Chapter 3993: Just a Job (Part 2)

"The bad news is that they already are all outside the range of detection of the Eyes. The only leads we have are the general direction they took and the fact that their destination must be an oasis. Grandma?"

"I’m not going to give you a map of the locations of all the mana geysers in the Blood Desert." The Guardian frowned. "That would be akin to giving you a free pass to every corner of my dominion and permission to plunder my mines.

"We both know that Ripha’s tower is not just for transportation and that you guys would take a few ’souvenirs’ on the road. Don’t mistake my generosity for stupidity."

"Point taken." Lith raised his hands with the palms out. "Dragonspeed it is. Where are we going to start?"

"The Yellow Wind riders’ Warp Steps-"

"From the site of the first attack." Friya cut Solus short. "After talking with Eryl, I asked her to mark the position of the oasis the Black Stork tribe came from and where the Yellow Wind ambushed them on the map.

"Lots of people of the Black Stork died there while the rest broke the encirclement and ran with all haste in our direction, hoping to reach the protection of the merfolk village. According to Eryl, the chase lasted for hours.

"If I’m right and the Yellow Wind tribe waited for the Black Stork to leave the safety of their old oasis before attacking, their village couldn’t be too far. They needed a constant supply of water and food for themselves and their horses.

"Fresh troops had to switch with the exhausted soldiers every few hours, or they would be too tired to fight. All these things require a nearby base of operations. With a bit of luck, the Yellow Wind tribe is still there."

"Even if they have already moved, they can’t have gone too far." Solus nodded.

"Not with so many prisoners and wounded." Friya replied. "Those they captured before leaving were in terrible condition. There was no reason to take them unless the Yellow Wind riders knew they could receive treatment in a timely manner.

"Moreover, I need to check if Drenya is among those who died in the initial assault."

"What if she’s already dead?" Quylla asked. "Will you abandon the people of the Black Stork tribe to their fate?"

"Of course not. They are innocents. At least, some of them are." Friya dismissed the idea with a sweep of her hand. "If Drenya is dead, however, this will turn into a simple rescue operation, and I won’t hesitate to let someone else do the heavy lifting.

"We can all fight together or use the Engine right off the bat."

She didn’t care much about a bunch of strangers, and their entitled attitude garnered them little sympathy. Putting herself and her children into danger to face her painful past was one thing. Taking such risks out of mere altruism was another.

"That’s an excellent idea." Quylla sighed in relief.

"Where’s our destination?" Lith extended his hand, and Friya gave him the map. "It’s close. At least at Dragonspeed. Get on board."

He shapeshifted into a Voidfeather Dragon and conjured hard-light seats and harnesses on his back.

Once everyone took positions, Lith took flight while surrounding his passengers with an air barrier. The site of the ambush was over five hundred kilometers (311 miles), but it took Lith just a few minutes to get there, and only because he needed to stop a few times to orient himself.

"Man, I wish GPS was a thing here." He grumbled.

"What did you say?" Friya asked in confusion.

"I said, I wish we had a locator beam." Lith lied through his fangs. "Sand to my right, left, ahead, and behind me. Every place looks the damn same."

He checked the position of the sun and then the map stored inside Soluspedia before sprinting forward with a powerful flap of his wings and put an end to that conversation.

"This is the place." He said while descending to the ground in a slow spiral.

For a few seconds, all the others could see was the homogeneous yellow of the sand. Then, as they got closer, they started to see black dots that quickly revealed themselves to be corpses that the Desert’s wind had half-buried in the sand.

"Good gods. It’s a massacre." Solus said as her keen sight counted dozens and dozens of different bodies.

Most of them belonged to the Black Stork tribe, but several members of the Yellow Wind lay there along with their strange horses.

The Voidfeather Dragon flapped his wings a few times to uncover the corpses and make sure not to squash any of them as he landed.

"You check from above. I’ll go from below." Nalrond shapeshifted into his Agni form and dove into the sand from a safe distance.

Earth Vision coupled with his Heart Sonar allowed him to spot the trail of bodies that marked the path of the fleeing survivors.

"I think you are right, Friya." Lith said while reverting to human size. "The Yellow Wind village must be nearby. Someone took their time stripping the corpses of everything valuable they carried."

"That’s the first thing you noticed?" Friya turned to glare at him in outrage. "There are children here. Even small children. Did you miss that tiny detail?"

She couldn’t bear to look at the small bundles of cotton and their bloody content for one second longer, instinctively bringing her hands to her womb.

"No, I didn’t." He replied. "But getting emotional won’t get us anywhere. We can’t change the past, but we can make sure that those who did this won’t have a future."

A baby girl lay on the ground still in her mother’s arms. A diagonal cut in the back had brought the woman down, and hooves had done the rest. There was but a slight resemblance with Kamila and Elysia, but more than enough to fill Lith’s gut with fire.

"Please, let’s not argue among us." Solus rubbed her eyes. "This is no different from one of our cases as a Ranger. We are just doing our job."

A wave of her hand brought all women in front of Friya to identify her mother, and stored everyone else inside the pocket dimension.

’We’ll give them a proper burial later. Now there is no time for that, but I won’t leave them here to rot.’ She thought.

"Drenya is not here." Friya said.

"Is she any of these people?" Nalrond emerged from a few meters away, taking the corpses of the women he had collected out of his dimensional amulet.

"There’s more?" Friya asked in shock, shaking her head after confirming that her mother wasn’t among the fallen.

"Yeah. The trail of bodies continued for a few hundred meters in that direction. After that, the Black Stork tribe must have put enough distance between them and the Yellow Wind to use a defensive artifact." Nalrond replied.

"Do you pick any signal, Solus?" Friya said.

"No, but we can more or less triangulate the position of the Yellow Winds village now." Solus traced two lines in the air, one departing from the site of the massacre and the other from the direction of the Starry Lagoon village.

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