Chapter 78: Chapter 78

She was ambushed just outside of Elven territory.

‘Typical.’

Of course they wouldn’t dare try an ambush on elven ground.

Rather than risk being caught and outright executed by a well-organized elven patrol, it was much safer to rob people in the much more chaotic human territory.

They followed her for a good few hours, ensuring she wasn’t just the scout of an advance party or some secret high-level Awakener before finally getting the courage to move.

Systemless as she was, she was still elven-trained, and spotting her trackers through her battle-honed senses and sensing their heat signatures with her cursed ability was child’s play.

‘Two in the trees to my right, three to the left, four on either side of the road in front of me, and a couple following from behind. All amateurs.’

The birds had stopped chirping in the trees by that point, and the foliage and branches extended above her, leaving little pinpricks of sunlight filtering down and providing a light shade from the sweat-inducing heat.

She couldn’t help but let a light smirk out, and the edges of her lips gently curved upward.

“Lost in the forest now, are we?”

Only one stepped out—a bulky man wearing piecemeal metal armor that looked like it had been hammered into shape from the scrap of a waste container.

She stopped and let him approach.

“Come on now, don’t be frightened, little elf. We won’t hurt you.”

He emphasized the ‘we’, not knowing that she was already well aware of their little ambush.

‘Idiot,’ Eve thought, gathering the ambient heat to her slowly as beads of sweat began to form on her brow.

Mistaking her stillness and sweat for fear, he continued approaching.

Clank, Clank—

The bits of metal bolted onto strips of hard leather over his body clanked and rattled together, and he stopped a few paces in front of her while resting his hand on the rusted hilt of the longsword sheathed to his side.

“Never thought I’d see an elf without so much as even a dagger. Just hand over whatever you’ve got and you might get to continue on your journey unharmed, yeah?”

Thankfully, the weather was hot enough that pulling the heat to herself was almost as easy as walking.

The man shifted again and scratched at his chin, perhaps feeling the colder temperature near her but not quite being able to understand it.

“And if I don’t have anything to give you?” she asked.

The man’s grip caressed the hilt of his sword.

“Well… I supposed we can still find some use for you.”

The man curled his lips and revealed a toothy smile.

‘Trash.’

They might as well have been demons.

‘It would be better if I didn’t start a forest fire on my first few steps into human territory.’

There would certainly be a fair share of fires later.

“Who’s this ‘we’ you keep referring to?” she asked.

Predictably, the man held his hands out wide, indicating the foliage on either side of the dirt road that was just wide enough for a carriage and a half to comfortably ride over.

“You guys can come out, the lady wants to see you.”

His tone was light and mocking, and his eyes hovered briefly over the stump of her left arm.

‘I wonder if he has any grasp of elven society.’

Was there more meaning to the gaze than just a brief look?

Following his orders, his men emerged from hiding.

Turning her head to take a quick glance over each one, she saw that they didn’t even have their weapons drawn.

‘Good. They don’t feel threatened in the slightest.’

The next part required a bit of focus, and the men seemed all too willing to give her the time she needed as they casually started chatting with each other.

“She doesn’t even have an arm. I thought elves were supposed to be tougher than this. I guess there are always exceptions, eh?”

“Hahaha, talk about easy pickings. Looks like today’s our lucky day!”

Their leader seemed to want to know how she would react next, maybe expecting her to cry in fear or beg for her life.

Coated in a sheen of sweat from the amount of heat she was holding in, she held their group composition firmly in her mind.

‘One mage behind, two archers on the left side, and another mage in front. The rest are melee.’

While pulling ambient heat from the air was great, it was more diluted than when she pulled it directly from something that was a direct generator of heat—such as a human body.

She also had to be careful of how resistant Awakeners were to fire, as their bodies were far more durable in every sense, and they only tended to get tougher as they increased in level.

‘Judging by their equipment, they’ve probably gotten most of their experience through Awakener kills or low-level dungeons.’

Fortunately, low-level dungeons could only take you to around level 3 or 4 due to the experience fall-off.

‘Their leader is probably the only one who has hit level 5.’

He was the closest one to her, anyway.

She closed her eyes and gave one last Pull to the ambient heat around her.

Then her eyes opened.

Their leader sensed that something was wrong in that brief moment and his muscles tensed, reflexes kicking in while he drew his sword.

‘Too late.’

Her hand shot upward, palm splayed out toward him, and a beam of blue fire so condensed that it could have been mistaken for a laser pierced through the center of the man’s throat and left a clean, cauterized wound about the size of her fist through his flesh. His head flopped to the side, barely attached to the rest of his body.

A rush of cold swept over her, and she leaped toward his collapsing body as she turned and shot two rapid beams of red fire, rougher and less condensed, toward the two archers on the left side of the road.

They dropped, lifeless, before they could even register what was going on.

‘Next, the mages.’

It took longer to launch a magic spell than it did an arrow, and spells generally moved slower.

She thudded onto the dead leader’s back and Pulled from his warm corpse with the stump of her left arm against the skin of his neck.

The heat surged into her far faster, her pores opened up to pour sweat so quickly that it caused a shock of chill to run through her body.

She shot a bolt of fire at the mage in front, trusting that he had specced less into physical durability due to his magical talents.

Of course, a mage doing so wasn’t anything to fault them for. It just made things easier for her.

The bolt took the mage in the face as he finished casting a spell and his body fell limp instantly, the fire burning through his eyes and flash-frying his brain.

‘Out of time.’

Only a second or two had passed, but it was long enough for the other mage to finish his spell.

‘Ha!’

The idiot cast a fireball at her while the other bandits were closing in on her. It would have missed anyway, but she pushed herself into the ball of explosive heat.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Boom-!

She couldn’t absorb it all, of course. That much heat would have fried even her, but as long as she just redirected it, save for some discomfort, it was harmless.

“Kghaaaa!!!”

She tried to redirect the heat toward the men running at her, all of whom wielded clubs and swords.

While some of it did escape into the air and shoot off in random directions, the flames exploded from her body after the fireball made contact with her, aimed mostly toward her assailants.

Of the four men closing in on her, two fell dead almost instantly, one was set aflame and rolled around on the ground, screaming, and the other gritted his teeth and forced his way through, probably having specced into more toughness-related stats than the others.

She took in that his hands were pulled back on his club to his left side.

She dropped to the ground, accelerating her fall with a blast of heat upwards, and just barely dodged the club that was swung faster than her eyes could follow.

‘Got you.’

She saw the mage through the man’s legs. He was down the road, still trying to get a clear shot, not wanting to incinerate his last ally.

Eve grabbed the man’s bare ankle and Pulled hard on the man’s heat, putting him into shock and then blasting the heat through the man’s ankle in a final beam that took the mage in the chest and dropped him to the ground.

The big man with the club fell, and she Pulled on his heat again before surging it through his body and directing it into his brain.

“Ghaa…”

The man fell on top of her and knocked the breath from her lungs.

After struggling for a few moments, she managed to wriggle out from under him and approached the last bandit, the one who had caught on fire but wasn’t outright dead after the fireball.

He’d managed to douse the fire by rolling in the dirt, but he just gripped his face and sobbed softly.

‘Looks like the fire got his eyes.’

She licked her lips and briefly savored the moment.

‘So much for your System, fucking trash.’

She briefly entertained the thought of leaving him blind there, but the risk of him actually surviving and telling others about her was too great.

“You got off lucky this time,” she said before placing her hand against his head and surging the last of her extra heat into the lowest form of flames, giving him a few final moments of searing agony.