“Orion, stay inside and help the guards,” Asteria ordered.
For a moment, he was reminded of when she took charge at the military base in Silverpeak all those years ago. Asteria had been a wrathful goddess among mortals then, and the air she exuded now was just the same.
“Stay safe,” he nodded, preparing to cast.
She gave him one last lingering look before yanking the carriage door open and marching out.
“Why is she going out?” Ophelia asked, wide-eyed at the suddenness.
“Don’t worry about her. My mother is strong,” Orion replied, already busy pressing himself against the window to try to catch a glimpse of what was going on.
Whatever shielding magic surrounded the carriage, it darkened the glass as a side effect, but with some effort, he could still see Asteria’s form as she strode ahead, where he could spy some sort of rocky formation blocking the road.
Classic bandit tactics. That doesn’t mean they aren’t effective.
Even if the driver hadn’t died, turning back now was not an option. They were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by rocky hills, wild grass, and the occasional thicket of trees. It would take several hours to reach Silverpeak again, and during that time, they would be highly vulnerable to any kind of attack.
No, his mother was right. It was better to trigger the trap and deal with the enemy now. A fighting retreat was only possible when you didn’t have to protect numerous civilians, after all.
Though perhaps, there aren’t actually that many civilians in this case.
Indeed, of the twenty passengers in the carriage, about ten had taken defensive positions, watching for any movement from outside and demonstrating a remarkable level of coordination for people who were supposed to be strangers.
The other ten, meanwhile, were acting as expected, pacing nervously and switching between loud demands to the hostesses and anxious glances at the others.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal to leave them here. I’m sure the bandits will only take their valuables and leave them alive. Since some of them are at a much higher level than people usually are, I’m betting they are still undercover.
Before Orion could dwell on that thought any longer, another explosion rocked the carriage. This one, unlike the first, was much closer, and Orion hurried to press his face against the window.
Smoke obscured much of his view, but he recognized the gleam of his mother’s silver shield, indicating she had raised it in time.
He sighed in relief, but didn’t dare look away.
Something rocketed through the air from above, crashing into Asteria’s shield with great force, followed by more and more projectiles.
Knowing his mother, Orion didn’t have to wait long for her to act.
In fact, it was just a few seconds later when the silver shield exploded outward, altering the path of every projectile heading her way and giving her a chance to move.
Over the past few weeks, Orion had been discovering a new side of his mother. Of course, he had always known she was more than capable of holding her own in a fight, especially considering what she’d done to the spy.
But he still considered her a potioneer first, someone whose talents mainly lay in the slow steeping of dangerous substances.
He hadn't considered what it really meant to be a master brewer. To be someone capable of handling the most toxic substances, of transforming seemingly harmless ingredients into truly deadly things.
After the weeks he’d spent sparring with her, he knew better.
It seemed that these bandits would soon learn the same lesson.
Where Asteria’s silhouette was once hidden by the smoke from the enemy’s explosion, a thin purple haze now began to spread around her, quickly growing in intensity and size until it engulfed the carriage and continued to reach outward.
Orion knew that this was only the beginning. The Last Breath was a cloud of neurotoxins, strong enough to knock out a level eighty guard with a single breath when first tested. It both disabled weaker enemies to stop them from swarming and served as a stepping stone for Asteria’s more powerful abilities.
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“What is this? Poison? We are all going to die!” One of the civilians shouted upon seeing the purple haze surrounding them.
The adventurers looked at each other grimly, clearly worried about the same thing but knowing better than to say it out loud, to avoid causing panic.
And any good bodyguard knew that chaos was the best time for a hidden enemy to strike.
“It won’t get in,” a hostess tried to calm the man down, though it didn’t seem to be doing much. “Our wards are rated against a Pestilence Spirit’s breath, Magnate Hessar. There is no need to worry.”
This Magnate Hessar, unfortunately, didn’t seem inclined to listen, as the corpulent man became increasingly agitated, stomping and yelling at the poor woman.
Considering that she had a solid twenty levels on him, maybe he shouldn’t have been that confident, but for the moment, social rankings still held, and the hostess kept her head bowed as he berated her.
Orion would have taken action to stop the absurd gesture, but his focus was drawn back as flashes of silver flew past the carriage.
“Now what?!” Hessar shouted. “What is that blasted woman doing?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Before he even realized what he was doing, Orion was on his feet and in the man’s personal space. “Don’t you dare speak of my mother like that. She’s protecting us, fighting against the bandits on her own. You will respect her.” He growled, more angry than he could remember being in a long time.
The man blinked, clearly caught off guard by his sudden intervention, but he quickly recovered, his face flushing. Before anything further could happen, though, another voice interrupted.
“Please stop, both of you.”
Ophelia had risen, standing beside the other hostess, and looked at them with determined eyes. “Now is not the time to fight among ourselves.”
