Chapter 31

"We will make this short. Where do you live?"

Alexis though that she would just protect them. But then she had a good idea. Why didn't they protect themselves?

Her own soul realm already acted like a bridge. To bring the soul avatars of the players over was not a problem for her.

As she was an adept in soul magic, to find the unprotected connection that the soul avatars used with their capsules, Alexis could easily find their real locations.

"Great Britain, huh. I wanted to conquer America first, but hey, plans do change."

The four players were not pleased with the development. They didn't speak to this woman at all.

But somehow, she correctly guessed their home country.

How did she do it? Could she read minds?

"Change of plans." Alexis warped them to their own rooms. "You will get to protect yourself!!!"

Alexis clapped her hands together and laughed a little bit.

"Please do not log out right now. It will bring you no harm but the capsule places your soul avatar at the last registered location. You will spawn in the capital again. But as long as you are here, you can use magic and anything at your disposal."

The group quickly caught up with what this crazy woman was telling them.

They died two times already against the demons. But now she was telling them that they had to fight again.

Not like they initially planned, they had to take care of the problem themselves.

"Please, can you at least help us? They will kill us again if we are by ourselves."

The mage pleaded for her help while being on the ground in a kowtow position.

Seeing the mage do something the other three followed.

He was the leader of the small group as he had the most knowledge and acted intelligent most of the times.

"How many are there and what were they like? I don't want to have scum like them in my world."

Alexis sat down at a table with the four and they recounted their experience from the beginning.

They accepted a quest for a cave that was the stronghold of five oni.

The oni were terrorizing the local population with constant attacks and abductions.

At first, a npc guard from the guild accompanied them. The guard however didn't survive the first encounter with the oni and perished away in less than a second.

The group did their best to get away from the oni, but they were physically stronger than them.

There was no escape from them. The oni even played catch with them for some time.

It was their way of wasting time and having fun.

They hunted the group for close to half an hour before killing them one by one.

Even then, the mage made the mistake to tell them that they would regroup and come to kill them.

The oni laughed him off and finished the job.

It came as a surprise for the oni, that the group really reappeared a few days later.

They seemed a little bit stronger than before, but nothing unmanageable for them.

It was at that point that the leader of the oni suggested that they may be liches.

Liches were an annoying species because there was only one reliable way of killing them once and for all. The core of a lich was called a phylactery, through this the lich could infinitely respawn without consequences.

If they really were liches, only one thing could be done against them. The oni had to follow the connection when the body of the lich died.

Only through that could they find the phylactery of the lich.

What they found however, left them more speechless as any lich ever could.

The idiots that came to them were actually human and not liches.

After the second kill, the lich tracking magic still failed. It had a chance close to a hundred percent to succeed.

When it still didn't work, the oni were skeptical if they were liches at all.

Even low-level liches were extremely powerful, and these people evidently were not.

A different thought came to the leader of the oni. If they were just soul avatars, everything would make sense.

Soul avatars however were powerful magic that these four did not understand in the slightest.

Someone seemed to create the avatars for them. That was the only logical conjecture that the oni could make.

The mage of the group that could only cast low-tier magic would have never succeeded in soul magic.

The lich tracking magic was meant for tracking the mana back to the source. But in the case of soul avatars this had to be switched with the intent of tracking the soul.

As the leader of the oni and also being a great mage, he combined a few spells together to get a similar result as with the lich tracking spell.

The spell 'guidance' was widely used by any race. Most notably it was used to find herbs in the forest. It would point you in the direction you had to go to reach your goal.

But this spell was fortunately combinable with many different spells.

The most common combination was 'guidance' plus 'paint', which would paint you a rough sketch of where you had to go.

This was especially great if one traversed some dungeons and had to find something.

To be told to go right on the next corner was way better than what only 'guidance' could do.

Guidance used absolute positioning. It also did not care at all if between you and you goal was a big wall.

Sometimes funny things would occur where your spell would tell you just to go through a wall that was in the rocks.

In 99% of the cases, this was just the magic misjudging the distance, but in this 1% of times, the wall would actually be an illusion.

