The giant approached with a ring of smaller armored units around it. These were reminiscent of the clawed creatures in looks, but they lacked the long claws and sharp teeth. Making up for it were eyes blazing with hate and intelligence. Perhaps not human intelligence, but they would be threats greater than any undead she’d fought, without doubt.

  They wore full sets of chainmail, with metal plate armor coverage similar to Julia’s. Their helmets were pointed conical, with a strip of metal extending down from the forehead to cover the nose. They had chainmail coming down the back of their helmets to protect their necks.

  They carried an assortment of two-handed weapons: clubs, axes, and swords, and they marched with a purpose. Julia was unsure if that purpose was killing her or protecting the knight in the center (clearly their leader), as she could feel the hate emanating from them like a physical force on her skin.

  The knight stopped where Julia had slain the clawed monster that attacked her. It reached into the water and picked the corpse up with one hand, spinning it around as though examining it. It seemed to get its fill and unceremoniously dropped the corpse back into the water before turning its gaze back to her.

  Julia was frantically trying to figure a way out of the situation when the knight spoke.

  “Capture,” it said with a voice that sounded like metal scraping against itself. As it said this, it raised its right hand and made a claw shape, as though gripping the area around Julia. She felt a stir in the mana around her, her Spiritual Sense informing her the mana was being infused with a will—a strong one.

  She was unsure what the will was instructing the mana to do, but she wasn’t going to wait and find out. The undead below began charging toward her tree, the clawed ones resuming their attempted climb. Julia could only think of one thing to do.

  She used her Mana Disruption Skill to send the mana in a small area around her into chaos. This skill sent out a cascade of mana with erratic will which began to infect the mana it bumped into. This chaos was effective at disrupting spells due to the nature of magic. Spells were complex constructions, so even one link in the spell’s chain being disrupted could cause the entire construct to crumble.

  The disruption attacked spells by infecting the mana they were being built on. It was also more effective than simply overriding the caster’s will with your own since individual segments of mana all had different, conflicting will infused into them.

  This meant that instead of trying to combat the caster’s entire will infused into a spell, each segment of chaotic mana wore away at it piece by piece. It was the difference between two small animals trying to kill each other and one small animal trying to defend against millions of ants.

  When the disruption chipped away at the knight’s spell, it reached into a tear in space and withdrew a chained-weapon—it must have a dimensional space artifact. The weapon was a huge, spiked metal ball attached to the end of a long chain. The chain was attached to a handle that the knight held, and Julia could see glowing inscriptions in the metal even from here.

  Deciding she didn’t want to know what its plan was, she charged as much mana as she felt comfortable with right now—about 25%—into her right hand before launching the largest Bolt she’d ever used at the knight. 25% of her current mana reserves was far more than even 50% of her previous. She had decided that being safe about her lightning didn’t really matter much if she died anyway.

  The Bolt struck the knight head-on, but a slightly-opaque black shield sprang into being around it. The Bolt traveled along the surface of the shield and struck behind the knight, frying a couple of the armored undead around it. This was not good.

  The knight twirled the spiked-ball over its head and launched it at Julia. She did everything she could think of. She jumped off the branch right as she saw it headed toward her, hoping to move before the knight had the chance to correct for her jump, while simultaneously making the water shield as dense and strong as she could.

  She hadn’t accounted for the spiked ball changing its course mid-air. It swerved after her as she jumped, and Julia started seeing her life flash before her eyes. Trixy Streaked toward the ball when it was less than a stride from Julia and headbutted it. She didn’t have much mass, but Trixy did have lightning speed. The impact sent it slightly to the side just as it hit Julia.

  Crack!

  Julia felt ribs on her left side break. The blow was glancing, but the thing was so heavy and fast that it almost didn’t matter—almost in that the thing might’ve actually killed her outright if it struck her center of mass. Didn’t the knight say “Capture!?” Julia suddenly realized—as her mind tried to focus on anything other than the pain—that “capture” to an undead might mean something different than the living.

  Realizing that this was likely her only chance at escape, Julia allowed herself to plow into the swamp water. Spinning from the spiked ball’s impact, she skipped over the surface once or twice before sinking under and coming to a rest on the swamp floor. She began casting as quickly as she could as Trixy wrapped herself around Julia’s damaged torso.

  Trixy cast invisibility while Julia used Water Magic to propel herself backward through the water. She was careful to make sure the surface stayed undisturbed from the motion, and she used a Class Skill she hadn’t used in live-combat yet.

