In this world, Magic is Everything. All people, all races, are granted with the power to perform mystical and magical feats via grimories, mystical tomes granted to each and every child on their 15th birthday. Those blessed by the mana can have their names written down in legend.
Shattered Grimoires is the work of the mind(s) of Ardere & Shattered Grimoire's staff. All characters and content are copyright their creators, and may not be replicated without their creators' permission. Black Clover is owned by Yuki Tabata and published by Viz Shonen Jump. All images belong to their original owners. The theme you are currently viewing was made by Eliza of ElizaCodes exclusively for Shattered Grimoires.
With the time of their invasion of wherever it was that Aamon had holed himself up drawing ever closer, there were still a plethora of things that bothered Griswold up to this very day. Some of them were just your run of the mill daily issues anyone would eventually begin to ponder on when they made their bread and butter by fighting and potentially killing those that threatened the safety of their country. In that sense, Griswold was really not all that different. He too pondered on what it might be like to die in such a place, if it would actually be worth dying for such a cause, if there were ways he alone might make a difference or get strong enough to actually push the whole team towards victory. He pondered on whether or not it would be worth while to spend what time he had left before they would need to be gathered to seek out an elemental spirit of his own.
These days, it seemed like anyone who was worth their weight around here had a spirit of some kind, yet he had never seen or heard of one that was not already bonded to someone else, which likely meant that such a thing wasn’t in the cards for him. But that was okay, he had his swords. That, and he had been shooting forward with leaps and bounds, managing not only to increase his mediocre amount of mana, he had also managed to increase the damage output of his spell to a level where he could probably blow up a fourth of the royal capital in one go. Now, it wasn’t like that was something he wanted to do, it was just something he took for the sake of measurement and scale. Besides, even if he did, the nobles would have the place rebuilt by the end of the afternoon, of that he had no real doubt. But all that aside, Griswold had always been more of a loner rather than a team player, so him getting something like a spirit seemed like a bad fit.
It also meant that him getting put in with four others he only had minimal interactions with for the sake of fighting an archdemon and his lackeys could be considered a bad fit. To this day, it still bothered him that they had all been called into the same place for the sake of training, only to have some talk about their thoughts and feelings and do exactly zero training. The best thing that had come out of that was the fact that they got to fly on the back of a dragon, or rather, the great spirit of fire, Salamander. Again, that was something that proved that those who were destined for greatness were chosen by an elemental spirit, as Ardere had become a respected captain of the Crimson Lion squad alongside the Salamander, and was now the designated person to be leading an assault on what was perhaps the most powerful member of the three archdemons the royal knights had to face.
It was funny to think that the first person he had ever met that had an elemental spirit of his own also grew incredibly quickly, and was now counted among the strongest magic knights in the kingdom. While Griswold himself had also become a whole lot stronger than he had been since the royal knight exams, or since the magic knight exams that came up roughly a month later, there was also no comparing him to that version of him that had been requested to meet the rest of his team for “training”. Given how the few people he had spoken to about all that had more or less wondered why such a thing hadn’t bothered him more than it did, he had simply responded by saying that it just didn’t. And while saying that much by itself did not sound overly credible, it was actually the truth. Griswold had never done the things he did so he could be counted among the strongest knight in the country and be hailed for it, on the contrary.
He had worked to become stronger so any criminal and villain that might be active in the forsaken region would shit their breeches at the sound of his name. The elf couldn’t give a rats ass what anyone thought in the royal capital, he only cared about having the trust of the peasants and commoners of this kingdom, primarily those that dwelled in the forsaken realm. The fact that he was now counted among the ranks of the Black Bulls and no longer as a random mercenary that made a living by beating the crap out of any criminal or monster that crossed his path both added and took away from his image. While him being a magic knight added a bit to the idea that he might not just be acting on his own, and might have more people behind him, it also meant that the bad people knew about how he was tasked with bringing people to jail rather than straight up killing them, acting as his own judge, jury and executioner.
But the latter of those statements was likely just as false as the first, for he was still the same old loner that he had been before he joined the squad, meaning he preferred to take care of his issues on his own without dragging people into it. That, and if the situation asked for it, he would still not hesitate to drive one of his blades straight through someone’s stomach so hard it shattered their spine. Just like how Hania had taught him a few things about how this land worked, so did he learn a thing or two from Lydia, primarily that correctional facilities were not for everyone, and that some people were rotten beyond the point of saving. While it might have sounded rough, uncaring and unfeeling, it was something Griswold too had come to believe in, having witnessed the things humans would do for the sake of getting ahead of the curve. And that was perhaps the most important thing he had to learn as an elf among man.
Growing up as an elf among elves had made him into a gentle soul that would only kill an animal if it threatened the safety of his people, meaning he did not even eat any meat aside from those particular moments. After all, killing something with perfectly edible meat was a damned shame, which was still something he lived by up to this very day. Whether it were a wolf, a bear or a wyvern, he’d just about eat it all, really only making an exception when it came to humanoid beings as it felt weird to him to eat something that possessed sentience going beyond mere basic instincts. While on the subject of instincts, that was something that had been undergoing quite a bit of development on Griswold’s part. While he himself called it instinct, the scholars had called that which he could now do “Ki”, which was supposed to be something that originally came from a different land known as the Hino country. Seemingly being quite well known there, that wasn’t so much the case here.
