Chapter 182: Cleaning Up the Battlefield |
Fran looked at the pool of red liquid before her, the substance Connor had been directly transformed into by her Blood of the Furnace. With a thought, she reversed the transformation.
A fallen figure suddenly appeared in front of her and hit the ground with a thud, completely lifeless.
“Good thing it’s finally over.”
Fran rubbed her head. After casting at such intensity for so long, her brain had been stretched far beyond its limit.
She lowered her head and rested for a moment before lifting it again and recalling the battle that had just taken place.
Connor’s decision to walk straight toward her had genuinely caught her off guard. She had originally thought she would have to take another strike before she could get close enough to release Blood of the Furnace directly.
But Connor had slowly walked over on his own, allowing her to finish him off without any effort at all.
And when she transformed him into that red liquid, she had clearly heard him shout those final words.
That made her frown. If it had been an ordinary person, then by all rights they would not have been able to say anything at all. They would have been instantly “refined” into a pool of red liquid.
That served as a warning to Fran. In the future, she would have to be careful when dealing with higher-tier professionals.
She needed to use Blood of the Furnace under the safest conditions possible. Otherwise, if the other side chose to stake everything on their final moment and drag her down with them, that would be no laughing matter.
Then there was the transmitter Connor had mentioned at the end. Fran understood why he had brought it up.
He had probably recognized that the spell ring she carried was far too high-tier, which had made him believe that there really was a Fourth-Tier Mage standing behind her.
That transmitter might attract someone, and that person was probably very close to Connor and would come to investigate the cause of his death.
By telling her about it, Connor was trying to stop that person from coming and provoking Fran in turn.
As for whether to deal with the transmitter, that was up to Fran.
Even Connor had been gambling on this. He was betting that Fran would want to avoid unnecessary trouble and would destroy the transmitter herself.
Fran walked outside the tent and used Telekinetic Hand to dump everything inside onto the ground. Then she directly picked up the black parcel with Telekinetic Hand.
Some basic caution was still necessary. What if this thing Connor had mentioned was actually a trap?
Then, from a distance, Fran launched a Fireball. It struck the black parcel in midair directly, and Dragon Flame scorched it with yet another layer of blackened burn marks.
Throughout the process, Fran did not sense any magical fluctuation at all. It seemed that the transmitter had been reduced to ashes.
After taking care of that pressing matter, Fran began cleaning up the battlefield.
Calling it “cleaning up the battlefield” really just meant taking anything valuable from the corpses, piling up whatever remained, and then using Dragon Flame to erase all traces.
Amid the blaze, Fran looked at the black residue inside the fire. Almost all of it had already turned to ash.
Then she lowered her head and began taking stock of what she had gained from the battle.
She found more than a dozen books in the tent. Aside from the novels and pornographic books, the only one of any value was a book recording geographical information.
At the same time, she found a stack of silver sheets inside a locked box, each one inscribed with numerous combat techniques. These were most likely the combat techniques of the Bloodwolf Knights.
However, after giving them a rough glance, Fran found them rather outdated. If she had only just left the City of Apprentices, they might still have been useful.
But now that she had Sunflame techniques, which were simply too effective, she had no interest in these combat techniques at all.
Incidentally, because she had defeated a Second-Tier enemy with Sunflame during that battle, all of her Sunflame techniques had increased by around 600 points.
Even the First-Tier spells she had just cast had received a substantial proficiency boost.
But despite the large increase, these techniques and spells, useful as they were in the first tier, were still some distance away from reaching mastery.
Fran continued examining her gains. The next item was a thick silver strip with an extremely irregular shape.
The whole thing looked somewhat like a token. From the very moment she saw it, Fran knew that this was no ordinary object.
Yet at the same time, she had no idea what it actually was. She only knew that it was something valuable, especially since it had been stored in the same protected box as the combat techniques.
Fran shook her head, set the item aside, and continued sorting through the rest.
In truth, the knights’ armor and weapons contained a great deal of special metal.
Although Fran had battered most of those weapons so badly that they were no longer usable, the metals themselves were still worth a great deal of money.
But she had no way to carry all of it away. Her only means of transport was a single black horse, and that simply could not haul much.
So Fran could only pick out a few metals that especially interested her, smash them into fragments, and place them into a bag.
There were also the coins she had found on the knights and inside the tent.
After tallying everything up, Fran discovered that all the money combined came to only about twenty-three gold coins. That made her curse the knights for being paupers.
That was about all the valuable loot she had managed to recover from them. Everything else had been burned into ash by her Dragon Flame.
Finally, she looked toward the fenced area where the tent had once stood. More than ten horses were still tied there.
At that moment, all of them were lowering their heads toward her black horse as though they were deeply afraid of it.
These horses had all been carefully selected from different places by the Bloodwolf Knights. Normally, when gathered together, they would horse around and clash with one another, none willing to submit.
But in the presence of Fran’s black horse, they all became timid. After several rounds of modification, Fran’s black horse could already be considered a genuine magical creature.
To those horses, Fran’s black horse was a being that looked the same as them on the outside, but inwardly was no different from a monster. Their fear was perfectly natural.
As Fran looked at them, she felt that this posed a rather troublesome problem.
To her, these horses were little more than tasteless scraps. They were worth some money and could be sold, certainly.
But the place she was heading next was the Northern Frontier. Let alone horses, even people had difficulty moving around there freely.
The mounts that truly ran across the Northern Frontier were all superior breeds tempered and selected by nature itself.
If these horses really followed her there, they would probably drop dead for her by the very next day.
So after thinking it over again and again, Fran simply untied the ropes and let the horses go wherever they pleased. She had no interest in getting involved with them.
Fran mounted her black horse and moved across the rough ground, made difficult to traverse by her repeated castings of 【Earth Uplift】.
The black horse sped onward in the direction of the Northern Frontier.