A Minimum of Six Months
She really had gotten stronger. And at an astonishing pace, too. She'd already used Fire Ball, the signature spell of the fire school.
Signature spell or not, Fire Ball was still low-tier magic. That didn't make it something you could laugh off. It was the most widely used spell in existence, and one fully capable of mass slaughter. At this stage of the Tower, being able to wield fire-school magic — one of the four primary elements, not some unattributed cantrip — was a genuinely enormous feat.
Yesterday's inheritance had to be the reason. She'd never used the spell before. Given that it hadn't been among the things she'd been so proud of yesterday, either she simply hadn't gotten around to bragging about it, or the knowledge had settled further overnight and made the casting possible.
The timing, however, could not have been worse.
The blast had been louder than I'd expected. Then again, this was her first time using it. Even knowing it was powerful, she wouldn't have had any real sense of just how powerful. I'd told her to fire the strongest thing she had, and Fire Ball was, after all, the most destructive spell she could currently throw.
But an explosion like that might draw other scout parties.
I finished off the handful of remaining gnolls and immediately signaled the others. The party closed in on us moments later. They took in the blast crater — the sheer force of it — and every face, including Na Seoyun's own, went slack with shock.
"When did you learn to cast something like that?"
Nam Eun-ju asked it like she genuinely couldn't believe what she was looking at.
"This morning. When I woke up, I just… felt like I could use it, more or less."
So I'd been right. She still hadn't fully absorbed the knowledge. Not that it was surprising — taking in that much power all at once and digesting it overnight was never going to happen. It was enough knowledge to raise the rank of her Basic Magic Theory. A great deal of it had probably poured in across the board.
"The noise was too loud. If there were scout parties nearby, they'll be running this way."
It really had been enormous. The sound would have carried almost anywhere. Hoping another scout party hadn't heard it wasn't even a hopeful observation — it was fantasy.
Na Seoyun's face fell a little at that.
"No. This isn't your fault. You were just following my orders. I was a little startled, but we cleaned it up fast, so it's fine."
"Okay…"
I wanted to comfort her properly, but we didn't have the time. I turned to the others.
"Let's move. If we stay here, the scouts will get here first."
"Yes."
"…Yeah."
Na-yeon's answer came a beat late. She was staring at the wreckage they had made, her expression tangled and unreadable.
It didn't seem like she felt guilty toward the gnolls. What she was looking at was, quite literally, the blast itself — the scar that she and Na Seoyun's magic had torn into the ground.
That complicated look was earned. Na Seoyun had already pulled ahead of her, but with Sylph at her side, Na-yeon had never fallen this far behind in ranged firepower. This, though, had driven the truth home. The gap between her and her younger sister had become enormous.
The crater from Casa — a Lowest-tier spirit — and the crater from Na Seoyun's Fire Ball were twice as wide. Nearly three times, even. The difference in mana stats, the insufficient rank of her spirit, the knowledge Na Seoyun had inherited, the gap in raw talent — a dozen factors had taken Seoyun's side, and the result was sitting there in the dirt.
There was nothing useful I could say to her. I just moved us faster.
And of course, the aftermath of that explosion was every bit as bad as I'd feared. Ahead of us, small but unmistakable, a gnoll scout party came into view.
Things had just gone sideways.
"…We take them here. We don't have time to turn back."
Na-yeon and Na Seoyun started preparing their magic again at once. Na-yeon summoned Casa and Sylph together this time, clearly intending to push the output as high as it would go. Na Seoyun, instead of another Fire Ball, began forming Magic Arrows.
I almost stopped Na-yeon — then let it go. We were already exposed. Better to finish this fast and move. First priority was getting out of this stretch of ground.
Their spells detonated one after the other.
A twin boom split the air. Small, compared to the earlier thunderclap — but the force behind it was nothing to dismiss. Na-yeon had layered Sylph's support over Casa's Fire Ball and driven the yield up by nearly half again. Even so, it still couldn't touch what Seoyun was doing.
