After I casted [Clean] on Firis, I started dissecting the Wind Hounds.
Firis had killed 23 of them in a matter of seconds. I took their skin and magic stones and stored them inside my inventory. Then I incinerated the remainings so other monsters wouldn’t come.
Once I was done with it all we started walking again. Sometime later my stomach started growling so we ate lunch then. For that I cooked something like hōtō with the wheat flour I had. Rock Boar meat is rather stiff, so it has a peculiar texture to it and with each bite it feels like more flavor comes out of it. It was all really tasty.
When we were done eating we continued walking until the sunset, then we looked for a safe place and I built a barrier with light magic. There I cast [Clean] on me and Firis, then she returned to her bigger body and I used her belly as pillow and covered myself with a blanket to sleep.
And repeating all of that, we kept moving forward through the forest and a total of four days passed. Just a little longer and we’d arrive at the city!
“We might arrive really soon now!”
“Since there isn’t such a great distance anymore, wouldn’t it be faster if you rode on my back?”
“I hadn’t thought about that option at all!!”
Doing that had never occurred to me, since we always spoke about all walking together, I was fixated on that single concept. But she was right, we could be faster if I rode on her back. I also regretted a bit that my imagination seemed to be lacking.
“Alright then, thank you for the offer.”
After I said that Firis made her body turn even bigger than her current one of a large dog, and ley her body on the ground. Then I climbed on her.
“I’m ready.”
I signaled her. She slowly stood up, and after saying “Here we go.” she started running.
As she ran, she used wind magic to negate the effect of the wind that came against us as she ran. It seemed like she was worried I’d be blown away if she didn’t do that. Even though I myself could use wind magic.
Since she ran while skillfully dodging the many trees, when I took a look around it looked almost like the window of a bullet train, with trees becoming a blur flowing backwards. After a few minutes we reached an unpaved road, she let me climb down there.
“Thank you Firis! We arrived in the blink of an eye. It’d have been nice if we had thought about this sooner.”
“Don’t mention it. And really, don’t worry about that, it was really fun walking slowly through the forest. It reminded me of the days when I trained with master.”
“Is that so?”
After she became Russel’s disciple, they went somewhere beyond the mountain range of the forest for two years. He took her to a place with lots and lots of magic presence and swarms of monsters that even Martha couldn’t defeat in a single blow. When she was back two years her speech had turned a lot more polite and kind. I can still remember how surprised I was back then as if it had happened yesterday.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of invest…training they might have done.
Half an hour after we started walking on the unpaved road a large wall could be seen far away.