Rasmus POV

He watched in confusion as the cloaked figure escorted the villagers out of the bandit camp. He had gone out ahead of his team in order to scout, but didn't think he would come across a situation like this.

He and his team had taken this mission from the guild and decided to help out this village. Mariann grew up in the surrounding area and had convinced all of them to take the job, despite the low reward and high risk. Of course, it didn't take much to convince them, and that was the reason they were all the way out here.

The village they were protecting was called Kastila, and from what he could tell, it was a nice village with good people. This just meant he and his team wanted to help even more.

That was why nobody had complained when they went on a late-night mission. Despite how cold it was, they had sucked it up and trudged through the snow and mountains to find where these bandits were coming from.

If they were lucky, they might even find their base.

Just earlier in the day, they had come across a village that had been ransacked, and they all agreed that it could be the Frost Bear Clan, which was why they all swiftly went after them. Unfortunately, they had lost track of them. The mountains were challenging to travel through, and the weather didn't help matters either.

That was why he was scouting ahead. He was hoping to find a hint of the direction they might have headed in and had become excited when he sensed the camp shrouded in multiple layers of stealth enchantments, just down the mountain in a small clearing with tall trees. He immediately contacted his team and observed the camp as he waited for them to catch up.

As he was waiting, he suddenly spotted some commotion. It was hard to tell what was going on because it was obscured, but he felt the slight fluctuations of mana and aura through it, which also meant that whatever it was, it made the people inside anxious enough that it seeped through the barrier.

He took a little risk and got closer to the barrier's edge. It was only once he was close enough that his perception skill was able to pierce whatever veil was at work. What he saw made him frown in consternation. Dead bodies were everywhere.

Heads that had been cut off were rolling around on the ground. Limbs were sprawled across the clearing. He didn't know who this person was, but they were brutal.

Just as the figure was walking away from the scene, Rasmus froze in fear, feeling like he had walked straight into the sights of a terrifying monster as if its jaws were looming over his head.

He didn't move a muscle and shrouded his aura as best as he could. In his gut, he knew that this would achieve nothing, that this person had already noticed him. But he was hoping that if he didn't appear like a threat, the person would simply ignore Rasmus.

It was only a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. Finally, the person seemed to be satisfied and headed deeper into the camp. Rasmus let out a long breath of relief the moment he felt like he was safe.

He quickly sent a warning to his group. But for some reason, it wasn't able to get through. It likely had to do with the barrier; he could feel the disruptive effect seep off it. Instead, he ran off and tried to cut them off before they reached his location. He wanted to let them know that the situation had changed before they did something that made their lives more difficult.

Thankfully, his speed was one of his biggest strengths, and he sped through the trees and back up the mountain where he knew they would be coming from. He didn't get very far until he came across them.

They were fully prepared, and he ran up to them, holding out his arms.

"Wait, wait, wait," he said to them.

"What do you mean, wait? Didn't you call out to us?" Jakob, their team leader, asked him, putting down his spear with confusion.

"There's been some… unexpected developments," he said slowly, not really knowing how to explain to them what he had seen.

"What kind of developments?" Kristan, their support mage, called out. Her staff was glowing, which likely meant she had been using some support magic to fuel their run all the way to his location.

He scrunched his brows together as he thought of how he wanted to explain it to them.

"They are all dead," he eventually stated.

"Who? The villagers they kidnapped?" Kristan asked, panicking.

He shook his head. "No, the bandits. They were all slaughtered by someone." He saw the mage let out a sigh of relief.

"By one person?" Jakob asked skeptically.

"Yeah, wasn't there supposed to be at least one Tier 4 amongst them?" Mariann added, also sounding like she didn't quite believe Rasmus.

"I'm telling you guys, I saw a lone person tear through the entire group of bandits," he insisted.

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"Did you actually see him with your own two eyes?" Kristan asked.

He was about to nod his head when he paused. "Well, not exactly. But I saw him standing in the middle of a bunch of dead bandits."

He could see that his teammates were skeptical of his story. They likely thought he was being dramatic.

"He might have panicked again, boss," Patrick, their other mage, said dismissively.

"I was not panicking," Rasmus argued fervently. Patrick was referencing the time when they were a relatively new team and Rasmus had gotten scared during a rift delve. It was a hilarious memory to look back on, but at the time, it was embarrassing.

He had run back, yelling at them to run away because he was being chased by a horde of monsters in the dark. He had still been Tier 3, so his perception hadn't been that amazing back then, but it turned out he had been getting chased by a group of five goblins. Not the terrifying horde he thought he had seen.

However, ever since then, his team had always taken his warnings with a grain of salt. Which, looking back on, is not the ideal way to treat your scout. The person responsible for alerting their team to dangers ahead.

