They charge.

Arthur runs as fast as he can, gripping his sword tightly and holding it underneath his left arm. He’s leaving Aryn slightly behind. She might have been able to stop their attacks like they were nothing, but she was dodging before. That means whatever she’s doing to protect herself must have a limit.

He swings his sword from below with one hand, but this time the blade slices the air. In a show of extraordinary acrobatic skill, the woman jumps high into the air, spinning as she practically flies over him and Aryn and lands… right next to the cart.

‘NO!’

“No, no, no, no, NO!” Aryn shouts as he runs back, and Arthur follows in an instant.

“Wha-!? What are you doing!? Stay away!” Melvin screams in panic, flailing his arms at the assassin. Yet a chop on the nape of his neck silences him and makes him drop limply to the ground, ****.

The assassin looks down at Donald, who is growling and rising as he aims a punch to the woman’s stomach. It lands, but she doesn’t flinch. The woman then raises her hand as if it were a blade and brings it down. But Aryn makes it in time. He jumps forward, throwing his body on top of Donald to protect him.

Arthur’s eyes widen when he sees blood spilled. Why? Why would Aryn be hurt from an unarmed attack!? But he saw it. He saw the tip of her fingers slice through all of Aryn’s armor and cut into his right shoulder, not unlike an extremely sharp sword.

Arthur reaches them and swings his sword again. However, the woman blocks with her bare arms again. Once more, she’s unharmed yet the strength behind the blow pushes her back.

Her expression never changes, even with her breathing getting heavier. She has that blank expression on her beaut- err… damned face.

Arthur clicks his tongue in annoyance and prepares to charge again, but stops when he sees the woman hold her hands together, as if she was holding a small ball in front of her. His eyes widen. He can feel something forming in her hands, and not a second later he’s able to see it. He knows it’s something very difficult to do, but this woman is expelling Prana out of her body and gathering it between her hands extremely quickly.

She pushes the sphere of colorless, concentrated magic energy with her fingertips, and it shoots forward towards Arthur. It’s fast, but still slower than an arrow. He tries to swat it away with his sword, but it meets a strange resistance. Even though the ball of Prana is floating, as if weightless, Arthur can’t just push it. What’s more, it’s like he’s clashing against another sword. No, it’s more like there are countless, small blades rotating around the sphere and they’re chipping away at his sword.

Arthur grits his teeth and focuses. He changes the flow of Prana in his body, giving priority to his arms. They burn with power, giving him the strength to push through.

“Aaaaaaah!” With a scream, he destroys the odd projectile. The sphere vanishes with the sound shattering metal, but his own sword didn’t go unscathed. A part of the blade is chipped, but it resisted due to already being duller and thicker than a normal sword. To contrast, the projectile was like an extremely sharp blade, but made more fragile because of it.

The assassin didn’t just watch him, though. In the two seconds it took to meet and destroy her attack, she threw Melvin over her shoulder with ease and started running away.

“Dammit!” The young man curses. His first instinct is to follow her, but hearing Aryn’s grunts as he gets off of Donald makes him remember the whole picture.

The other girl, Marina, seems to have wounded one of her opponents and is trying to neutralize the other.

“Mr. Donald…!” Arthur starts.

“Go after her!” The man yells. “You’re the only one who can catch up to her! You can’t let her take Melvin!”

“Go, kid!” Aryn shouts in agreement. He’s holding his injured shoulder as he stands up. “This hurts like hell, but I can still fight. I’ll help the girl over there and we’ll catch up to you. Hurry!”

‘Shit! Fine!’

Arthur nods firmly, his expression resolute. He turns around and runs after the stoic woman. His dash is fast enough to make the wind rush past his face. The terrain is all green plains around, so he can still see her running east.

It’s a full minute of full-speed running. Maybe they’d be matched in speed, but due to the woman having to carry Melvin over her shoulder, Arthur is slowly catching up. But things aren’t looking good.

Soon, the western edge of the kingdom’s biggest forest comes into view. The Noble Woods are known for holding the highest concentration of monsters in the country. Enough that people theorize they all come from there and then spread out.

If he loses her there, not only will it become more dangerous to look for them, it would put Melvin in even more peril. Thankfully, his mother did say that there’s a river that crosses the forest, making the western side the smallest and least dangerous.

The moment they step into the woods, the woman leaps high into the air, smoothly landing on one of the top branches of a tree. It’s a powerful jump, a testament to her precise control of the prana in her body.

Arthur clicks his tongue. It’s not something he can do yet. To be more accurate, he could jump that high, perhaps even higher. But to accurately measure the strength needed to follow her and land precisely where he wants requires a lot of practice. Therefore, he follows them on the ground, his eyes having to shift between his path and the woman leaping from tree to tree.

She takes advantage of that, hurling another sharp sphere towards him when his eyes are on the path. It’s so sudden that he can’t meet it with his sword, instead having to rely on reflexes to dodge.

He turns his body, and while the spinning blades around the deathly ball shred through the armor on his shoulder, the small metal sheets inside the brigandine let his body escape unscathed.

He grunts.

‘Fine. I’ll play.’