“Why am I always the one who carries your s*?”

Albert is grumbling as always, this time, however, he is guilty of being a pervert. His red cheeks can confirm that. I stopped slapping him only after both of my hands started to hurt. Only then I was merciful enough to tell the maids to start slapping him for me.

I am expecting to leave the forest until the evening and then continue eastward. All my scouts confirmed that there will be plains, and possibly a few villages.

Some people may think that being in the forest is great: breathing a fresh forest air, fishing, camping. For me it was becoming the worst of nightmares. It is only my second day here but I can feel getting sick from just looking at this green color. At least I know that soon I might start seeing something further than 10 meters in front. I was not feeling comfortable also due to the local wildlife. Large monsters are yet to try attacking us but the goblins and the wolves create a lot of distraction.

I was so sick of this place that I allowed Elina to carry me.

“Why don’t you start walking yourself? You are either being carried around, or just sleep somewhere.” (E)

“You are against it? Ri…!”

“OKAY. Just don’t pester them. Poor girls, how can they bear with such a master…” (E)

Meanwhile, we walked into a wall of plants. With my foxfires I burned them and behind was a cave. Albert was tasked with guarding the maids. I was going there with Elina to find out if there is something useful.

“If this monkey dares to grope you, don’t be shy to kick him in the balls. Don’t worry, I will be sure to castrate him for any of his pervert deeds.” I assured my maids and went into the cave.

After I made sure that there is a fine distance of 20 meters between them, I hurried after Elina.

This cave looks to be somewhat maintained, there are old wooden boxes and bags. It looks like it was used as a smuggling outpost. After we walked for almost a kilometer, we encountered another green wall. This time I decided not to burn everything to ashes but to accurately cut our way out. If my assumptions are correct, we shortened our travelling time by a couple of hours.

“I’ll wait here, go bring the others.” Elina decided to guard this place and I will have to walk back by myself. Well, I am faster after all.

Soon we continued down the smuggler’s trail. Now it will be hard to jeopardize my planning. Or so I thought.

We have walked into a ravine. While it would be easy to cross it, right now we have an altar which is actually not that light to drag it up and down. In my former plan we would have walked around without having to cross it but now it would take us a few more hours.

After a little brainstorming I came up with an unorthodox idea of using my flight deck as a bridge.

The ravine is 20 meters wide and my 1 meter little accessory would not be enough to cover it but then I thought about the fact that it is not exactly connected to me with any struts. It is just floating close to me. My genius plan is to imagine it being 20 meter long and hope that it works out.

Of course that was a bit overoptimistic from my side. Neither my deck could be used as floating board to carry everything around. It sticks close to me and refuses to leave. The final plan was successful.

“Another step!”

“Aye, another step!”

“Careful! Don’t step that far!”

We build a little tower from the ‘Rogues’ and I was standing at its top. Like that we were able to transfer all our stuff across the ravine. We lost only an hour. We are still ahead of my schedule!

If everything goes well, within 3 hours we will come out of the forest.

When we were very close to our today’s goal, we walked into a group of people. Not the ‘good’ kind of people.

“If you surrender, we might just sell you into slavery instead of killing!”

The smugglers have shown up and were very angry that someone found their trail. Now was the question. Talk with them or…

“We have no reason to fight. We too are not welcome in the kingdom, you know?” I tried persuading them.

“If so, then why the hell you came here?”

“We are fleeing from the duke of Caliga.” For now this goes good.

“Oh my, that a*hole drove away another bunch of people?”

“I see that you get what I say, so how about we just pretend we didn’t see each other and go do our own business?” Please, let it work out.

“Fine… Alright lads, let ‘em pass. I just hope I won’t regret that.”

“If we ever walk into each other, I hope we will have some mutually beneficial business.” I showed him my most ‘sincere’ business smile.

“You bet, foxkin.” He showed a smile of his own. We both sense possible profit from our meeting.

Without any more issues we finally walked out of the forest and were ready to keep moving forward.