Well shit... its been a minute. I've enjoyed this story too much to let it die out. Even if just for the few readers who made it this far. For anyone who still read it in the past year. Thank you. It's always the engagement that adds more fuel to the creative machine. Life's gotten in the way, blah blah blah, in short, I want to finish this novel. Its fun, and with a bit of maturity, I can continue.

But anyways, enough of that mushy introspection, onto the madness.

William turned to the forest. "The others! They're in danger!"

"What?" Morey sputtered, 'Was this really a good time?'

"This was a planned sabotage, dammit! What the hell do they want?" William growled as his hand tightened around the hilt of his blade.

The roar of the dragon regained the attention of both of the seekers. It was getting closer.

"Shit…" Morey cursed to himself. This didn't make any sense, who would be behind this? No one acted all that suspiciously except…

"The mages!" he exclaimed.

"What?" William asked, his eyes darting to Morey for a moment before returning to the dragon.

"The mages!" Morey repeated, "They were acting weird during the fight. Towards the end they decided to stick with Carlos despite knowing it would be more dangerous."

"Hmm, well that is a bit off but still…"

"One of them smiled at me when they went to Carlos. I don't know them well, but I just thought they were the cowardly types. But they went with him knowing that he was going to be at the center of all the monster's attention, they weren't afraid." Morey added quickly. They both heard an explosion nearby. It was getting even closer.

"That can't be true…" William whispered, "That can't be true! They worked in the army for years! Why would they do this?"

"I don't know," Morey shrugged helplessly, "But would they even have the resources to pull this off? They can't be that strong right..? But then again it isn't that hard to hide your strength to have more tricks up your sleeve."

"No, their strength as far as I know is limited," William answered, "And the only way to cause these large scale disasters is to use an incredibly powerful artifact, but that in of itself is nearly impossible. Mages of their status have to get approval from their superiors to just get access to them during training. It's practically impossible to get approval to use one during a high stakes battle," William paused, thinking for a moment, "There is no way that they're alone in this…"

"That only makes it harder to figure out who else is in on it if there's a chance that even a high ranking bastard could be involved," Morey sighed, "This is stupid. What are we going to-"

The roar made them both jump.

"Oh right...dragon…" The two seekers sighed.

"Well its pretty clear that the dragon is just a red herring," Morey groaned.

"No, it's more than that," William said, unsheathing his sword and putting up a guarded stance, "it's their best way to take us down."

Morey shook his head as he copied William's stance. "Well, let's not get killed then. Then we'll kick whoever's ass it was that made us go through this."

"Boy, I don't condone the violent actions, but we do need to put a stop to their madness. They've involved too many innocents in this sabotage, lots of people are getting hurt."

"I guess, but I have a feeling that they'll be fine, because they have to focus on someone else..." Morey dawled, in which William sent him a questioning look, "I mean us," Morey elaborated, causing William to raise an eyebrow, " Think about it, we're seekers, people hate seekers, and here's a group wants us dead and people will either not realize or care why it happened."

"People will still question it. If not one, then another one will," William said sternly, "Not everyone hates seekers Morey, there are natives out there who care, natives out there who don't deserve this treatment. That is the reason why we have to fight."

"I don't think you understand how stacked the cards are against us. Its our word vs theirs, and you said that this world is dominated by the natives."

"We don't have time to antagonize people! We have to survive!"

"Yeah? And then what? What's going to happen then? We'll be welcomed with confetti and cheers? "

"Morey I just want you to understand, no matter what happens, please do not let your anger get the best of you. We have to focus."

There was no way that he was going to survive if he lost his cool, so taking a deep breath he did a quick nod, "Yeah, fine you're right," Morey begrudgingly said. He looked up at the dragon, it was now taking a nose dive right to their location, mostly likely due to the fact that it sensed them, "So what's the plan?"

"Well, before when I had the belief that the army would help us out on the way back, I was going to try and exchange blows with it first to try and gauge its strength. Then maybe try to outlast it. Both of us slowly chipped away at its defenses until it fell."

The dragon was getting closer, and William pinched the bridge of his nose with his shield hand, his face falling into a scowl, "But now that things have changed, we can't afford to wear ourselves out. As much as it pains me to think this, we can't rule out the fact that anyone defending the village is actually defending it. Anyone could be in on it. So we need as much of our strength and stamina on the way back in case another battle comes."

"'When' another battle comes," Morey corrected.

William shot Morey with a glare, causing the boy to shut up. The dragon was getting even closer now, not even a kilometer away now.

"'If' another battle comes up," William stressed, "We need all the strength we can preserve in order to figure out a way out of this."

"Um, Will?" Morey tensed. The dragon finally managed to see them and now was headed straight for them with its mouth wide open.

"Get behind me, I'll handle this," William growled, raising his golden sword.

"Dammit Will, don't let your charity get the better of you. You need all the help you can get!" Morey shouted.