Multi-Shot Magic Arrow. Pierce.
She didn't add the Explosive Attribute. She was watching the noise.
The arrows left her hands in a hissing storm — more than thirty of them in a single breath. Every last one punched straight through a gnoll and shredded the formation as it went. A piercing attribute, and looking closer, the arrows themselves were spinning. Rotation layered on penetration. The bodies they punched through were left with twisted holes the thickness of a thumb, and most of those holes had gone through something vital.
High-level control, on top of everything else. I couldn't hide my admiration for how far Na Seoyun's magic had come. She hadn't been capable of this kind of fine control before. It was remarkable. Personally, I found this more impressive than the Fire Ball. You couldn't make a clean comparison — difficulty shifted with aptitude — but I could say with certainty that what I was watching was in no way a lesser display.
Na-yeon looked like her soul had left her body.
I glanced at her.
"We've already been spotted, but hold back on the Fire Balls."
Na-yeon's Fire Ball was weak enough that the sound wasn't usually a problem, but there was no point taking chances. I'd let it slide this time. From here on, we needed to keep them from pinning our position. A light warning was enough.
"…Okay. Sorry."
Her sense of danger was still too thin. I bit down on the inside of my lip and said nothing more.
I finished the scout party with a half-dazed Na-yeon and the rest of the group in tow, then pushed us toward the Black Gnoll border.
The pursuit after that was relentless. Once they had a fix on us, the scout parties that had been spread wide across the region all started running our way. Before long we were being ambushed more often than we were the ones doing the ambushing.
The barking rolled toward us in waves. Damn it. We held through the first day somehow. There was no rest, but we'd covered a respectable stretch of ground.
We still had nearly two days of travel left. Without interference, it was a one-day run. The interference did not stop coming.
Stamina was still holding. Even Ha Yoo-jin and Na-yeon, worn down as they were, were hanging on. How much longer that would last was another question. The pack running at us right now was already a serious number.
"…Nam Eun-ju, Ha Yoo-jin — hold the rear. Seoyun, with me."
"Yes."
We turned and charged the scout party that had been chasing us. Their numbers had swollen by the day; what hit us now was close to five hundred strong. Cleaning all of them up was going to take a little time.
"Hah!"
Na Seoyun's physical stats had climbed just as clearly as her magic. She wrapped herself in aura and fought at a level that didn't fall far short of my own. The path we cut was paved with gnoll corpses — and that, in itself, was a loss. We were only fighting because our position was already blown. I would have avoided combat entirely if I could.
Na-yeon's support fire came in behind us. The gnolls that peeled off to hit the rear never made it past Nam Eun-ju's wall. Ha Yoo-jin was helping, though I wasn't sure she even needed it. Nam Eun-ju stood planted and broke the runners as they came, crushing them as they hit her.
The fighting itself had gotten almost comfortable. I no longer had to spare attention for the back line, and Na Seoyun was well past the point of being threatened by enemies like these, so I could cut loose without looking over my shoulder.
Wiping out a five-hundred-strong gnoll pack took a little over ten minutes.
A huge leap forward. I still couldn't keep the bitterness off my face.
"They've got us again."
"…It couldn't be helped, oppa. There were just too many of them."
The plan to punch through at speed was already in pieces. It had been over, honestly, from the moment we'd been late to read the Golden Gnolls' movements.
I turned it over for a long time. If we kept going like this, there was no answer.
"…Let's get to the border first. We'll look at the situation and decide from there."
My voice came out flat. Na Seoyun didn't argue.
Gnolls were already starting to pour toward the line we were traveling. There was no time to rest, and nowhere to do it. Over the two days it took us to reach the border, we fought dozens of battles, large and small. I could feel the encirclement folding in. If the party's physical stats hadn't risen across the board, they would have run us down long before this.
I was starting to feel it myself. Na-yeon and Ha Yoo-jin were already half-carried, leaning on Na Seoyun and Nam Eun-ju as we moved.
