Chapter 11.
'No matter where you go in this world, you're always bound to find wicked souls,' Richard felt a tad helpless with this situation, disappointment settling in his chest.
To think the first humans he'd meet after coming to such a world would be so cruel, willing to harm another race just because they felt they might cause harm someday, when it was obvious from looking at the terrified goblin families that they had no such intentions.
'I don't think it would be too much to say that they might've set their sights on this forest and merely wanted to kill these guys and chase them out of their homes,' Richard said to himself, because the more he watched the three adventurers.
The more he suspected that the goblins were simply in the way of something larger, something that had nothing to do with the self-defense these three were spouting and more to do with expansion and greed.
"I take it you plan on getting in our way?" Tony finally broke the silence, his hand slowly moving to the great sword strapped across his back, the blade beginning to slide out of its sheath.
Richard glanced at the confused goblins for a moment, taking in their frightened faces and the way the mothers held their children so tightly, before setting his sights back on the trio standing in his clearing.
"I'm afraid so," he said, offering them an apologetic smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Then so be it," Tony said, his voice flat and resigned, before glancing at Eva with a subtle nod.
She instantly got the message and sped toward Richard, her lean body exploding into motion with a speed that was genuinely impressive, her feet carrying her across the clearing in the span of a heartbeat.
As an assassin, her speed was impeccable, and in a short moment.
She instantly emerged before Richard, close enough that he could see the individual scratches on her daggers and the cold certainty in her eyes.
Eva's eyes gleamed coldly just like her twin daggers, one blade coming down on Richard's head in a vicious arc while the other aimed to slash his throat, a two-pronged attack designed to kill instantly with no chance for survival.
'System?' Richard was neither frightened nor worried, his expression remaining calm even as death rushed toward him from inches away.
[Target within range, spending 1 SP]
[Total system points: 8]
A steel cage with steel bars spaced 2 inches apart from each other emerged out of the blue before Richard, materializing from nothing in a flash of blue light that wrapped around Eva before she could complete her attack, trapping her inside the metal enclosure before her blades could find their mark.
Clang!
Eva's eyes widened in disbelief when her daggers bounced off the steel bars, the impact sending vibrations up her arms and leaving nothing but shallow blade marks on the metal where there should have been blood and victory.
"Y-You?! You're a mage?!" Eva exclaimed, her voice cracking with shock as she gripped the bars of her cage, rattling them uselessly as she stared at Richard with a mixture of fear and fury.
But Richard had already shifted his focus from her to Tony, who was standing frozen in the distance with his great sword half-drawn and his expression equally stunned by what he had just witnessed.
The main reason Richard wasn't afraid earlier, even when Eva had been rushing toward him with murder in her eyes, was because even though she was fast, he had already instructed the system to create a cage around her the moment she came within his range, a simple conditional command that required no reaction time on his part.
She might be fast, but he believed the system was definitely faster, and the gamble had paid off in the end.
****
"What type of spell was that?" Tony turned to glance at Madison, his face flushed with confusion and a hint of panic, seeking answers from the only magic user in their party because he had never seen anything like that in all his years of adventuring.
Madison's face was pale, her knuckles white as she gripped her staff, and when she answered, her voice came out shaky and distressed. "It's a trapping spell of some kind, but I've never seen one performed so quickly before."
Tony's grip on his great sword tightened as he looked back at Richard, who was standing calmly behind his steel cage with that same unreadable expression, and for the first time since arriving at this clearing, Tony wondered if they had made a terrible mistake in choosing to fight rather than talk.
'Just who the hell is this guy?' Tony's mind was currently in chaos, his thoughts racing as he tried to make sense of what he had just witnessed. 'I've been watching him the whole time and I didn't see him chant a single word, he didn't even use a magic circle!'
He knew a few things about mages from his years of working alongside them at the Adventurer's guild, the basics like how spellcasting worked, the need for concentration, the importance of incantations, and how magic circles always formed to shape and direct the flow of mana.
But this was his first time seeing something like this, a spell that simply appeared without any of the usual warning signs, and that lack of understanding made him deeply uneasy.
"Well, aren't you going to come at me too?" Richard's voice snapped Tony out of his shock.
"I've got your girlfriend held hostage, don't you want to save her?" Richard patted the cage that Eva was trapped in, his knuckles rapping against the steel bars casually, making Tony's blood boil.
Due to the fact that the cage had been created with only 1 SP, the internal space was quite small and constrictive to the point that Eva couldn't easily move around without pressing against the bars on all sides.
Tony gnashed his teeth together so hard he thought they might crack, clearly irritated by the stranger's taunts, but even then, he didn't take a single step forward.