"You aren't going to make us walk it, are you?" Alex asked with a worried tone.
They were currently walking through the forest around and above Darkless City.
Nymira looked like she was getting more nervous by the second, while Alex looked terrified at the implication that they might have to walk it all the way to Diamond Academy.
"Answer my damn questions!" Alex shouted with despair in his voice.
"What questions?" Silas asked back, oblivious to the 78 times Alex had repeated the same question repeatedly.
"Are we going to walk it all the way to the academy?"
"That would be nice, wouldn't it? A walk all the way to the center of the continent? How long would it take us with the speed we're currently going at? A month? Hmm... Maybe more?" Silas scratched his chin while life slowly left Alex's eyes.
"Silas. Can we fight the monsters on the way as well. It would be goo training for us, especially since Alex can't run away this time like the coward he is." Nymira's nervous expression disappeared as a cold one showed on her face.
"H-Hey... Nym. Come on. Think about it."
"Call me Nym again and I'll break every single finger on that hand of yours." She harrumphed and looked away with a sneer.
"You let Silas call you Nym all the time. Are we not friends, Nym..." Alex immediately felt her glare- "Ira... Nymira!" He shouted quickly, and she simply looked away without saying a word.
"Friends don't abandon eachother." She complained.
"I was gonna come back!" Alex pleaded.
"Oh... Sure you were. The same way you said you'd replace those towels you keep taking from us."
"Hey! It's not my fault you guys only have like three towels." Alex harrumphed as well.
The entire time, Silas simply watched with a wry smile on his face. He couldn't help but chuckle at certain parts, but eventually, he decided to stop their quarreling, which would have most likely lasted for a couple of hours more than he would have liked.
"We're not walking it. I would fly it there, but since you guys can't fly yet, we'll just go through one of the teleportation hubs to the nearest city and take a carriage from there." Silas explained.
"Can't we just teleport in there? They have a teleportation hub inside, right?" Nymira asked.
"They do, but the teleportation hubs don't work like that. They only let you leave, not enter." Silas explained.
"You'd think they wouldn't have such a design flaw... You know, since they're one of the 4 great academies." Nymira sighed.
"It isn't a design flaw. It's been done like that on purpose. There have been attacks on the academy before. Sure, it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there have been quite a few attacks in the last couple of centuries.
By not allowing anyone to teleport inside the academy, they can't be attacked from the inside. Any attacker would need to go through all the cities and formations that work as a defense line between them and the academy." Silas explained.
"What if there are people inside the academy who want to attack the academy? Wouldn't that be an attack from the inside?" Alex asked from the side, now composed and calm since he didn't have to walk to the continent's center anymore.
Egiladore was quite large, and despite it being one continent on the planet, the planet itself was quite large too.
"Hmm. Technically, yes. However, they care about having an entire army sent through their teleportation hub to fight the academy from the inside out.
At the same time, if they have a significantly large army, they could form an attack from both the outside and inside, essentially sandwiching the academy. By only allowing teleportation to the outside, the academy gains this advantage. The academy can do the same thing the enemy would have been able to do if they had access to the academy's teleportation hubs." Silas finished explaining.
"Ah... That's pretty clever." Alex complimented.
"Eh... I can think of a hundred different way to make it even better than it's current system." Silas shrugged.
"Why didn't you do it for Darkless then?" Nymira asked.
"Well, they aren't paying me enough, and Archie isn't letting me do anything these days. I destroy one city and suddenly everyone cares about lives." Silas could not help but sneer from the side.
"To be fair, you destroying that city is the reason the organization is being called a terrorist one." Alex argued, but even after a couple of seconds passed, Silas simply ignored him, not saying a single word to him the entire time.
It didn't take long for them to approach the next city. It was the nearest one, and while there were towns closer to Darkless, none of them had teleportation hubs.
As they closed in on the city, Nymira quickly pointed out that there seemed to be a line in front of the city's gates with guards outside.
Silas had seen it a couple of minutes before she had, while Alex hadn't seen it at all since he didn't have any artifacts to help him see further.
He only had his robes, but they only increased his natural mana regeneration rate and base strength and speed.
It did nothing else; he needed someone like Silas or Nymira to spot it first.
"It's going to be a bit like Uladia, but those seem to be royal guards, so I'm not sure how welcoming they will be."
"It's a city. Of course they're going to be royal guards. Only towns have to hire normal guards." Nymira said with a slight sneer.
"Hmm... Oh well. You two take your hoods off." Silas ordered while taking his own off.
Keeping hoods on usually just made someone more suspicious, so walking without them made it much easier to pass by despite their hair color.
At the same time, Nymira and Alex weren't nearly as recognizable as Silas since, despite their hair color, Silas had a far higher bounty on his head.
"Just get your coins ready." Silas whispered to them and went into the line.
At the same time, his hair was no longer white. Instead, it was black, and his eyes, despite still being emerald in color, looked a lot duller than before.
He would have changed his face, but the bounty posters didn't look anything like him, so he didn't care to change it.
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