บท 49: A Canyon full of Fireworks
The next morning Myra was already getting ready to leave and follow the academy students.
"Rae be good and don't cause your daddy too much trouble. I should be back later today."
The child nodded obediently wondering where Myra would be going to.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to look if your aunty Alyn and Nell and Liam are in trouble and help them."
"Okay, mommy will surely save them, you are the strongest!"
Myra laughed and gave Rae a kiss before the journey started. Once more Aaron was left in Silverspire feeling a little bit annoyed that he could not join her.
He did not argue with her though, as someone would have to take care of Rae and keep up all the work on the shop and holdings. If one of them was going to fight something as strong as a Lindwurm, it just had to be Myra.
--
"Why is she still not here? Do we have to kill a few of them, as an incentive to make her come here? Did you give them enough of a scare that her friends would inform her?"
A twisted looking man stood at the edge of the cliff overlooking a long ravine next to a few of his followers. With his plans being delayed his cruel face was looking even scarier than it would normally.
"If this keeps getting delayed, the formation will run out of power, before it even activates! Get the girl here now, before I start using your sorry lives as fuel! Do you think it's easy to find thousands of people and capturing them without anyone noticing? If this fails we're going to need another decade to prepare."
"Yes my Lord, we will get to it right away." The man kneeling in front of the obvious leader of this group, quickly rushed away. Soon, the man could no longer be seen, as his path was leading him through a tunnel down to the ravine.
In order to put more pressure on the group of students, they would have to think of something quickly as their Lord kept watching the situation as he did before and would not forgive any mistakes.
--
When Myra entered the area where the academy's students should be, she quickly noticed that they seemed to be in trouble. The spirit world seemed in uproar, as if something caused a disturbance there and riled up all the spirits.
Most of the magical beasts in the area would also be aggressive and attack anything they could find.
'Is this the reason why this Lindwurm was behaving strangely?' she inspected the ravine and it was easy to notice that both the way forward as well as the way out was blocked by various magical beasts.
She would easily be able to rush past them, but the academy students had a much harder time doing so. Without having the ability to fly, they could only defend or try to break free.
When Myra rushed past the beasts, making full use of the phantom acts abilities to travel short distances through the spirit world even with a rider, she could feel that something in the ravine changed.
With a humming noise, several formations all over the ravine were activated forming a powerful cage around the area, and locking down all movement in the area.
'Did I stumble into some ancient defence of some kind?' Myra wondered to herself and pushed a little bit with her spirit against the power trying to force her down.
"Oh … It had quite a bit of power remaining for such an old thing. I hope no one got hurt because of it." She mumbled and soon after she could hear massive explosions all over the ravine as the formations couldn't bear the forces anymore and the opposing forces ripped them apart.
Pillars and waves of magical power could be seen all over the area, lighting the sky for miles and miles.
"Maybe, ... I pushed a little bit too hard, well, can't change it. Maybe even Rae had seen the magic from home." she grinned at the thought of Rae looking at the horizon seeing all the magic going off like fireworks.
Myra never realized that she stepped into a trap, neither did she realize that someone wanted to harm her. She just moved on to the actual target of her journey, her friends and fellow students who were now stunned as were all the magical beasts and were still trapped in the ravine.
"Nell, Liam! Alyyyn!" she called out to them, looking for her friends. She was standing in the middle of a somewhat hastily erected camp.
Even without much effort, a group of mages could quickly build a castle, let alone a temporary camp. It had earth walls and was made out of little stone houses, like some village that had just sprung up from the ground.
The houses were obviously very simple and crude, not looking pretty in any way, but it was a good shelter nonetheless.
"Myra? What are you doing here?" Liam was the first to answer her and was rather bewildered to see her here.
"I came to rescue you obviously, why do you ask such silly questions?"
"Myra! I'm so happy to see you here." Alyn quickly gave her a hug. "There are so many more of them than we expected. We already killed two Lindwurm beasts but there seems to be a whole group of them here. I really don't wanna spend the next two months out in this wilderness."
"A whole group? Was someone hurt?" she looked around and couldn't find Nell.
"Yes they ate Nell. Said he tasted delicious." Liam told her after he noticed Myra looking around, doing his best to imitate Aaron's stoic expression.
