The Insider System

Chapter 313: Setting Out

As Lake was guided into the room where the carts were being loaded by a guard he saw the Temple Head and started to walk towards her after thanking the guard for helping him. There were still a few minutes until the time they were told to be here so he was hoping the Temple Head would have time to tell him what she wanted him to do.

All it took for her to start talking to him was for him to get close. "Just stand here next to me. We're going in the same cart." This is exactly what he had expected so he did as he was told and stayed quiet while the Temple Head told everyone else where to go and what to do. They would have plenty of time to talk while in the cart so he didn't need to get in the way of what she was doing.

Once she had put everyone in the room into one of the carts the Temple Head looked at her list and said. "It looks like everyone showed up on time. We're ready to go." Lake wanted to ask where Tiff was but he knew he could just find out himself if he used Detector so he looked around for her while the Temple Head got into the cart.

He found Tiff as he turned around to get into the cart himself because she was sitting right next to the Temple Head. Lake guessed it made sense for her to be in this cart but the fact the Temple Head made him stand outside until now made him think no one was going to be inside. Surely if there were already people in here waiting he could have been one of them.

"Why did you make me wait outside if people were already in here sitting down?" Lake couldn't help himself and ended up asking this right after he thought it. "I didn't want you to take my seat." Realizing there was in fact only one place left for him to sit, Lake closed the door and sat next to the only person in the cart that he didn't know.

"Hello I'm Lake." Lake wasn't sure why the Temple Head wanted to sit next to Tiff so badly and wanted to see if it had to do with the guy he was now next to. "Nice to meet you." Like usual the person didn't give their name right away but they still answered in a friendly voice so he didn't think they were going to be unpleasant to be next to.

Lake was about to say something else to the man to see if they could talk on the trip to pass the time but the man cut him off as soon as his mouth opened. "It's alright for you to talk if you want to but try to keep it short. I need to be able to hear what's going on around us and it's already hard enough in a cart."

Hearing this he looked at the Temple Head who was currently whispering to Tiff and realized why this seat was so much worse. It looked like he was in for a completely silent trip to the Metal Domain to keep the guy next to him happy. That was fine though since he had things he could do to pass the time.

Holding his hand out and forming a small vortex, Lake started to spin it to get back to speed training. He also went ahead and activated Mute to keep this from making any noise since he felt he would be asked to stop if it made any noise that the guy next to him could notice.

...

Looking across to the other side of the cart Tiff wondered if Lake even understood why the guy next to him needed him to stay silent. Henry was the best scout they had at the Temple before Lake got here but since his ears were how he gathered information so when he was making use of his skills you needed to stay almost completely silent for it to work.

Seeing Lake hold one of his hands up Tiff thought he was about to start spinning an arrow so he could start to tell them which direction they should go but instead a small vortex formed and started to spin. Tiff expected Henry to ask Lake to stop right away because this type of magic made noise but when this never happened Tiff realized Lake was able to cancel out the noise his magic made.

"That's an interesting skill. Do you think it would be more useful than your stealth skill?" Hearing the Temple Head had started to talk to her again Tiff turned and said. "I would rather be heard than seen." In reality the two together would be ideal but it was unlikely that anyone would ever get so lucky.

Looking back towards Lake Tiff wished she could ask for details on this skill that was canceling the noise coming from the mana on his hand. If it was just a skill that made his Wind magic silent that was good but if it could affect any noise at all it was an amazing skill that would probably be Legendary.

Thinking back to her training she tried to remember someone the Temple had her trained by that had a skill that made their movements silent and tried to remember what job he had said it came from. If she was recalling correctly it was Hunter and that would make sense for Lake since he carried a bow the only problem was she distinctly remembered it not affecting her trainers magic.

This made her think she was right and it was some mage skill she had never heard of before. Thinking of how helpful silent magic would be, Tiff thought back to her training days once again. Back then they had been told to not cast any spells while they were trying to hide because anyone with high enough Intelligence would be able to feel the magic and find where you were by following this and wondered if this skill maybe wasn't as good as they thought.

She could still tell there was some type of magic being used near her even though she couldn't hear it so the skill didn't really do much to help you hide. This made her think that maybe the silence of his magic was something he was doing by messing with the principles instead of something a skill was doing.

It was well known that even common skills were never useless and she kind of felt that silent magic that could still be felt was pretty close to useless unless you were fighting against someone with close to 0 in Intelligence and a skill that helped in a fight like that would still be considered useless.

"Temple Head there are people following the carts." Snapping out of her current thought pattern Tiff reacted to what Harry said by looking at the Temple Head. "That was fast wasn't it. I was expecting them to let us get further from the city before they got this close."

Seeing how calm the Temple Head was made her feel a bit better but it didn't change the fact that if they saw her they would know what she was almost instantly. The Temple Head seemed to know what she was thinking because she said. "Don't worry about it Tiff we brought people with us that will take care of it. We don't even need to get out of the cart to fight. I do need to get word to the other carts that there's a fight about to happen though."

After she said this Tiff saw the temple head knock on the top of the cart a couple times before the person outside driving started to talk. "I just let the other carts know madam." After the man said this Tiff expected something to happen but they just kept driving like there weren't people following them.

...

Seeing the fight didn't kick off right away, Lake went ahead and used Detector to look around them for Demon Worshipers. Not seeing any he guessed they were out of his range and switched over to using Mana Vision. This allowed him to see much further and identify what looked like people in the distance keeping pace with them.

Quickly counting them up, Lake was about to tell the Temple Head how many of them there were when he remembered she had just said they wouldn't be helping in the fight. This meant it didn't really matter to them unless the Temple Head had a way to get that information to whoever would be taking care of this.

After thinking this he just refocused on his training while wondering if they really wouldn't be forced to fight on the way to the Metal Domain. He felt it was unlikely that the Demon Worshipers wouldn't focus on the only cart that didn't stop when they attacked but he guessed he would just have to see what happened.