Orion stilled. For a moment, he felt the urge to growl at her for the insolence. Who did she think she was, to tell him what to do? He had already been forced to listen to this idiotic man rave and rant for too long, and now he had gone so far as to dare insult his mother!
And yet, something about this rage felt off. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t believe himself capable of it, no, but that it had come on too quickly.
Orion knew himself. This was not how he behaved when he was angry.
Without another word, he grabbed a vial from his lab coat’s inner pocket and downed it in one gulp, then offered another to the fat man.
Suddenly, his thoughts started to clear up. He didn’t know exactly when they had become muddled, but after drinking his mother’s all-purpose antitoxin, it was obvious he had been poisoned.
Was it the mou? But Ophelia was served it too, and she doesn’t seem affected at all. Unless she has something else to fight poisons, of course.
Considering the idea he was forming about the girl’s background, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched. There were too many bodyguards for her not to be prepared to deal with a poisoning attempt.
Still, the fact that he had been had without even realizing it, especially considering that he’d developed something of an immunity to many toxic compounds over the years…
“We were poisoned,” he told Hessar, who had yet to grab the vial, “something to lower our inhibitions, or to make us lose our cool faster. Drink.”
The man looked at him with distrust, but after a moment, he took the antidote and swallowed it in one quick motion.
When he finished swallowing, his skin lost some of the crimson hue it had gained, and he staggered backward. “What in the hells? Who would even do something like that?”
Grimly, Orion began passing vials around the carriage, noting how each person reacted. “If you’ve eaten or drunk anything inside here, please take the antidote. It couldn’t have been in the air, or my mother would have noticed. If you haven’t ingested anything, do not drink it, or you could develop dangerous symptoms.”
That wasn’t the truth. The antidote was custom-made by Asteria to be completely harmless to anything except the poison it was meant to fight. It was a marvel of potion-making, and it was an insult even to suggest she would craft something so poorly done.
But she wasn’t here to get mad, and more importantly, he was pretty sure there was at least one mole inside.
During the seven hours of the journey so far, he had seen everyone take at least a sip of water.
Seeing how quickly some people hurried to drink the vial, they also started experiencing some symptoms, but Orion wasn’t surprised to see that two of the supposed civilians hesitated. However, one man he had identified as part of Ophelia’s hidden protection detail, given his high level, also wasn’t taking the potion.
“I only drank some water. If it’s as dangerous as you say, it would be better not to take it,” one said.
“M-me too. I brought some snacks along, so I didn’t eat anything here, and really, I feel fine.”
The last one stayed silent, watching them carefully. Orion’s gaze didn’t waver, staring him down with his hand extended, holding the vial of antidote.
“Ah, fuck it. Who even cares at this point,” he sighed. The hostess suddenly pulled Orion back, and a loud clang echoed through the carriage. A hidden blade inside the man’s clothing had slashed the woman’s arm, which was coated in a cold, steely color.
“Attack!” The man roared, and the two seemingly hesitant civilians moved suddenly, turning into silent assassins as they lunged at Ophelia.
They crashed into a Light Shield. Their daggers scraped against it, dripping with dark liquid that he was sure would be enough to kill him a dozen times over. But it didn’t matter because they couldn’t reach him.
“Another mage?!” One of them muttered, jumping back as one of the guards lunged at him.
Soon, the carriage descended into chaos. Two more civilians turned out to be enemies, and they joined the fight by attacking the defenders from behind, stabbing one and cutting down another.
Even more confusing, two of the men Orion was sure were Ophelia’s guards turned out to be traitors when they attacked the adventurers guarding the door, injuring the tank and damaging the healer.
It was then, of course, that the ground beneath the carriage began to shake, and something slammed into it from below.
Ordinarily, such an attack would have been treated like any other and repelled by the wards, but it somehow focused exactly on the one weak spot Orion had noticed earlier, and as soon as it connected, a cascade failure of spells occurred.
The carriage’s floor shattered, and a hole quickly opened from beneath, allowing several hooded men to enter.
In just a couple of minutes, the situation went from tense to frankly unsustainable. The few civilians who were what they looked like were cowering, and it didn’t take a genius to know they would be caught in the crossfire soon enough.
The defenders, who had been gradually pushing the enemy back, were suddenly outnumbered. Orion watched the healer reenter the fight, followed by the tank, who slammed his shield down and blocked the masked men’s path.
They hadn’t lost yet, but they were increasingly against the odds.
Orion realized something had to change to shift the momentum, and he knew only one person capable of making that happen.
Without hesitation, he crafted two [Infinite Lasers] and fired them at the closest wall, accidentally cutting off the arm of an assassin who had just finished defeating a guard.
Orion then grabbed Ophelia’s arm and pushed his Light Shield into overdrive by channeling light mana through a crystal multiple times until he knew the spell was about to collapse.
The first fool who tried to attack it learned the hard way why he had done so.
Light burst as the carriage’s windows shattered from the explosion, and Orion leapt out, pulling Ophelia with him into the toxic haze.
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