"Morey I need you! Just not-" Before the knight could finish his sentence the dragon's massive wing tackled him, missing Morey by a few inches, dragging him off towards the forest again.

"William!" Morey screamed, dashing after the dragon. He could barely make out what his mentor was trying to tell him.

"More….The…..cind…."

"What?" Morey yelled out to him, still running.

"BEHIND YOU!" William roared as he held on to the dragon.

Morey spun around only to get engulfed in flames.

The dragon was supposed to be with William, so what was attacking him? He couldn't see through the flames. The armor was designed mostly for protecting him from sharp and blunt attacks, not from the heat!

The armor did a decent job at blocking the brunt of the flames, unfortunately the metal was slowly starting to heat up the outer metal layer. Thankfully, the interior padding did a good job from Morey getting burned, but it could only do so much as he started to feel the heat slowly reach his skin.

Along with that, the visor wasn't as well protected, allowing for small licks of flames to sneak into his defenses. His face burned, and he was blinded, causing him to stumble backwards.

Morey couldn't hear his mentor anymore, too far away to be heard, which meant that he was on his own.

Morey wasn't a stranger to these...Spirits? Elementals? He could never tell the difference, but that didn't really matter, no matter how much William insisted that it did.

He was getting off track again, the bottom line was that this wasn't his first time dealing with these...things.

The fire was starting to die down, and he slowly began to turn around.

Blasting their flames all at once was going to be their biggest mistake, something that William told him to keep in mind was the fact that even the strongest of monsters still get tired. Elemental spirits, despite being metaphysical in nature, still need to become physical to hurt living things.

"And in order to hurt me, you…" Morey growled as he charged at the spirits, "Have got to follow our rules!" He shouted as he leaped into the air and brought his sword down, cutting one of them roughly in half. The cut was not clean, and his blade made sure of that, like a rabid dog in the heat of a fight, he went for the second one before it could spew any flames. All creatures, no matter the size or strength, have stamina. Which meant that they had to get tired, or at the very least, let their guard down.

Morey had no problem fighting unfairly, so when the spirits were weakened, he went all out on and dicing at them ignoring the sounds of pain they were letting out. All the screeches only caused his maniacal smile to grow. "It's been so long since I've…" He sliced another down, "Let loose!" He laughed as he continued his onslaught. He was so caught up in the fight that he didn't see a sludge of magma crawling towards him. The cinders all spreaded out, confusing the young warrior.

"What the he- '' Before he could finish that sentence he screamed. The lobber spat out a full set of lava at his back, melting away at the metal that was protecting him from the heat.

"Aaaargh!" He screamed as he fell forward, the lava melting away the metal platings on his back. The molten material started to burn through his leather gear. Having no choice, he yanks the material off his back in a panic. "Fuck!" Morey growled, as fell forward. He could almost hear William's boisterous laugh at his stupid mistake.

"I would say that your biggest mistake, Morey is…" The older man said as he chewed on a turkey leg, Morey being pinned underneath him, covered in wounds, "Is that you tend to underestimate everyone!" He laughed.

The young boy could do nothing but groan under him. He was a complete mess. Yet William looked completely fresh and unfazed, despite sparring for over 4 hours. The only sign of any scuffle on the knight was the light scratches on his shield, and a small drop of sweat falling down atop his forehead. He was sure that he would be able to at the very least land a single hit, but no, he couldn't even do that.

"You know…" William continued, "You're going to have to be more creative if you wish to take down stronger opponents. You've lived with being the strongest for too long. That's the point of this exercise."

Morey dodged another volley of fireballs coming from the recovering cinders, the heat blasts barely missing him by an inch, singing the tips of his hair. Gritting his teeth he tried to close in the distance between him and the stupid spirits, only for the lava blob to set between them, its body atop them shifting around into a round shape...and blowing up like a balloon.

It was in that moment it dawned on the boy, the Tauros army couldn't fight the thing head on, how the hell was he going to do it?

Before he could even wrack a semblance of a response the monster swung at him with full force. He reacted with a raise of his shield, in which his body reacted with the sound of a nasty crack as he felt his shoulder get lodged out of its socket. "AH! FUCK!" He screamed as he got launched back even further, landing painfully on a charred tree. He panted, looking up at the enemies he was going up against.

Several cinders were still prowling along, and the giant glob of lava was still crawling towards him, hurling another ball of the hot liquid at the boy.

In a panic he jumped out of the way, cursing as he felt small burns form on the side of his body, some droplets of the molten metal landing on his exposed side.

"Dammit! Dammit!" He screamed as he pushed himself to run further as the volley of fireballs were all launched at him next. He needed to be sure if William was doing oka-

"WILLIAM!" He shouted, as he tried to look over all the flame enemies around him, desperate to find his mentor. But before he could even think, he got bombarded, and his world went dark.