Therefore, the mages became paranoid and would touch any wall guidance told them to go through.

Many even fired a simple spells against it to see if it would pass through because they were too lazy to touch it.

In the case of the oni though, he used guidance in combination with a vision skill called far-sight.

This worked wonders because the gods did not protect the soul connections at all.

The oni was able to follow the soul connection back to the home world of the four and even mark the coordinates there with magic.

To create a portal leading there was still a large endeavor, but they wanted to try anyways.

In the world they were in, the oni were hunted like cattle. To remain there was illogical for them.

And through the visual link he established, the oni could see the capsules that connected the players into the world as well as outside.

The oni leader was exhilarated because technology wise, this place was far superior to any place he had seen it his entire life.

This was the chance they had waited for. Many years now had they occupied the castle they were in.

At first through the shadows, but sooner or later they were found out and had to defend themselves.

Sadly any human that came afterwards tried to kill them.

The oni were a friendly race to begin with. But even they had been put in the role of a caged animal.

The days where the oni and the other races lived peacefully alongside each other were gone. Most likely they would never return until they got further away than ever before.

And these humans gave them that chance. To finally break out of this cruel world.

They did not kill the last human they experimented on. To the surprise of the thief of the group, the oni held a banquette where he even got some fine meat and drinks for free.

Suddenly, all the malice the oni held was gone. They seemed friendly to a scary degree.

When asking the oni why they were sparing him, they just told him that he came from the promised land and that he had given them the coordinates to establish a connection.

All he could do now was swear in a language the oni did not speak.

The oni got a good laugh from that.

They seemed to understand that the thief understood what they had in plan.

He was weak but certainly not dumb.

They had a fine evening party and sent the thief away by midnight.

He had to walk the entire way to the capital again because he was not killed by them.

All that he could think about was that they had fucked up big time.

***

"They were strangely glad to come to our world? Is it that bad for them in the other world?"

After listening to the entire story, Alexis felt a little bit bad for the oni. Sure, they played with their food and killed many humans. But from their point of view, it was a necessary evil that had to be done. They took the first opportunity they could, to leave the world they were in.

That was some commitment they showed.

If Alexis was able to talk to them, maybe they could make some sort of contract with her.

It would definitely be better for them if they agreed to it. Otherwise, Alexis would have to eliminate them.

"Right, before I forget, how do they want to come over? The portal you mentioned would surely cost a lot of energy, right?"

The thief of the group nodded and looked down a little bit.

"They mentioned on the sidelines that they had a good mountain of mana crystals that they stole together over the years."

Alexis wanted to slap the four right now.

"Why didn't you tell me this information earlier. God damn it, show me on this map where the hell the oni are. I want to make a deal with them and get their mana crystals.

I can easily bring them to our realm, they don't have to waste my precious mana crystals for that."

Alexis conjured a sheet of paper with the vicinity of waterstone mapped onto it.

She pointed at the sheet in a hurry and wanted them to mark it.

The group could somehow understand why she was in a hurry but they found it suspicious that she was so elated by the news of mana crystals.

After the mage marked it the position, Alexis vanished with a be right back.

They did not know what to do right now, but the strange woman left them in their home world as their game characters.

The onis weren't their problem anymore, now came the time for them to enjoy the benefits of having their in-game avatars in the real world.

***

Meanwhile Alexis rushed to the castle with excitement. She could instantly solve two of her problems at once. Why were they using Alexis precious resources if they could just ask for a lift?

Flying at a frightening speed that would even shock human mages that could fly, Alexis's vision finally saw the castle the onis were occupying.

Her map skill showed them as enemies, but to her this was just a good indicator of where exactly they were hiding.

The group of oni were standing in a circle around a large blue stone.

Alexis had to hurry now.

"Please wait before wasting my resources."

The oni took an aggressive stance when they heard someone else entering their premises.

It was unacceptable to have their plan ruined now.

They came so far already, too far to back out of it now. Someone came right as they wanted to activate the portal machine the leader built in a hurry.

"I am not here to fight you. It's the opposite I want to help you. Even if you find it hard to believe, I also come from the other world."

One oni did not care and slashed at Alexis with his sword.