Normally, Velik chafed at moving so slowly. What took most people a week to travel, he could do in an hour or two, and he had no doubt he could reach the boundary in a few days. For the time being, it suited his purposes to move slowly, and he found that he appreciated the luxury of being able to just sit there and let the horse pull the wagon while he force-fed his battered system more upgrades.

What he didn’t enjoy was the chatter of other people, but even that didn’t turn out to be all that bad. There was a lot of overlap between people who preferred solitary lives away from civilizations and people who were interested in starting their lives over as druids, so while they were all friendly enough, none of them felt the need to fill every waking moment with pointless conversation.

He pushed the stat foods as hard as he could, one every fourteen hours. It made him feel absolutely awful, but it wasn’t crippling. If and when monsters attacked, he was able to fight back. Though it turned out that a wagon full of druids were more than capable of taking care of themselves, especially since all of them were at least level 25. In Sildra’s case, she was close to level 40. Purging all those agents of corruption was apparently good for grinding out levels, and the fact that her class could absorb champion seeds only made the process go even faster.

The dungeon seed itself was gone, sent to Cravel to be worked on by Torwin’s tinkerer friend—the same one who’d repaired his mana compass, he believed. That would be handled by Jensen, possibly with some plans to bring a team of gold-ranked hunters on board. If things worked out like they all hoped, it would mean an end to the dungeon seeds and, hopefully, a finite number of agents remaining in the human lands.

Whatever happened in Ghestal wasn’t Velik’s concern anymore. He’d done enough to set everyone up for success at this point. They had the tools, knowledge, and strength to check the corruption themselves, and he was confident that Sildra’s circle of druids would expand to whatever size it needed to until they wiped out every one of the body snatching monsters.

His job was to go to the source and make sure it could never reintroduce new dungeon seeds. Since he’d almost certainly have to go through Tesir to reach that point, that plan suited him just fine. Velik wasn’t exactly eager to meet the tiger divine beast again, but that confrontation was inevitable, and, if Morgus was to be believed, he’d be far stronger once he passed the boundary and transitioned from the normal system to the LPS version.

As for what Sildra wanted, it was very complex with lots of politics involved between a few different factions occupying the same space. Treaties and oaths of mutual support between noble houses had dragged a lot of people who otherwise would have had nothing to do with it into the mix, and the whole thing had eventually settled into a deadlock until Tesir had upset the balance.

No one was really completely sure who was an agent of corruption and who was just acting out of self-interest, and the powers in charge weren’t letting druids get close enough to them to find out one way or another. They cited fear of assassination or sabotage, which might have been reasonable under normal circumstances, but had only escalated the fighting when the king had ordered his nobles to start raising armies to break up the eastern front.

Velik wanted nothing to do with any of that, but in the interest of preventing a lot of potential fighting and death, he’d agreed to help Sildra for the week or so it would take him to finish up the rest of the stat boosters. His role was simple: to get her or another druid within spitting distance of their list of suspect nobles and forcibly extract any agents of corruption they found.

The hope was that without them in the mix, their former hosts would be able to deescalate the fighting. Velik didn’t know how feasible that really was, but his part was merely hunting down the monsters and disposing of them, and he was happy to do that.

They rolled into a dry, dusty town called Avordin when Velik had nine meals left. If he took his time, that gave him one week before he was done. The boundary was a scant thirty miles east, where a large fort was controlled by one of the dukes who was suspected of being an agent of corruption. The town itself was relatively tiny with a native population of perhaps four hundred, but these days it was completely overrun by military camps.

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They flanked both sides of the road, rows and rows of tents with pennants for different nobles proudly displayed. Past Avordin was more of the same, the only differences being the number of tents and the colors on the pennants. There were no less than eight different nobles fielding their platoons of soldiers, which was weirdly impressive in its own way.

“I didn’t realize there were so many soldiers in Ghestal,” Velik remarked upon seeing the endless dusty fields of tents.

“It’s because of Slokara. Every baron and duke is required to keep a standing army of at least three hundred fighters and another five hundred reserves,” one of the druids explained. “Only the officers and knights will have classes related to military combat. The rest will be guards or hunters.”

