[Red Lion Tribe]

By now it was the next morning after Darganth and Serania's first night together. While he initially wanted to go for a second round, when he noticed her state he decided against it. While they knew each other for only a few days and he initially slept with her only because of her beauty, during their conversation the rest of the night, she grew on him quite a lot. By now he didn't even want her to experience what she had to live through for years for one more day.

This lead to him using a combination of plant and poison magic to create a fake potion. While it would have no real effect, to the untrained eye it seemed like a real potion. Thus, when Serania woke up, he asked her to drink it, but to leave some small drops in it. Noticing her looking at the bottle in irritation, Darganth explained his plan to her.

“This is something I created just now. I has no effect, except for being easily traceable for a few days. I want you to drink this and pretend that it is a potion that would increase fertility. You can think of any excuse how you got it. If you then say that you used it before sleeping with me, in the hopes of birthing a boy with my affinity’s, you only have to add that another man impregnating you may kill the first child due to the potions effect. This should buy you enough time to increase your rank as a magician so that Gervas can't force you to do anything.”

This explanation made her look at him in gratitude. Chugging the potion, she placed the bottle besides her before throwing her arms around him. Returning her hug, he waits for her to calm down a bit. Once they separated, they spend the next two hours saying goodbye to each other, before Darganth walked out of the tent.

Making his way to Gervas tent, he quickly notified him of his departure before leaving back to his cave. While his initial plan had been to kill him, now he would leave this to Serania as it seems that he doesn't care for his son or is intimidated by the fact that it likely was the work of a dragon. With it being unlikely that he will bother him, Darganth let him live until Serania takes care of him.

He even passed on the chance to empty Gervas tent of all treasures, hoping for them to remain for her. While he wasn't sure about those the tribe knew they could use, the rest would likely remain till she killed Gervas.

On his way Darganth thought about the increase in power he had received last night. While not bringing him to a new order, he was now quite far into the first order in aura and magic. This made him realize that despite not having hunted, these past few days were the best spend ones since his reincarnation.

Making sure that no one followed him, he undid his transformation and took flight. While briefly considering to stage a flyover over the camp, he decides against it despite it being nearly guaranteed amusing to watch Gervas fearful and furious reaction. But now Gervas was already marked as Serania's target and he wouldn't even be able to offer an entertaining fight. Thus Darganth made his way directly back to his cave, making a mental note to watch Gervas last moment once his powers have recovered enough to allow him to view the past.

Unbeknown to him, his flight was spotted by an archer currently making her way through the forest. After she had received her mission, Allaire had found no traces of Darganth. By now she already thought about stopping her search, when she noticed him flying overhead. While he was now already over three meters long, his pitch black scales were easily recognizable.

Meanwhile, at the Red Lion Tribe, the preparation for the dismantling of their camp were under way. While they would only take the most important things with them, such as their tents and food, they had to build provisional carriages. While most of the tribe was busy with these works, Serania stood in front of Gervas. He had called her to him a few hours after Darganth left.

While he initially became frustrated that she learned nothing pertaining magic or any important secrets, when she told him that she was likely pregnant with his child, he wanted to jump up in joy. While a persons affinity's are not solely based on the affinity of the parents, it plays a large role and the chance to get someone with space affinity was too great of a chance. Giving his orders that she would be treated with utmost care for the coming months, he didn't notice her short smile.

Initially she expected to be freed only from her nightly activity's, but he exempted her from all duty's, not knowing that this would increase the time she had to train and quicken his death. Leaving the tent, she watched from she camps edge as the rest of the tribe packed up their tents and threw them on carriages that looked like they would fall apart at every moment. All the time she absorbed the surrounding mana, while constantly suppressing her grin.

After nearly five hours, they had finished their work. With all the tents stacked on the wagons, the women and other non-combatants grouped up between them, while the men trained in the use of aura formed a protective screen around the convoy. Due to the beast continents nature, they had no animals to tow the carriages, so the task fell to the non-combatants.

While a single aura user could do the work of a dozen of them, they pushed this task to the rest with the excuse of not wasting mana. While it was true, now that she knew how much more powerful even a second order aura trainee was thanks to Darganth, Serania knew better than to believe them. Even if it would take two aura users for each carriage, the amount of people at the third order alone was higher than the number of carriages.

