"We will see what we find, but we're not here on a humanitarian mission to rescue wasteland nomads too dumb to know when they should run." The voice over the megaphone informed Wolfe with mild disdain.
"Good enough for me. Being alive is all that matters, and we have no use for your new camp." Wolfe agreed, making the soldiers on foot laugh.
"The witches are on the run now, but they will be back. We will leave here long before the ground thaws. Their busses can't travel in the mud and snow, it slows them to a crawl, and we will have what we came for by the time the weather starts warming up." The man who had run the test on him replied quietly, giving Wolfe the heads up about how long to stay gone.
They weren't wrong about that. Those things barely sufficed as troop transports on a solid surface. Not that Wolfe would admit that he knew firsthand.
The soldiers began to search the camp for useful supplies and intelligence, cheering when they found all the preserved meat and other foodstuffs that the witches had no time to collect.
They didn't care about the firearms any more than the witches did, and they didn't object when Wolfe grabbed a rifle with a scope on it and a case of ammunition. He hadn't mastered the ability to enchant the weapon yet, but he had every intention of learning the ability in a hurry now that he had faced the fury of an artillery barrage without any ability to really fight back.
The mundane army brought more tanks than the Sylvan Flank had troops. Even enchanted rifles might not have made this a fair fight, but it would have made him feel a lot better about their chances.
Playing dumb until they found the bunker was annoying, they didn't seem any more capable of detecting it than the undead were, but finally, their technology detected the ward, and they managed to find a way in.
"Sir, I think we found the nomad. She's tied to a chair and beat half to death, but she's breathing." A soldier called from inside.
"Any aura?" The officer called back.
"Zero. She's not using any more magic than her brother." The soldiers confirmed.
"Alright, I am feeling generous today since we didn't suffer any losses, so get in there and load up a pack, get your sister dressed and get the hell out of my camp." The officer declared over the speaker, then opened the top hatch of his tank and lifted his head out into the cool winter air.
When he got inside the bunker, Wolfe noticed that Priya had cast [Sleep] on herself to make the act more convincing, preventing her from waking up too easily.
He quickly packed as much freeze-dried food as he could into a pack, then topped it with a pair of rolled-up sleeping bags and pulled a warm uniform onto Pria's sleeping body.
With that done and new winter boots on both their feet, Wolfe slung her over his shoulder and headed for the gate.
"Go North for at least a day if you want to miss the herd. After that, you can go where you like." The soldier guarding the gate informed him, pointing in the appropriate direction.
Once they thought that he was just another human struggling to get by, the mundane army was fairly easy to get along with, and Wolfe didn't sense any excess malice from the troops at all. They were only here for one thing, but Wolfe didn't know what it was yet.
"Good luck," Wolfe called to the gate guard, who replied with a shooing motion as he jogged out of sight into the waste.
For the first two hours, there was nothing but frozen earth and broken trees left by the advance of the armoured vehicles. But during the third hour, jets began to fly overhead, with their engines shrieking in an eerie way the history books never mentioned.
None of the high-speed fighters showed any interest in the two vagabond youths cast out of society, though. They only kept flying south, heading for the battlefield and for Sylvan City.
This was no small attack, and he didn't even have a radio with him to report it. Or, if he did, it was buried somewhere in his pack, and he wasn't going to stop now to look for it.
"Are we dead yet?" Priya whispered as she began to wake up, nearly four hours after they left the camp.
ραпdα -n૦νe| , c૦m "Not yet. We're four hours north of the line, and it is looking pretty clear that the mundane army is dead set on destroying the witches this time. They said that they would have what they wanted by spring, but with that much firepower, I can't see anything else that they could be after." Wolfe informed her.
"It's like they didn't learn anything from the great wars. Or maybe they just think we have weakened enough that they can kill us all this time without destroying the world.
But our first concern should be finding shelter and getting far enough away from the battle that we can search for the others." Priya suggested.
As they walked, the signs of battle behind them got easier and easier to spot in the distance. The Covens had realized that they were under attack by a foreign nation and not just monsters, so they had pulled out the real weapons of war.
Enchanted artillery, witch arrays that were powered by one hundred casters at a time, relic weapons from the Great War. Everything was deployed against the invaders, turning the afternoon sky to a sickly black haze as the mundane army and their monster horde burned.
As the day wore on, the battle got more intense, with purple and blue lightning raining down from black clouds that blotted out the sky and rumbling that shook their feet as Wolfe and Priya continued to run.
Jets rushed to the scene of the battle, spraying something into the clouds that broke the spell and created clear paths in the sky. As the clear area spread, Wolfe felt the bond with his witches growing fuzzy, weakened by some unknown interference.
He looked to Priya for answers, and she nodded. "I feel it too. The chemical rain and that smoke that they dropped on us both stifle witch magic. I can usually feel my Familiar back in the city, but the bond is totally blocked for now. I'm afraid we can't go back for them yet. They will have to stay safe without us."
On closer examination, she was right. Her aura was notably weakened, even though the smoke had mostly cleared before they had left the camp. If that was the case, the rest of the unit must be in very bad shape unless their armour spells held strong and protected them from the effects.
The link was filled with panic and desperation, but there was no sense of pain, and they were all still pulling mana from him, so nobody was dead or seriously injured from his little group, although the link with the Servants was feeling particularly faint.
Just before dark, the sound of another group of tanks approaching warned them that they needed to hide for the night and do it quickly.
"There is a small cliff just ahead. Use earth magic to dig out a small bunker and then hide the entrance. If we need it, I can put a barrier inside to keep it from collapsing under the weight of vehicles, but I don't think they're going to try to drive off a ledge." Wolfe suggested, jogging toward the spot that he meant.
Once they arrived, he placed a hand on Priya's shoulder and transferred her the necessary mana since she would need to make the cavern in the remaining time that they had available.
Once the small cave was opened, Priya climbed inside, carved open a few air vents to the surface, and reformed the cliff face to close the entrance behind Wolfe.
Wolfe was tempted to use fire magic to warm the rocks, but they were only a few meters underground, and he wasn't sure whether the army passing by would detect it and come to investigate.
So, the pair spent the night sharing one of the sleeping bags Wolfe had packed, relying on each other's body heat to keep warm.
With most of the entrances blocked, the ground wasn't nearly as cold as the outside air, and two bodies in a small cavern made it nearly comfortable inside if you disregarded the firing of large guns and the sound of tracked vehicles passing nearly overhead.
By dawn, everything had fallen silent again, with only the cracking of a nearby fire breaking the early morning stillness.
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