Battlefield

“Is this the fastest your train can go?” Giselle pried about two minutes after our departure.

The cloud of mixed flares continued to expand, carried by fast winds far above our heads. New flares erupted from the ground at irregular intervals, further feeding it.

Soon, a smell of ammonia and acidic wet metal reached us. The air itself seemed to have gained a cottony texture and an unpleasant, bitter aftertaste.

“Blight,” Danyar said, smacking his lips.

He was standing in the doorframe between he cab and the living area, holding the top of the doorframe with one arm for stability.

“Can you go any faster?” Giselle insisted, shaking my shoulder.

I’d pushed the throttle all the way down and locked it in place with its designated pin. I glanced up at a small red switch that, on a regular train, would have allowed to engage a sequence to overclock a steam engine.

Giselle followed my line of sight, and immediately reached for that switch.

I slapped her hand away.

“Even if we could go any faster, the dunes are too bumpy! We go too fast, and the train will derail and overturn!”

“What?”

“We’ll overturn,” I tried to mimic the undesirable event with hand gestures.

Giselle looked around, briefly making eye contact with Danayr, as if to confirm if what I was saying was true. He shrugged.

“So if it’s flat, like fully flat, we’ll go faster?” Giselle asked.

“We could,” I glanced at the switch again.

I hadn’t fully experimented with it back when I had still been out hunting centipedes by myself, but I suspected I could also use mana in some way to make it go faster.

Or just want the train to accelerate. Just wanting to do the magic things has worked out for me so far.

“Alright, I’ll make it happen!” Giselle decisively stated, before ducking outside, onto the narrow platform surrounding the cab.

Danayr followed her, grabbing her with one arm and holding onto the railing with the other. She paid him no mind as she moved her hands forward.

The dunes on either side of the train suddenly puffed away. It was as if an invisible horizontal tornado had hit them. Sand slowly started falling from the sky, where it’d been displaced to, some two meters on either side of the train.

“It’s flat, what are you waiting for?” Giselle yelled.

“Yes, that’s right,” I reassured myself.

I pressed the button above me. Something clicked inside the console, and one of the dials opened up, like the lens of a camera, to reveal a pull-switch.

For the briefest of moments, I became upset at the god for his lack of understanding of trains, or attention to detail, but that feeling was quickly chased away by the fact that he’d actually made all of this very easy for me.

I pulled the switch, extracting a long, thin, indented rod.

An arming key!

It took me a second to find its designated slot on the side of the throttle, but once I inserted it, the train jerked forward.

< Creature slain: elder wild snake.>

“Sorry, mister snake…” I muttered.

< Creature slain: Desert scorpion.>

I didn’t even feel the impact as we rode over it. It was like riding over a small stick in a car. Giselle screeched outside, tough, having seen the impact.

Wind was rushing in through the open door, and the noise of wheels and machinery clanking over rails became unbearable.

“Can you clear the way again?” I yelled, covering one of my ears with my hand, but not wanting to let go of the arming key.

< Creature slain: Blighted puce.>

We were fast approaching Arnis, but after two more wind blasts, Giselle ducked back inside.

“I’m almost out of mana!”

“Wait here,” Danayr squeezed past her and rushed into the living area. He returned with a vial of green liquid.

Giselle quickly drank the mana potion, thanked him, and went back outside.

Turning my head to check on her suddenly caused black dots to appear at the corner of my vision.

“Creaful,” Danyar caught me, as my hand suddenly slipped off the console, and I felt my legs give in under me.

“What-”

“Drink this,” He wrapped my fingers around a mana potion, bringing it to my mouth. “Watch your mana, you can’t collapse from mana exhaustion now!” He warned me and joined Giselle outside.

<MP: 17/20 000>

I forced myself to grab the arming key again. It had twisted when I let go, partially popping out of its designated slot. It didn’t go back in until I finished drinking the potion.

---

Fine dust and smoke mixed as a battle unfolded all around the city.

The defensive wooden wall surrounding it had crumbled, and the fighting had spilled both into and outside of its perimeter.

Guards in blue uniforms were trying to gather up any scattered civilians, while adventurers were fighting the horde of monsters.

This was unlike anything I had ever seen before. People were screaming in panic, yelling out orders, and calling out for help. Monsters, a mixture of blighted giant animals, sentient trees, and various insects, were scattered around. The eyes of those creatures had turned a sickly, cloudy white, and their blood came out purple when adventurers struck them.

I spotted a couple carving up the corpses of the fallen monsters, scavenging for cores, before another wave chased them away.

The monsters were coming from the west. They crept, or ran, or skiddled forth, attacking whoever they collectively perceived as most vulnerable.

“Hey, you! Friend or foe?” A voice came from a few meters away from where I’d stopped the train.

“Friends!”

“I’m looking for my brother!” Giselle hopped off and ran up to a guard in that long, drapy blue uniform.

I quickly followed.

