The night was as cold as it was dark. Normally, Namidia would have no other choice but to endure the cold touch of the metal plates of her armor, but tonight...
Tonight was as scary as it was warm.
When the first strikes fell upon the camp, Namidia thought it was divine retribution for the arrogance of humans daring to step so near the divine forest.
She saw with her own eyes how a monstrous force slammed into Cessayah, the highest-ranking mage in the whole mercenary guild, instantly reducing her beautiful body into a bunch of scrapped meat... Only to then consume it all when a cone of heavenly fire blossomed from where the mage was struck.
With her own eyes, Namidia witnessed that very fire consume the guild officers who stood guard to keep all the fans away from the high mage as she invoked her immense abilities.
And ever since the first attack came, she had no other choice but to quickly adapt to how it was only a beginning instead of a single, furious strike against the strongest of them.
In the end, though, the danger was pretty mild.
As devastating as each of those attacks was, they only ever claimed a limited amount of lives. Soon after Cessayah's death, when the headquarters issued the order for everyone to restrain their auras...
The attacks somewhat lost accuracy, first falling upon the greatest gatherings of the crowd, then through the gaps in the haphazard defenses that all the remaining mages in the camp raised.
In the end, all those mighty attacks only brought less than two hundred deaths, with only a few injured who lived to tell the tale of facing this kind of ungodly attack with their own flesh.
And in the camp where four thousand adventurers and a further two thousand servants and logistic officers gathered, two hundred simply paled in comparison to the full scale of their force.
'To top it all off, we are but the advance guard for the rest of the armies promised by the alliance. Once our number swells even further, it will be even harder to even notice those causalities...'
Namidia's thoughts flowed freely, unrestrained by anything. Such was the blessing and the curse of the guard duty, a duty that Namidia took strangely seriously.
'There's something wrong with the forest. It's different than what I've read in the books,' Namidia summed up all of her observations only to take a look at a small candle enclosed in a small box that hung down her belt.
Its tiny, dim light was already flickering, announcing the swift end of her guard duty time.
'I wonder how many more shots will come tonight,' Namidia thought, eager to use the rest of this peaceful time to its limits. After all, once back at her tent, peace would be the last thing she could get.
'Maybe whoever invokes this powerful spell needs to rest too?' Namidia tried to see through the barrier of the unknown that shielded whoever or whatever was attacking them.
Theatrically stumping her foot on the ground in empty frustration, Namidia quickly escaped to her tent. And even though there was just enough space to house her, Sulean, and their things inside, she had no problems nestling herself in a relatively warm and somewhat soft spot.
Soon, despite all the noise around, Namidia's consciousness started to disperse, lulled to sleep by all the mental and physical exhaustion the girl collected over the last twenty-or-so hours.
The voices of the people at nearby campfires started to dull, all of the different tones merging into a single line of a constant, background noise. Yet, just as Namidia was about to step through the gates of reality and escape the torture of life into the momentary relief of sleep... the uniform background noise changed.
This small, barely noticeable difference was something no normal human could ever notice.
But Namidia was a veteran of several years, two wars, and the last conquest of the divine forest to the far east. For her, it was the tiniest changes in her surroundings that alerted her the quickest.
Raising up from her nicely nestled spot, Namidia walked on her knees to the entrance of her tent, putting her face out to the cold of the night to look for what could've forced her awake.
And yet, as she looked around, she couldn't see a single suspicious thing.
Some mercenaries continued to talk, eat, and play cards by the fires, too terrified by the randomly occurring attacks of divine wrath to fall asleep. Others walked around the camp, patroling it according to their duty routines, moving from one checkpoint to another.
A bit further out in the distance, near the edge of the camp, Namidia could see Sulean already giving up to the power of the booze, abandoning his duty in favor of stealing a quick nap.
'This little...' Moving her sight even further, Namidia muffled a curse while catching sight of a group of mercenaries walking by. One of them even had to bother to wave at Sulean, clearly making fun of Namidia's lazy friend!
'Shit! If this gets reported...' Forced awake and finally learning the reason behind her sudden awakening, Namidia gathered herself from the tent before taking a few, sleepy and dazed steps. Then, after clearing the sleepiness of her eyes, she sped up and quickly caught up to sleeping...
'Huh?'
Upon touching the man's shoulder, Namidia realized the man wasn't sleeping at all, staring intently somewhere to the side with a weird look on his face.
'Did he notice something weird?' Namidia thought, feeling the last bits of her inner peace falling apart as the quirkiness of her partner she once found amusing now proved to be nothing less but a hellish pain in the ass.
Still, she looked the same way her partner had glued his eyes to, but save for the group she noticed before, she saw nothing.
"Th... They..." Finally overcoming whatever caused him to shut up for a moment, Sulean slowly raised his hand to point at the very group Namidia noticed. The look on his face clarified, settling in on a raw, unadulterated terror.
And right as flames suddenly burst out from the nearby supply depot, right as yet another thundering attack fell on the opposite end of the camp, Sulean finally managed to swallow his saliva and utter, "THEY ARE HERE!"