After the punch, Rusty attempted to get to his feet but as he tried the arm on his left shoulder grabbed his head and pushed him to the background. Using his ability Rusty sent a spike of solid blood through the hand of the arm on his shoulder. Lawrence, who had begun walking towards Rusty made a subtle grunt of pain when Rusty stabbed the hand and as Rusty felt its weight disappearing Lawrence's hand reappeared from out of his body with a small bleeding hole in his hand, but instead a look of anger or dissatisfaction Lawrence instead gave Rusty a smile.

“Stabbing my hand was possibly the worst thing you could have done! Look at your outfit, do you even realize what you’ve done?” Lawrence said to him from a few meters away as he began laughing. Rusty feeling inclined to listen to him, looked down at his outfit where he found blood splatters all across the upper left half of his outfit.

“Now let’s end this little sparring match and move on shall we?” Lawrence said enthusiastically.

Rusty took a step back, knowing what was about to happen as both of Lawrence's hands began to collapse in on his body. A punch came from Rusty’s left side followed up by an immediate punch from under his chin which sent him back to the ground once more. The punches kept coming from different positions but all in the same area which gave Rusty an idea. Using his ability Rusty grabbed his shirt and ripped it off, it hurt to have done it with enough force to rip his shirt off through is armor, but it was better than being punched continuously.

“HAH! Nice one!” Lawrence said who’s hands reappeared as he walked over to Rusty who got up as fast as he could from the ground and got ready to continue.

“Easy there!” Lawrence said in a calming voice raising his hands as if to steady Rusty who he was still too far away from to be doing, “We’re done here.”

“Wait...what?!” Rusty replied in disbelief.

“As in we’re no longer going to be doing this,” Lawrence said to him while heading towards the exit, “Now let’s go!”

“You’re not gonna grab the rest of your clothes?” Rusty asked pointing to his armor, shirt, boots, and socks which were near the middle of the room.

“Nope! Now hurry up so we can go,” Lawrence replied.

Rusty jogged to his shirt to retrieve it then went after Lawrence. Once they were out of the room with Rusty still following him Lawrence laughed to himself turned to Rusty and said, “Oh you should have seen when I put Taste through that two weeks ago!” he laughed again, “Oh man it was the most pathetic half-assed attempt to fight me that I've ever seen, first he instead of say, giving himself an intangible ability so that he could test my abilities without getting hurt, he tried to use an ability that stored kinetic energy to smash me, which I just ported away from of course. After that he tried an ability that shot high-pressure water, which failed horribly, Then he tried a few more before I decided to end it with the blood on the shirt trick that I tried on you, which I’m happy you figured a way out of, cause only about half of my opponents ever do and if they don't then it makes for a boring battle. When I did it on Taste it was absolutely pathetic, he didn’t try anything other than to shield his face, he could have at least tried to stop my hand by grabbing it you’d think, but no, he didn’t. You’ll definitely have some bruises and a black eye, but just think about it this way, yours won’t turn out nearly as bad as Tastes, when we were done with his match his face was covered in bruises, he was bleeding a bit too now that I think about it.” Their walk led them to the front door where two sets of clothes with winter coats were sitting on a bench at the side of the room.

Lawrence walked up to the bench and started getting dressed with everything in one pile except for the pants as he still had his originals, “These are for us” he said pointing to the other pile.

After Rusty put on the new shirt and the coat in the pile he followed Lawrence out one of the massive doors of the building they started walking down the road, ”What are we doing?” Rusty asked.

“We’re doing a patrol of the town, although, we’re only going to go up and down the main roads that branch off from the main building we’ve been staying in.”

“Got it,” Rusty replied.

At first the walking okay, this was because Lawrence kept on talking about what happened in Taste’s sparring match when he joined the team, “After I sparred with Taste I would have kicked him out of the squad if Chi hadn’t already officially accepted him into the team, so I've just been making him do the grunt work until he improves. Although for him improvement will definitely be harder than most people's though. Thanks to his our he has to constantly adapt to his situation with what he’s given, and frankly, he just doesn’t have the brains for that yet.”

After walking for a few more seconds Lawrence turned his head to look at Rusty, “Here’s a useful tip, don’t try too many new things at once or else you’ll end up like Taste, as a jack of all trades he's a master of none, and being a master at something is always better.”

