Chapter 5: Time for a change.

"Laurence! Is it really you?"

The man who just exclaimed my father's name was tall and well built, with wide shoulders and muscles visible through his uniform that showed his considerable physical training.

He had short, carbon black hair which, that coupled with his deep blue eyes, gave him an impression of a cool and collected person, an impression slaughtered by his tone of voice that seemed those of a child who had just found his best friend.

His uniform was black in color with golden accents on his shoulders, buttons and on his collar, on the right side of his chest was an emblem that looked like a golden circle around a star of the same color on a black background.

"Sikra? Is it really you? What are you doing here?" Asked my father.

"So it really is you Laurence!" The man, which I now knew was called Sikra, laughed and took my father in a warm hug, "As for what I'm doing here, I'm a peace envoy from the Soulborne Kingdom, but come, come, let's go catch up somewhere private."

I, just as confused as the other envoy seemingly was, followed the adults to a private room.

"So? How are you Laurence? And who's the small one next to you?" it looked like he had just noticed me, this was the first time he looked at me.

"She's my daughter Avys, cute, isn't she?" he replied with a grin while patting my head a few times.

"Are you sure you don't want to leave the little one somewhere? We might get into some pretty dark topics." questioned the other envoy walking together with us.

"Nah, I'm good." I replied, to which father confirmed, "As she says, she's good."

"Alright then." replied the man skeptically.

We sat down in a private room reserved for merchants from other cities that come to talk about internal matters, or in this case, from outside the Wild Lands.

"Let's begin with some introductions, shall we?" Said Sikra, "I'm Sikra Sinler, officer of the Soulborne kingdom and this by my side is Zarvo Gilgard, my colleague in our mission assigned by our king."

"Nice to meet you, you can call me Zarvo." continued the guy himself.

The man, Zarvo, was short and looked at least twenty years older than father, with gray hair amidst his black ones that showed age, his eyes were calm, dark reddish brown in color.

But what really stood out to me, not only about him, but about Sikra too, was the great amount of mana woven into their uniform, there was probably half as much mana as I had I my entire body.

I could feel the mana moving inside of it, even containing mana of different natures, I guessed that it contained different enchantments with different effects.

"Nice to meet you Zarvo, I'm Laurence Winterridge, you can call me Laurence, and as I said before, this is my daughter Avys, but wasn't your kingdom's name Yeorene last time I was there?"

"You're right, it was Yeorene," he spat out, "but now it's different, you must remember how it was back in those days, the nobles doing whatever they wanted to the people with absolutely no repercussion.

Eventually the population had enough and a revolution happened, so guided by our current King we took control of the country, it didn't even last long thanks to the king's and his closest aides overwhelming magical abilities.

In the past five years the neighboring countries that held a similar system rose in rebellion too and joined us in a single great country, the Soulborne Kingdom.

Now things are very different from before, nobility doesn't exist anymore, the king gave us what we really wanted, the opportunity to rise to the peak of a field as long as we have the ability and the talent."

If his expression was anything to go by, then he really believed in his king from the bottom of his heart, all these stories made me want to meet this king myself, he seemed like a good guy.

"This sounds great Sikra, your previous rulers weren't really the best."

At this the older man, Zarvo, scoffed, "That's an understatement, not only were they cruel to the common populace and didn't care about us in the least, but they were incompetent fools to boot."

Sikra sighed, but his eyes said that he agreed with those words wholeheartedly, "Now, back to what we're doing here, our mission is to give our help to the people of the Wild Lands."

"Help us? How?"

"Well, first of all, groups of our elite mages are cleaning the forest from the beasts as we speak, they are fully equipped and trained for warfare, it's going smoothly to this point."

'Wow, this is really a lot of help.' I thought to myself.

The main problem with the beasts wasn't their singular prowess, a prepared and trained mage could deal with a couple of them at the same time, the problem was that there were too many of them and we had too few trained mages.

"That sounds too good to be true, where is the catch." Asked my father.

"Catch?" I asked confused, how could there be a catch about that?

"Yes dear, nobody from the outside world would help us in exchange for nothing, they haven't done so until now, why would it change?"

After a bit of thought I realized that he was right, if the outside world had enough mages to clean up the Wild Lands, but never did so it meant that they never wanted to do so.

But evidently now they had a reason to do so, something to gain from it.

"There is no real catch, our king wants to annex the Wild Lands to the kingdom as a special territory, you'll lose a bit of autonomy, but you'll gain so much more." Replied the old looking man Zarvo.

