The Path of Ruin

After throwing all the food away, the gray-eyed woman gave her men a simple order.

"Gather everyone together and take a head count."

All the moving carriages stopped and the whole group gathered together. Then the counting began.

And the result was...

"Huh..."

She suddenly narrowed her eyes.

"What happened?"

"There are fifty-seven people..."

The total number was supposed to be fifty-eight.

The woman ran her eyes over those gathered in front of her. After a brief moment, she paused, frowned, and turned to the man next to her.

"Count again, there are fifty-eight of us."

The man counted again.

But...

"I count fifty-seven, my lady..."

After what she heard, the gray-eyed woman turned to someone else.

She told her to count everyone too.

And then...

"I count fifty-six, my lady."

Her brow furrowed even more in confusion.

Were they under the influence of an illusion?

Was something playing with their sense of sight?

Had they all been poisoned with some unknown poison?

What was going on here?

'I don't sense any eon.'

She turned her eyes to her right, to the woman who had a follower ability on eon sensing.

Her reaction was to shake her head from side to side.

'If she doesn't sense any either...'

They had been poisoned.

And none of them had any idea how small or big the effect of this poison was.

*******

"M- my lady!"

The gray-eyed woman sighed deeply.

She had no idea what had happened again.

But... it certainly wasn't good.

"Haaaah... what happened again?"

"We found pits dug ahead of our path, traps that could damage the carriages!"

'They know our route completely.'

The road would probably be full of such traps. And if they made the scouts focus on these traps, then they would be vulnerable to threats from their surroundings.

"Change our path, take a different route. Not the routes indicated on the maps, they might have guessed that we would change direction. Try to choose the most likely route that will not be a trap and make sure we take that route."

Their journey would perhaps take a little longer... and that would probably be a big problem for those who couldn't sleep.

But it was certainly a better option than driving themselves into their traps and leaving themselves open to the threat.

Still... the news didn't stop there.

"We can't contact a Follower and a Bearer!"

'Where are they? How can they do it?'

Hours later...

"People started vomiting and hallucinating!"

'We're not even eating... how did they get poisoned?'

"We've lost four more people!"

How...

How could they kill people without being caught in any way?

"The tire of one of our carriages went into a trap!"

They had changed their direction, their path.

How could they encounter traps even here?!

She was going insane!

'If only... if only I had an ability for scouting...'

As a Pursuer, she was quite strong.

But her abilities were all about head-to-head combat.

She was useless in the current situation and had to rely on others. And her enemies were superior, more knowledgeable than those she had to rely on!

So... even with extra precautions, they finally entered into the night with only a day left to the capital.

After the next night, at dawn, they would be able to see the walls of the capital.

They were so close...

But they were also so close to exhaustion.

There were only thirty-seven survivors.

Twenty of them could never sleep, they were tired and worn out.

They could never eat, afraid of poisons. They were starving, close to collapse, unable to move.

The situation was bad.

Extremely bad.

But the worst thing was... they were attacked in this state.

At their weakest moment, when everyone could barely walk, goblins and wolves suddenly rained down on them.

Just like the first two attacks, they were frenzied. Moreover... they were marching on exhausted soldiers.

Was there really any way to defend this?

Well, there was.

And it was herself.

She took her soldiers behind her, confidently diving among the goblins and wolves.

Her gray eyes turned green as her eon activated, then her skin color turned slightly green as well.

She felt a growing anger inside her, the power coursing through her muscles as she grew slightly taller.

The goblins and wolves didn't stand a chance.

They couldn't even touch the soldiers.

The gray-eyed woman- though... green, actually, when she used eon, showed how much of a difference there was between them as a Pursuer by tearing them apart with her bare hands; by unleashing her rage on them.

When it was all over... all around them was just carnage.

Massacre in the truest sense of the word.

Disassembled bodies and blood...

The ground was not even visible because of the red in some places.

The gray-eyed woman felt her anger fade as she withdrew eon from her body. The green spots in her skin color disappeared, returning to their original color. Then she turned back towards her group and spoke coldly.

"We continue."

Her men could not look at her without being slightly frightened, even though they knew what her ability was. Still, they did not disobey her.

