'It's been too long since I heard from my sisters and judging by Dad's gloomy tone, he's still mad at Mom. Maybe now he has calmed down enough to talk about it.' Friya thought.
Rena and Senton wanted to check on Zekell and make sure that Leria would have all the support she needed. Ever since the copycat's attack on Zinya's house, the kids had refused to return to Lutia, bawling their eyes out in fear.
Not even after Lith had them talking with Frey and Filia over the communication amulet and reassuring Aran and Leria that nothing bad had happened to their friends did they want to walk through the Warp Gate again.
They would always start to cry, hugging their magical beasts, Abominus and Onyx, and shivering at the memory of the massacre.
Now that enough time had passed, their parents hoped that the kids would find the strength to confront their fears.
Senton didn't like Leria refusing to come down from Abominus' back in case she needed to retreat quickly nor the fact that she used her free hand to hold Lith's instead of that of her own father.
"Don't take it personally, dear." Rena said while holding his arm. "When you have seen real monsters, it's hard to inspire more confidence than a 20 meters tall Dragon."
"Will you really let me ride on your back if I come with you to Lutia, uncle Lith?" She looked at the Warp Gate as if untold horrors waited for her on the other side.
"I promise." Lith replied. "And if anything goes wrong, I also promise to fly you back to Grandma."
"I call dibs on the horns." Aran looked at the ripple in the dimensional energy while quaking in his pants, but he had his priorities straight.
"I wanted to ride between the horns!" Leria protested.
"You can stay between the feathers." He replied with defiance. "Horns are cool so they are a boy thing while feathers are soft, like a girl."
"Mom, Aran is being mean!"
"Thank the gods!" Rena raised her eyes to the heavens with gratitude. "We have yet to get there and things are already back to normal."
The bickering intensified to the point that the kids didn't notice being in Lutia until their steeds came out of the barn and a wind way too chilly to belong to the desert ruffled their hair.
The group stopped to look at the familiar landscape while Lith used Life Vision to make sure they were actually alone.
The grass had been regrown with magic, the holes in the ground had been filled, and even Zinya's house had been rebuilt, leaving no trace of the fight.
"Tezka?" Lith said after failing to find any trace of the Eldritch.
No reply came and since there was also no sign of impending threats, he was the first to step outside the defensive arrays of the Verhen household.
"Thank the gods you are back, Raaz." Bromann, one of the family's oldest friends and head of the farmhands rushed toward them. "I've made sure that the army fixed the fields but after plowing and fertilizing them there wasn't much we could do without you."
He pointed at the men tending the fields that were long ready for the sowing.
"There was a rumor saying that you had moved to the desert and wouldn't come back. Lots of people wanted to quit and search for new employment. It was hard to convince them to say, especially with the famine."
"What do you mean?" Raaz had been too busy enjoying his vacation first and dealing with Aran's trauma later to worry about rumors.
"This year people don't want to be paid with money, but with food. An uncultivated field produces none and everyone is eager to stockpile enough to get us through the next winter." Bromann left out the part about him being one of them.
He had stayed out of loyalty, but fear became stronger with every working day lost waiting for Raaz's return.
"There was even a rumor saying that the Crown would have seized your fields as compensation for the death of all those poor soldiers."
"That's just-" A friendly nudge from Rena reminded Raaz of the kids. "nonsense. I never planned to move out of the Kingdom and the Crown would never do that. Tell him, son."
"Don't worry, Bromann. The situation in Nestrar is solved and soon there will be no longer need to ration the food. I took care of that." Lith couldn't share any detail of his work but he was allowed to wink.
Bromann was a practical man and that was all he needed to know.
"Thank the gods you are here, Lith." Bromann shook his hand with gratitude. "I wonder how would the Kingdom fare without you and that nice gentleman, Vastor. He took care of Zinya's house and compensated everyone who got their property damaged."