And he could see why, as the very foundation of it seemed to be built around a bunch of floaty theories and poorly translated stories from a country entirely foreign to him. “The ability to perceive the world by tapping into the natural energy that all beings and objects give off”, all of which had seemed like a load of poppycock, at least until the point came where he actually experienced this much for himself. When he had been training one of the juniors of the Black Bulls squad, Ivy, doing so with wooden sticks instead of actual weaponry, he had started to see exactly what the scholars mentioned with their pretty words with his own eyes. Actually being able to see that kinetic energy that came off of objects in motion, whether it were his own blade, rock and stone getting kicked up by an eruption or explosion of mana, even the movement of other people. He could see it all with some level of clarity, even when that person made their way out of his direct field of vision, he could still “see” them.
Having taken this training a step further in yet another sparring session with Ivy, he had gone as far as to train using a blindfold during their bout, which was performed by using actual weaponry instead of some willow sticks he had prepared out in the wilderness near Sosshi. And while that too had pushed him further along to the point he wanted to be, it wasn’t until he had gone up against Verena’s latest line of golems that he had managed to make another breakthrough. Increasing the speed at which he could move and prepare his spells while still being able to maintain his concentration on maintaining his “Ki”, it seemed that she herself had also managed to get a grasp on the concept of solar magic, which would undoubtedly give rise to another new golem at some point. Regardless, all of it had pushed him to a point where the next step to reaching even higher levels was almost within his grasp, yet still out of reach at present.
In spite of that, the levels to which he had managed to push himself steadily grew with every battle, and given the amount of battles he had to take part in during your average month, that was by itself quite a welcome fact. In recent months, Griswold had indirectly been tasked with taking care of a lot of weird creatures, monsters and people. And while the amount of people that he had to take care of were arguably more monstrous than the majority of the actual monsters he had been put up against, the new beings he had come across obviously made the biggest impact on him by far. Some of the creatures that had left the most of an impact were likely those that had somehow been cursed into their present fate, which was more often than not the curse of either an extremely powerful witch or an even more powerful demon.
The werewolves he had encountered for instance were just regular people at some point, though some peculiar magical stone, like a relic of some kind, had cursed these ordinary civilians to become monsters. Part wolf and part human, they had initially been able to contain themselves up until the moment they changed, at which point all the breaks went off. At some point, it seemed the curse set in so deep that they eventually just gave up on the pretext of humanity, working towards their lupine cravings even when they were in their unaltered state. Becoming inhabitants of Hage and preying on children as they were apparently tastier, several of them would have lost their lives if it hadn’t been for his intervention. Destroying the blood stone had also done nothing towards lifting the curse, which was quite a sad thought even now.
Still, with the stone destroyed and the wolves systematically rooted out of Hage, the people were once again safe, while the actual wolves and wargs got to reclaim their territory in the deep woodlands near the fringe. At the time, it was mostly thanks to his extrasensory abilities that he had managed to locate the missing child within the forest, as he possessed no actual tracking spells or anything of the sort. The only thing he had going for him was his Ki sensing ability, as well as his skills as a fairly accomplished tracker. Not being the kind to toot his own horn or believe in his own hype, he did think that it was fair to believe that he had allowed a lot of people to keep living their mostly happy lives due to his actions. And since it made him more powerful in the process of actually doing his job, it was well worth the effort no matter how he looked at it.
Aside from his encounter with the hag, which had taken place inside of a system of caverns too, there was no doubt in his mind that his fight against the werewolves had been much more difficult. Even before he had ventured into the caverns, the initial assault against him that was orchestrated primarily by using several large wargs which were under the control of some kind of blood haze had been quite brutal. However, thanks to his extrasensory abilities like his Ki, he had managed to not only win the fight, but he had been able to do so in a way that allowed him to use his ever growing amounts of physical strength to knock out every single one of the wargs before getting to the two werewolves that remained after he had killed the first. Due to his vast amounts of love for the natural world, the fact that he had been able to fight the wargs in a non-lethal manner had been a huge blessing.
It was also thanks in part to his physical mastery, his still-increasing unarmed and swordsmanship skills and his Ki sensory abilities mixed with his actual mana sensing capabilities that he had managed to beat the second werewolf that crossed his path with surprising ease. So while he did not want to boast or anything along those lines, there was simply no denying the fact that the beast had not stood a chance against the seasoned elven mage and swordsman. Combining his physical speed with his ability to quite accurately read the straight forward and feral lunges and swipes aimed at him by the furious Lycan, he eventually landed a strike on its lower abdomen, causing its guts to come pouring out as the beast dropped to its knees. Frantically trying to keep everything inside and wait for its healing factor to kick in, it did not get to that point as the same blade that had rent its flesh now stuck out of his skull, thus ending the beast’s killing spree.
