Slokara didn’t look that much different from Ghestal, as far as Velik could tell. The trees were the same. The fields were the same. The only real change was that the mountains were on the north side instead of the south. It had taken them a solid three days to get through, which was extraordinarily good time, according to Torwin.

Once they were finally out of the mountains, they set up a camp in the trees and took a solid twelve hours of downtime. Velik could have kept going, but it was easy to see how hard the trip had been on Torwin. Never mind the regular strain of prolonged high-speed traveling, the avalanche he’d been caught in had beaten the man all to hell. A healing potion had helped, but it wasn’t enough.

“Maybe we’ll find a different route back when we’re done,” Velik offered while they sat around a campfire, eating a rabbit stew Torwin had cooked up for them.

“If we can,” Torwin agreed. “Depends on whether we’re being chased out or not.”

“You think that’ll happen? I kind of doubt anyone in this country who’s strong enough to keep up with us would bother to come all the way to the border. Don’t they have anything better to do, like hunt down their own body snatchers?”

As far as Velik knew, Sildra’s new circle hadn’t spread past the border, which meant the Slokarans had no reliable way to sniff out the agents of corruption embedded into their society. That assumed they were even there, of course. There was no way to tell. Maybe the monsters weren’t interested in Slokara, or just hadn’t had enough time to get that far.

Or maybe Slokara was completely rotten from top to bottom. The whole country could be in the grips of the monsters already. The border closing might not be to keep the infestation out so much as it was to prevent anyone who could spot it from getting in.

“Morgus shelter us from that storm,” Torwin muttered fervently when Velik brought the idea up. “If Slokara has fallen, then they’ll be mobilizing their armies to fall on Ghestal and claim the country through sheer force now that infiltration has failed.”

“Would we be ready to repel them?”

Torwin snorted. “Not likely. There’s some sort of… I don’t want to call it a rebellion, because chances are the baronies involved are under agent control, but a coalition of them is gathering on the eastern front. The royal army is working to contain that with support from the western and southern baronies, last I heard. If Slokara invades right now, they’ll probably march all the way to the capital without meeting any real resistance.”

As horrible as it was to think, the best case scenario was probably that Slokara was in the same position Ghestal was—where they had a problem of corruption infesting the governmental structure, one that hadn’t completely subsumed the kingdom. If there were no agents of corruption, Slokara was likely to take advantage of Ghestal’s weakness to invade. And if they’d completely fallen, they might go ahead and invade anyway.

All of that was outside the scope of Velik’s responsibilities, at least for the moment. He had no intentions of ever getting drafted into the war, but if it turned out that Slokara was just as infested, he’d happily help Sildra’s druid circle establish a foothold in the country. That would come later, if it ever happened at all. Before that, they had a trip to the Verdant Belt to complete and a dungeon seed to find.

They spent the rest of the night carving new arrows for Torwin to help him replace the hundreds that he’d spent crossing the mountain. They weren’t as good as the ones he’d purchased from a professional fletcher’s shop, but they were strong enough to support the various skills Torwin channeled through them, and that was the important part.

After that, they slept in shifts, with Torwin snoozing away the remaining night hours and Velik taking his turn after the sun came up. By the time the sun was overhead, they were ready to resume their journey.

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* * *

“I see what you mean about not blending in,” Velik said. “Why is everyone so… so bright?”

They’d spied their first town about three hours after leaving the woods clinging to the base of the mountains. The trees and animals might have been the same as back home, but the locals were certainly different. For one thing, everyone was much taller than average. Velik would probably be considered on the short side for a man here, and he was close to six feet.

He probably still could have gotten away with walking through town except for his hair. His was dark brown, almost black, and the stubble that grew on his face was equally dark. The locals ranged from light brown to blonde that was almost white, and they tended heavily to the top end of that spectrum. Every single one of them was like that, too. Their skin tones were also paler, though that wasn’t so far away from Velik’s that he thought he’d be called out over it. Plenty of the field workers had tans, after all.

“Just how they grow them down south, I guess,” Torwin told him. “But you see why getting a local resupply is going to be an issue?”

There was a garrison at the east end of the town, and it was fully populated by soldiers. They were out in force throughout the town, too, keeping the peace and watching for trouble. Even the locals weren’t immune to scrutiny, though Velik had only seen one guy descended upon and forced to present papers. He’d come out of the inn and wore a traveler’s pack, so Velik guessed he wasn’t native to the area.

“Is it always like this?” he asked.

“Not usually this bad,” Torwin said, “though to be fair, I haven’t been down here in a decade. Might be the threat of body snatchers has them riled up.”

That would certainly explain the animosity from the soldiers, but Velik didn’t see how it would do any good. [Apex Hunter] wasn’t concerned about anyone down there. No one was over level 40, maybe not even 35, and the average level was more like 20. That included the locals, which surprised Velik for a second. These people were close to the forest, after all, and he’d personally confirmed an abundance of monsters there.

Then he remembered how weak the villagers back home on the frontier were, and they were primarily logging towns that sent crews into the actual forest. These people were the same, but for some reason, Velik had heard “military-driven country” and assumed they’d all be stronger. In hindsight, he wasn’t sure why he’d thought that included the grocers and cobblers of the society.

“Either way, we’ve got no papers. Going down there would be asking for trouble,” Torwin said. “We’d be better off foraging if supplies get low, but I think we should be a good month away from that.”

Velik mentally reviewed the contents of his storage space, an act that was as simple as thinking about it. An image of all the things stowed away in there came to him, not organized in any sort of way, but still easy enough to sort through. Half the space was taken up with foodstuffs and Torwin’s collection of casks. He’d all but bought out an inn of their supply back home and paid a premium price for the privilege to get them to agree to his requests. Apparently, they’d valued keeping their regulars happy more than scoring some extra coin and had needed some convincing.

The way that guy drank, though, there was no way he’d have enough beer to last even another two weeks, let alone a month. That was not Velik’s problem, however. “Yep,” he said. “Plenty of food. We should be home before we run out.”

“Nothing left to do but do it,” Torwin said. “We won’t be taking any of the roads, obviously, but I think if we follow the mountains east, we’ll circle far enough around the country to get to the Verdant Belt eventually. Probably be an extra thousand miles, but we’ll get there without anyone trying to arrest us.”

“Someone’s looking at us,” Velik said.

“What? We’re five miles away. Do they have someone high level there?” Torwin quickly spotted the man once Velik pointed it out. Standing on top of the barracks was a soldier with some sort of spy glass pointed in their direction. “Ah. Damn it. If someone was willing to drop a thousand decarmas on something like that for a garrison in some no-name town at the edge of the kingdom, there’s no telling what other toys they might have to play with. We should get going before they send people out to investigate.”

“Even if they can follow the trail, there’s no way they can keep up,” Velik pointed out. “But… long range communication might alert soldiers ahead of us.”

“Exactly. It would be best if they lost track of us sooner rather than later. We’ll do a long loop back toward the mountains. If we’re lucky, they’ll think we’re just spies sent from Ghestal who learned what we wanted and fled back home.”

Velik didn’t bother to argue with that, but it sounded like wishful thinking to him. No one would brave the mountain crossing just to give up after spying on a town with a population of a few hundred situated at a dead-end wagon trail. But if they were quick enough and a bit lucky, maybe they’d stay ahead of anyone looking for them.