Once Jeanne had smoothly neutralized an ambush that could have easily devolved into a grueling, bloody battle, she noticed a distinct shift in how the caravan personnel looked at her.
Previously, their glances were just what you'd expect for a thoroughly ordinary non-Infected traveler, or perhaps a visually striking young girl—perfectly polite, but nothing extraordinary. Now, however, the vibe had flipped entirely! The gazes directed her way had officially mutated from evaluating a teenage girl to revering an absolute immortal deity. Half the crew barely possessed the courage to maintain direct eye contact with her!
Whenever they caught sight of the distant ridge line—now a blackened wasteland of charred earth scorched by Jeanne's holy fire, bristling with towering clusters of jagged iron thorns—everyone in the camp immediately racked their brains to remember if they had somehow offended this walking natural disaster over the last few days.
After all, during the initial leg of the trip, they had assumed this little sister looked completely frail and delicate. Whenever she had enthusiastically offered to lend a hand with the heavy lifting, they had flatly rejected her warm-hearted gestures, terrified that her lack of physical strength would just cause them extra trouble.
Is she the type to hold a grudge? the drivers worriedly thought. What if she decides to systematically erase us in our sleep while we're completely oblivious? Given the raw, terrifying display they had just witnessed, snuffs like that would be child's play for her.
Consequently, a heavy, profoundly silent atmosphere blanketed the encampment. At the end of the day, navigating a highway alongside a beautiful young lady is one thing, but traveling alongside a literal prehistoric apex predator is a completely different ballgame—the latter can effortlessly rip you into clean, bite-sized pieces the moment it gets bored.
Jeanne, for her part, was entirely powerless to remedy the awkward atmosphere. Would a verbal explanation magically convince these traumatized drivers to stop fearing her? Not a chance.
Fortunately, it wasn't a major inconvenience. If these personnel preferred to avoid direct communication, Jeanne was perfectly content to be left to her own devices. She simply amused herself in her own corner, and best of all, now that she was casually playing with her dragon companion to pass the time, absolutely no one dared to look at her funny.
Meanwhile, what was Kal'tsit up to? The ancient doctor had secured a structurally sound sector of the camp and was currently dedicating her entire analytical focus to evaluating the severed fragments of the black iron thorns produced by Jeanne's abilities.
Indeed, after securing explicit permission from Jeanne, the physician had neatly lopped off a collection of the metallic spikes to store inside her transport vehicle. She was currently dissecting them with intense clinical curiosity, treating them as a fascinating physical derivative of Jeanne's unique personal template.
Seeing that Kal'tsit was profoundly captivated by the structural composition of her manifestations, Jeanne simply chose not to dispel the iron field, especially since maintaining it cost her zero physical or spiritual energy anyway. What Jeanne internally classified as nothing more than valueless scrap metal had suddenly transformed into an excellent bartering chip, fetching a remarkably handsome price after a quick transaction with Kal'tsit. Judging by the gleam in the doctor's eyes, this specific trade arrangement would likely yield a multitude of commercial opportunities in the future.
At that moment, Kal'tsit sat hunched over her workbench, her eyes tracking the precise microscopic contours of the iron thorns. On a baseline material level, these manifestations appeared to be standard, unadulterated iron structures. What truly baffled Kal'tsit's scientific sensibilities was the underlying methodology of their materialization. Even the most advanced school of Originium Arts required a physical medium or a localized catalyst to alter reality, didn't it?
"An exceptionally anomalous entity," Kal'tsit murmured after an extended period of silent contemplation, compiling her diagnostic profile on the enigmatic girl. "Despite maintaining a physical template that mirrors humanity perfectly, she commands specialized capabilities that transcend the structural limits of human biology."
Even Kal'tsit had to internally concede that the monumental reservoir of global knowledge she had meticulously accumulated over countless centuries possessed zero analytical leverage when applied to Jeanne's parameters.
However, the evaluation wasn't completely devoid of strategic silver linings. At the very least, Kal'tsit had isolated a method to secure a completely stable, localized supply line for raw iron. The only remaining variable was verifying whether Jeanne's manifestation protocol suffered from any long-term structural limitations or resource constraints.
If scalable, this represented an absolute macro-strategic breakthrough for Babel. Fundamental industrial commodities like high-grade steel were a resource a military faction could simply never possess in excess, and foreign syndicates universally restricted bulk sales to independent organizations.
As for the precise composition of these thorns... she would have to hand them over to the engineering department back home for a rigorous chemical breakdown; the crude field setup here offered zero capacity to conduct advanced material science research. Yet, Kal'tsit could already deduce that these structures were fundamentally distinct from ordinary manufactured iron; a highly peculiar, foreign substance seemed to be woven deep within the molecular matrix.
I must state it once more, Kal'tsit thought, that child is a walking, breathing tapestry of absolute mystery.
Had Kal'tsit been a completely unhinged, amoral scientist, her cognitive faculties would currently be entirely consumed by elaborate schemes to lure Jeanne into a subterranean laboratory, systematically prepping her to be sliced into neat, microscopically thin sections for experimental vivisection.
"Why does it suddenly feel so freezing in here? Is it just my imagination?"
Lounging alone in her distant corner while playing with her dragon, Jeanne suddenly felt an ominous, localized shiver run down her spine. A sudden wave of biological intuition warned her that a thoroughly unpleasant development was currently brewing somewhere in her immediate vicinity.