It had taken quite an effort to take down all of the five wargs that had attacked him while under some sort of control while also having to deal with a werewolf, making sure he was not bitten or clawed up too deeply, if at all. To him, especially at the time, he was quite new to werewolves being an actual living, breathing species rather than something one encountered in books and tales used to scare children or teach them a lesson. Believing that it might be some kind of disease, sickness or curse that could be transmitted by those means, he had to keep his wits about him the entire time. While it would absolutely have been easier to just kill all of the wargs before killing the two werewolves, in his opinion, the wargs were just as much a victim of what was transpiring as the people who were suffering due to the wolves. It was all just one big cascade of issues that all resulted from the same damn source in the end.
The wolves coming into the forsaken realm and attacking farmers, farmhands and livestock was clearly an issue of the wargs pushing them out of their regular territory and hunting grounds, which was but the first and most notable issue. The second was the wargs that now occupied the space of the wolves, taking their hunting grounds for themselves after they too had been driven out of their ancestral home due to the werewolves having emerged from their cave and becoming a more notable threat that roamed that specific portion of the forest. And with the blood haze seeping out from the cave and corrupting other lupines and putting them under the direct control of the original werewolf to be made by the bloodstone, that whole cascade made a lot of sense to him. So when Griswold finally destroyed the bloodstone and managed to cleanse the wargs and the final werewolf with its destruction, part of him was still somewhat sad.
Not because he had eventually ended up clearing the haze that was messing with natural cycle of the forest, but because of the fact that several wolves and at least two werewolves had to die in the end. Had he known that he could have fixed them by doing something as simple as blowing up the bloodstone, or even knowing about the bloodstone being a thing, it would have been the very first thing he would have taken out. But as that was not the kind of knowledge he had at his disposal, two people from Hage who were cursed to live as beasts had to pay for it with their lives. Making matters worse, the werewolf he had actually managed to cleanse of the bloodstone and save from the collapsing cavern, was the brother of the first of the two werewolves he had killed in an attempt to save a child from being devoured by it. All in all, that whole encounter had been a rather sad event and a clusterfuck of emotion, even though he would not physically show it.
The other time where his senses had more or less saved him and his heartstrings got tugged at was when he had gone through the motions of aiding someone who had been bitten by a vampire and was now turning into one herself, a curse that would have been triggered upon the moment of her death. After clearing up a bit of problems regarding who the vampire in question might be, due to him hiding among the people and looking just like everyone else, it had sent him and the magic knight that was with him down into an elven ruin. Funnily enough, fate had sent him into that general region once before to take care of elven wraiths that had been raised from the grave due to a powerful artifact, a staff, being taken from the grave of their lord. Upon leaving the tomb, the elves had been raised by the enchantment on the staff, tempting them to come looking for it and eventually maddening them to the point where they would kill anything in their path.
And even after that, he had been looking for ruins that might have anything to do with demons, one of the people being with him on that failed enterprise being the very same guy that had come with him on a quest to find and root out a vampire from Kiten. Fate worked in strange ways, that much was clear. But to continue his train of thought, the search for the vampire who had fled the moment he had been found out, had made his way into a similar elven ruin which had been unearthed in part during the war against the diamond kingdom. Since that time, he had been bringing several people down into the ruins where he had been trapped for centuries in an attempt at recreating the family he had lost so many years ago. Had he managed to get the woman he had bitten, he would have tried to turn children next, which was arguably worse than it going after grown men and women.
In the darkness of the ruins that were quite a ways beneath ground level, being able to track someone using footprints and looking for any swaths of missing dust meant absolutely nothing, meaning it had once again come down to his ability to control his extrasensory ki abilities, as well as his magical ability to create light in an effort to locate his query. Once it was found and the people it had turned into vampires had been burned to ash, the creature had shown its true form, becoming a creature that seemed to be more like a bat than an actual man, though it did not possess any wings with which it could fly. And given the fact that they were fighting in underground corridors, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Still, even without the ability to fly, it used the shadows and its own speed incredibly well.
Dashing from shadow to shadow, using its magic and its feral form to inflict as much damage as possible, Griswold had managed to wear it down with his swords, his own speed and his ability to track it even when he couldn’t actually see it. Something had just been pushing him towards a point where he could actually locate it, seeing images in his mind that let him keep tabs on it no matter where it went as long as it did not get too far away. Luckily for them, the vampire had entered a state of such fierce bloodlust that leaving them and making a run for it was no longer in the cards. After a grueling battle, it was with some measure of pain in his heart that he had to put the creature down for good, knowing that the path it had been set upon was one caused by a madness induced by being consciously locked away for centuries after being cursed due to the whims of a demon.
While those encounters had really worked towards shaping him as a person, it went without saying that these same fragments in time sharpened his skills as a warriors and a mage too. But he knew that there was still much more room for him to grow, both in the physical sense, as well as the magical one. With his magic growing to be more and more destructive, he hoped that by truly unlocking his potential, he might one day be capable of more than just destroying things. If anything, him picking up a sword and studying to become a better swordsman and hand-to-hand combatant was something he had done so that he would be able to fight without quite literally destroying everything around him. For that was the real purpose to Solar magic, complete and utter destruction in a matter of seconds.
