389 389 From Their Friends
Wolfe looked around the battlefield at the carnage that had been left behind by the new weapons that he had made for the Witches. The battle had been almost completely fought by regular Rank One Witches on duty at a guard camp, but with just a bit of preparation and his help, they had done far better at taking down the monsters than his own group had when caught unprepared.
The difference that a few new weapons made to the battle was astounding. The rifles he made for the witches back in the Den were incredible, but he had never really had a chance to compare them directly against a fight without them.
ραΠdαsΝοvel.cοm Today, he had the chance to fight the same enemy with regular weapons and Witch Magic, and then upgraded weapons, plus one more strong witch.
If this was all it took to make enough of a difference to completely turn the tide in a large-scale battle as well as a fight against monsters, Wolfe realized that his hobby of creating new weapons could be one of the most valuable skills that he had to offer.
For their part, the Witches looked stunned that they had won. The power coming off the corpses made it very obvious that the battle shouldn’t have been an easy one, but they didn’t take any casualties at all.
“Gather up all the materials. We can use them back at the Academy, and Professor Ashcroft will thank you. Don’t forget that the blood is also valuable.” Headmistress Peach reminded them, breaking the silent reverie.
The witches from the camp came out with bottles, bags and a few hastily created tarps that were made with Witch Magic to hold the corpses of the monsters. They set to work right away, getting everything packaged up for transport, and then they sent a radio message back to the Academy informing them of the situation and asking for a truck to get the materials.
Headmistress Peach looked over the group that was huddled around the fire, slowly recovering as they got another meal in them, and then back at Wolfe.
“Did you not bother to try to save any men from the Grand Dutchies?” She asked curiously.
“Actually, I did. Over half of a busload. But there are a number of villages that are working with Gormana to the west of you, and some of the ones that I saved were soldiers from Gormana, so I dropped them all off with a farming village to either return to their countrymen or start a new life in the swamps.
We even hunted some mundane animals to bring with them as a gift so that they wouldn’t return to the town empty-handed. That should be enough to buy them some goodwill from the locals, and the information that they have about the Grand Dutchies controlled city will do them a lot of good.
The two nations still aren’t getting along, and the Gormana forces are treating their presence here as a capitalist partnership. The witches enchant the land. They farm it and ship the excess home for profit.
Everyone in that village was getting along without force or coercion, so I didn’t do anything to upset them. We just bought some supplies and moved on to the south, where we found the real problem.” Wolfe explained.
Peach was going to need more explanation than that, but she could get it from the Witches that they had saved from inside the city. They knew all about what was going on, and they would have no qualms about informing the Headmistress all about how the Rebels had betrayed them in order to curry favour with the Grand Dutchies.
“What’s next for you, then?” Peach asked Wolfe as the soldiers worked to package the kills.
“I think that it’s about time we went back home. There is a lot to do in the Frozen Wastes over the summer, and I get the feeling that the Covens are going to want us to ship them an awful lot of weapons over the course of the next year.
Our new city is only just getting established, but I think that we can expand our influence a little more this summer. If we do it right, then you won’t have to worry about the mundane armies coming through the Frozen Wastes anymore.”
Peach chuckled at Wolfe’s ambitious plan but didn’t say anything to stop him. If he really could unite enough of the mutants and outcasts of the Frozen Wastes to turn back an invasion, either by armies or monsters, the whole power dynamic of the continent would begin to shift.
“Weren’t you going to scout the human-controlled villages?” Peach asked.
Wolfe nodded. “I was, and I did. Well, a little bit. There is a lot more going on than I thought, but from what I can tell, the Rebels split into two factions. One that allied with the Grand Dutchies and one that allied with Gormana. Gormana controls most of the swamps, while the Grand Dutchies control the southern coast and possibly the western coastline as well.
That’s not the sort of problem that one person can make a real difference in unless I spend a year going from village to village trying to solve everyone’s problems.
The human forces sounded like they had that pretty much under control, and from what I could tell, they were about to deal with the slave trading as well. In fact, the practice seems to be a large part of why they were blockaded in the first place.
The Grand Dutchies have always been the ones buying the prisoners that the nomads and bandits take in the Coven territories.”
Peach looked at Wolfe suspiciously. “And how did you find all that out?”
Ella chuckled and shook her head in dismay at the answer. “That’s the stupid part. He just asked them. We literally checked into a hotel, sat down at the bar and by the end of the night, they had told us fifty years’ worth of political history among the human nations.
All it took was to hide my aura so they thought we were both humans. Nobody thought to look and see if the bodyguard of a Witch with a Goblin Familiar to see if he was a Demon as well. So, they opened up like we were a wandering human couple and told us all about their homeland and its troubles as we drank.”