Yet, after executing a swift mental audit, she confirmed she hadn't done anything to sabotage Talulah prior to her departure from the northern wilderness. Satisfied that no cosmic karma was slated to bite her from behind, Jeanne dismissed the chill with absolute confidence.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for Jeanne to bitterly regret the massive flag she had just planted in her own trajectory. The highway raid from the Sarkaz Drifters wasn't the explosive finale of their journey—it was merely the opening salvo!
Perhaps the sprawling convoy of trucks laden with heavy supplies was simply too glaring a target across the barren wastes, but over the subsequent transit, Jeanne found herself intercepting multiple waves of aggressive hostiles on a near-daily basis, featuring a colorful rotation of regional factions.
A vast majority of these attackers were low-tier rabble that Jeanne could easily vaporize with a single, unbothered sweep of her blade. However, a select few units exhibited a remarkably high standard of tactical coordination, systematically launching coordinated harassments designed to bleed the caravan's operational focus.
This unrelenting cycle of guerrilla skirmishes intensified exponentially as the column steadily eroded the remaining geographical distance toward the outer borders of Kazdel. The hostile syndicates even took to launching midnight raids, forcefully shattering the crew's sleep cycles with explosive skirmishes before executing rapid, high-velocity retreats the moment defensive perimeters crystallized.
Jeanne's psychological patience with these pests had officially degraded to absolute zero. Had she not been actively reining herself in to avoid drawing an excessive level of geopolitical attention to their transit, she would have long since summoned a massive Earth Dragon to run sentry duty through the night, ensuring these midnight rovers suffered a one-way ticket to the graveyard!
BOOM—!
"Are these lunatics completely out of their minds?!" Jeanne snapped, forcefully tearing herself awake as the resonant detonation of an offensive Originium Art rocked the campsite yet again. "They literally just launched an assault an hour ago! Do these people fundamentally not require biological rest cycles? Do they truly have nothing better to do with their lives than roam around executing petty harassment runs?!"
Shaking off the remnants of her slumber, Jeanne vaulted to her feet, her eyes burning with an intense focus as she scanned the darkness. She was fully prepared to hunt down a couple of local Sarkaz combatants; if she didn't personally pulverize someone's skeletal structure tonight, the absolute fury simmering in her chest would never subside!
Across the perimeter, Kal'tsit's demeanor had grown progressively more reclusive and silent over the past few days. The ancient doctor spent a significant portion of her hours tucked away in secluded pockets of the convoy, utilizing an encrypted long-range communicator to transmit highly classified data packages back to Babel's central command. Jeanne maintained zero voyeuristic desire to eavesdrop on private operational correspondence, so she refrained from prying into the logistics of those calls.
Yet, even if Kal'tsit's stony facial expressions remained completely unreadable, the rapidly deteriorating security index of their environment told Jeanne everything she needed to know. This journey was no longer a standard transit plagued by random highwaymen; the surrounding factions were clearly organizing a massive, coordinated macro-operation.
And judging by the sheer tactical pressure manifesting through tonight's opening salvo... this was definitively not a standard hit-and-run harassment play. Jeanne's gaze narrowed as a massive, weaponized fireball arched over the defensive line, detonating directly inside the central camp matrix with catastrophic kinetic force.
Down along the perimeter, the veteran drivers and guards instantly processed the abnormal lethality of the incoming assault. Recognizing that the structural threshold of the encounter had shifted, they rapidly brandished their armaments, spilling out from the transport hulls to establish a hardened defensive front against the approaching vanguard.
"You're out here? Maintain a maximum state of operational vigilance," Kal'tsit commanded, her silhouette materializing beside Jeanne to evaluate the battlefield. Her voice carried a distinct trace of clinical severity as she issued the safety warning. "Tonight's deployment parameters are heavily skewed. The people orchestrating this strike are highly trained military professionals!"
The logistical indicators were blindingly obvious: the enemy had meticulously pre-staged this coordinated assault at this exact geographical bottleneck. The ceaseless, agonizing harassment runs they had endured over the preceding days were explicitly engineered to systematically degrade the caravan's sleep cycles, forcing a state of chronic mental fatigue right before the hammer dropped.
Tonight was undoubtedly the grand finale—the final, absolute push to liquidate the column!
Fortunately, Kal'tsit had successfully established encrypted contact with Babel command over the preceding intervals; their elite field operators should already be accelerating toward these coordinates to execute a high-velocity extraction run.
However, right as the reassurance of Babel's incoming reinforcement units crossed her mind, Kal'tsit's eyes suddenly locked onto the aggressive pacing of the enemy's forward advance. A cold, analytical calculation crystallized within her hyper-advanced intellect.
The enemy's operational timeline... why does it feel so incredibly rushed?
Geographically speaking, this specific valley was fundamentally not the optimal kill zone to execute astrike against a transport fleet. The canyon pass the caravan was scheduled to navigate tomorrow morning offered vastly superior terrain dynamics, boasting a collection of absolute choke points that were far easier to lock down for a decisive ambush!
The underlying strategic reality immediately laid itself bare. The hostile command structure had clearly received direct intelligence confirming that Babel's elite operators were actively en route to reinforce the sector. They were forcing a premature, desperate engagement tonight precisely because they knew their operational window would slammed shut the moment Babel's main forces integrated with the column!
Which meant, by absolute logical deduction... the internal command apparatus of Babel currently harbored a mole.