Truth be told, it was one of those things Griswold had always been wondering about, why he had been born with an affinity towards solar magic of all things. It had been stated plenty often by a true mana zealot like Echo that Griswold had not been blessed by the mana, for he had always behaved like mana was not just something every person was born with, but that it was some kind of divine being, some sort of a god. For someone who had been raised with the belief that nature was something to be both cherished and looked after, the idea that his magic had to be the kind that indiscriminately destroyed just about everything in his surroundings often kept him up at night. It made him wonder if some kind of mistake had been made, that maybe there was still something more waiting for him that he had not yet managed to achieve, some sort of hidden potential yet to be unlocked.
Whether that was something that was actually in the cards for him or not however remained to be seen, though the one thing he could do as a means of increasing the potency of mind and body was the aforementioned act of picking up a sword. While it had been a difficult journey at first, mostly because the only kind of weapon he had ever handled before that point in time had been a dagger, as well as an actual pitchfork used for farming duties. But seeing as how polearms were not really his cup of tea and daggers were arguably too small a weapon, he focused on learning how to wield a sword instead. Initially, he had done so by receiving a greatsword from Hania just prior to the royal knight exams. While he could not possibly have known about Griswold’s own struggles with his magic at the time, that act had set him on a different path.
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Last Edit: Nov 1, 2021 19:46:20 GMT -5 by Griswold
Because thanks to that sword he had gotten at the time, he had been pushing himself to become good enough with it to where he might not need to rely on his spells all the time. From that point on, he had received pointers from Hans and watched him fight, began gathering more weapons to use in battle, up to the point where he felt like wielding a greatsword only halted him. As such, he began wielding a bastard sword, which could still be used with two hands, as well as one if need be. That, and he always had a dagger on his person for the sake of injuring an opponent or simply for the sake of gutting or skinning animals he captured to prepare dinner when out on a long mission. But one thing all of these weapons had in common was the fact that they needed someone to be capable.
Capable in wielding the weapon properly, knowing the limits of their weapon and the limits of their own body and much more. For someone who was truly fast and powerful might try to strike a spell with their edge, and risk losing their weapon in the process, just as one might wield a truly powerful sword while their body and mind were weak and untrained, which essentially made the weapon useless. At the point Griswold was at now, he believed he had the kind of weapons that would last in a fight against foes near his level, just like he believed that his body and mind had at the very least been tempered to the point where he could use them to the fullest without having to rely on his volatile magic. That said, he would not deny that it was still hard to rely on his own senses all the time.
During the time they considered “training” with the royal knight squad that was supposed to be sent after Aamon, he had been told that when one was to be dealing with demons, one could not always rely on their senses. And as someone who had been trained ever since he was a child to do precisely that, it was something that had not really been sitting well with him at all. It either insinuated that his senses were not good enough, or that no matter how good one’s senses were, the demons would have some way to twist and bend it towards one’s own detriment. It had been why he had spent quite a few weeks on the road and the wilds after meeting with other magic knights to take care of the werewolf problem in Hage and the vampire problem in Kiten. Funnily enough, it had been because of him being on the road that he had encountered yet another creature problem near the black bulls base in Sosshi.
As it were, it was not every day that one went out to wander the trade routes and encounter men that appeared to be half bull and half person, being some kind of hybrid of the two species that wielded weapons to devastating effects. Ironically, the fact that these beasts had appeared so close to the base of the black bulls while being bull monsters themselves seemed like it could not possibly have been a coincidence. That said though, it had been the only thing he could attribute to it at the time of encountering them, a complete coincidence. Without trying to even communicate or anything along those lines, the beasts had instantly attacked him with large battle axes, the kind of which a single strike would easily cleave the average human in two equal halves. But as he had bested an ancient vampire and a band of roving werewolves with his wits and his swords, taking out some beasts that appeared to be all brawn and no brain wasn’t exactly all that hard.
So some days after facing off against those beasts and allowing all that he had learned up until that point sink in, he deemed it to be about time for him to truly put it all to the test. While it might have sounded silly, ever since the last time the black bulls had truly sat together to celebrate whatever it was that they were celebrating around the fire pit, which had apparently been so loud it had awoken the dead to the point where Chisana had made his way over to it as well, he believed that Charles might have been a prime candidate for a good sparring session. While coming back from the dead was a feat that he considered to be quite supernatural, that did not mean that it made the person capable of doing it a prime target for a fight. This was especially true since being dead had apparently weakened him significantly. Who would have possibly thought that being dead might do such a thing to a person.