"Don't be mean, Myra is worried, you shouldn't make fun of your brother like this!" Alyn scolded Liam, who quickly surrendered.
Alyn then turned back to answer Myra's question more seriously. "No one is hurt seriously. A few scratches here and there, but nothing that would cause any permanent damage.
"The real issue is that we don't have enough people to keep any more of the large magical beasts locked down in an area. As soon as the other beasts help to break the one we captured out of the seals or bindings they can easily escape and we can't kill them. It takes forever to hunt them down this way."
Arguing with his girlfriend was nearly as bad as arguing with Myra. In the end, this girl might not kill him accidentally but she might very well tell his parents. Liam didn't even want to consider even more terrible consequences.
"It's not like Liam to make fun of his brother, shouldn't it be Nell who does that?" Myra didn't expect Liam to also tease Nell from time to time.
"Well, Nell is currently in a complicated situation. It's better if we don't bother him." Alyn explained vaguely.
"The beasts! They are retreating!" someone called out all of a sudden.
"That's unexpected. Why would they suddenly give up like that?" – "Were they not deranged and just blindly attacked anything?"
"Uhm, that reminds me Liam, I noticed that something in this area was interfering with the spirit world here. It would likely cause the beasts to go mad. Might have been some old defensive formation or something similar. It felt very old."
"Felt very old? You mean the explosions we've seen earlier that nearly blinded us were caused by you destroying this thing?"
"Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't careful enough and destroyed it rather completely due to my negligence, but at least the beasts should calm down again, I don't think they were tainted or something."
"That's great. It's a good experience, but I don't like killing beasts without a proper reason, even though their meat is really tasty. I will give you some of our spoils of the fight, everyone got some of its meat and in the end you really helped us out here after all."
Alyn happily shared some of the meat they acquired and with Myra's magical and financial help unlike other students, all of them had a magical pouch that could store a lot of things, including meat from a magical beast.
"I'm sure Rae will love that thanks. She always enjoy tasting new food and there is no way we could get Lindwurm meat in Silverspire normally."
With the problems of her friends resolved, Myra quickly returned to Silverspire, even before the students could get ready for leaving the area.
Her phantom cat might be fast, but it was a long distance and it would still be late in the afternoon until she would be back home.
--
"Finally it's here!" Myra exclaimed the next morning shortly after she got ready for taking a look at the shop.
"The essence crystals have arrived, now I can work on making something for our guards."
Aaron inspected the crystals and nodded as if to admit that they were indeed nice looking.
"You mean the guards that you want to personally train and plan to use for that magic tower thing?"
"Mhm, yes training people takes a lot longer than building structures."
"What about you let me train them? I really don't have much to do since I left the academy. I could use a proper job. Running errands and bringing documents from one place to another can really be handed by some helper."
"Sorry, but you'd have to get used to this style of combat first so you can train them properly and I don't think this will work for you."
Aaron frowned and quickly asked more questions about what Myra had in mind for these troops and why he wouldn't be able to train them.
"Well, Alyn told me recently that she might join me earlier rather than later. She will drop out from the academy and look for a regular school inside Silverspire."
"I think she wants a family too and as the academy really can't provide her with much help with her archery she's a little unhappy."
With that little bit of information Aaron was convinced that there would be someone training them who was loyal to Myra, but did Alyn have what it takes to command? She seemed rather shy whenever he met her.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" – "It definitely is, just wait and see."
"Well" Aaron shrugged. "If you say it is going to work I believe you."
Once more he looked at the strange gear concepts in front of him, gear he did not think Myra had designed for others. It looked more like something she wanted to make for herself and later redesigned it to make it work for other people as well.
"Archers." He still had a hard time just trying to picture a group of magical knights with bows. There was a reason why the term had become magical knights over time, mostly because only melee weapons seemed to work for a spirit weapon and as they were expensive, mostly nobles would join that profession.
"No, it won't be archers it will be magical archers." As if this alone was strange enough Aaron shook his head, he shouldn't be surprised by Myra's ideas anymore, but she still managed to bring up something new and unexpected.
"She's really going to make a group of flying magical archers."
"Seems like those bow fanatics will finally get their chance to become magical knights. I really wonder how this will change battles in the future."
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