[TTIABAD] Chapter 116: A Trap

“Damn it. I wanted to fight the cavemen.”

“Derek! Now isn’t the time for that!” Tyler hissed out in a whisper, clearly worried.

Well, on one hand, he had the right to be. I was very good at what I did, namely, keeping me and everyone away from anything that could end us without much effort. And that was a lot of things at the moment. We were deep enough in the dungeon that I didn’t feel safe entirely. But it was better than being murdered by an assassin. Now we had people here, which sure, that was completely possible. No one said there was only one town, village, or city out here. Hell, they could have just been a random group of B-Rank adventurers that randomly had taken our targets from us by pure chance.

But I doubted it. They weren’t strong enough.

“This is a trap, somehow.” I said.

All three of my companions had stern faces. It wasn’t exactly that they thought these random people were related to the assassin but that they were another group trying to kill us. Distrust of others were at an all time high. Sadly, I had different thoughts on the matter.

“Well… this is probably related to the assassin. We should move as fast and as far as possible, immediately.”

“What? How is it related to that guy that tried to kill us?” Tyler asked.

Instead of answering, I just pointed forward. Tyler turned, watching the group of five fight. They seemed to be normal enough people, well, adventurers at least, but some things stood out. Like how they were all using a similar element, something common in certain adventuring teams it seemed. Variety was great but having five earth mages, which these five were, meant most things just got fucking wrecked. But if you paid attention… and looked at their faces… even without my power you could tell that-

“They’re too weak.” Riary said after less than a minute.

“Yup. They’re really struggling with that group. Which makes no sense for… many reasons. That’s the weakest group around. Even getting this far would have been nearly impossible without me scouting the way. Maybe they went through the earth or something but… it smells fishy. I’m guessing the assassin took a roundabout approach or something but somehow got ahead of us.”

“But why fight the cavemen?” Tyler asked.

“Eyes maybe.” I said. Tyler eyebrows shot up to his head. “No, not like that. There’s practically a path of weak enemies from here to the cavemen. It would be a complete guess but not entirely possible we’d come this way. No, even then, that wouldn’t make enough sense…” I trailed off thinking about it.

“I believe the assassin expects we might help.” Konohora said.

I looked at her and shrugged. “Maybe. But that would mean he would need to know we’re roughly in this area. Which… I wouldn’t even know how he would realize that. It’s one thing to know we’re on a certain path but another to know where on the path we are. It’s almost like he’d need to be tracking us-”

I stiffened, as did the others. Was he tracking us? I expected him to follow but hadn’t considered we were being tracked by anything in particular.

“I haven’t felt any sort of scrying magic.” Riary said. Right, I had totally forgotten that was a thing people could just have.

“Our traces through the dungeon would not have been that hard to follow…” Konohora said, speaking warily.

“But we moved so fast!” Tyler said in a half whisper, full of indignation.

“Compared to who?” I said. “I could have ran three times the distance in the same amount of time and I suspect his shadow movement is even faster for long hauls. He might have simply found some signs that pointed that way and made a guess. Either way, it’s definitely a trap. Helping them, harming them, them merely just seeing us… no matter what, it would become an opportunity to attack us.”

“Can you… tell if they’re going to attack us?” Tyler asked me.

I blinked owlishly at him.

“You know! With your superpower!”

“Tyler… your faith in me is amazing but no. Maybe I could get something if they were standing right in front of me, all their muscles and power ready to unleash an attack, but I can’t just tell if someone means me harm in general. That’s not related to how ‘strong’ or ‘powerful’ someone or something is enough.”

“Your power does seem to be able to do anything.” Riary said with a smirk.

I couldn’t deny that. It almost made me scared shitless of meeting some old monster with a few hundred years to experiment and modify their own Ability. I’d already seen exactly one example of that and I’m 99% sure she could have deconstructed me to my base components within a moment if she really wanted to. Her arrogance had just been sky high. The only saving grace is that like me, she seemed to have ‘directed’ her ability to mostly interact with air.

“So, what do we do?” Tyler asked.

““Backtrack.”” I and Riary said at the same time, giving me a snort afterwards.

“Backtrack?”

“Going down this path is now suicidal at best. An assassin in wait, that knows he can be found? Nope. I don’t have the confidence to kill him and every hopefully failed assassination will make him that much more trickier to deal with.”

Saying so, I had to kiss my dreams of fighting actual cavemen goodbye, and start moving back where we came from. I could probably figure out a new path. But it wouldn’t exactly be simple…

*****

I let out a low growl. This was… getting ridiculous. It’d been a week now. In that time, we’d foughten more monsters but nothing that could truly challenge us. The reason for that was simple, I’d been afraid to draw the attention of anything too powerful.

I kept trying to move us deeper but that was dangerous and worse, the assassin was still tracking us somehow. This was the third time we’d run into the same group of adventurers. Riary had seemed suspicious the second time but her face morphed into an outright scowl after this.

“Divination.” She said darkly.

