing as a squad of spear wielding goblins charged at them out of the darkness! In no time at all, the goblins closed the distance between the bush they'd emerged from and Jun's barrier, their spear tips thrusting into it with the combined weight of the diminutive monsters and their impressive speed. Jun surged mana into the barrier, reinforcing it as the spears struck!
Five muted clinks like utensils tapping against glass rang out as the goblins struck her barrier and stopped, the attack barely taking any mana as Jun stood there, a blush starting to creep across her cheeks as she felt more than half of her mana devoted to the magical barriers surrounding them. She might have overprepared.
The goblins snarled at the students after their failed attack and started to viciously stab at the magical barrier, filling the air with the sound of muted taps and clinks. Jun blinked as the vicious assault by five goblins only barely ate into the mana devoted to her front barrier. If she did nothing else to reinforce it, it would take the goblins several minutes to break it.
"Well... that's underwhelming," Keira deadpanned, watching the squad of goblins separated from her by a few feet and an opaque barrier.
"Yup," Aya said, pointing at the soil in front of them as a large brown blob coalesced and shot into the ground. Moments later, the assault stopped as a series of spikes erupted from the ground beneath the goblins, impaling them.
Cleaning up the kills took longer than the actual fight did, and minutes later the party was on the move again, having shoved the goblins' weapons and ears into their bags and thrown the corpses into the bushes. The spears hadn't been very valuable, little more than sharpened spikes of iron bolted to a wooden handle, but loot was loot. The goblins hadn't had anything else of interest on them, no food or other trinkets, which meant that their camp was probably close by, and Keira quickly found the goblins' tracks and started retracing them.
It only took an hour to find the goblin camp, and it was deserted. The squad they'd already taken care of seemed to be the only ones that used the camp, and a quick search turned up a rolled scroll in the goblin language and a couple bags of some kind of unidentifiable jerky. Having learned more about goblin eating habits, the students reignited the cold fire in the camp and burned the food alongside anything else the goblins might find useful before leaving, the scroll tucked into Aya's bag.
After the fight and burning the camp, the rest of the day was uneventful, and they settled down for the night in another camp under an overhang of rock. Dinner that night was more cold rations as Aya and Keira poured over their maps. Even with the detour, they were making surprising progress through the Forest and would soon be in the targeted Iron region. Unlike the night before, Jun's watch was peaceful and the night passed quietly before they set out again in the morning, headed into the foothills.
Garug narrowed his eyes as he looked upon the corpses of the missing squad. When the five scouts failed to report in the night before, he'd sent a scout to their camp to bring them back to the warband. But instead of warriors drunk off contraband booze sleeping it off, the scout had found the camp ransacked, the supplies burned and warriors missing. The scout, a youth named Torshek, showed her intelligence and immediately returned to the warband for reinforcements rather than search for the missing squad herself. It was no surprise the girl was well on her way to the peak of the First Step despite her youth.
Garug decided to go out personally, taking the strongest of his warband, 100 warriors all at the peak of the First Step led by himself and his Second Step shamans, including his youngest son. The warband scoured the woods for hours until they found what was left of them.
They'd been impaled numerous times, their weapons and valuable stolen and their corpses mutilated and cruelly thrown into the bushes. "Humans," he growled with hate. With a barked order, a dozen of his warriors gathered fallen branches, quickly forming a large pile of wood that they carefully arranged the dead squad on.
Without saying a word, each of them chose one of the trinkets they carried for fortune and honor and placed it amongst the bodies. Garug chose a brush covered in dried blood. A moderate honor, recording his attack on the hated enemy's supplies and future soldiers. Each threat eliminated when young was one less horror that would come to slaughter the People and mutilate their corpses, defiling them and stealing their glory from the afterlife. A small pile of trinkets covered the five lost warriors, hopefully enough honor to restore their ears in the after and give them food to eat.
With another barked order, Garug's warriors stood in circles around the bonfire as their oldest shaman walked forward, a ball of flame hovering between her hands. As she knelt down before the pyre, the ball of flame drifted forward and touched against the pile of kindling at the base of the pyre. The shaman continued kneeling as the kindling went up in flames, feeding her mana to it to spread the flames unnaturally fast and to burn unnaturally hot. A wave of heat washed over the assembled warriors as they watched the pyre burn. Soon, the shaman slumped forward, her hair starting to smoke before a pair of warriors rushed forward and pulled her to safety.
The youngest shaman, his son, began to treat her with the glow of healing magic as the next oldest took her place, kneeling and channeling his mana into the pyre until he too slumped over and was replaced. One by one, the clan's shamans fed their mana to the pyre until all six of the eldest were spent and left under the ministrations of the youngest. As the bodies burned, Garug started to chant, soon joined by the voices of his warriors.
"Blessed warriors of the people. Struck down in defense of the defenseless. Honor stolen by villains in death. Your brethren surrender their honor unto you, that you may ride upon wind and flame among your blessed ancestors. Spirits of wind and flame, called to witness your sacrifice, carry your burdens away. A vow of vengeance is made, that your enemies that dishonor you shall be dishonored themselves, their stolen glory restored to their victims."
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