Chapter -21474836328 (Minor Interlude: After Action Report)

  “The camp was close to the location provided to the messenger by the ranger, and wasn’t very hard to find from above. It was laid out in a standard legion Castra, the size for a single cohort. As I approached, I only saw a single figure moving around inside the camp, while every other body I could see was slumped on the ground and unmoving. I assumed that this was another of the bandit legion deserters, as it was not wearing ranger issued equipment. I got some extra altitude and executed a high velocity impact, resulting in a rather delightful crater.

  “I was still dusting myself off when I heard a sound coming from the crater that was something like metal scraping across metal. Very unpleasant. When I turned to look, I saw the splattered remains of the figure moving across the inside of the crater to the center. Curiosity got the better of me, and I waited and observed. A short time later, the remains had all accumulated and the movement stopped. Then everything sort of fell apart into a pile of black sand, and a naked woman stood up out of it. She screamed and raised her arms, which were now wielding a ridiculous sword. It was way out of proportion. Entirely too long and thin.

  “Anyway, she lunged at me. Identification showed a [Mage] tag light red coloration, so I’d estimate her level around 128. Possibly waiting on skills before advancing, but that’s only a guess. In any case, she was fast for a level 128 mage, but still way too slow to realistically hit me. I was still feeling curious, so I took measure of her ability. Despite being a mage, her sword work was impressive; definitely some professional training there. Her forms were odd, so I’m thinking maybe an elf gave her some instruction, which could explain the weirdly dainty sword.

  “After several minutes, I became bored of parrying her attacks. I let her get in close, and she attempted to shove me down with her foot. I, of course, used the touch to increase the effect of gravity on her body, which took quite a lot more mana than I anticipated, but she fell down anyway. At that point, I identified myself, and she stated that she was working with the ranger team I’d been called in to assist. I cancelled my gravity effect, and she led me to the rangers. Another oddity I noticed is that she had an unwavering sense of where they were located, both direction and distance.

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  “When we found the rangers, they were all perfectly fine, and had even been working on freeing themselves from their captivity. As it turned out, the healer of all people had managed to kill every single other person in the camp, called it something like ‘orbital desecration’ or whatever. You know healer types and all their big words for things.

  “Since I was no longer needed at that point, and they had solved the mystery of the missing cohort, I took off and returned here.”

  Gravity finished giving her after action report, and all the other sentinels present started asking their questions and providing tactical feedback. Swarm suggested that she could have remained in the air a bit longer to observe the situation before deciding to simply smash into the only living person, and Gravity’s retort was that if everyone was dead, then there was no longer any problem. Scorch said they really shouldn’t be making a habit of going around crushing rangers into craters, no matter how impressive the crater. This started a brawl, which Night pointedly stayed out of.

  No, he was seated calmly in his chair, hands raised before him, fingers pressed together, thinking. The woman described by his erstwhile subordinate had rung some bells, and he was now crawling through the archive of his memories, searching for a particular shelf that he hoped would never need to be revisited.

  “Gravity,” he spoke, finally, “you neglected to provide a physical description of the woman you encountered, only a brief outline of a few of her combat abilities. I would prefer to know her appearance so that if encountered in the future, I am able to properly identify her.”

  Night didn’t feel any better after Gravity provided the woman’s description. She was too low level and entirely too short to be exactly the same woman he had met several thousand years prior; however, she had asked a favor of him, and a favor was owed. “Pass a message to me when we meet again and I do not know who you are.” A simple enough favor, and Night was glad to finally fulfill it and be done dealing with her.