At the end of the day, he imagined that the guy should just be happy that he was no longer dead and buried, and got a second chance at living his life. While the roles between them were now reversed to the point where Griswold was no longer the one that needed aid on a higher ranking mission or dungeon adventure, the black swordsman was glad that the guy was alive. They were a black bull just like him after all, and it seemed like he knew Hania to some degree, meaning he couldn’t possibly be all bad. So with his current predicament and his body being weakened, Griswold imagined that the guy who was being considered prime material for vice captaincy was going to be the best target for a spar. Whether or not this was truly the case remained to be seen, as the elven mage himself had never truly seen what the guy was like in battle, what his magic was like, or how he utilized it. All he knew at this point was that he was in possession of an elemental spirit.
With the difference these spirits had clearly been shown to make during training sessions he had gone through, as well as knowing how most of those who held a spirit had managed to climb the ranks fairly quickly, there was no denying that it bothered him how he had never been chosen by one himself. In a way, it was like the mad mage had told him during the time they went through the tower of quinteps, he had simply not been chosen by the mana. Personally not looking at the whole concept like something that was truly alive, he did look at it in the sense that there was something about a person’s mana and the fact that spirits seemed to be attracted to a person with a certain type of the stuff. Clearly, his own was not on par with their requirements, which was why he would just keep training and fighting on his own until he reached a level where he contend with the spirit holders. But at the end of the day, one was only capable of getting so far on their own.
And so today, he had decided to switch things up a bit, doing the one thing that seemed to make sense to him given the situation. As going out to find some powerful monster would take too long and would also put that monster’s life at risk for no real reason, he had come to ask a person that seemed to spend a lot of time slumbering in the same headquarters where Griswold had spent whatever time he did not already spent out on the road. While they had more or less met while attempting to track a monster that had retreated into the fringe, as well as during both the royal knights “training” exercise and the meeting of the Bulls, he really did not know a lot about Charles. The few things he did know about him were the things he himself had divulged during the meeting of their royal knight squad, as well as the fact that he was apparently the most likely person to take the position of vice captain of the Black Bulls, as that was something the captain himself had been yelling about.
All of these things made the entire encounter worth the effort to Griswold, as he would get to determine whether the guy was truly worth the words of admiration he had been receiving. And that was not something he said out of spite, quite the opposite actually. Because for as much as he had seen so far, there was not really someone in the squad aside from captain Malcolm himself that could give Griswold a run for his money as the runner up in the squad. That, and getting to see what the guy was actually capable of in terms of strategic methodology and magical aptitude would only serve to help him out a great deal once they had to go in and fight Aamon and his cohorts. In a way, calling him out to do some actual combat training together seemed like the kind of thing that they had both not received from their squad, making this the training exercise for their squad…. Or at least half of the squad.
But what with how Ardere and Cyrus were both considered archmage level magic knights, they really did not have anything to prove to anyone when it came down to taking on any archdemons. In those regards, Charles and Griswold were different. While they too were powerful in their own right and had proven themselves capable enough, neither of them were archmages. And to that end, he himself felt like there was a lot of room for him to yet prove himself capable, not to his team, but to himself. Around two archmages, he could constantly compare his level of skills with theirs, seeing the things where he still needed to grow and maybe even finding some grounds in which they were already similar as it was. While he wasn’t counting on the latter, that would surely have been a big boost to his own self esteem. So as he was pacing around in front of the Black Bulls headquarters, he waited for Charles to get ready, even making that much known verbally.
“Whenever you’re ready!”
Being unusually loud as he said those words, almost yelling them from the outside in, he imagined that if Charles were actually awake, he would more than likely have heard him call out. And if he didn’t, that just meant Griswold had to start training on his own until the guy actually rolled out of bed, or finished doing whatever it was that he did up there. So while he waited, he decided to walk over to the area he deemed fit to be used for this kind of training, a place that had more than likely already been used as a training site by the black bulls of the past. Several meters past the tree-line was an open spot in the woods, one that had been tramped and beaten severely, likely pummeled into the wasteland it was by the use of magic and brute force. Whatever the case, the two of them would not be able to do a whole lot of damage to the landscape and to nature itself by having their spar in such a location, making it perfect by Griswold’s standards.
And in that clearing, he would wait about as patiently as he could possibly be, which was barely something that could be measured. When he did not show for quite some time however, it bothered him that he was just sitting around like some fool, waiting for someone who might very well still be in bed and might not even have heard him to begin with. As it turned out, patience was really not something he excelled at, and so he just started wandering through the forest that bordered on the bit of dead soil next to the black bulls base. Due to their proximity to the town of Sosshi, forests like these were always populated by one thing or the other, something that could be either human, beast or even monster. After all, the forsaken realm and the fringe were both quite close to one another, so creatures that people would call monsters hauling ass and leaving the area to head further down south and into the land of Clover were not exactly rare.
So as he was just patiently wandering around, waiting to hear back from Charles and generally be able to see his arrival in the field, it was around that time that he heard somebody call out from the forest. Turning to face the general direction of the scream, he temporarily froze, closing his eyes and focusing entirely on his hearing. Finding that shutting down his other senses helped him increase that of those that remained, he hoped that doing this now would let him at the very least pinpoint a general direction to follow should he be able to pick up the sounds again. Knowing that it was very much possible that whoever let out this call for aid would not get a second chance at doing so, he could not be faulted for hoping for the best in this situation. However, when it remained quiet, the only thing he could realistically do was to head in the general direction or pretend he had never heard it to begin with.