"Look, if you don't believe me, come take a look for yourselves. You can see with your own eyes and determine if I was being 'dramatic'. How does that sound?" He said to them sourly.

This seemed to convince them a little more, and as they made their way back to the camp, they were a bit more wary.

It didn't take them long to arrive. But he held up his hand to halt them for a moment. The barrier was gone. He wasn't able to feel it anymore and could see straight into the camp without being impeded by any item or skill.

It was also the reason why his entire team froze in place when they saw the carnage before them. The dead bodies that he had tried to explain to them were in plain view. Snow was already accumulating on their bodies now that the barrier was gone.

"Okay, maybe you weren't being dramatic," Patrick stated quietly.

"I told you."

"And you don't know who it was? Or what he looked like?" Kristan asked.

"No, he was wearing a cloak that obscured most of his features. It was likely a male, though. That is all I can really say with confidence," he replied to her.

"What about the villagers? They couldn't have gone far, right?" Mariann commented.

Rasmus pointed in the direction he sensed a faint trail of aura. "They probably went that way."

"You want to go after them?" Jakob, their leader, asked all of them.

"Not really," Kristan replied swiftly. "I don't know who this person is, but I doubt they are the nicest person if they can do all of this," she explained while gesturing at the mess around them.

"You have a point, but we also have some responsibility to make sure these villagers aren't in the hands of someone worse," Jakob pointed out.

They all grumbled, but Rasmus knew right away what the decision was going to be. It didn't take them longer than ten seconds before they all made their choice. However, before they went off to chase these villagers, they quickly searched the camp.

They made sure to grab a bunch of the rings from the dead bandits and anything else they could find that might help locate their hideout, but once they did, they quickly followed the trail left behind by the villagers.

They were making good time as well. To be fair, they were all Tier 4s, and their travel speed was likely many times faster than the villagers who were around Tier 3.

The aura trail he was tracking was getting closer by the minute, and before long, they were almost on top of them. Even some of the others began to sense the group of people up ahead. They were just about to head over and make themselves known when they suddenly heard a voice at their backs.

"Oh, you guys were the adventurers who were talking with the chief." The voice was quite youthful-sounding, but considering that none of them had detected the person until they were breathing down their necks, it made all of them immediately swing around and attack on reflex.

Rasmus sent a large wave of disruptive mana to disorientate the person. Kristin threw a blindness spell right after him as well. Jakob was already getting up close and thrusting the spear at the person's stomach.

However, to all of their surprise, the stream of mana was ignored entirely, the blindness spell was ineffective, and the spear was smacked to the side by their bare hand.

"Jeez, you guys need to calm down," the person huffed out. The casual and joking tone of his voice surprisingly de-escalated the situation quite quickly, and no one made any further moves to attack.

Rasmus recognized the person right away as the person who had saved the villagers and killed all of the bandits.

"You know us?" He asked the figure.

The person nodded and slowly removed the hood of their cloak, revealing a very young face. One that seemed vaguely familiar.

"Wait a minute! Aren't you that healer from the Shattered Winter School?" Mariann asked with wide eyes, still a little in shock.

The boy nodded at them with a bright smile. "Mm hm. So you do remember."

Rasmus could barely connect this baby-faced boy to the bloodbath they had all seen just minutes ago. It was a complete contradiction, and he clearly wasn't the only person on his team to think this.

Most of them had various looks of confusion on their faces.

"What kind of healer slaughters dozens of people by themselves?" Kristan muttered underneath her breath, but they all heard it.

Rasmus agreed with her as well. As far as he knew, the healer they had seen back at the Kastila had been Tier 3. He took the time to analyze the boy's aura. However, he wasn't able to extend his senses past the initial defenses before it was broken apart.

The boy's gaze landed on Rasmus when this happened, and Rasmus suddenly felt that same uneasy sensation he had gotten before he met up with his team. His instincts told him that he needed to be more careful around this boy, regardless of his tier.

"I couldn't exactly let those bandits keep them captured, now could I?" The boy stated matter-of-factly.

"All alone?"

The boy shrugged. "They were honestly pretty weak for their tier," he said as if that somehow explained how someone not older than twenty winters was able to wipe out an entire group of bandits by themselves. It wasn't even a matter of the enemies' strength at that point. It was just a simple numbers issue.

Twenty people against one? That wasn't exactly great odds, no matter the situation.

Rasmus could do nothing but shake his head. He had heard that those from the Shattered Winter School were on another level, but he was only starting to understand what that meant truly. If everyone from the school were able to do that, he couldn't imagine what the Lord of the Shattered Throne could do.

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