Chapter 88: 88. Into The Ashplain

They left Vashari two hours before dawn.

Sael had suggested the timing, not for secrecy, she said, but because the Ashplain’s first fifty kilometers were open savanna, and crossing open savanna in full daylight meant announcing their position to every vantage point between the coast and the eastern mountains. Leaving early would put them deep into the plain’s central corridor before the sun gave anyone a clear sightline.

Owen had agreed. He had also noticed, without saying so, that Sael’s suggestion showed a detailed knowledge of Ironmane surveillance patterns — more detailed than she had let on in the compound meeting.

He walked the Ashplain in his humanoid form. His traveling coat didn’t do much against the pre-dawn chill, not cold by human-continent standards, but dry in a way the coast hadn’t been. The air smelled of mineral soil and dry grass, and underneath that, something harder to name. Old. Like the land had a particular quality to it that the city didn’t.

Leah walked in her natural form, and out here she moved differently than she had in the city. Easier. Her stride lengthened, her posture loosened, and she looked less like someone who had spent fourteen months in a cell and more like someone who simply belonged here.

She noticed him noticing.

“The Ashplain does that,” she said. “To anyone who grew up here. You come back and the body remembers things the mind hasn’t thought about in years.”

“Good things I hope?”

“Mostly.” Her ears tracked something in the grass ahead — he picked it up through Mana Sense, a large herbivore startled and moving away. “My first hunt was here. I was eleven. My mother’s senior warriors took me out before dawn, same as this.”

“Did you catch anything?”

“A grassland boar. Twice my size.” A pause. “I was very proud of myself.”

“You should have been,” Owen said.

She glanced at him. Not quite a smile, but close.

Behind them, the group held its formation. Alfred had taken the rear without needing to be asked, his tower shield across his back, his sense of his surrounding — less refined than Owen’s but trained and dependable — covering their back approaches.

Odessa walked mid-group with her Azure Sky Dragon circling thirty meters overhead, high enough to scan ahead but close enough to respond quickly. Yuki held the left flank, the position that gave her the best reaction angle if anything came from the grass on the unwatched side.

Uru rode on Yuki’s head and periodically sent pulses through the bond.

Three kilometers in there was a presence.

Owen stopped walking.

The group stopped with him — no signal needed. The months of shared experience had built a collective attentiveness to his movement that worked almost like its own instinct.

He extended his Mana Sense to full range and read the plain around them.

Grass. Open ground. The retreating signature of the boar. And then — at roughly four hundred meters, spread in a wide arc across their path — eleven signatures. Beastfolk. All B-rank or above, some approaching A-rank. The particular shape of their mana arrangements told him these were people actively trying to suppress their output. Trying to blend into the background noise of the savanna.

“Eleven,” he said quietly. “Four hundred meters. In an Arc formation, two o’clock to ten o’clock.”

“Ironmane?” Leah asked.

“The mana pattern matches what Vorak’s scouts were running in Vashari.” He paused. “They’re better at suppression out here though.”

“I presume they’ve been tracking us since we left,” Alfred said. Calm, not alarmed. Just noting it.

“Probably since the gate,” Leah agreed. “Vorak would have had people watching the compound.”

“Then they know our numbers and what we’re carrying,” Yuki said. She was already loosening her katana grips. “And they chose just eleven. Either they’re very confident—”

“Or there are more behind them,” Owen finished. He checked. Further out, past the eleven… yes. A second cluster. Seven signatures, two hundred meters back, positioned as a reserve.

“Eighteen total,” he said. “Seven held back behind the first line.”

A moment of quiet passed before a voice was heard again.

“Odessa,” Owen said. “How’s your altitude?”

“Azure is at thirty meters and fighting the wind. If I push her to fifty she’ll have better strike angles but less precision on the water breath in a crosswind.”

“Keep her at thirty. Her Precision matters more.” He looked at the group. “We don’t need to go through all eighteen. If we break the first line quickly enough, the second wave may decide it’s not worth it.”

“And if they don’t?” Leah asked.

Owen’s wings shifted slightly under his coat. “Then we break the second line too.”

“Simple enough,” Leah said eagerly.

Owen said. “The Ironmane warriors are just following orders from leadership that’s been compromised. That’s not on them.”

“Understood,” Alfred said.

“Understood,” Yuki confirmed.

Leah said nothing. Owen decided to take that as agreement.

Then they proceeded forward.

The Ironmane broke cover at three hundred meters.