After Lawrence’s advice, they continued to walk down the first road. The walk from then onwards was mostly silent, which rusty didn’t mind and every now and then Lawrence would start talking to himself about what sounded like poetry ideas. It took about forty minutes to go from the temple building down one road and back and by then Rusty was thoroughly bored of the nonstop walking in silence as halfway through the walk Lawrence stopped just saying his random thoughts aloud. When the got back to the temple building everything had seemed the same, and so they headed off down the nest to the left of that one that seemed even longer than the last one. After a little over half an hour, they were back where they started, it turned out that the road wasn’t as long as it had looked.

“This is boring,” Rusty said aloud as they began to walk down the third road.

“It needs to be done,” Lawrence stated, “Also its a way to test your endurance, so stop complaining.”

They continued down the road as they had the others. Similar to the other two roads, the third road was covered in a surprisingly thin layer of snow, Rusty was expecting a town in a place so far North to have thicker amounts of snow on the ground. The empty dark houses upon houses left the mood feeling tense even though Rusty knew nothing would happen. With this road being the shortest one yet, it took no more than twenty minutes to back to the temple building. As the two of them were about to head down the last road Lawrence stopped Rusty who wasn’t really paying all that much attention.

“Take a look at this,” Lawrence said as he knelt down to the ground. In front of Lawrence and leading down the road were footprints, human footprints.

“Is that...?”

“It is” Lawrence answered, “They appear to come down from the road and head into the temple, it's probably just Webs, one of them probably forgot something important and they sent Webs back to get it, it wouldn’t be the first time at least.”

“So should we just continue down the path?” Rusty asked.

“I said it was probably Webs, as in it could be a stranger, and if that’s the case then we need to go question them, see if they know anything, and besides, if it was Webs we can just assume that he would've taken care of anything that would require our attention on his way back here anyway, so come on, let’s go,” Lawrence said as he led Rusty back to the temple as he followed the tracks in the snow.

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Chase looked up ahead to see they next village they were supposed to head to, but couldn’t see the sign clear enough because of the blizzard to be able to make out any words. Chase had no idea as to why the snowstorm was so much harsher than it was at Northguard, it was even a bit difficult to stand in the thick layer of snow that they’d been traversing. the last village they went to called “Gelum village” was just like Northguard in its population situation, it was completely devoid of life. As Chase and his group which consisted of himself and his three comrades in which he was at the back, entered the village they were able to see the sign and confirm which town they were in. Once in the small town called “Feather Fall”, where Chase could guarantee that the snow wasn’t at all falling like a feather. Once they reached the middle of the town they looked around at the surrounding houses in the town and to their happy surprise, one of the houses seemed to have a light on near the other side of the town. As their team began to head over to the house Chase suddenly tripped on some sort of rock, making a high pitched scream as he fell.

“Are you okay?” Cloud said as he extended his hand to help Chase up.

“Yeah I’m fine,” said Chase as he took Clouds hand and got back up, “Just some big rock lying in the middle of the road under the snow,” Chase said, annoyed at the thought, “Right Cloud?” Chase didn’t get a reply from Cloud, “Cloud?” He tried again.

“Chase,” he said, “That’s not a rock.”

Chase turned to look at where he fell and began to say, “What do you mean it's not a rock...oh my god.” On the ground where Chase had tripped, there was a dead body of a man lying on the ground with a gaping hole in his chest.

“We need to tell the captain about this,” Cloud said.

“Indeed. Captain!” Chase said loudly as he turned to face the rest of the group just to see only Cloud standing there with him while it seemed that the captain and Boomer had already made it to the building with lights inside.

“Come on Cloud!” Chase said as he ran as best he could in the snow towards the building.

“Got it!” Cloud replied and the two of them ran over to the building.

As they reached the building the captain was about to open the door, “Captain!” Chase shouted, “We found a dead body in the road!”

“A dead body? This may be more serious than we thought, once we get back to Northguard will have Lawrence return to the capital immediately to let them know what we’ve discovered, but without an eyewitness report we have no real evidence to be able to confirm anything that’s happened here.” the captain said to the group.

“What should we do captain?” asked Boomer, who had been surprisingly silent since Gelum village.

“Boomer! Cloud! Go investigate the dead body, see if it can tell us anything. Cloud, we’re going to investigate this building, we should stay in groups of two at the least, got that?” the captain asked.

“Understood,” said the other three, after which Cloud led Boomer to the body they had found while the captain opened the door to the building while Chase pulled his knife out from the left side of his belt. Once the door was opened Chase and the captain walked in ready for combat just to find a small child in a thick fur coat sitting in front of a fire.