While she found this idiotic as it slowed down their traveling speed, she could currently do nothing against it. Thus, instead of bothering with a problem she could do nothing against, she spend the time training. While she was allowed to sit in a carriage along with the chief and his wives, due to the technique she got from Darganth not creating any visible indications, she had to only watch out for Gervas while condensing symbols. This was also the reason why she didn't instantly condense all three first ranks symbols like Darganth had done, despite being confident in achieving it thanks to the knowledge she received.

Like this, their journey continued for two days, without any large disturbances. While they encountered small groups of beasts, there were never any that could become dangerous for even their first ranks. During this time, they didn't manage to traverse that much distance, mainly due to the forest slowing them down even more than normally due to their carriages. Some of their combatants would also separate from them in small groups in regular intervals, scouting ahead and redirecting them around more dangerous beasts at their return. This slowed them down even further, as they evaded every beast above the second order.

By now they had reached quite close to the mountain Darganth inhabitants. When they first noticed the pitch black dragon flying overhead, Gervas had nearly tried to attack it, but was held back by his guards. Serania, who had watched this happen from a distance was quite torn whether she should hope that the chief manages to break free and attacks or not.

On one hand, she had noticed the spells that Darganth had kept active to scan his surroundings, managing to infer his mana pool to be larger than everything she has seen. Should a fight break out, she was quite sure that Gervas would die within seconds. But at the same time, she wasn't sure whether the dragon would attack the rest of the tribe for their chiefs actions. Of course, even if Gervas had attacked, she would have survived, but at the moment she didn't know that dragon to be Darganth, or even that he is a dragon.

When they finished their march for the day, the tribe once again formed a circle out of the carriages, serving as a provisional defense. This was already routine for them, as they would periodically move camp ever since before every currently living tribe members birth. Finding a good place to sleep for the night, she noticed that Gervas was taking part in the night watch himself. Finding this unnatural, she cast a weak wind spell to allow her to overhear his conversation with one of the guards.

While the knowledge she received was not enough to instantly learn how to form invisible spell circles, the darkness and weak nature of the spell allowed her to hide the circle from everyone present.

“I hope that these bastards won't come here. I don't want to be swarmed by goblins with only these carriages as walls.”

“Agreed chief. But if it gets too difficult, we can always leave the burdens behind and escape with most of the warriors.” Hearing those words Serania found it difficult to suppress her urge to kill the man with a well placed spell. While she had not yet formed any of the symbols, with the second order not forming despite her just having cast a spell only due to the first order one still missing, a sneak attack with a spell would make simple work out of him.

“But lets leave that as a last resort. I still need the women to let loose some steam, being friendly to that eagle bastard brought my patience to its limit.”

“I still don't know why you did that. If you wanted him to teach you magic we could have simply captured him and forced him to tell us.”

“Such idiocy is why you are still stuck at the first rank. Even before I knew he was a space mage that could escape at any time, we needed a good reason to act against him. Bird beastmen are rare, their birth rates are so low that they fiercely protect their own. I don't know what they are exactly, but I am quite sure that he has methods to notify his tribe should something happen to him.”

“But would they truly attack us for one person, especially when he is already dead? They would guaranteed loose more.”

“They wouldn't. From what I have heard when I had traveled around, they band together in such large groups that the lowest of their tribes count as mid-sized one. And you know what that means?”

“Third ranks.”

“Yes, third ranks. While we may have lost the chance to learn magic, we have gotten his child. Even if he only uses aura, space aura is still more powerful than the other elements. We just need to take care to educate him as we want and this entire thing was worth it.”

Noticing the man to to leave Gervas side, again pretended to sleep. While her anger spiked after the last words, she calmed herself and ended her spell. Taking precautions against a possible goblin attack was far more important that angering herself over these comments. Looking towards Gervas to ensure that looked another way, she cast a area detection spell. Waiting for the spell to show her its results, she started sleeping once she found no goblins or beasts nearby.

Gervas was meanwhile growing nervous. He had just felt a detection spell wash over him and not knowing that it came from Serania, he believed it to be from an enemy. Quickly passing words of this around, the guards got into position. Standing dispersed around the camp, ready for any attack, they waited for twenty minutes, but no attack came.

“Maybe its just a beast wanting to find out how strong we are, but it decided against attacking after realizing that the chief is at the second rank?” One of the men around him asked.

“Maybe. Tell the men that they can relax somewhat, but they should remain vigilant. We don't know if and when we may get attacked.” These words quickly spread through the guards.