Eleven warriors stepped out of the grass in a line timed to land with impact — weapons out, spaced wide, the posture of a force that was hoping for surrender before it came to anything else. The warrior at the front wasn’t Vorak, but he carried himself like someone who answered directly to him. Large even by lion-folk standards, his mane greying with age, holding a two-handed war-staff across his body.

“Travelers,” he said. His voice carried across the plain without effort. “The Ashplain route is temporarily closed by order of Chief Marak of the Ironmane Clan. Turn back to Vashari.”

“The Ashplain is neutral ground under inter-clan agreement,” Leah said. “Chief Marak doesn’t have the authority to close it unilaterally.”

“The Chief’s authority is sufficient,” the warrior said. “Turn back.”

“No,” Owen said.

The lead warrior looked at him with the expression of someone who had hoped the figure in the traveling coat was a secondary concern, but he was now reconsidering.

Then he raised his war-staff and the eleven warriors moved.

Owen shrugged the coat off and his wings snapped to full extension.

A dragon’s wingspan at close range — even in humanoid form, even standing on the ground — produced a reflex in most living things that had nothing to do with decision-making. The eleven warriors’ forward momentum stalled, just for a half-second, something older than training taking over. Fear.

Half a second was enough.

Leah moved first. She crossed twenty meters to the nearest warrior in a low, flat sprint, and hit him in a controlled takedown that used his own momentum against him, her grip finding his weapon arm rather than his body, folding him onto the grass without much effort.

Owen went through the center.

He activated Momentum Shift and drove into the core of the formation. The lead warrior’s war-staff swung for his head and he ducked under it, came up inside its range where it was useless, and closed both hands on the warrior’s collar with enough force to make the point clearly. He lifted, turned, and put him down hard enough that the fall did the work.

Alfred had taken on three warriors at once and was handling it with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that speed was no longer something he needed to rely on. His tower shield took their strikes without complaint. His counters were measured and placed deliberately, each one aimed at ending the engagement rather than escalating it.

Odessa directed her Azure Sky Dragon to strike in front of a group of three who were angling toward Owen’s rear — a concentrated water blast that didn’t hit them but carved a channel in the dirt directly in their path, making their approach suddenly awkward. They broke their run to redirect, and by the time they had, Yuki was already there.

She read where they were going before they had fully committed to it, and positioned herself at the point where all three lines of movement converged. Her katana worked in flat, controlled strikes: hands, elbows, nothing intended to do lasting damage.

When they swung back, Beast Shift with Uru let her move through their strikes cleanly, and the confusion on their faces compounded with each exchange.

The eleventh warrior came at Yuki from behind.

Uru dropped from her head.

The slime hit the warrior’s sword and immediately went to work with its Corrosion, eating through the material in seconds. The warrior shouted and dropped the blade. Uru reformed on the ground beside him, expanded to roughly twice its usual size, and wrapped a pseudopod around his ankles. The warrior went down.

Eleven warriors down.

The second wave had been watching from two hundred meters back. But They didn’t advance.

—

Owen walked toward the second line at an unhurried pace.

At a hundred meters, the seven warriors held their ground but didn’t raise weapons.

At fifty, one of them stepped back.

Owen stopped at thirty meters and looked at them.

“I’m not interested in putting more people on the ground,” he said. His voice was level — not angry, not particularly forceful, just clear.

“But I will if that’s what’s needed. The Ashplain is neutral ground. We are using it. Chief Marak’s orders does not override the inter-clan agreement that every warrior in front of me swore to uphold when they took their rank.”

The wind moved through the grass. No one spoke.

“We’re not turning back,” Owen said. “The only question is whether you report to Vorak that you stood aside, or that you tried and got the same result as the eleven behind me.”

The seven exchanged glances. Then the warrior who had stepped back stepped further, and the others followed, and the second wave withdrew into the grass without another word.

Owen waited until his Mana Sense confirmed they were actually leaving and not repositioning.

He turned back to the group. Leah was standing over the lead warrior, who had pushed himself upright and was watching her with an expression Owen couldn’t read from this distance. She said something to him — short, direct — and he looked away.

Owen picked up his coat from where it had fallen.

“The Ashplain’s clear for now,” he said. “We should move. Vorak will have their report within the hour and whoever he sends next will be better prepared.”

“Better than eighteen,” Odessa said. She was watching her Azure Sky Dragon spiral back to altitude with the look of someone who had found the last twelve minutes genuinely satisfying. “That’s both encouraging and worrying.”

“Everything on this continent is,” Alfred said, and produced his thermos from his inventory, ready for another sip of his famous tea.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep