Quel'Thalas lay bathed in the Sunwell's radiance, and the Rune Stone barrier kept all of Eversong Woods in perpetual spring.
A crimson-purple Hawkstrider pulled a luxurious four-wheeled carriage, while Al lounged lazily beside the carriage shaft.
The breeze occasionally shook a few leaves from the gold-and-red magical maples. Al held the "Advanced Abjuration Course" he had borrowed from the Sunstrider Court library, but for once, he was not studying it. With [Hyperthymesia], he could thoroughly master this hefty tome in less than half a month.
His handsome little face glowed with vitality. A dark-red magical maple leaf drifted into his palm, and he gradually became lost in the picturesque scenery around him.
Less than a hundred years left. If the next stage of the plan can be carried out, then...
Al clenched his delicate little fists, silently steeling himself.
Hmm? The stench of a magical beast. No, that's not right!
Al sniffed the strange odor lingering in the air. His expression remained unchanged, but he sat up straight.
His lips barely moved as he silently recited an incantation, and a translucent violet shield appeared.
"Frost Nova!"
The instant the incantation left his lips, a tall figure with long, pointed tusks emerged from the shadows. The foul breath from its gaping maw wafted beneath Al's nose.
The spell and the Troll assassin appeared simultaneously. Thick frost magic froze his feet in place, leaving him unable to move, as though the Troll assassin had run straight into Al's Frost Nova of his own accord.
With a casual, silent cast of Polymorph, he turned the immobilized Troll assassin into a docile sheep.
Then [Hyperthymesia] activated. Mysterious runes appeared in his eyes, and time all but stopped within his memory palace as Al examined the proportions of light and shadow one by one.
"Three o'clock, seven o'clock, nine o'clock, plus the blind spot behind the carriage. About seven Amani Troll assassins. Hmm, let me think. No spellcasters. Not too tricky."
Al seemed to spend a long time thinking within his memory palace, but only a single second passed in the Prime Material world.
He hesitated no longer, nimbly leaping down from the carriage and casting Blink repeatedly amid a dense succession of arcane fluctuations.
"Arcane Burst!"
The brief incantation left his lips, and a sphere of bright pink light exploded around him, blasting three bedraggled figures out of the shadows.
"Four more."
Al spun around in a flash. The cool breeze turned scorching as a blood-red dragon's head appeared out of thin air, its explosive breath engulfing the two Trolls behind him.
Just like that, six Trolls were either stunned, polymorphed, or killed on the spot.
Walking toward the three Troll assassins who had been blasted away and were struggling to crawl across the ground, he loudly recited an obscure, difficult incantation, seemingly intent on finishing everything in one stroke.
His chanting grew faster and faster, but just as the spell was about to be completed, Al abruptly stopped. A thick block of solid ice swiftly encased him.
The instant Ice Block formed, a blurry figure appeared behind Al. Two clearly poisoned daggers stabbed viciously into the "icebox," sending sprays of ice chips flying.
The assassin's daggers hacked at the hard ice again and again, while Al watched the persistent high-level rogue mockingly from within.
The Troll assassin roared silently, then vanished on the spot in a puff of smoke.
Al swiftly canceled Ice Block, unleashing a surge of freezing air as he tried to pin the high-level assassin in place with the same trick.
Unfortunately, the Troll did not appear after the spell. This was a ruthless, seasoned expert who had evidently fled the instant Al emerged from Ice Block.
"Nimble little fly. You really think my five-word Gladiator title was handed to me for free?"
Shaking his head without another word, he raised both hands high, stood on tiptoe, and rapidly spat out a string of incantations.
Dark clouds covered the sky, and his hands shone with a ghostly blue light. Before long, fist-sized hailstones came pelting down like rain as Al unleashed an enormous [Blizzard] covering a five-hundred-meter radius.
Thunderclouds roared, and chilling winds sounded a funeral dirge. A terrifying natural disaster ravaged Al's surroundings. As hail fell, the magical maples seemed to wail, their thick trunks snapped in half. All six Amani Trolls lying on the ground suffered shattered bones and torn tendons, howling as they crawled about.
"Die!"
Al guessed it probably meant something like "die" or "kill" in Trollish.
A shrill roar rang out. Wrapped in shadows, the high-level Troll assassin charged at Al at a speed far beyond his earlier pace, milky-white light shining around his feet.
"Hmm, Cloak of Shadows plus Sprint. Nice skills."
Al stopped channeling Blizzard and languidly watched the high-level assassin racing toward him, even finding the leisure to comment.
The cold gleam of the high-level assassin's daggers sliced through the lingering frost mist beside Al. A flawlessly precise [Mutilate] crossed into Al's skull. The two were incredibly close, close enough to smell the stench on the Troll's tusks and the malice and astonishment in his blood-red eyes.
"I'm tired of this game of cat and mouse. Let's end it here."
Al's figure slowly faded, then appeared behind the Troll, leaving the Troll alone, bewildered in the wind.
[Presence of Mind] activated.
"Pyroblast!"
A scorching boulder the size of a washbasin streaked through the air in an orange-red trail and slammed into the stunned Troll's head with a tremendous boom.
Thick smoke billowed from the corpse that fell to the ground. Through it, there was clearly nothing above the neck. The head had been completely vaporized the instant the Pyroblast struck.
"Sure enough, Presence of Mind into a big fireball is the true romance of a mage lord. Melee mages like Gandalf are all heretics."
Grumbling, Al brushed nonexistent dust from his clothes and collected the seven Troll corpses scattered across the ground into his spatial backpack.
"More new specimens. Too bad I hit too hard and didn't leave any alive. Oh well, next time I'll go to the Ghostlands and catch a Troll Witch Doctor for a look.
"They say the Amani Trolls have Loa divine magic far beyond that of the other Troll Empires. I wonder whether humanoids like Trolls can be recorded in the Monster Compendium..."
Looking at the scorched earth and the eighty-percent-cooked Hawkstrider, Al found himself in a bit of a bind. He had been eating hot pot and singing, enjoying laughter all along the way, only for bandits to blow up the train mid-journey. Who could he even complain to?
He did not consider where the assassins had come from or what they were plotting. Those were matters for important people to worry about. He merely gathered the broken trees neatly, one by one, and placed them in his spatial backpack. Gifts from nature could not be wasted, of course.
With new specimens in hand, Al hummed as he strode away.