So, the mission is going to be to get through the miles of tents to find the commanders, who are presumably rich and will have much bigger, nicer tents. Seems simple enough. The complication is dragging someone else along with me.

“Where are we starting?” he asked as he eyed up the soldiers staring back at them.

“We’re on friendly terms with one of the barons here responding to the king’s mandate,” Sildra explained. “Several druids have already been through his camp and confirmed it’s clean. We’ll be staying there since there’s no real room in Avordin now.”

“Fun.”

* * *

Truthfully, the tent itself was a luxury. Velik spent more time sleeping under the stars than anywhere else, and having a bedroll and a windbreak was not his typical setup. He supposed he probably ought to enjoy the comfort while he still could, because he didn’t expect to sleep in a bed for a long time once he left.

The fact that he had to share the tent with three other people overshadowed the slight luxury it represented.

All of the druids were in the same situation, even Sildra. They’d been stuck wherever there was room for them, usually in whatever odd tent wasn’t full to capacity. None of them had expected that, wrongly assuming they’d stick together. Sildra had gone to speak to the commander in charge about rectifying that issue, and in the meantime had just asked Velik not to start any trouble.

Like I would raise a ruckus over something this petty.

“You can drop your kit over there in the corner,” one of the soldiers said in an attempt to be helpful and friendly.

“Don’t have one,” Velik said.

Another soldier snorted. “That’s stupid.”

The third one smacked the back of his head. “You’re stupid,” he said. “He probably doesn’t need one. Can’t you feel how high his level is?”

“Nah. Can’t feel shit.”

“And that’s why you’re stupid! I told you to pick up some sort of instinctual [Identify]. Don’t got time to be targeting every soldier on the other side of the line once the fighting starts.”

“That’s what we’ve got you for,” the nice soldier said.

“Yeah? What’s the plan when I’m not around? Just mouth off until some platinum-ranked hunter squishes you like a bug?”

“Him?” the rude soldier asked, jerking a thumb at Velik. “He’s what, twenty? Twenty-one? How old are you, kid?”

“Eighteen,” Velik said.

“There you go. Eighteen. Couldn’t possibly be higher than level 15.”

The smart soldier just shook his head. “Idiot. Ten fulmites says he’s at least level 50.”

Surprisingly good guess.

Both of the other soldiers burst into laughter. “Oh, come on. There’s stretching for the truth, and then there’s what you’re trying to spin. The youngest knight in history to reach level 50 was still thirty-two. The youngest mage was forty-six. The youngest commander was forty-nine. But sure, if you’re giving money away, I’ll take it off your hands.”

“Easy enough to answer,” the rude soldier said. He rounded on Velik and pointed a finger. “What’s your level?”

“Would you believe 50?” Velik asked.

“I would not.”

Shrugging, Velik moved past him. “I don’t know what to tell you then.”

Before the conversation could go much further, one of Sildra’s druids stuck his head through the open tent flap. “Hey, boss wants you to head into town. She’s meeting with one of the barons and then it’s time for our first run.”

“First run at what?” one of the soldiers asked.

“We’re not supposed to share the details,” the druid told him before disappearing from the tent. Velik listened to him walk away, then turned to follow.

“Hey now, before you go, you gotta tell us your real level,” the nice soldier said.

“I already told you,” Velik said.

Then he vanished from inside the tent, leaving a round of surprised cursing behind him. Velik was a hundred feet down the trail between rows when he let off on the burst of speed. A pair of men walking by jumped in surprise, both of them eyeing him warily.

“Good gods,” one of the soldiers back in the tent muttered. “Maybe he really is… Nah. Couldn’t be.”

“Pay up!” the other one handed him.

“Didn’t prove nothing!”

The two soldiers out in the open looked like they were debating whether to try to stop him, and Velik wasn’t in the mood to answer questions. With a small nod of his head in their direction, he ran off at top speed again. All that was left behind was a bit more dust to add to what was already floating in the air.