After we had narrowly escaped the (probable) mermerl ambush—though I hadn’t actually seen what’d happened—the prince and I had ended up pretty far east.
Or, to be more precise, we had traveled far northeast.
A quick look at the map told us that we were currently just north of the country that had declared war.
The wilderness stretched onward along the Northern Ridges, but following it wasn’t really an option for us—the monsters we’d encounter would be difficult to deal with. Their ranks would only get higher, and eventually, they’d be too high to deal with.
We needed to change course.
First, we would head southwest diagonally, and then we would continue going around in a counterclockwise fashion. This detour would allow us to swing around the war zone.
While we could Jump part of the way, we’d mostly be making this trek on foot.
We had a golden opportunity to train on low-rank beasts here. I decided to have Prince Wald at least become strong enough to defeat D-rank monsters on his own.
He fought using a mixture of magic and swordplay. Apparently, he wanted to specialize as a mage, rather than a mage knight, to use the Ivory Veil more effectively. However, I explained to him that mages needed good stamina as well.
Sitting on the pack the young man had shed as he entered combat, I casually shot down any encroaching monsters who were looking to join the fight.
There were an awful lot of frog and rabbit monsters around here.
I could use the frog hides to make tents, and the rabbit fur would be nice for lining the insides of our coats... And the meat of both wouldn’t go to waste either, of course.
“I’ve got you!” Wald shouted. “Fire Arrow!”
The prince flung a plume of fire magic toward his opponent. It smashed into a giant frog with enough force to throw the beast into a somersault. It rolled to a stop and didn’t move again.
I congratulated him. “Good job. Looks like you’ve really gotten the hang of things.”
“But I want to learn to use magic without incanting, like you can.”
“That comes with practice. If you cast your spells enough times, it’ll become second nature. But anyway, let’s carve up the...” I trailed off, distracted by a strong noise. “Huh?”
“Horses...” Wald said slowly. “And they’re coming this way.”
I turned to look toward the forest treeline to our south. There were three people on horseback approaching us. They must’ve noticed magic being cast here and were coming to see what the commotion was.
We’d thought we had been alone out in the wilderness here, but these people must’ve been hidden in the woods.
They didn’t appear to be bandits. Instead, they were clearly soldiers belonging to the border patrol.
But they couldn’t be regular soldiers in the border patrol’s employ, however. They were each wearing what appeared to be their own personal armor that didn’t match one another. However, all three wore matching shoulder plates that indicated their affiliation.
“They must be mercenaries,” I said. “This is going to be trouble.”
“Kariya, look. Who...?”
“I doubt they’re a part of the army here—they’re probably just hired hands to fill the border patrol, bought with coin. The whole lot of them are thugs,” I explained. “Anyway, pull your hood up. They’ll probably drag us back to their base. I’ll try to parley with them and work things out, but in the worst case, they’ll rob us blind and strip us bare.”
The prince quietly steeled himself. He nodded. “I see. All right.”
We couldn’t use Jump to escape at this point. These people had already seen us, and they were coming our way to take us away.
Since most people in this world believed that only transmigrators could use Jump, we’d be in deep shit if word got out that two travelers had escaped them by using it.
Wald approached me, and I took the light orb off his wrist. A typical NPC wouldn’t be carrying around something of such a high rank.
I didn’t bother hiding our wallets or other equipment, though. Even if they were stolen from us, I could replace them from what I had in my Pocket Dimension stash. As for the crown Wald wore on his arm, we had disguised it so it looked cheap. As long as that wasn’t stolen from him, everything would be fine.
“You two there! Come to spy on us, have you?!” one yelled.
“Of course not,” I insisted, telling them that we were hunters who had come down from the mountain.
That did us a ton of good—they arrested us.
To be fair, no typical “hunters from the mountain” would be using offensive magic to hunt. Magic tended to ruin prey, and the average person couldn’t even use offensive magic to begin with.
It was inevitable that we’d be arrested from the moment we’d gotten caught.