Roughly thirty minutes later, a thundering wave of ogres came crashing toward us from the western road, eyes bloodshot with panic and rage. A full-blown stampede.
The instructors weren’t idiots. It didn’t take long for them to realize where the ogres were headed: straight for the fortress, where Cordelia had rallied the knights and special-class students.
Which meant staying on the main road was a death sentence.
But fleeing deeper into the Maze Woods wasn’t a great alternative either. That meant wandering into unknown monster territory, and the risks there weren’t much better.
In the end, we settled for hiding just off the road, crouched low in a patch of tangled underbrush. Nothing fancy, just out of sight. Or so we hoped.
Not that it helped much.
The students had no idea what was really going on. Following orders, they covered their mouths and huddled down in the thicket, trying not to breathe too loudly. But our opponents weren’t human. They were ogres. Wild beasts with more instinct than intellect. Disguising your appearance wasn’t enough. You had to erase your scent, your aura, your presence entirely.
And we weren’t doing that. Not really.
All we were doing was hiding in bushes and hoping for the best. We weren’t even fully obscured from the road.
I sighed and muttered under my breath, “Guess I’ve got no choice…”
Once more, I reached out to Lilith through the mental link and began activating the sagecraft ritual sequence.
And once more, Koharu’s face drained of color. Her voice trembled as she turned toward me, eyes wide.
“Ryuto-kun, you just did something completely insane again, didn’t you?”
Meanwhile, one of the instructors was glancing around nervously, turning in small circles as he scanned the surroundings. He clearly had no idea who’d done what, but he could feel it. He sensed that some kind of protective spell had been cast over the group.
I raised a brow and turned back to Koharu. “Oh? You can tell what I did?”
Her jaw tightened as she gave a short, almost reluctant nod. “Even I can recognize this.”
“Then go ahead. Tell me.”
She swallowed hard and began listing, one hesitant word at a time. “First, optical camouflage. Then a basic sensory illusion that scrambles olfactory perception, followed by mild spatial isolation at the level of air currents, and lastly, a low-grade sonic barrier?”
Bingo.
What we had now was full-spectrum stealth, an all-in-one, passive concealment field. Right now, we were effectively a black hole carved out of the forest floor. Isolated. Untraceable.
“Correct,” I said with a slight grin. “There are other spells that do similar things, of course.”
These kinds of stealth techniques were always in demand, though rarely studied. Too subtle, too technical. Most magic students went for flashy fireballs or dramatic elemental attacks. But me? I’d picked this up as part of my sagecraft fundamentals.
Well, “picked up” wasn’t quite accurate. It had been drilled into me. One of those lessons that “just happened” when you trained under a sage.
【Combat Sage Art: Form Zero (No-Color Mode)】
Form Zero was the starting point. Form Nine, the end.
If you mastered all nine, your body would transcend mortality, your soul becoming a spiritual entity completely merged with nature: immortal, ageless, indistinguishable from the divine.
A god in all but name.
Of course, that sort of thing didn’t interest me, so I only ever bothered to learn the first form.
Koharu stared at me, still visibly shaken. “This is a technique used by covert operatives, isn’t it? Both the eastern realms and the western nations have intelligence agencies with similar methods, though they go by different names.”
Right, like in the eastern nations, their operatives were literally called ninja.
And to make things worse, I’d heard that in the west, they had a completely skewed idea of what ninjas were. Thought of them more like comic book superheroes with psychic powers. Honestly, the image kind of fit right now.
“But still…” Koharu’s voice trailed off uneasily.
I glanced at her. “What is it?”
“Right now, not even wild animals or adventurers with high-level detection skills can sense us, can they?”
“That’s right,” I confirmed, nodding.
“Even trained covert operatives can barely conceal their own presence, let alone others. They’re lucky if they can hide themselves effectively.”
“Yeah, that tracks,” I said, half-listening.
She took a step closer, voice now rising with disbelief. “This level of stealth is the kind of thing a prodigy might achieve after dedicating over a decade of their life to mastering it.”
“Sounds about right.”
“But you managed to erase completely the presence of nearly fifty people. As if we don’t even exist.”
Right then, a stampede of ogres thundered past just meters in front of us.
They didn’t see us. Didn’t smell us. Didn’t even pause.
Just moments ago, that same horde had been blindsided, slaughtered by something they couldn’t comprehend. And even now, at the tail end of the formation, they were still being hunted. Their numbers were thinning fast, bodies carved down like butter under a hot knife.
Their eyes were bloodshot, wide with terror. Their faces contorted with panic, foam at their mouths, chests heaving. Screaming, babbling, fleeing like cornered animals in a slaughterhouse.
And really, who could blame them?
Fifty adventurers, each at B-rank power level, had appeared out of nowhere to strike the rear guard.
In a backwater kingdom, that would’ve been considered an army-crushing, apocalyptic force.
Once the last of the ogres vanished into the woods beyond, I clapped my hands once, the sharp slap breaking the silence.
“Area secured,” I said with a nod. “Now then, I guess it’s time I caught up to Lilith.”