Now no longer constantly combat ready, they patrolled through most of the night. When it reached three in the morning, they started loosing focus. When someone wanted to attack us, they would have done so earlier, they reasoned. Unbeknown to them, there was a group that planned to attack them, but simply failed to notice them earlier.

Making their way towards the camp was a group of goblins. Goblins were a group of humanoid monsters with neither great physical strength nor high intelligence. The only reason they still exist as a species is their high birth rate and the lack of danger they hold towards any sufficiently powerful individual. A large part of this comes from their lack of innate mana progression as well as lack of intelligence to learn aura or magic.

After having received the news of the tribe making camp, their leader had send out about half of them to attack. While they would normally leave only minimal defenders in their cave, Darganth's arrival meant that they had to operate in smaller groups due to their fear of being found by him.

Despite lacking in intelligence, their small statue and dark green skin allows them to be extremely stealthy, especially by night. This lead them to reach up to a few meters away from the camp, before they were spotted.

“Goblins!”

Hearing the guards shout, everybody got up in a hurry. While the defense was normally left to the aura users, against goblins they all could make an impact. While the non-combatants started standing up and preparing, the first warriors attacked the goblins. Letting loose projectiles of all kinds, the goblins at the front of the charge started dying in waves. Despite this, their numbers didn't fall and they reached the defenders after just a few seconds.

While the front line devolved into a brawl, Serania had picked up a short knife for her defense and started scanning through their numbers. Due to the darkness, she used a heat vision spell which allowed her to quickly identify the largest goblins. Even children know that while they could not train in mana, goblins would grow in size and power by eating. After a reaching a certain size, they would then evolve into hobgoblins, gaining an increased level of intelligence, enough to allow them to learn aura and magic.

While the goblins she identified were still far from being a hobgoblin, they were still the leaders and the most powerful ones in the group. Thinking for a moment, she got the idea to use the chaos of the fighting to form her first magic symbol, while at the same time killing a few of these goblins. Despite her mana pool not having fully filled up again, she formed the mana she had into a projectile, firing it towards the horde.

Having no element, this attack was nearly completely invisible to the naked eye and thus struck its target with neither the goblins nor the tribe knowing what happened. Striking the goblins head with enough force to let it burst like a water melon, the its comrades started to grow nervous. Due to their lack of intelligence, goblins are extremely brave against enemies but even more fearful of everything unknown. This combined with their lack of knowledge about mana and magic started a slight panic among them.

When the second head burst, this panic grew even more, with the first ones even fleeing. Noticing the enemy to start wavering, Gervas started to become encased in external aura. With his defense now strong enough that he was completely immune to the goblins weapons, he started rampaging among their ranks, no loner bothering to defend. While he could only keep this up for about five minutes, his actions were the last straw that lead to a full rout.

First having some of their strongest members dying out of nowhere and then the enemy growing invincible lead to even the strongest goblins in the group fleeing after not even fifteen minutes of fighting. Despite their irritation over their quick flight, the tribe started celebrating. Not only did they defend themselves against a horde of goblins, they did so with nearly no casualty’s.

Despite just having achieved victory, Gervas gave the order to start moving. While they had just a few hours of sleep, the fear that this was only a scout group and a larger one would arrive soon made the tribe move despite this.

The goblins were meanwhile making their way back to their cave. Contrary to the tribes fears, they didn't start amassing an army to retaliate, at least not against them. When the group returned, their leader demanded to know why they did so empty handed.

“Were attacked by monster. Descended from mountain and killed goblins.” One replied to him while pointing upwards.

This made the leader furious. Back when Darganth had fought against the ice bears some goblins had witnessed it and what they thought to be miracles. As only Hobgoblins could know magic, they only knew that the strongest of them sometimes created miracles. Seeing Darganth use this unknown power that was, in their mind, reserved for their strongest made them call him monster. While they had witnessed elemental beasts, these only had one element and thus becoming known to them. In contrast, Darganth had sometimes used pure mana as attacks as it was nearly completely invisible to the naked eye.

“First monster steal supreme goblin power, now monster attack? Then now we get ready to hunt monster.” The leader declared.

This caused chaos to erupt in the cave, with goblins running around and grabbing whatever weapon they could find. While most were simple rocks and clubs, a few had weapons they gained from previous raids.