"For example?" I asked, which evidently seemed weird to them as I was met with a weird gaze from the old man, but I had no clue or interest in knowing why.

"For example, your people will be able to leave the cities without fear of beasts, you'll be more connected to more cities all around the kingdom, long range communications, help from the country in case of famines or outside attacks, we can share our knowledge in magic by teaching your people and so too many more things to say them all right now."

Well, that did sound great and I couldn't find any drawbacks, but I wasn't experienced enough to even begin making an actual assessment of their words, for all I knew what they wanted in exchange could offset the gains, even if I highly doubted so.

"So you came here to ask the mayor to accept, right?" Asked my father.

"Exactly, but don't worry, he already did so, he wants the best for this city and so do we, you may not believe it, but our new king is a dreamer and an idealist before being a conqueror."

This conversation was really way over my head, I was content with studying magic and letting the adults take decisions for now, as long as they didn't affect negatively the common people's lives.

Not that I could do anything even if they negatively effected them, but I was pretty sure I could be a thorn in their sides if I tried hard enough.

"I see, I guess that as soon as you wrap things up with the mayor here you'll pass to the other armored cities in the Wild Lands, right?"

"Exactly."

"In that case I'll pass your words to the other mages and everyone else back in Icerock, oh, a small advice, don't even think of using force if one of ours refuses, you'll lose more than you win by attacking an armored city."

Zarvo sneered, "I doubt it, we have advanced warfare tactics and too many mage, but winning you over peacefully is in everyone's best interests."

"Yeah, sure, it was just a warning anyway, I've done what I was here for so see you later Sikra."

"See you Laurence."

"Goodbye Sikra." I said as I left the room, I really didn't like the old man so I didn't say goodbye to him.

Back in the room, Sikra punched Zarvo on the arm strong enough to make him winch in pain, "Ow, Sikra! What was that for?"

"You're a moron, that's why, and what Laurence said was correct, we'd lose more mages than it's worth by conquering the armored cities by force."

"I can't see how, we have around a hundred times their numbers, in a single city there are a hundred to two hundred mages at most, and most of them are researchers, not fighters, we could pick them one by one and they wouldn't even know about it, we'd certainly create a lot of dissatisfaction after, but I'm only talking about the hypothetical fight."

Sikra looked at his colleague with disappointment evident on his face, "Zarvo, you are perfectly correct, but you lack a tiny detail, do you know how the cities protected by a hundred mages at most, most of which aren't even fighters as you said, could exist without problems in one of the most inhospitable places in the continent for hundreds of years?"

At his colleague's lack of response he resumed his speech, "Because every single year most of their efforts are on the research and development of a new barrier and every single year they take down the previous one and put the new and improved one in place.

The armored cities are called that for a reason, many beasts attack them every single day, day and night, but no beast has entered or even scratched the walls in more than a hundred years."

"Oh." Replied dumbly the older man, he really hadn't thought things through and he had now probably offended an influential person in one of the cities they were supposed to get under their wings peacefully.

"Oh, indeed, and I didn't even manage to ask Laurence about his daughter, it had been so long since I met him and you fucked everything up."

Meanwhile, the two people Sikra was talking about were once again on their magical carriage and on their way to the gate to go back home.

"Dad?"

"Yes Avys?"

"I want to go with those soldier mages and hunt the beasts too."

He gulped as he recognized the look in my eyes, now he either convinced me to do otherwise or he locked me up at home or he bribed me to not do so.

"Why?"

"Do you remember why I wanted to start coming with you on your merchant trips?"

"Because you wanted practical training in magic." He replied matter of factly with a straight face.

"The other one."

"You wanted test subjects for your new spells."

I gave up, father was going to keep messing with me, "I wanted our people to smile and live a free life."

"Yeah, sure." he replied sarcastically.

"Okay, it might have been the tertiary objective, but it was still among the first three!"

"Whatever you say, princess."

Among our bickering which temporarily made me forget what the conversation was even about, we reached the gate.

"Hey Richard, we're leaving!"

"Oh, already? Did you meet with those guys from the outside?" asked the young guard.

"Yeah, it was a very fruitful discussion, if everything goes well things will change for the best here for the people of the Wild Lands." answered farther, he didn't seem to mind at all the old guy's final parting words.

He was happier about the fact that it finally seemed like the Wild Land where going to change.

We left the gate behind us and began another journey to go back home.