And even after all that ground, we were still in Area 29. We had come as far as the place that used to be Area 28, and the designation hadn't changed.
Which meant—
The Golden Gnoll main force is following us.
At a pace matching ours, or faster. That was a problem. We could not afford to meet the main force. Not under any circumstances.
The border was close now. I could feel it. And as it drew nearer, the scout parties began to thin. It made sense — the border was under constant fighting, so they wouldn't have the spare strength to keep flooding this approach with scouts.
That sliver of breathing room was enough. We reached the border.
A familiar landscape. I had seen it once before. It was not a welcome sight.
Looking out over the border from a distance, I felt something close to despair.
It was true they no longer had the strength to keep throwing scout parties at us. A battle was already raging across the border — and it was a battle on a scale far beyond anything I had pictured.
The gnoll main force. They hadn't failed to catch us.
The banner of the Worshipping Golden Gnoll Tribe was planted in the middle of that battlefield.
……
No one in the party said a word. They couldn't. We had been dancing on the Golden Gnolls' palm the entire time.
They must have read our destination the moment we started heading this way. Instead of wasting time tracking us themselves, they had used the smaller tribes to keep the pressure on, bleeding our speed, while they ran straight for the border.
…Should we have changed direction somewhere in the middle?
A stupid thought, and I knew it. Changing direction would have suited them even better. Reaching a human village from here was a six-day march even without detours — more than enough time for word to reach them and for them to come running. Even if we turned now, they would simply ease off this battlefield and start the chase again. Head downslope and we would walk straight into scout lines and pursuit parties already laid out and waiting.
"…What do we do?"
Joo Ha-yeon's voice had nothing left in it. She was exhausted down to the bone. Three days of forced march. None of them had imagined it would come to this. They had gotten so much stronger — they had believed that would be enough to break through.
I had allowed for this possibility, so the blow landed softer on me than on them. Being cut off, failing to get out, ending up isolated — knowing it was coming didn't make a crisis any less of a crisis.
But.
The first cycle had worse than this. Plenty of it.
If I had let fear and confusion run me then the way a fool would, I wouldn't be standing here now.
I forced myself to think it through cold.
The scout numbers really had dropped off once we hit the border. That was the only reason we had this scrap of breathing room. Closer to Area 30, the gnolls were thinner and the watch was lighter.
Breaking out through the border itself was no longer possible. Tens of thousands — no, the central tribe had moved to the border now, which meant the Black Gnolls would answer in kind. Combined, that was more than a hundred thousand gnolls boiling over the same stretch of ground. We did not have the strength to punch through that.
Going downslope was impossible, for the reasons I'd already turned over. I'd briefly considered breaking out the opposite way, into Brown Gnoll territory, but that route would take even longer than pushing toward the human lines.
We were completely isolated.
I looked at the others. Every face was drawn tight with fear. Joo Ha-yeon, who had been riding the high of her new power. Nam Eun-ju, who had believed she could finally carry her own weight. Na Seoyun, who had pulled five Legendary skills and been so sure she would be a real help to me. Na-yeon and Ha Yoo-jin, who hadn't received any inheritance this time, looked worse than any of them.
I thought it through for a long time, and came — reluctantly — to the same place I had started. It was the first method I had considered. I had not wanted to use it. There was nothing else left.
The plan would slip. Survival came first. Plans only mattered if you were still alive to run them.
I had Giants to face. I had not the slightest intention of dying to a pack of gnolls.
"…We hold out."
"…What?"
"Holding our ground is the better option. No — there's nothing else we can do."
"…Shin-hoo? What are you talking about…"
I looked at them, my face even.
"We cross into Area 30, and we hold."
"…How long are you planning to hold out?"
Joo Ha-yeon's voice was drained. She had already seen there was no other way.
I said it the way you deliver a sentence.
Two years.
The party stared at me in horror.