I blinked. Wait. WHAT?

I was shocked enough that Tyler beat me to the punch.

“Are you saying they can tell the future?” He asked, eyes wide and jaw dropped.

“...kinda.” Riary said, looking glum. “It’s not that simple. Future telling is… not the right way to say it. They divine, discover. If they have enough information at hand… they can make extremely good guesses that don’t seem to make sense on the surface.”

“Prediction based on information… but to a literal magical degree.” I said.

Riary nodded. Well… fuck.

There was an old, ancient saying. I forget it and how it went but it basically boiled down that if god had but one grain of rice and that was the only thing in the universe, he would be able to know that universe entirely. Or something like that. That wasn’t a great thing to deal with. That blew my information gathering out of the water.

“That… puts us in a tough spot.” I said.

Konohora nodded. “We can continue to circle around, trying to find a way through… but it is likely they will catch us in time.”

“Worse, this is basically proof that it is ‘they’ and not ‘he’. I doubt the assassin was hiding divination in his back pocket the whole time. We’re dealing with a group. To make matters worse, it’s been a week. Hell, if he got back to town within a day, the wound we left would be completely gone. It would have cost him nearly nothing to have a healer heal him.”

“So… we backtrack again?” Tyler asked.

“Yes… harder this time. We need to go back the way we came by a large margin and take a completely different route through this forest. We’re in a relatively safe clearing here but-”

I paused mid word as I felt something nearly indescribable. My tongue went dry in my mouth, my pupils shook, my blood practically flowed in reverse. I wasn’t just feeling power… I was feeling something so utterly alien that I couldn’t describe it even if I tried. It wasn’t normal, it was, it was so utterly different that my Analyze gave up for a moment. This wasn’t an incredibly harm quantum physics problem, this was someone telling my analyze one plus one equals three. And that was before the absolute ocean worth’s of power swept out and hit me like a brick wall to the face.

I’d felt this before, once, but I had been too weak to understand the nuance, the pure amount then.

This was someone on Vanessa Vilconoff’s level. Not just any B-Rank… but someone near the top.

I glanced over and floating through the air…

Was a Fairy.

Oh. Oh fuck.

“We have finally found you, the Legendary Demon.” The Fairy spoke. “I am Rinkaru and today you shall die.” She said with all the seriousness of the grave.

She was small, around eight inches tall, with butterfly wings. She wore what looked like nearly translucent clothes around her small body, glittering in the dungeon sunlight. Pale blue hair and pink eyes glared down at me, with a face that looked entirely too serious on such a beautiful small creature.

Fairies… I’d heard of them. They were the reason Humanity had survived as long as it had. They were protectors, the guardians, of Humans. They had been the vanguard against the demon invasion that started forty years ago and went on for thirty. Their population had been decimated as a result. But humanity still stood.

Most of the time… they were as anyone would expect. Happy, playful, giggly, playing pranks, but people had learned long, long ago that they were one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet.

“A fairy…” Tyler said, eyes surprised. But there wasn’t fear there. That was a mistake. Konohora and Riary, I noticed, had visibly paled. This had gone from dangerous to really bad very quickly.

The fairy, Rinkaru, looked down at Tyler.

“Tell me, Son of Man, why have you allied with the Enemy?” Rinkaru asked.

Tyler was caught flat footed.

“He’s, he’s my friend. Derek hasn’t done anything wrong! Why are you trying to kill him?!” Tyler asked nobly.

Rinkaru just shook her head slightly.

“Young, so young. My people, my sisters, were not slaughtered so a human youth could ignore and spit on their sacrifice. You have betrayed humanity and for that crime, you shall be ended.”

“But why?! Derek… he hasn’t done anything wrong!” Tyler cried out. I watched and waited. He wasn’t going to convince her but every second gave me more time to think about how on earth we were going to come out of this alive.

“He is a Demon.” Rinkaru said with finality. “That is wrong enough.”

I felt-

****

Konohora had been watching, keeping her eyes firmly planted on the fairy while trying to make sure the assassin didn’t appear out of nowhere.

And then there was a blast of energy and light that nearly took off her head. It went through multiple trees, burrowing through them, destroying them with ease. She recovered fast, turning… only to gape at what she was seeing.

The Fairy, Rinkaru, had teleported instantly. She was now behind Derek with her hand raised, still glowing, and Derek…

His left shoulder was completely gone. His left arm barely hanging on by threads of flesh. He was looking down at it with shock and horror writ over his face.

“Fast.” Rinkaru said, her voice metaphorically like a bomb in the silence that followed from her blast. “A C-Rank dodging my blast… how rare. Killing you is even more important than I ever feared.”

Dodging? With grim realization, Konohora realized how Derek’s body was bent to the side. Rinkaru had been aiming for his head.

Konohora felt fear flood her veins as she realized they’d have to fight one of the strongest creatures in the world.

When she saw three more people walk out from between the trees, her fear nearly turned to panic.