Not really considering the latter to be an option at all, he began making his way through the trees at a high pace. Because of the training he had done, as well as his many travels across the country, he had a fairly easy time maneuvering around branches that stuck out, outgrowing roots that might trip someone up, basically all of nature’s little gimmicks that one often overlooked. More importantly, due to his hours upon hours of practice, he had naturally become more in tune with his surroundings, picking up on movement and actually being able to picture in his head what his eyes could not even properly see yet. It went to show that the people who had devised this technique, or rather this method of tracking and extrasensory potential really knew what they had been doing when they came up with it.
It made him wonder as to just what else these people were capable of, and whether or not this whole Ki thing was merely the tip of the iceberg or the endgame. Perhaps one day he would find out, though right now, it was important to reach the origin of the call. Running for what felt like a lot longer than it actually was, it was not long before he picked up on a bunch of presences that were still obscured from his sight by a bunch of trees and other foliage, making it hard to figure out exactly what he was dealing with. All he knew was that there were several people there, as well as their rough location, which was good enough for the time being. Emerging from the tree line, he noticed several people holding another person hostage. What the actual goal here was, that remained to be seen, though it was quite clear that they did not get along as the animosity was tangible.
Closer inspection proved however that the man they held in bondage was a human, and that the perpetrators seemed to have a bunch of features about them that made them stand out among the average human population. Some were quite short, to the point where they were just tall enough to reach his belly button with their nose if they stood up, the others possessing notably pointy ears. While the former were everything most people expected to see when they thought about what dwarves might look like, the latter were clearly elves, which would be a rather odd thing for him to not get right after being born among them and actually having lived with them until he was about eighteen years old. Even at the time, he was used to being around dwarves too, though they looked more like elves due to the lineage being somewhat watered down.
The same could be said about most modern elves, which have turned more human than elf due to the fact that human numbers rose drastically while elven numbers began to dwindle. Griswold however could say that he knew a bit about both worlds, as he had an elven father, a mother who was of elven and dwarven lineage, and obviously because he himself had spent the past four to five years in human society. Having not seen any people who were even remotely like him since the time his own enclave had disappeared with everyone he had ever known inside of it, Griswold did not enjoy the fact that it was under these circumstances. Approaching them with his hands elevated to shoulder level as a means of showing he had no ill intentions, at least not yet, he saw how several of the men and women present drew ornate daggers that looked similar to the ones he had once had, but had lost when he came to the land of Clover.
Again making it clear that he had heard the screams and had come here for the purpose of learning what had happened, two of the men sprinted in his direction with their weapons drawn, making their intentions quite clear. They likely had no idea who Griswold was, where he had grown up and what he was, seeing only the black bulls symbol on his coat and believing him to be threat to them for being unfriendly with a human. Reaching for the dagger at his waist, it was suddenly as if time had slowed down a bit. While nothing drastic, the moment his extrasensory ki abilities kicked in after feeling threatened, he could see the first hit coming towards him. Deflecting the blow by matching it with his own dagger, he moved low so he could not only dodge the other attack that was coming to him, but to actually dish out a counterattack aimed at the ankle with the tip of his boot.
Not actually wanting to hurt these people until he was really presented with no other choice, the kick utterly destroyed the man’s footing and sent him fumbling and tumbling onto the ground while Griswold disengaged from the other guy. What he would have wanted more than anything right now was to figure out who these people were, where they had come from and why they were so hostile to people of the human variety. So when he stated the same question a third time, he greeted by more people reaching for weaponry and one pulling out a grimoire with a far fancier cover than the ones he had seen in the land of Clover up until now. Creating several faint blue magic circles, they released a thin vapor into the area that smelled strongly of sea water, which needless to say was not a scent Griswold could truly appreciate due to his oceanic encounters that ended rather poorly.
It was only once the scent of salt hit him that he realized he might be in a bit of trouble as the amount of attackers began to duplicate. Seeing quite a few men and women, elves and dwarves alike, coming at him with axes, swords and daggers, he realized that this had more than likely not been a concealment spell, but an illusionary spell instead. Trying to deflect a strike that was coming at him from the front, he felt his dagger slipping through the weapon and the person, as it was just an image made out of salty haze after all. Feeling a strike in his back as he got hit by a cleaver and sent to the ground, his mana skin had at the very least managed to dampen the blow and keep his organs, bones and even his actual skin intact. His cloak however was not so lucky, which began making him a bit upset.
Not just upset with the people he was fighting, but upset with the whole situation. These people should not have been fighting him as they were essentially the same, though the fact that he was wearing the colors of a magic knight squad probably threw them off, especially since they were not even that far removed from Sosshi and the Black Bulls base. One way or the other, he wanted to try and reach these people, though he did not want to try and get to that point by getting beaten up to just within an inch of his life and get taken as a hostage like the other human in the process. Realizing he would need to put out quite a bit of force just to get these people to listen to what he had to say, he put his dagger back into the scabbard and dove forward along the ground to avoid an attack that might very well have been illusionary, though he would not be taking that risk.
