The dust and smoke cleared up and Evan looked around and saw that there were twelve figures encircling him.
Though his expression was serene, he had multiple thought processes running concurrently.
'I went in the opposite direction and I still got surrounded…was this their intention all along? Reverse Psychology?'
However, things were not as deep as Evan thought.
They indeed had a trap set for him in the Northern plains, and they actually had two others hiding to continue baiting him to the north after he had taken down the first guy.
His actions of suddenly flying south put them through the wringer as they had to quickly abandon their traps and they even ended up using their one-time use teleportation artifacts to catch up to Evan in Rahead.
These were the artifacts they planned to use after they finished dealing with Evan, but they ended up using them just to catch up with the boy.