Shadow of War

Dago sat down beside Mariko and thanked him.

Mariko waved a hand. "I still haven't thanked you for last time. We're even."

Like Mariko, he tossed a dead branch into the campfire and looked through the fog-like night.

He saw the firelight flickering across Mariko's face, where a worried expression hung.

"How have things been lately? You don't look very happy either," Dago asked.

"I suppose you learned today about the Black-Robed Wizards from the Dark Crystal Highlands invading. War has begun again!"

Mariko stared blankly into the campfire and spoke uneasily.

Dago fell silent. The war had come too suddenly, and he did not know how to respond.

"I once lived through a war in the wizarding world. I know how terrifying it is."

"While destroying everything, it grinds the extremes of human nature—cowardice and courage, selfishness and sacrifice, forgetting and remembrance—into dust, then scatters them into the winds of time. We must take it seriously."

Mariko spoke with a distant gaze, lost in memory.

"From my experience, the war is still only local and small-scale. The day of a full-scale invasion has not truly arrived yet."

Mariko's aged, low voice passed through the flickering campfire once more.

"How long do we have?" Dago asked.

"Maybe one or two months. Maybe less. This is the time for enemy wizards to test our strength, gather intelligence, assassinate, and betray."

"Next, the prices of all kinds of goods in Aina Town will rise sharply, especially anything related to the supernatural."

"It's already too late to move to Aina Town. People from the surrounding villages are all pouring into town, and rents have become outrageous."

Mariko analyzed the course of the war one point after another. After some thought, he added, "There is actually no need to follow the crowd into town. Once the town is breached, living inside will be the most dangerous option."

"We wizards scattered through the forest are the ones enemy wizards find most troublesome. We know the terrain, and we're slippery as eels, like old hunters of the forest."

"We may usually guard against one another, but now that war has come, we must watch out for and help each other like brothers and sisters."

Dago silently listened to Mariko's analysis and nodded repeatedly.

"My proposal is to establish a Forest Mutual Aid Society. There are only two of us now, but I will seek out more people living in the forest and bring them in."

Mariko looked at Dago with blazing eyes.

"I have no problem with that." Dago nodded and spoke after a moment of silence.

"Thank you for your support, Dago." Mariko stood and patted Dago on the shoulder.

Dago shook his head without saying anything. He then rose, left Mariko's wooden cabin, picked up a burning branch, and walked back to his own shelter.

He had already witnessed one corner of war in the wizarding world. Mentor Rosalyn had been the first wizard in this world to treat him kindly.

Yet in the blink of an eye, she had been destroyed by war.

"The Black-Robed Wizards of the Dark Crystal Highlands?"

Dago gritted his teeth and forced down the fire in his heart.

An Apprentice Wizard at the very bottom like him might not even qualify for an urn.

He had also considered leaving the territory of Ainak Wizard Academy and becoming a wandering wizard somewhere else.

Leaving aside how many Magic Stones he had left, enough to begin the next leg of his journey, that fire in his heart had been burning him all along.

When the world shed its fairy-tale filter, madness became the idealist's final candle. Between lucid despair and gentle obsession, I chose to become Don Quixote, using imagined glory to fight real mediocrity.

Dago pulled himself together, buried his grief, and entered a frenzied training mode.

Only strength could extinguish the fire in his heart.

Over the next dozen days, Dago trained desperately like a madman.

He compressed his natural sleep to less than four hours a day, spending nearly all his remaining time on arduous cultivation.

During that time, he made a trip to town to replenish his daily supplies and found the situation far more serious than he had imagined.

The entire Aina Town seemed to have fallen into an atmosphere of tension and agitation.

From potion ingredients and equipment to grain, bread, and other daily necessities, almost everything had gone up in price wildly.

The most outrageous increase was in rent in the residential districts. News had spread from the surrounding areas that some villages had been completely massacred by the Black-Robed Wizards, so their people had flooded into town.

A town originally designed for three hundred thousand people had swelled to nearly four hundred thousand. Even the cheapest rent now cost four or five Magic Stone Fragments a month.

Meanwhile, the wealthy merchants and nobles in town had fled early to regions untouched by the war.

War was like a vortex, devouring everyone's lives.

On the morning of the fourth day, at the shelter in the forest.

Fully armed, Dago crouched in the clearing and wolfed down roasted venison. The delicious magical beast meat had already run out.

Before long, he finished eating, slung on his pack, picked up his machete, and adjusted his snug hunting clothes.

Today, he was going to Moonlight Lake again to gather Moonlight Flowers. He called up the system panel.

[Universal Wizard Meditation Method(Metamorphosis 11/10000); Ice Crystal Cannon(Metamorphosis 97/10000); Resonance Art(Beginner 855/1000); Detection Technique(Beginner 787/1000); Potion Brewing(Novice 1/100)]

This was his confidence: two skills had entered Metamorphosis, making them faster and stronger.