Rolling as he hit the ground so he could bounce right back on his feet, he reached for his sword Disglair and held it with his right hand. Temporarily closing his eyes as he took a deep breath, as he exhaled, he went on to fully focus himself on his surroundings. As he opened his eyes back up, As he opened his eyes back up, they could now discern reality from any of the falsehoods that were thrown his way by the illusion. Instead of seeing a small taskforce of enemies wielding cleavers and blades, the number had now been reduced by at least seventy percent, leaving the same initial number as there had been when he had run into them before. As it were, he could tell that maintaining this level of focus meant that he was somewhat slower to respond to other external things, which generally lowered his true mobility, though that was a price he was willing to pay for a better outcome for all involved parties.
As it was currently unlikely that any of them had figured out Griswold was now capable of seeing through these illusions with relative ease, he moved around a bit, slicing into thin air from time to time just to keep up the illusion of being under an illusion. Doing so until one of them attempted to yet again strike him in the back, he turned around, using the pommel of his sword to strike against the hand holding the dagger before violently slamming his free fist against the side of their head. Believing that they should feel lucky that he was not currently amplifying his physical strength with his magic, or that strike might very well have caused their neck to snap or their head to be torn off, depending on the level of amplification. As the elf got struck in the face and went down on their knees, he could tell that the others were now starting to come to terms with the fact that the illusion was not working as intended.
Instantly, the illusory mage began pumping the area full with additional magic circles, causing Griswold to again see things that were not there, though this lasted for only a short while. The moment he focused on the ones he knew were real, it was as if he just stared right through the illusions as he now began his own assault. No longer waiting for them to move against him, it was time to utilize physique and magic alike, or this was likely going to devolve into a big fat issue. Closing the distance in mere moments, a swift blow to the chest with his knee followed by a blow to the nose knocked out one of the dwarves as a resulting explosion of solar mana was released to all in his direct vicinity. Always making sure to contain his magic use when out in nature as he did not want to be starting any forest fires, he made sure the trees and the hostage all remained unharmed by his spell.
Unfortunately, he could not stop there, as there were still too many unknown variables at play here. While he knew one of them was at least capable of producing illusions, there was no telling what the others could do by the time they brought out their own grimoires. If they were to keep somehow amplifying the illusions, there was a big chance that Griswold would no longer be able to pierce through them with his Ki, which in turn made any potential use of hostile magic stacked on top that much more dangerous. So he had to keep going, he had to keep brutalizing his own kind until they gave up and were willing to talk to him. Switching his focus to the illusionary mage he had knocked over with his solar eruption, he wandered over to her and picked her up off of the floor before putting his blade against her shoulder.
Believing putting it against her throat would make it too simple for a slip up to occur and cause serious damage to an artery, he called out for everyone to stop and put their weapons down, as well as for the woman to put down her grimoire and end the spell. As they still seemed to be rather violent towards him, for reasons he did not fully understand, he released his intimidating aura, telling everyone and everything around him to stop. Due to the sheer difference in power, getting them to do exactly that was quite easy, though it did not help in erasing the hostility they felt towards him. After a few moments, the command was starting to wear off, at which point Griswold was the first to show some goodwill towards these people by letting the woman go and putting his sword back into the scabbard on his back.
Going back to holding both his hands open and at shoulder height, he once again asked what they were doing, showing that he was not out to capture these individuals. Having shown how easily he could have taken them all out if he had wanted to do so, it seemed that this time around, the people actually believed him, prompting him to put his hands back down as it made him feel like a criminal. While he had other questions he wished to ask, the first thing he unfortunately had to get to was the matter of the hostage, and what this person had done to warrant such a fate. Apparently, they had asked the man to get a bunch of items for them that they required to fix an issue they faced at home as their crops were doing badly. Having paid the money in advance, the guy had then told them that if they wanted it, they needed to pay him the same amount twice as the price had gone up.
Feeling like they had gotten scammed, and for good reason, they had descended down upon him at night, had him bound and gagged and prepared to take him back to their home to be punished accordingly. As they had already looked around, it seemed as though they money they had paid him had already been gone, while their purchase had likely never even made it to the man’s home in the first place. Believing the entire thing reeked of a scam performed by someone who was likely well protected by the law, had friends in high places, or had dangerous friends in low places, Griswold actually understood quite well why they had taken matters into their own hands. While he himself was a magic knight of Clover, he knew full well that there was still plenty of corruption going around that was almost impossible to root out, which would likely have prompted to him taking matters into his own hands as well.
Unclasping his cloak, Griswold went through the effort of taking off his shirt, showing the elven markings he had on his back to the other elves and dwarves. While it meant the most to the elves, it was clear that the dwarves also understood what this meant, as Griswold was not human like the others. Being of both elven and dwarven bloodlines, he informed the group that his people had once lived in a place called the Shadesinger enclave, and that it had somehow disappeared from the face of the earth some years ago. Leaving him as the sole survivor, or at least that was what he believed it made him, the others expressed their condolences, as they had not heard of that place for many years. Making it clear that they sometimes held shared meetings in the past with regards to how to continue in an ever changing world, Griswold was told that his people had long since stopped coming to these meetings.