There was no resting now.

They had to reach the capital... before she herself became tremendously exhausted.

When the sun rose the next morning... they found three more dead.

No, they hadn't disappeared or been poisoned to death like the previous ones.

Two had simply died of starvation and lack of sleep.

And one person... had been killed with his throat slit, as if he had been left in the middle as a message to everyone.

And it was at this point that the gray-eyed woman understood one thing in particular.

The people after them... they wanted them to slowly lose themselves.

They wanted them to go crazy.

They wanted to break them psychologically.

She reminded herself of what she had told her soldiers when the attacks had just begun.

"Don't be afraid! Our enemies are hiding and moving silently, clearly expressing their fear. This means they are weaker than us!"

They must be really weak if they were using this method.

She sighed deeply, looked up at the sky.

After a while, she gathered everyone together again.

She counted thirty-six people, including herself.

Again, the others did not add up to her count.

Why was this so?

What was wrong with her that this was happening?

She didn't feel any eon so just what was the reason...

One by one, she ran her eyes over everyone who was still alive.

They all looked so tired that it seemed impossible to tell if there was a traitor among them.

But then...

"Huh?"

The woman she was keeping with her made a sound of surprise.

The gray-eyed woman turned to her quickly, clearly expecting an answer, even if she didn't say anything. And she got her answer.

The woman, whose Follower ability allowed her to have a keen sense of eon, raised her finger and pointed to someone in the group.

This person... was a normal human being. His role in the group was simply to be a 'soldier'.

"That man... he is surrounded by a tiny eon that seems almost impossible to feel."

She didn't listen to her anymore. She didn't need to.

She hurried to the man in question, and when she was next to him, he almost fell to the ground in fright, but paused at the last moment.

"Y- yes, my lady!"

She narrowed her eyes, studying him with great care.

She did not recognize him, it was not a face she knew well.

She could see beads of sweat running down his forehead.

His eyes were trembling, signs of fear.

And... there was indeed an eon hovering around him that was hard to feel.

"Who are you? What is your name?"

The man opened his mouth to answer.

But the moment he did... the small amount of eon around him fluctuated.

The woman suddenly realized that her ears were numb. It was as if... her hearing was being tampered with. At the same time, the image of the man in front of her blurred slightly, almost blending together... disappearing.

'He's running away?'

She raised her hand and swung it hard towards where he had just been standing, even though she was not sure of his position.

Before he knew what was happening, the man she had attacked was instantly pinned to the ground. His head and left shoulder hit the ground so hard that cracks appeared beneath him, blood splattered over a wide area.

When she saw the eon around him disappear and realized that her senses had returned, she squinted again, looked around quickly, and turned to the others.

What she saw... was them looking at her in genuine horror.

"Huh?"

Surprise showed on her face.

Why were they looking at her like that? She had just killed the traitor or one of them...

"M- my lady..."

The person approaching behind her was Follower, who had just pointed the man out to her.

"T- the man gave his name normally, stated his rank, asked for your orders... Why... did you... kill him?"

The woman quickly looked at the corpse on the floor, then back at the woman who had just told her this.

What...?

Hadn't they seen how the man had started to disappear?

For them... this man had just stood where he was and done what was asked of him?

As her eyes widened, it suddenly dawned on the gray-eyed woman what was happening.

The man... was not trying to escape by dulling her senses.

On the contrary, she had been tricked.

The ability had been used on her and she had been made to think that this person was a traitor.

She clenched her fist. Her face twitched as her lips began to tremble with anger.

Whoever that was... was playing a game with her, literally.

They had a Bearer, or a Follower, from the very beginning.

It was just that... they were so skilled that she couldn't even sense them. Not even the woman she always kept around.

'They can distort all of the senses... does the sense of eon also apply?'

This... would explain a lot.

How they were never caught and more...

And yet...

"Tch..."

Still... she was even more frustrated, enraged now.

She had been made to kill one of his men with her own hands. This would shake the group's trust in her, make them fear her, and further disrupt the order.

It was so clever...

If she was incapable of thinking about it, she would surely have gone mad by now.

Fortunately, she could still think, and she wasn't going to let her emotions get in the way of her logic just yet.