However, Metamorphosis required a brutal amount of progress, and he had discovered that earning progress had become more difficult.

During the Beginner stage, each use of a skill earned one point of progress. After entering Metamorphosis, he needed to use it two or three times to gain a single point.

Perhaps it was related to the explosive increase in his total mental power after advancing to a Third-Level Apprentice Wizard.

Following the route he had marked before, he set off for Moonlight Lake, with Detection Technique clearing the way like radar.

The magical beast meat had happened to run out, and he intended to hunt some more to bring back.

Leaving aside its delicious taste, its body-strengthening effects alone made it worth hunting.

However, Mariko had seemed to feel nothing after eating the magical beast meat Dago brought him last time. It seemed that its effects were insignificant to wizards.

It was simply meat more delicious than ordinary meat, good for an occasional treat or for selling.

The Shadow Leopards in the dense forest seemed to have died out. None attacked him along the way, and Dago arrived at Moonlight Lake with regret, where he saw the patch of Moonlight Flowers.

The traces from his previous harvesting were still there. This time, he planned to dig them all up at once.

If he left them here any longer, they might be harvested by those wizards sent out to scout.

Dago casually glanced at several floating logs in the lake and strode toward the flower patch as if he had seen nothing.

He pulled out his shovel and started digging furiously. Before long, the vast patch of Moonlight Flowers looked as though it had been clawed up by a dog.

Dago filled an entire pack, then sat in the clearing, enjoying the breeze and the scenery.

It was not until a Bronze Crocodile could no longer hold back and charged rapidly toward him.

I've been waiting for you. Deep blue rings swirled in Dago's eyes as he raised a hand and condensed an Air Bullet, firing it out.

Boom! It struck the crocodile's bronze-colored back dead on, but did little damage to the hardest part of the five-meter-long Bronze Crocodile.

The shockwave from the Air Bullet's explosion slowed the Bronze Crocodile's charge, while the pain only heightened its ferocity.

Dago remained seated in the clearing, quietly chanting the spell for Ice Crystal Technique. In an instant, snowflakes drifted through the air as an ice crystal pillar rapidly condensed into shape.

"Go!" Dago shouted. An ice crystal pillar thicker than his arm shot forward.

Bang! The ice crystal pillar struck the Bronze Crocodile's back head-on. It embedded itself there, radiating cold air, but did not pierce very deeply.

More than ten meters away from Dago, the Bronze Crocodile roared in pain and continued charging.

Like a matador, Dago continuously chanted spells and drove ice crystal pillars into the Bronze Crocodile's back. When the fourth one struck, it slowly stopped, let out a mournful cry, and died.

Still unconvinced, Dago fired an Air Bullet into its wound. Only after seeing it remain motionless did he breathe a sigh of relief.

The other Bronze Crocodiles by the lake were also stirring restlessly. Dago calculated his remaining mental power...

He could probably kill another ten or so, and there was not the slightest panic on his face.

He fired an Air Bullet into the lake, frightening them back into the water.

Seeing this, Dago swiftly grabbed his machete and ran toward the dead Bronze Crocodile, hacking at its limbs and tail.

Every few minutes, he fired an Air Bullet into the lake. It took Dago more than ten minutes to cut off the Bronze Crocodile's limbs and tail, and even his blade had become chipped.

He tied the limbs and tail together with the rope he carried. They weighed a good twenty or thirty pounds, and he hoisted them onto his shoulder.

Then he returned to the clearing, put on his pack, and quickly slipped away.

He discovered that as time passed, the Air Bullet's deterrent effect on the Bronze Crocodiles by the lake was growing weaker and weaker.

He could slaughter them now, but he did not want to take that risk.

After returning to the shelter, Dago unloaded his burdens.

He placed the Moonlight Flowers in the corner to dry in the shade as before, washed the Bronze Crocodile's limbs and tail clean, then put them into his wooden refrigerator.

Dago left the shelter and began his daily training. This habit had already seeped into his bones.

Before he knew it, it was nearly lunchtime. Dago stopped training, lit a fire, and set an iron pot over it.

He took out the chilled Bronze Crocodile meat, put it into cold water, and skimmed off the foam after it came to a boil.

Then he added some of the forest's special berries and fine salt and let it stew.

Nearly an hour later, Dago finally ate the pot of stewed Bronze Crocodile meat. The meat was firm and springy.

When he chewed it, he could clearly feel the texture of the muscle fibers, yet it was not overly tough or dry.

He licked his lips with lingering satisfaction. With another Bronze Crocodile hunting ground, he would not have to worry about running out of delicious magical beast meat in the future.

However, the selling price of magical beast meat in town had now plummeted, because many of the nobles and wealthy merchants who could afford it had fled. Dago could do nothing about that.

"If no one buys it, I'll keep it for myself. I'll bring some to Mariko this afternoon too." Dago sighed.