Wondering why that might be, he imagined that it could have been due to the fact that they just wanted to live peaceful lives, unbothered by the rest of the world, capable of doing as they pleased. That said, it was hard to believe that people such as his parents and grandparents would suddenly just turn their backs on their own kind for the sake of being their own government. Not really knowing what to tell them, one of the elves told him that they had managed to establish somewhat of a settlement of their own, which had gradually been growing bigger and bigger. Due to the wars between humans and humans, humans and demons and demons against everything else in the world, many elven and dwarven societies had started coming together in the same place as they did not exactly feel at home in any of the human-governed countries.
In a way, Griswold understood quite well what it was like to have to adjust to a country ran by humans when not being used to their customs. While there were plenty of people in high places that had elven genes, many of them, if not most of them had long since forgotten that they had any elven blood in them at all, more or less becoming full blooded humans by this point. For them, it was easy to feel like they were fitting in, and for good reason, they had grown up there. But for these people, and for people like Griswold, the whole thing took an awful lot of getting used to. For where one society worked mostly around trade and a collective benefit, human society as he had seen it worked towards the betterment of the elite while using up the underprivileged and the poor, which took an awful lot of getting used to.
In fact, this had taken so much adjusting that Griswold was still not quite there yet, having tried his best for roughly four and a half years to do just that. Fully under the impression that these people had gotten duped, Griswold told them to head back home, and that he would personally see to this particular issue. At first, they seemed against it as they really wanted to punish the man for his actions against them and their community, though the Black Bull quickly went on to remind them that if they were to kidnap a citizen from the land of Clover, that it would likely make them outlaws and put them and their people into a very dangerous spot. Due to the fact that the hostage had been gagged and bound, it was unlikely that he saw or heard anything that was going on right now, which worked in their favor.
Telling them that if they left now, he would do his best to see to it that this man was punished accordingly and that they would get to see some kind of reconciliation package sent their way. Gathering their belongings, one of them handed Griswold a hastily scribbled note that would help him if he ever wanted to find where they had gone. After all, if he could not find them, most of what he said was not something he would be able to make true on. With that, they said their goodbyes, with one of them spitting on the trousers of the wrapped up con-man. As they disappeared into the tree line, Griswold put his shirt back on, put his cloak back into place and began untying the man. Starting with the blindfold and the earplugs, the man started struggling a bit, but stopped when he noticed the Black Bulls logo on his coat.
Allowing Griswold to slip him out of the ropes that bound him, the man was feeling over the portions of his body that clearly suffered from rope burn, though he could not really care much for the guy and his wellbeing right now. For what he had done, he should have been put on trial and severely beaten, though the oath Griswold had sworn when he became a magic knight meant that he could not do such a thing without good reason. As such, he made it clear to the man that the people that had punished him had been defeated, questioned and sent off to prison, and that it was stated that he had conned them by taking a lot of their money and never delivering the goods, even going as far as asking for a secondary payment. At first, the man tried to deny the accusations, but when Griswold claimed that he had enough evidence to prove the opposite to be true, the man went through a shift in behavior.
By the time Griswold let the guy know that he was going to be escorting him to Sosshi so he could be picked up and escorted to prison, from which he would then get to wait out what his punishment was going to be, the man turned to violence. Attacking him without warning, Griswold experienced something he had not yet felt before. Capable of picking up on the surge in violence, he could see the punch coming before it had truly been thrown. Almost as if his Ki was just present for some reason, which it usually never was until he personally triggered the phenomenon, he could quickly respond to it by using the full totality of his speed, rendering the small distance between the two irrelevant. With a swift blow, the fist aimed at him was knocked away, causing the man to go off balance, allowing Griswold to raise his knee and kick the guy square in the gut with about as much force as he could muster in that moment.
As the con-man dropped down to his knees, he hunched over and retched on the floor, causing whatever he had eaten prior to being whisked away in the night to come down in the tall grass. Reaching down and gripping the guy by his collar once he was done throwing up, Griswold made it quite clear that if the man was to put any more effort into trying to attack him and escape, there would be no further need for a trial or for prison. Making it clear as day that Griswold would be leaving his corpse for the woodland beasts to feed on, the guy nodded in agreement with this new plan as tears formed in the corners of his eyes. Shoving the guy ahead of him, they would not stop until they had made it to a guard post inside of Sosshi, at which point Griswold would dispose of the man in a cell and leave his treatment to the guards.
Returning to the headquarters of the bulls, he did not do so because he wanted to see if Charles was finally ready to continue with the training or not. Instead, part of him wanted to just get some rest and ponder on the things he had learned today. The fact that there were still people like him out there was quite an inviting thought to say the least, and one he would certainly be pondering on for some time to come.