  Dispersal was a skill that allowed her to disperse her Mana Body into a certain radius around her. It was sort of like she became a fog, but it wasn’t a complete dispersal of herself. She had a core, after all. This was also why she hadn’t used it up to this point. Making her body less dense to the point that she could be described as a fog left her core helplessly undefended.

  Still, considering she had no idea how the initial archer skeleton had seen her through her invisibility, this felt like the right time to be reckless. Now dispersed into a bubble of water and propelling deeper into the swamp—away from the biome border, Julia spent her entire focus just maintaining her spells and Skill. They didn’t stop until Trixy was so low on mana that her Invisibility was threatening to end.

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  They came to a stop, dispelling all their magical effects and Skills, and Julia sprang to her feet with her sword drawn—looking out for any danger. She didn’t see any, and after scanning the surroundings for a few minutes in silence, she sheathed her sword and hopped up into a tree.

  Her first order of business was tending to her wounds. The flail, or whatever that weapon was, had only impacted her, so she simply sent mana there to fix up her side. In her flesh body, she’d have had to worry about ribs being in the wrong places, but her Mana Body had no such qualms. Her eye was another matter.

  Tackling the healing again, she made minor adjustments this time. Instead of sending raw mana to her eye to heal it, she infused the consumption aspect into it, focusing intently on only consuming the foreign mana that was likely festering in the wound.

  “MMMMMM—” Julia covered her mouth with her hand to suppress any moans or screams of pain. The spell was eating bits of the flesh around her eye, as it seemed the foreign mana had seeped into her body beyond the initial surface wound. She decided she was right to dread thinking about what that mana would do to the living.

  When it was consumed completely and converted into pure mana, her eye began stitching itself back together. It only took a few seconds, but the amount of mana she needed had brought her reserves—already below 50%—down even further. She couldn’t stop now, though. She was a journey—at most—from the site of the battle. She had to gain more distance.

  She lightened her body and began her tree hopping, angling away from the border and further into the swamp.

  The sun began to set as Julia sat atop a tree root, examining her reflection in the water. Her bright, blonde hair was braided, with the braid extending down her back and into her cuirass. The locks on the sides hugged her head before flowing back across her ears toward the braid. Several flyaway hairs were sticking up and out from her hairline.

  Her face was covered in so much grime that there was scarcely anything but her light blue eyes visible, faintly glowing with Truesight. She wiped a bit of the scum away to reveal tanned skin with many freckles from too much time spent outside in direct sunlight. She stopped wiping her face off and lightly touched the skin around her now-healed eye.

  There was a large, jagged scar there running from the bottom right corner under her eye to the top left and splitting through her brow—the eyebrow hair having not grown back over the scar. Her eye itself had healed just fine, but the scar remained for reasons unknown to her.

  It now joined the likes of the huge line across her back where the goblin had almost split her in half in the dungeon. Neither scar had healed, despite her Mana Body having—apparently—near-perfect regeneration. Perhaps it was an issue with her mind more than her body. Perhaps she subconsciously wanted these scars, whether for the reasons Ravina had given or ones unknown to her conscious mind.

  She had no way to figure it out and no time to consider it now, though. She held her helmet up and stared into its visor. It was undamaged, which was a shock to her considering the damage her eye had suffered. It seemed the gh?l’s claw had somehow wedged itself into the visor of her helmet and scraped up her face as she dodged away from it.

  She realized she had made a mistake in ducking before dodging backward. She wanted to protect her head, so she instinctively tucked herself in as she jumped. This had the unintended effect of actually pushing her head closer to the nearest gh?l as she dodged. If she had leaned back instead, that would have the effect of both lowering her head to make it a less visible target while also getting it farther away from her assailants. She’d have to remember that.

  As for the name—gh?l—that had come a couple hours after her retreat. She’d been traveling non-stop for those hours when the System decided the conflict was over and pinged her with a notification. She decided that was a good-enough indication that she had escaped any potential pursuers, so she stopped to take a rest while examining the notification.

  Seven Levels in her main Class, and eleven in her Subclass were her rewards from that disastrous encounter. While happy, Julia couldn’t help but shudder thinking about how strong those undead must be for her to get so much experience from killing a few of them.

  She rose and donned her helmet again. She’d have to remember to have her Water Shield up as much as possible. It likely saved her life if the attacks that managed to get through it still did that much damage to her.

  She leaped up to a branch and resumed her dash. She was only moving for another ten minutes before she heard the sounds of a scuffle. There were loud splashes and sounds of metal striking metal. Normally, Julia wouldn’t even consider approaching battle after such a grievous defeat. However, if there were enemies of those undead, she had to know. Potential allies were things she desperately needed right now.

  She shifted her jumps a little and headed toward the sounds and—likely—another battle.