"The Kingdom has more than two Archmages and each one of us is doing their part." Lith was well-aware that ever since he had left his job as Ranger his contributions had been minimal.
His replacement had destroyed no Lost City during his tour, but the Kellar region was as safe as always.
"Puah!" Bromann spat on the floor. "A bunch of arrogant idiots who never did Lutia any good, unlike the two of you."
"Bromann! Politics will not feed my family during winter!" One of the farmhands yelled and the others grumbled in annoyance.
"Don't worry, son. I'm safe here. You take the kids to see grandpa Zekell." Raaz said while caressing Aran's head.
"I'm not leaving you alone, Dad." He replied.
"I'm not alone. There's Bromann and my friends here." Raaz waved at the men in the fields. "Also there are people from the Queen's corps hidden all around us and a Phoenix in my shadow."
Actually, there were three. Salaark didn't half-ass the security detail of her guests.
"Go and have some fun. I promise that I'll be safe until your return."
Only after they exchanged a pinky promise did Aran agree to leave.
"Do you want to walk or Warp?" Lith asked.
"Warp!" The kids replied in unison, eager to get to the safety of Lutia.
"We'll walk." Rena said. "I want to show you there's nothing to be afraid of and see what's changed since we have left."
Lutia had gone from a small village to a small city and was slowly expanding.
Back when Lith was a kid, it would take half an hour to reach it but now after twenty minutes, they would enter Lutia's outskirts.
"What about the joyride?" Leria asked.
"What would you do if a Dragon who isn't your uncle flew over your house?" Lith replied.
"I would invite them in since they are your relative-"
"I would hide in the basement and call for your help." Rena answered for her.
"Exactly." Lith sighed at the little girl's naivety. "Dragons are like people. Not all of them are good, like the one who I had to send to jail."
In all of his stories, the bad guys like Syrook were sent to a vaguely descript and remote prison from which they would never be able to escape.
The only thing the kids knew for sure was that gardening was an integral part of the rehabilitation program since according to Lith, the bad guys spent their lifelong sentence pushing up daisies.
War needed to hit a Skeletal Knight once to disperse the darkness that animated it, but only if Solus managed to make the blade get past the protections and touch the corpse.
She already had trouble moving with her human body, let alone while being forced to puppeteer an oversized armor.
"I hate undead!" She roared as no matter how hard she hit them with the Sage Staff, the Skeletal Knight would keep getting up and fighting until all of their limbs had been destroyed.
"Fall back, Major!" Captain Eman was surprised by how feminine Lith's voice sounded from time to time. "You are already tired from the previous fight and need to rest. We'll cover your escape!"
The officer unleashed the tier five spell, Dark Star, generating a pillar of darkness that descended from above and engulfed the Skeletal Knights surrounding them. Darkness magic was the origin and the bane of the undead, quickly turning them into ashes.
"And leave you guys behind? Never!" Solus blocked Quaron's attempt to Blink past the Dark Star and inside her defenses by putting a shield of light right in front of his exit point.
He slammed his face hard against the construct and tumbled on the ground without even knowing what had gone wrong. The Ranger had tried to Blink behind her back, unaware that Solus's mana sense could see all around her.
She pointed at his position and the Captains opened fire with their wands but Quaron conjured an earth shield to defend himself before Blinking away to escape from the Demons that had encircled him.
'If only I could use Invigoration like a true Awakened, I would have impaled him on a tier five spirit spell!' Solus thought while the soldiers complimented "Lith" for his impeccable timing and leadership.
Usually, a deep blue mana core would have been capable of casting several powerful spells before needing rest but her case was different. Her cracked core leaked energy by the second and keeping her physical form caused Solus great pain.
Her life force was cracked as well and it crumbled faster with each move that she made. Even with the aid of the Sage Staff, focusing on a spell drained a lot of her focus.
To make matters worse, not only was she still unable to cast spells with her body due to the lack of auxiliary cores, but she also couldn't afford to go all out. If her body disappeared, leaving behind an empty suit of armor, Lith's cover would be blown.
