Surprise, but a welcomed one

Leon had no trouble following the tracks. Ever since he managed to get a single clue, it felt as if the entire forest did its best to help him figure out the rest of the path that someone took in the past.

'Broken bushes, bent grass, strange way for the leaves to face...' Leon thought, unable to stop a smirk from appearing on his face. 'Brother, you really ought to do a better job at that!'

Leon continued to follow the tracks for quite a while. And as the minutes of his job turned into the first hour and then a second one, he had no other choice but to admit that whoever he was following...

Wasn't an expert at all.

'That I can say for sure,' he thought when he stumbled upon yet another area where whoever he was tracking failed to move properly, leaving a huge area full of marks.

'You might not be pathetically bad at the job, but you are quite a few years worth of experience too early to try to elude my eyes!'

Leon rejoiced, openly reveling in the feeling of superiority. Yet, as much as he wanted to ignore it, he couldn't help but be aware of one, simple fact.

And it was a simple truth that it was never a competition. And unless the person he was tracking was really just slightly better than an amateur, then they didn't try to cover their tracks at all!

In the end, after roughly three further hours of tracking, Leon finally decided to take a break.

'It's not like they can escape from me now,' he thought while taking a seat on a sturdy-looking branch of a tree. He then pulled out a small sack that he stole from one of the mercenaries he was sitting at the fireplace with.

Just like expected, it contained some coins and a packet of dried-up and bound meat.

'A perfect snack,' Leon thought, taking his time to chew on the hard piece of salty jerky.

'It's awful,' he thought a moment later when he had no choice but to praise the food the villagers served for him back at the Gleenwood village.

The food was awful... but it was food nevertheless. And whether it was good or bad, Leon had to take in some nutrients to preserve his strength in the long run.

'I guess hunting in this forest would be easy,' he thought, giving himself a moment to dream about freshly hunted meat that he would then fry over a small fire only to then rub the salt off the jerky on it to make it actually delicious.

Then, Leon finished the piece of the meat before softly dropping himself down from the branch and getting back to work.

He had no reason to be in any hurry... other than his desire to earn some real money and then get to the city where he could get good food again.

'When the push comes to shove, all humans will always strive to fulfill their basic needs,' he thought, dropping the naive thoughts of hunting.

Finding some prey would be easy with his mana constantly alerting him of small animals all over the place. Yet, doing so would lead to the risk of someone noticing his presence, a risk that brought along too many risks and dangers with it for Leon to ever accept it.

Soon, the bloodmancer was back to following the tracks while he made sure to figure out as much about his real prey as he could from the markings they left over in the forest.

'It wasn't a group, that's for sure,' Leon soon figured out when he finally noticed the patterns of the areas of greater damage to the foliage.

And then, in the most anticlimactic moment, Lean suddenly found himself at the edge of the woodlands and a massive clearing.

Clearing that was bustling with human activity, something he could observe even while still hidden pretty deep behind the treeline.

'What the hell?' Leon thought, unable to hold back his disappointment. 'Just when it was getting slightly harder to follow them...' he whined in his thoughts before taking a deep breath and regaining his focus.

Now that he found some humans hiding in the forest, the first part of his mission was over. But he was still far from completing his entire task.

'Whether it's a camp for deserters or misled conscripts, there is someone among them who can survive in the forest,' Leon thought as he used every last bit of his experience to approach the edge of the woodlands without alerting anyone.

In the end, Leon fell down to the ground, crawling through the wet undergrowth. Inch by inch, he got closer, before nothing but some shadows and ignorance of the people nearby kept him hidden.

And then, rather than coming out and taking everyone by a surprise... Leon started to observe.

The camp filled only about a tenth of the entire plain hidden within the forest, even though Leon could count as many as over two hundred people in there.

'That's weird,' he soon noticed something that didn't make sense. 'There are at least two hundred people here... but there is only so much food?' he thought when he laid his eyes down on two racks with pieces of relatively fresh meat hanging down from them.

And then, a person emerged from another part of the woodlands while carrying a huge animal carcass on their back.

At first, that person talked with several villages. Then, said person passed the corpse of a huge animal to a man so covered in blood he could only be a butcher. And then, the same person approached the rack with the drying meat to pick one of the pieces of themselves.

'Huh?' Leon heavily twitched when the face of the person finally came into his view.

Because it was no one else... but Alice!

His shock was so massive he couldn't stop himself from nearly jumping.

'Fuck, stop!' the bloodmancer quickly came to his senses, taking his soul into a steel-like grip. 'She's long dead! This girl is just a fucking lookalike!' he forced himself to believe, refusing to accept what would be the least likely but most desired explanation of the situation.

Sadly, it was too late.

His sudden jump was actually only a small twitch... but it was still enough to alert the huntress, causing her to look right in the direction he was hiding in.

The girl then lowered herself to her knees while simultaneously pulling out a massive dagger and a small horseman's pick from behind her belt.

'That's one ugly weapon,' Leon thought as soon as he noticed old bloodstains on the girl's pick.

It was a weapon he was pretty familiar with as it was considered to be one of the simplest to use tools of murder possible that retained an extremely high degree of lethality.

And for a weapon that was actually difficult to use without killing your opponent... it was something Leon was sadly extremely familiar with.

Yet, rather than panicking, he slowly brought his hand down and tightened his fingers around the handle of his short spear.

The texture of the runes he drew on it caused his mind to calm down, even when the girl started to slowly approach the line of the trees. And with the power hidden underneath those runes, even the sight of the deserters organizing themselves to join the girl failed to uproot Leon's confidence.

'I guess it's time to test out just how good you are, partner,' he addressed his thoughts to his weapon before pushing himself deeper into the trees.

Leon could likely take on an entire camp worth of those people by himself. But he had no reason for making things harder for himself.

And so, he crawled to the back a little before using the distance he gained to climb up one of the nearby trees.

Soon, the girl stepped inside the treeline with several deserters following closely behind.

'And now, it's time for the fun part of the job,' Leon thought, gripping his short spear tightly in his hand and holding his breath down.