AK - The Alchemy Kingdom

“Their communicator is active, but that only means it wasn’t destroyed…”

Karl continued to play to odds on his mind while the other Councilors panicked in their own ways. Lew and the two foreign elders apparently kept their cool, but that wasn’t carelessness, only their training guiding their response. The Alchemist didn’t want to accept that they couldn’t do anything besides waiting and praying, so he uselessly asked something he already knew.

“How fast can Sania get to them?”

Lew answered with an apologetic expression.

“Even if she travels through the night… Probably, days.”

Sania was leading the group of workers responsible for clearing the path to the tribes, so she was the closest asset to Tael’s group. Unfortunately, she was still more than 150 kilometers away. She would, of course, use the wind booster and burn all of the available LQ wind crystals to get there faster, but it would still take her days. Karl ended up voicing his thoughts without measuring the words.

“They don’t have this much time… They would be dead before she arrives.”

The sentence only pushed the concerned Councilors to a darker place. Marlen instinctively reacted by pointing out the other possibilities.

“We don’t know if it’s what you think… You also said that they shouldn’t be so close to the forest’s border…”

Karl wanted nothing but to agree with her. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of the event left little room for other explanations. He could indeed be wrong about it. After all, he wasn’t omniscient. However, Master AI’s description just fitted the report perfectly. The following lack of reply only added up to that conclusion.

“I wish I had other explanation, but… What they reported is something very specific. The glowing flies are clearly influenced by the light element, but they aren’t magic beasts. So their condition could only be the result of a light spell or something similar. Unless there’s a light Mage in the forest casting spells at this hour, the only other culprit I can think of is Fairies…”

The Faries are a sentient race that form a crystal core, like the Treants. But, differently from the latter, many considered their existence a tale. Mostly because of their rarity, but also because of the strange stories told by those who allegedly met them. In reality, the Faries are a race of beings born with a light crystal core, which gives them extreme control over the element.

Like all beings with a crystal core, the Faries are deeply influenced by their element, so they’re pure but also fierce. Even so, it wasn’t impossible to reason or even live in harmony with them. But, unfortunately, just like how happened with the Treants, the Serions didn’t think twice before attacking and trying to enslave them when they arrived on this continent.

The Humans might have forgotten the records and knowledge of the enimit between their races, but it never left the Faries’ memories. After all, they were a long-lived race, so most of them had a clear image of how destructive the Serions could be, and they wouldn’t differentiate Humans. In their eyes, they were all the same.

Karl wasn’t surprised about the existence of Faries. Master AI had already taught him about the different beings who live in this world. However, he wasn’t expecting to cross paths with them so close to the forest’s border since they had fled to the deepest parts of the woods.

In fact, not many sentient beings could live close to the forest’s center. Apart from the high levels of energy, the HT beasts would also threaten their existence. However, the Faries’ control over the light element allowed them to hide from their enemies, so they find a way to survive in the deepest parts of the forest. That’s why their appearance was so unexpected.

“Since it’s too far from their territory, it should be just a small group… But I don’t think the team would be able to face them, even if it’s just a couple of Faries. Light is a powerful element, but the danger lies in their illusions. With their mastery over the element, if our guys are caught by an illusion, they wouldn’t be able to fight back. Even though only high-level Faries have enough attacking power to threaten our team directly, most of them can use some illusion trick…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence as everyone understood it. They just hoped their people would be able to escape this predicament.

***

The Eastern Forest covered a little more than 5.4 million square kilometers of the continent. However, the forest was far from being homogenous because of the energy veins. Almost one hundred veins would create dozens of different and unexpected biomes through the forest.

Sania had just entered a part with visible denser vegetation, probably caused by a small vein. Unfortunately, she couldn’t stop to check or mark the location. Besides the life clock hanging over her comrades’ heads, a group of tireless grey wolves insisted on pursuing her. Actually, she wanted nothing more than stop and give the beasts a good time, her hands ached for a good fight, but every second could mean the death of someone.

Usually, the wolves would be fast enough to get her, but she was going at least three times faster. Although she wasn’t as proficient as her sister, nor could she jump through the trees to avoid the irregular path, Sania was going pretty fast. Every time the arrays on the back of her coat glowed, a good amount of wind energy would be transformed into the element to push her forward.

The tool was pretty much the same as the wind booster on her boots, but on a large scale. Instead of focusing on sustainable energy consumption to increase her speed and jump like its predecessor, the tool just blindly wasted wind energy to push her as fast as possible. Of course, she was still using the lightness rune to reduce the strain on the tool, but even so, a LQ wind crystal would last through a few hours under this regimen.

Creating such a wasteful and unsustainable tool pained Alchemists’ hearts, but they needed something for emergencies, and this was all they could think of at this moment. Fortunately, they weren’t just throwing away good and fresh resources. They carefully selected crystals at the end of their lifetime to fuel the extravagant and inefficient array. So they weren’t actually losing that much.

Unsurprisingly, the elemental cost wasn’t the only downside of the tool. The instability of activation interfered in the user’s movements, and the side effects included dizziness, sickness, headache, and pain over the joints. Sania felt most of those, but she refused to stop until she got to the team’s last location.

The young woman had been traveling for 30 hours and had only stopped a dozen times for a few minutes. Not even her sister would be able to do such a thing. In fact, she couldn’t keep this going much longer, but hopefully, the tower wouldn’t be far. Fortunately, the teams left an Alchemy mark on a tree every kilometer, so she could use a locator to track the tower’s position. The marks would also be helpful to mark the traveled distance.

Sania breathed a sigh of relief as she couldn’t hear the wolves anymore. It wouldn’t be nice to come rescue the team and bring a pack of wolves. Though she wasn’t sure about losing the beasts, she decided against stopping to check, as her legs would probably give up.