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It would’ve been hard to react quickly while using Levitation, so I called it off and... the second I did, the robed figure fired a spear of light at me! Thankfully, because I’d just dropped down to the roof instead of hanging in the air, it sailed over my head. Bwoosh! It hit the building behind me—the wall of the inn—shattering it explosively!
Wait, was that an attack spell?! I didn’t think anybody knew those out here... I had a ton of questions about the caster’s identity, but now wasn’t exactly the time for an interview!
While muttering an incantation, I sprinted across the roof toward the robed figure. Gourry ran to my right, picking up speed as he got ahead of me.
“—!”
I heard an unknown male voice drifting on the night breeze—presumably the robed figure chanting some kind of spell. A ball of illumination, like lamplight, appeared before him at about eye level. It then split into five globes headed straight for Gourry!
A wide-area attack against someone running on an uneven surface like a roof was a raw deal. But Gourry dodged each orb as easily as if he were skipping through a field, quickly closing the distance on the caster. He pulled his sword just as he drew near...
But the robed man leaped—no, he flew! He sailed straight up, his speed only increasing as he did, then stopped midair out of sword’s reach.
Using a flight spell right after an attack spell?! That was way too fast for a chant... Or does he have an ally close by who cast it for him?!
The robed figure in the air looked down at Gourry, who’d come to a stop. Then...
“It’s not over yeeet!” Ran took off running! “Everyone knows...” She got right under the robed man. “...that staffs...” She thrust her staff upward with both hands. “...are longer than swords!”
But it didn’t reach.
“Heh,” the man snorted. But just then—Whom!—he was blown straight upward! “Gwuh?!” he shouted as he flew.
I had no idea what Ran had done, but... “Now’s our chance to beat it!” I cried, running along the roof and jumping down at a random point. Gourry and Ran followed suit.
The man in the robe, still hovering above, muttered something...
Another spell chant?! While he’s still controlling his flight spell?
The next instant, five balls of flame appeared around him!
Is this guy serious? We’re in the middle of a city!
Even if he was bluffing, I had to act like he wasn’t—so I fired my spell. “Freeze Arrow!”
The ten arrows of cold I produced flew straight toward the robed man overhead. In response, he launched his fireballs. One of them collided with a frigid bolt, and—Fwooom!—an inferno blossomed across the night sky! A moment later, the other fireballs did the same close to me! Babababwoom! Flames raced over wooden walls and roof.
These weren’t like the Fireballs I knew that exploded on impact; they were more like literal balls of fire. They didn’t have the power to instantly reduce anything they hit to ash, but they sure did a good job setting the wooden houses ablaze! I gotta say, though... if he’d unleashed them to counter my Freeze Arrow, his aim was piss poor.
I took off down a side alley with Gourry and Ran behind me. There was no follow-up attack from the robed man. As I suspected, the brightness of the conflagration he’d started made it impossible for him to track us through the umbra of the backstreets.
And so we continued our escape through the night-cloaked city.
In the end, we made it out without any signs of further pursuit.
Dawn broke over the unfamiliar land the next morning. With the sunrise, birds—at least, what I assumed were birds—started singing. At first I thought they sounded like the ones from back home, but when I listened a bit closer, their songs were different from what I knew. Some of them sounded downright like ominous cackling... What in the world made that noise?
Following the prior night’s hubbub and our subsequent flight, Gourry, Ran, and I had been forced to camp out in the forest. We’d gotten a delicious meal out of our short stay in Lanoma, but we were now out the lodging fee for three rooms for the night (paid in advance). We made do for breakfast once again out of the rations we’d picked up in Moss Village.
The biscuits—at least, what had been sold to us as biscuits—were twice as hard and half as good as what you’d expect when hearing that word. But hey, they were dirt cheap, so I wasn’t going to complain. We could get them down with some boiled water from the river nearby, but it was less like a nice morning meal and more like a nutritional supplement. Not that we had a lot of other options under the circumstances.
“Now...” After finishing breakfast, I let out a sigh before addressing my two companions. “After all that work to disguise ourselves and stay off the beaten path... it’s a mystery how our pursuers found us.”
We’d taken so many precautions, yet we’d been discovered so easily. Until we knew how they’d done it, the same thing was likely to keep happening.
“How they found us, huh?” Gourry made a big show of contemplating the matter, then said, “What do you think, Lina?”
“Right back on me, huh?! Were you just pretending to think, Gourry?”
“Of course not. I asked myself, ‘If I think it over, am I gonna come up with an answer?’ And the answer was ‘no way in heck.’ So I asked you.”
“That’s basically not thinking!”
There, Ran cheerily raised her right hand, still holding her staff protectively in her left. “Ooh! Me, me, me!”
“Go for it, Ran,” I said, calling on her.
“Okay!” She rocketed to her feet in an at-attention posture, and proclaimed, “I suspect me!”
“Huuuuh?!” Gourry and I cried in unison at her unexpected take.
“Why?!” I couldn’t help asking.
“Well, Nissy Lina and Rostir Gourry knew each other in advance. That only leaves me! Pretty likely culprit, huh?” she responded brightly (for some reason).
“Point taken...”
“In addition—”
“There’s more?!”
“—the fact that I’m acknowledging that I seem suspicious might itself be a plan to throw suspicions off me! Oooooh, so cunning!”
“Fair enough,” I said.
At this, she puffed her cheeks out sulkily. “You’re not taking me seriously, Nissy Lina!”
I groaned in exhaustion.
The truth was... Yeah, okay. Ran admitting she was suspicious could have been a plan to divert suspicion. She sounded like a bubblehead at times, but perhaps that belied her intellect. If I’m being honest, though, I didn’t take her for a great mole. If she worked for the Kingdom of Luzilte, that meant she was under orders from someone we’d met prior to encountering her... in other words, Bronco of Maricida City or one of his compatriots. But if that were the case, her magical abilities would’ve made her a shoo-in for their mission to investigate and take out whatever took out the bandits. Plus, even if Ran were the mole, I still had no idea how she was contacting our pursuers. That’s not to say I trusted her unconditionally, however.
I let out a soft sigh. “Well, I’ll keep you a suspect in the back of my mind.”
“’Kay!” Ran nodded in satisfaction. I wasn’t sure what she was so pleased about.
Anyway, putting her aside... In the inner realm where magic techniques were widely studied, it was possible to make a mark on a magic item and track its location from the astral plane. But out here, it was hard to believe anyone had the know-how to do that. On the flip side, however, it was entirely possible they had spells that I knew nothing about. Speaking of...
“That reminds me, Ran. Last night, what was that spell you used to give the robed guy a good whack?” I asked.
She blinked in confusion. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? An elf taught it to me.”
“Huh? I thought that was a spell to extend a jump...” I remembered seeing her use it to leap aboard the bas boat.
“What? Ohhh...” She smiled, seemingly in realization. “It’s the same spell.”
“Is it?” I scowled. They were both wind spells, most likely—one using wind to carry you further and the other to push your opponent away—but to say they were the same thing was a bit of an overstatement.
“Yup, same spell! Lemme cast it right now.” Ran began chanting.
Magic required an incantation of chaos words to call upon the power of preternatural forces... That was apparently the same in both the inner and outer lands, and I detected no dialectical difference between what Ran used and what I knew. Wait... hmm? While she was chanting, she grasped a handful of grass in her right hand, then threw it over her head.
“Wind Breath!” When Ran released the words of power, the grass she’d tossed—rather than getting carried off by the wind or falling back on the ground—began to float lightly around her. “See?”
Ran grabbed my hand unceremoniously and put her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t feel a breeze or anything, but the grass drifting around her changed course as she moved.
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