“Go to the city, take shelter -” The guard was about to finish his orders when Giselle showed him the pin on her chest. His demeanour changed instantly. “Please, we need all the help we can get! Sister, we need you!”

“I understand, but have you seen him?”

Giselle handed the guard the sketch. He took it, glancing from it to her, and pleading with her again.

“I have not but -”

Danyar rushed forth. He blocked a leaping wolf with the shaft of his spear. By the time the guard had turned around, realising what’d happened, I’d already punched clean through the blighted animal.

“Now is not the time! We can help too, he and I,” I hastily explained. “Where do you want us?”

The guard looked between the two of us, confused. His hand did not leave the hilt of his long, curved sword.

“They’re with me, please, if you see this man, tell him his sister is looking for him.”

The guard glanced between the three of us for a second longer, confused by the whole situation.

A roar coming from the distance snapped him out of it.

He nodded to Giselle, and just as we started jogging towards the town, he called out:

“Wait!” Yellow light flashed from his eyes, briefly covering the visible part of his face. Danyar frowned, squinting at the guard. Then, a line of yellow light appeared over his own head. It floated over his forehead like a halo tilted too far forward.

“This way, the others will know you’re with us,” the guard explained.

“With the Caravan?” Giselle asked. She didn’t seem surprised by this spell at all.

The guard didn’t reply. Instead, he reached through a slit in his robes to a bag on his chest and tossed each of us a long vial filled with a thick blue liquid. “Blight antidote,” He explained, looking at me specifically before crossing his wrists over the left side of his chest, in a gesture I could only interpret as ‘goodbye’, and ran off further out.

“We can put people on the train,” I said, after drinking the potion. “We can help evacuate-”

A fireball struck the locomotive, and the ground beneath it rose, toppling it over.

The locomotive promptly vanished, at the cost of my mana dropping to 0 for the second time in as many hours.

“You!” Someone yelled from the other side of where my train had just stood. “How did you get here?”

The smoke settled down enough for me to make out a ginger woman with a bow in hand. My heart skipped a beat, as for the briefest of moments I saw Medina there. But I quickly realised it was the woman who’d scammed me in that first town I’d visited.

She didn’t scam me -

A loud, crumbling noise came from within the wall, and we all turned to watch a building collapse on itself. Screams came from that direction, and I postponed this reunion.

The archer ran past me, followed by the rest of her charter. The man in robes gave me a wink and muttered an unfinished sentence about casting.

“Good job,” a metal gauntlet tapped me on the shoulder. “You listened.”

The knight ran to join his companions.

“Is he the man who made you buy me?” Danyar’s gaze followed him. He looked astonished for a second, and my cheeks turned red from embarrassment at his words. “Huh,” he added, before his tone shifted to his usual neutral tone. “Let’s go!”

“I’m with you. You tank, you do the killing, and I’ll cover you both,” Giselle decided. “Let’s be companions,” she extended a hand, face down. “Just for the next few hours.”

I tentatively put my hand over hers, and Danyar rolled his eyes before putting his there too.

< Companions +2: Danayr, Giselle Aller.>

< Skills +1: Companion locator.>

< Accept: y/n? >

“Oh, that’s a wind mage thing,” Giselle pulled her hand away. “Just press yes, you don’t have to use it if you don’t have mana, but it will be useful for Chiyo and I.”

She was talking to Danayr specifically, seemingly under the impression that I knew everything about magic.

“All set, let’s go!”

Another flare was fired from deeper within the city. Whoever was deafening those streets was falling back.

Two giant frogs leapt at us from over the rooftops as we dashed in. Both were covered in large purple spots. One had a tree branch sticking out of its forehead. At first, I thought it had been planted there during an attack. But when it leaped closer and threw out its tongue, which I easily dodged over, I realised that the branch was growing directly from its slimy skin.

“Chiyo, go to the-”

Giselle was cut off by me tugging on the frog’s tongue. I lurched it forward and straight through my fist. This time, there were no flames or sizzling around. Giselle screeched behind me, and I was hit from the back with a cold gust of blood.

“Don’t throw things at me!”

Danyar was pushed back, and we bumped shoulders. The frog he’d been fighting was bleeding out on a neighbouring roof. But the blight kept it going. It spat a ball of acid towards us. I jumped up, bringing my gauntlets into a guard, and scattering the acid around.

I paid no mind to the notifications and turned towards Giselle.

She was kneeling by an old woman, hastily wrapping a bandage around the woman’s leg. When she was done, she hopped up and glared at me.

“You, and you,” She turned towards Dnayar, “Need to pay attention to your surroundings! And, oh, try, you know,” She patted a new shallow burn on her wrist, not intentionally, perhaps simply to subside the pain, “Ah, never mind. What’s the plan? Are we clearing out this area or -”

The deep sound of a horn reverberated through the air. The air grew hotter, and the sand suddenly rose from the ground.

“He’s coming…” The old woman muttered. “The demon king is coming to kill us all!”