The Lone Wanderer

The good news was that Nesha’s affinity allowed her to cover a lot of ground extremely quickly: especially when she went all out like this. Leaping over the eastern border of the city, she was confident that she had overtaken the three nobles despite their head-start and her detour.

Glancing at the large metallic gate to her right and the footpath that the Violet and his subordinates would hopefully follow out of the city, she oriented herself, recalling where she had buried the nearest batch of magical constructs. She kept heading straight for a couple hundred metres, stopping behind a small hill that the road slightly curved around.

Using her earth affinity, she shifted the dirt beneath her feet, feeling for the location of the enchanted slabs. Once she found them, she began slowly moving them directly beneath the path.

Obviously, this wasn’t the only set of traps that she had prepared.

Twilight City was massive, and Nesha hadn’t known which gate the patriarch would have entered from, which had left her with no choice but to plant hundreds of constructs at as many as fifteen different locations.

As if the sheer redundancy of her arrangements wasn’t annoying enough, Nesha hadn’t been able to bury the engraved objects too close to the paths, since other people traversed them all the time. Having the traps right next to the road would have risked somebody with keen senses stumbling upon them by accident, ruining her preparations and potentially compromising her safety.

Fifty or so metres away had been the closest she had been willing to plant the constructs, meaning that her plan heavily hinged on her arriving at the correct location earlier than her targets and taking a few minutes to move the objects closer.

Between the sheer number of enchanted slabs that she had spread around Twilight City, the time, effort, and risk in maintaining them for weeks without anybody noticing, and finally the short window that she had to act right now, she had been forced to severely restrict the scope of her traps.

‘It’ll have to do,’ she thought, wiping the sweat off her forehead as she hid behind the hill.

She’d only displaced about eighty percent of the constructs, but it had already taken way too long. Assuming that the nobles hadn’t decided to exit through a different gate at the last minute, they should be arriving soon.

Nesha crouched and walked another hundred or so metres away from the path, spying on it from within the tall grass. While her enemies were unlikely to scan the dirt several metres below the surface with their domains, there was a good chance that they would notice her if she remained closer.

Only when she spotted three silhouettes strolling leisurely along the dirt path did she halt her steps and hold her breath to avoid alerting them. She couldn’t examine the newcomers properly due to the distance and her current vantage point, but their numbers and timing suggested that it was probably her targets.

They were currently too far away for even their footsteps to be heard, so the only sounds that reached Nesha’s ears were the chirping crickets of the surrounding fields and her own racing heartbeat.

Perhaps she should have waited for Micky or Percy to help her with this. Dispatching a Violet and a couple of Blues would have been effortless for them. The problem was that her boyfriend and his fellow aspect had had to rush to the Camelot province the day before. It had taken months of back and forth to get the nobles of House Oratio here, and Nesha had no idea when she’d get another chance to ambush them.

‘It’s fine. They’re just a bunch of weaklings with little combat experience, if any, used to hiding within Machaon’s shadow. It’s why he didn’t even bother including their House in his army. Either way, this is something I need to do on my own…’

Nesha wasn’t above receiving help from Percy for something that she couldn’t do alone. For example, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to bring down House Asclepius by herself, but a little House Oratio? That should be well within her ability to handle.

Unfortunately, a complication emerged just as the nobles neared the location of her traps.

One of them said something that Nesha was too far away to hear, prompting the others to nod. Then, the same person who had spoken took off to the sky, his companions releasing bursts of fire and air mana: respectively: from their feet to follow.

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Nesha gritted her teeth. While this confirmed that the trio had to be the Violet and Blues of House Oratio, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to catch them by surprise like this.

This was a possibility that she had obviously considered: she’d have been a fool not to: yet part of her had hoped that her targets would have stuck to the ground for a while longer. Although flying wasn’t prohibited inside Twilight City, visitors generally avoided it out of respect toward the Syndicate. The nobles walking out of the gate had thus been a relatively safe bet, with the rest of the distance to the traps having been up to Nesha’s luck: or the lack thereof, evidently.

She sighed, pushing her boosting art to the limit and reaching into the mana contained within the slabs to pull them out of the ground.

Her enemies spotted her instantly, jerking their heads toward her, right as dozens of metallic slabs made of the same dark material as her armour pierced through the dirt and shot toward them.

