where is the town?

traveling with a. mage as bodyguards they use the carriage few minutes. there was nothing going on watching as a trees go by things became repetitive at some point. many of them began to wonder if they were going in circle. of course that thought cleared their mind as their movements stopped and knocked over tree was blocking their path. the soldier in the shadow kid got out to take a look. there's suspicions were that it was probably bandits but there were no bandits in sight. but what did happen was a rather large bear attacked their carriage. the mage scared stay of cowering inside the soldier using his brute strength force. the bear off the carriage but the bear obviously thought back hostile towards the soldier it began using immense strength. so much so that even with the soldiers new arms he was having trouble keeping up. if that wasn't enough, another large bear though, not as big came rushing out as well. shadow kid feeling obligated and out of concern intervene using his triangular blades. while the bear was on all fours, he rose from beneath the bear and slid its throat ending the sudden rush. the soldier having no weapons at the time used to rather sharp claws of his crystallized arms to dig in deep around the throat area of the other bear to mimic what the shadow kid did. the two bears were incapacitated on the side of the road. the mage not wanting to be wasteful besides to skim the two bears. while doing so, the two protectors began doing their job looking out for any other unwanted and wanders the shadow kid looking around the forest area while the soldier remained at the major side, going deeper in our lurker of shadows. discover something interested. a bear cub putting two and two together. he assesses that their attackers were to parents trying to feed their child out of empathy. he didn't want to leave them there so we decides to bring Cub back with returning with the cab in his hoodie he sees the major already disassembled the carcasses of the two dead bears. of course the shadow feeling. sorry for the baby cub covers its eyes so it doesn't see its dead. parents loading everything in on two of the wagon and confirming there aren't any damages. they set off again as they continue riding the wagon yet again they start to notice that the scenery is the same as it always is. there's no changes and even more than an hour. according to the map it should be a day in 6 minutes travel the day had already passed so they should have been in town. 6 minutes ago they stopped again trying to figure out if they missed an intersection or something but it should have been a straight shot. there were no clear indications that they had merged off anywhere, so the mage suggested that it's possibly a spell of misdirection and if that's the case they could already be there and they just don't know it. the shadow thinks about that possibility and tries using his power to try and move around the illusion but no luck. the mage wants to try to dispel it but doesn't know any spells that can do that The only moves they can think of were returning or camping, but if they stay too long they might miss their appointment with the head. mage keeping an eye on the cart soldier notices. something strange about the trees though. each of the trees seem to be mirror images of each other. the patterns on the tree are drastically different. some of them even resembling symbols he points it out to the other two thinking it might be a clue to getting them out of there. the mage tries testing the tree for magic but no luck. the shadow not knowing any magic tries to think of a different way to solve the problem he read is a torch with some of the materials that they have on them and using the torch. he would burn any trees that had a symbol on it or anything that look like a simple. at first it started to look like there was a forest fire and then the illusion did start to break for a minute but then it reset as well as the fire is going out. if that wasn't enough though, the soldiers armed at something weird while the soldier relaxed in the wagon, one of its new arms started moving on its own. it's stretched all the way to one of the trees and chopped it down. the illusion then started to break again for a minute but then restarted the soldier regained control of his arm again The shadow catching on to what just happened finds another tree with the symbol and starts to cut away at the tree with an ax that they had brought. the illusion started to destabilize more this time lasting 5 more minutes. it was clear what needed to be done. they needed to cut down as many trees as possible to get the illusion to break so that they can proceed while pushing forward towards the town was a task. not easy to do. when they finally made it into town, they noticed that a lot of people were surprised that someone made it in the chief of the village explained that the reason they sent for a mage was because the four started doing strange things like creating illusions that made it harder for people to go in and out and even illusions that started to mimic foods and vegetables which was causing a widespread famine. not knowing what's real and what's fake, it became harder to identify things finding the spell Castor apologized knowing that they were not up to the task without having the ability to dispell anything, but the mage did have some insight though. his understanding on the matter was that someone was going around carving incantations into different trees and if they were doing that someone had to be living in the force somewhere. so the mage offered the soldier and the kid of shadow larger sum of the money that he would have gotten if they go find the mage in the force who's causing this problem and so they agreed