The Skeletal Knights outnumbered the Demons ten to one and with each mage that fell, with each shadow that faded because Lith was too far away to infuse them with new strength, the situation grew direr.
A small unit of undead managed to flank Solus and strike at her constructs. They got past the shattered shields before she could reform them, separating Solus from the Captains by alternating feints and darkness spells.
'This doesn't make any sense. Skeletal Knights are supposed to be incapable of such clever thinking without- Oh shit!' Only then did she notice that Quaron had ceased his attack to direct the battle from a safe distance.
As Syrook's Harbinger, he had access to most of his bloodline abilities, including control over the undead conjured by Nether Gate.
Solus Blinked to blindside Ranger, but the moment Quaron saw the dimensional energy gather, he turned around and put all of his weight behind a lunge aimed at the heart of his hated enemy.
Metal clashed with metal and enchantment with enchantment until his glaive pierced through a wailing Skeletal Knight.
"What the fuck?"
"Nothing personal, kid." A voice said from behind his back, making him shudder.
'He must have Blinked the undead first as a decoy! Too bad Verhen forgot that my weapon has blades at both ends.' He thought while shifting his body weight and reversing the grip on the polearm to strike at the source of the voice.
This time, it hit only air.
When Quaron turned around, Solus was still where he had seen her a few seconds ago. Her tier four Light Mastery spell, Stingray, however, was right in front of him
She had simply used the dimensional door to carry a small cantrip and make him think that she had moved while she had used that time to weave a spell instead.
The construct resembled a huge multi faceted sphere akin to a disco ball the size of an SUV. Quaron expected it to shapeshift into a more dangerous form the moment it came close enough so he attacked it with a barrage of low tier spells.
Such a clumsy form made Stingray an easy target and if he managed to weaken the construct before its activation, he would regain the initiative.
Quaron conjured one tier three spell after the other, exploiting their fast casting time to make up for quality with quantity. Unfortunately for him, Stingray wasn't a construct so much as a carrier.
The moment that the sphere got close enough to its mark, it released from each of its facets the equivalent of a tier three Light Mastery spell. The hail of golden beams of light pierced through the elemental spells and then filled the area around the Ranger.
Only a few managed to hit him while the rest opened holes in the ground, making Quaron's footing uneven.
'That's the worst waste of mana I've ever seen. My armor may be weakened but it can take much more than this before-' Instead of disappearing after the initial burst, the rays of light remained fixed in place and adjusted their trajectory to converge on him.
Quaron Blinked away, only to discover that nothing had changed aside from his position.
Solus had waited to activate Stingray because Light Mastery spells lost their firepower with distance and because by placing it in the middle of Quaron's Blinking range, Stingray made dimensional magic useless.
On top of that, part of the Light Beams surrounding him had turned into hard-light constructs, limiting his movements and making it impossible for him to fly away. Everything else poured on him, hitting Quaron akin to a swarm of incandescent drills.
The Ranger Blinked again to gain the moment of respite he needed to take a deep breath. Mana sense showed Solus where he would reappear and she adjusted Stingray's line of fire accordingly.
Yet this time Quaron welcomed her spell with a burst of bright blue Origin Flames that ate at the incoming beams of light, working their way up to the core of the spell. Solus used part of the energy stored in her spell to put out the flames but Quaron simply breathed more.
Stingray collapsed, leaving the two contestants far away enough from each other to use Invigoration yet only one of them could actually do it.
'Shit! I hoped that he would rush at me while we are both down on mana. I can't last for much longer.' She thought while heavily panting.
Rangers were used to working alone and had often to fight tribes of monsters or groups of bandits. Those who charged in blindly rarely lived long. Quaron had noticed how after their fight "Verhen's" power had drastically dropped.
At first, he had put pressure on Solus to keep her from using Invigoration, yet time and time again she didn't even when she had the opportunity.