The mages of House Oratio easily blocked most of the projectiles with their domains, not even bothering to use their mana, though Nesha caused a few of the objects to circle around the nobles, trying to box them in.

When the closest constructs were about fifty metres from the three men, she willed the enchantments to activate, causing the air and light around them to twist into a chaotic tapestry of colours. She would have preferred to get them even closer first, but she knew that her opponents would destroy them long before that happened.

The spatial distortion cleared up a couple of seconds later, revealing the enemy nobles alive and well, without so much as a crease on their robes.

Nesha clenched her fists hard enough to drain them of all colour.

This result hadn’t exactly been unexpected, but it was still somewhat disappointing. After practicing affinity fusion and magiscript relentlessly over the past decade, on top of promoting her second core to Green and mastering her boosting arts, Nesha had grown several times stronger since her last fight.

Even though she hadn’t been able to prepare as many constructs as she would have liked in each location, nor get them close enough to her opponents before activating them, she had still packed a lot more power into the objects than what she had used in the Thirsty Valley to slaughter several Greens.

The problem was that her opponents this time weren’t Greens.

“I would have commended you for the effort, but this was honestly quite pathetic,” the Violet said in a relaxed tone as he and his subordinates flew closer to Nesha. “Is it too much to ask that you tell us who sent you before you die?” he asked as he landed about twenty metres away.

Nesha frowned. Her face wasn’t even concealed any more, since she had gotten rid of the veil before leaving the city. “You still haven’t recognized me, Uncle Jeen?”

The man furrowed his brow, probably having not expected to be addressed in such a familiar manner. He tossed her an appraising look that lasted for several seconds before his eyes finally widened in recognition. “Little Nesha? You’re still alive?”

“Sorry to disappoint,” she spat.

“Nonsense!” the man said, speaking in an ecstatic manner as he wore the warmest smile that his greasy face was capable of producing. “You can’t imagine how many sleepless nights I’ve spent worrying about your safety. Why don’t you come back with us to our mansion? We’ll clean you up and plead with Lord Asclepius and the Divine Root to pardon your crimes. I’ll even pretend that your misguided attempt to assassinate me just now was merely a prank from my confused and grieving niece.”

“Do us both a favour and cut the crap, will you?” Nesha said, her eyes narrowing. “I was young when you burnt my House to the ground and butchered my family, not stupid. I can’t even imagine being able to sleep after what you’ve done. My father thought of you like a brother before you stabbed him in the back. If you want to sell me to Machaon, you’ll have to settle for a corpse.”

Machaon had been the one behind the destruction of her family, but it was House Oratio that had carried out the orders. They hadn’t necessarily been more powerful than House Veritas, but it was difficult to defend against a betrayal that nobody saw coming.

Jeen’s fake smile crumbled away like a broken vase as he realized that his honeyed words weren’t fooling anybody. Gesturing at his subordinates to surround Nesha, the three nobles tried to incapacitate her with their domains.

Unfortunately for them, Nesha possessed a domain of her own.

With two Green cores and four versions of the Dance active, she was technically closer to Blue than any Green on Remior, including Percy. While she wasn’t able to retain her domain without her boosting art, she was more than capable of wielding it with the spell active.

Of course, Nesha’s domain was only about as powerful as a Blue’s. It couldn’t possibly overpower the willpower of a Violet and both of his subordinates at the same time, yet it still allowed her to resist their joint pressure just enough to move.

A giant fireball, a sharp gale of wind, and a boulder large enough to crush both of the other spells closed in on her, colliding into an apocalyptic blend of elemental mana as she slipped away through space.

Not letting up, the powerful nobles kept firing one spell after the other, taking full advantage of their numbers and higher grades to bully Nesha around. Her body stretched and twisted into unrecognizable shapes as she danced away from the deadly spells, dodging the hostile mana by the skin of her teeth.

It wasn’t just space that bent to assist her. The ground did as well, bouncing up and down like a trampoline to propel her away from the attacks, the electricity in the air pulling at her metallic coat to accelerate her further. Nesha’s movements rolled gracefully into one another as her body and her four affinities worked in perfect harmony.

[Congratulations! Your spells have merged: Synchronization: Refined + Elastic Ground: Refined + Dance of the Savage Gods: Masterful + Twisted Ballet: Masterful + Magnetic Coat - Masterful -> Ballet of the Savage Gods: Masterful!]