At the start of the journey, Annie had asked Richard how they were supposed to get through the blockade of the other tribes and meet up with the dwarves.
Lord's answer had been that they could simply walk straight in.
"Since the encirclement is made up of several mutually hostile tribes, there are bound to be plenty of gaps. We just need to follow one of them in." Afraid Annie might not believe him, he had even gone out of his way to explain.
The explanation sounded fine at first glance, but the more she thought about it, the more problems she saw. To guard against one another, the tribes would inevitably send out large numbers of scouts. There would certainly be gaps, but finding them without being spotted by the scouts was the real challenge.
Annie had originally stayed quiet, intending to watch him make a fool of himself. In the end, she saw no joke, and only grew more and more puzzled herself.
She discovered that Richard had a very strange object.
It was a scope made from two iron tubes of different diameters. A white crystal lens was set into both the front and the rear. The middle sections were connected by threads, and twisting them in opposite directions shortened or lengthened the whole thing.
Lord often held the object and looked through it from every direction, then directed the group to advance, retreat, turn, or halt. When he was busy, Hert or Gunther occasionally took over, likewise giving orders while looking through it.
As a result, the whole group's journey became remarkably peaceful. The nimble barbarians, sturdy centaurs, and mysterious shamans seemed no more than travelers passing through the endless wilderness. Ahead lay nothing but the unchanging sea of grass and earth. They never encountered a single scout.
After watching for two days, Annie could be almost certain that the secret lay in this scope.
Her curiosity grew like weeds in the rainy season, until there came a moment when she could no longer hold it back.
When Richard had just finished using it and was about to put it away, she deftly took the scope from him and eagerly brought her eye to the lens.
Her sense of distance warped in an instant. A moss-covered boulder shaped like a reclining ox appeared before her eyes, every detail clear.
She did not say anything foolish like, "Why did that rock suddenly come over here?" Instead, she immediately grasped the principle behind it: the scope could extend her line of sight.
Annie had to admit that she was stunned. Someone had actually combined the properties of matter itself to achieve an effect that even expensive magical artifacts could rarely manage.
Most of the time, the Half-Elf thought the Lord of High Mountain Keep was a brute with nothing but muscles in his head, his brain shrinking day by day as his muscles multiplied. Yet whenever she caught a stray glimmer of wisdom from him, she could not help wondering whether he was a philosopher skilled at hiding himself.
For example, there was the unique Earth Dwelling architecture. And then there was this "Eagle-Eye Scope" in his hand. Its structure was not particularly complicated, but how ingenious was the thinking behind it?
"As long as you use this thing, you can spot the enemy very easily in advance." Annie twisted the two tubes as she looked through it, discovering that this could even adjust the extent to which her vision was extended.
She quickly became addicted to the novel gadget, turning it around and looking in every direction like a child.
"Don't break it." Richard tried to snatch the scope back, annoyed. He had ruined a whole pile of lenses before barely managing to put together this usable treasure.
"We're all grasshoppers tied to the same rope. Why bother separating what's yours from what's mine?" That was exactly what Lord had said when he used her handkerchief to blow his nose the day before yesterday.
Richard planted his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes, both angry and helpless.
"So that's what the white crystals were for." Only after she had played with it to her heart's content did Annie reluctantly return it.
Bayleaf Lake was roughly three or four days from High Mountain Keep. With the scope, the first three days of travel went smoothly. But the final several dozen miles were the most densely contested area for the Wildlanders. There was no way they could pass through safely with the scope alone.
"My shaman knows Obscuring Mist." Richard pointed at the robed Ogre and, unusually, took the initiative to explain it to Annie.
The Hum-Ha Duo had originally possessed only two points of intelligence. After becoming shamans, they happened to encounter a turbulent period when bandits roamed everywhere. Their starting levels had also been low, but after gaining several levels while serving with the guards, they had now reached four.
By human standards, that level of intelligence was still, regrettably, idiotic. But by Ogre standards, it was astonishing.
Even idiots came in different degrees. The Hum-Ha Duo could at least be considered relatively clever idiots now.
They had learned to stay quiet. They rarely did anything outrageous at any time or place, and they could even barely understand Lord's commands. For them personally, this was only a tiny step, but for the entire Ogre race, it was an epoch-making leap.
Obscuring Mist was not a higher-tier Invisibility spell after all. It could only obscure the eye and could not directly make them invisible, so Richard chose to cross the final stretch at night.
The expeditionary force hid in the grass and waited patiently until the sun set and night fell.
Heaven favored them greatly. Tonight was a starless, lightless night, and a sparse drizzle was falling as well.
The Ha in the Hum-Ha Duo began chanting the spell with his clumsy tongue. As the spell's preparation gradually neared completion, it seemed, from inside the spell, as though a crystal dome were slowly descending from above.
It was the perfect smuggling plan. Obscuring Mist's concealment effect was already quite good, and with the cover of night and rain, no one could discover anything unusual without coming close and examining them carefully.
However, the newly promoted Ogre shaman's spell covered only a limited area, while the High Mountain Keep expeditionary force had rather too many people. The only solution was to squeeze in as hard as they could.
"Come on, come on. Don't just stand there. Form up the way we practiced before."
Lord drew a deep breath from his dantian and inhaled deeply. Yet even the warriors who had never wavered in the face of mountains of corpses and seas of blood looked somewhat reluctant.
Annie finally understood what Richard had meant earlier by precisely calculating the troop strength. The entire group crowded around the Ogre shaman, desperately squeezing into a circular area. In the end, the gap they barely managed to leave could truly accommodate only a slender Half-Elf.
"Advance!" Richard rolled his eyes repeatedly as the surrounding big men jabbed him with their elbows.
Only Annie, as a woman, received a little preferential treatment and had relatively ample room. Aside from her, everyone else—even those as burly as Hert and Gunther—could not help feeling as though their feet had already left the ground. All they could do was take tiny steps, inching forward bit by bit.
Fortunately, their suffering did not last long.
When the group had covered only half the planned distance, they heard the faint sounds of fighting coming from ahead. As they continued forward and the distance gradually closed, the sounds grew clearer as well.
"One side is dwarves. I heard Dwarven being spoken. They're still holding their ground!" Annie was the first to make a judgment.
She had frequent contact with dwarves, so she could understand a little Dwarven.
At everyone's strong insistence, Obscuring Mist was immediately dispelled. The area ahead was already engulfed in battle, so no one would notice this sneaky group of outsiders for a short while anyway.
The High Mountain Keep group followed Lord through the darkness and hid in a particularly dense patch of grass.
A little over a mile ahead lay the dwarf tribe's encampment.
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