Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

The approaching figure was dressed in the military academy's summer uniform, but this person was slim and of a different build compared to Bard. Winters recognized at a glance that this was not Bard. Moreover, this person was not carrying weapons like halberds, indicating they were not a student on night duty.

Caught someone sneaking out of bed! Winters couldn't believe his eyes. It was such a coincidence that the patrolling person hadn't caught the student breaking curfew, but he, the one playing hooky, had caught one.

The person Winters stopped was also stunned; they had chosen to run from this spot only after seeing the patrol walk away. Little did they expect that half of a body would suddenly sit up from the dark stone table at the side of the road, almost like encountering a ghost.

"You! What grade are you in?!" Winters's belly was on fire, his tone extremely harsh.

Unexpectedly, the person across him who wanted to sneak out didn't respond at all. They ducked and ran past Winters, heading straight for the residential area.

Winters was momentarily too shocked to react; it took him a moment to realize the little rascal had actually run away.

Caught sneaking out by the squad leader, and instead of properly admitting their error and begging for mercy, they dared to run away?!

This ignited Winters's fury so much that he chased after them, cursing as he ran, "What the hell are you running for? Do you think you can escape?"

Winters, being taller and more agile, had the edge in this footrace. Despite the head start the curfew breaker gained, they couldn't outrun Winters. Barely thirty meters in, Winters had caught up to them.

"Can you outrun the monks, let alone the Monastery?" Winters bellowed, grabbed the person's shoulder from behind, and with a strong pull, brought them to the ground.

But it wasn't until he grabbed the person's shoulder that Winters realized something was off: this person wore a hooded cloak over their face, had slim and soft shoulders, was too light to be a man, and fell over with just a tug... No! This was a woman! There are no female students at the military school! She was a thief!

The female thief grunted from the rough fall caused by Winters's tug.

While it was a thief he had thrown to the ground, Winters still felt a pang of guilt for knocking over a woman.

But in the next instant, the female thief got up swiftly, silent as a shadow, drawing a dagger that glittered with the cold light. She gave Winters no time to react, pouncing on him like a leopard, aiming the dagger straight at his chest.

Although Winters had the advantages of height, weight, and strength, he was taken completely by surprise by this woman.

Winters was utterly shocked that this woman would attempt to kill him without a word, dagger aimed straight for his heart. Astonished, he thought: Was tossing you over really a reason for a deadly attack?

The instincts honed from years of practicing swordsmanship saved Winters. Subconsciously, he swung his right arm and deflected the dagger, which missed his chest but left a deep cut on the outside of his right upper arm.

Immediately after, the woman's shoulder slammed hard against Winters's chest, knocking him off balance and to the ground. But the relentless woman pressed her full weight onto the dagger, stabbing violently towards Winters's neck.

Ignoring the intense pain from the knife wound on his right arm, Winters crossed his hands and clamped onto the woman's arms. This was the preliminary move of a grappling technique, setting him up to twist the dagger away.

But Winters was merely acting on instinct, forgetting all techniques in his desperation, only blindly pushing the woman away with brute force.

However, in the moment of standoff between the two, Winters had a flash of inspiration, recalling what Aike had said during the day: "If you can use magic to singe off arm hair, then you can also use magic to ignite hair."

So without even the time to perform the casting gesture, he went straight into casting mode. Enduring the intense pressure and stinging pain, he poured all his might into the Ignition Spell, channeling his magical energy into the exposed hair of the woman sitting astride him.

First came smoke, then a spark of flame, and then the woman's hair burst into fire from Winters's magical Ignition Spell, her hood following suit, her head ablaze like a torch.

The female assassin hadn't realized her hair was alight until after the initial spark lasted for more than a second; only then did she smell the burning scent and feel the sharp pain of the flames searing her skin.

The woman, who had been silent and straight for Winters's life a second earlier, now screamed and leapt off him, whipping off her hood and frantically batting at her burning hair.

With the immediate threat to his life subsided, Winters couldn't yet focus on pursuing this murderous woman. He struggled to his feet, fumbling for the whistle issued to students on night patrol, and blew it with all the air in his cheeks.

It was not the sentry's duty to eliminate invaders, but to signal an alert to comrades in time.

The piercing whistle shattered the silence of the night; with it, Winters notified Bard and the other students on duty about the situation, hoping they would come to his aid quickly. Despite his opponent being a woman with far less strength and weight, her deadly and ruthless tactics still unnerved him.

This woman struck to kill without blinking, attacking with no hint of hesitation. Facing such a ruthless killer unarmed, Winters truly felt uneasy.

The woman, hearing the whistles, ran into the alley of the residential area without fully extinguishing the flames on her head. Winters followed closely behind, only to find the woman flinging her dagger at him as she turned her head.

Winters quickly dodged; the dagger just missed him by the width of a finger. He had narrowly avoided having another gash to bleed from.

Winters continued the chase, but after a few steps, severe pain shot through the sole of his foot as if something sharp had pierced it.

Unable to continue running, Winters, gasping for breath, fumbled to pull a metal object from the sole of his shoe and only then realized what had happened when he saw it up close.

It turned out the woman had scattered metal caltrops along the way at some point, and he had stepped on one, causing his foot to be injured.

After several setbacks, Winters was now close to madness due to this troublesome woman.

When he looked up again, the woman with flames in her hair had disappeared into the pitch-black alley.

The residential area's alleys were not the result of planned design but merely gaps left when the houses were built, twisting and turning, extending in all directions.

Winters knew that once the woman entered the alleys, there was no chance of catching her. He also worried about walking into an ambush by her, so he had no choice but to give up the pursuit.

A random thought crossed his mind: This woman is utterly immoral. Didn't she realize that the nearby residents might also step on these when they pass by here tomorrow?

He didn't understand why he was even concerned about the living quality of the nearby residents, as their plight could not be worse than his current situation.

Realizing he could no longer catch the female thief, he turned around and started walking back. After the short yet intense struggle for life, a sudden fear crept into his heart.

No one faces death without fear, and had his luck or reflexes been a fraction slower, he might well have been lying on the ground, waiting for death.

Winters could never have imagined that a night shift could nearly result in a fatality—with him as the victim.

All of a sudden, Winters felt his right hand wet; under the moonlight, he saw it was smeared with a black liquid. Only then did he realize it was blood.

The thief had left him injured from the first round when she pulled out her dagger. His right arm had a deep wound, and the right sleeve of his summer uniform was soaked with blood.

As the adrenaline effect wore off, fatigue and the sharp pain from the wound on his right arm intensified their assault on Winters. With nothing on hand to treat the wound, he clenched his left fist and tucked it under the armpit of his right arm, hoping to stanch the bleeding somewhat.

As he was walking, Winters noticed the reflection of metal on the ground—it was the dagger. He picked it up, thinking, "This is a war trophy that cost me dearly; I should keep it as a memento."

Beside the dagger was a small square package the size of a palm. Winters picked it up too. The fabric on the outside of the package felt like silk, indicating it was not mere garbage but something the woman dropped while trying to put out the fire in her hair. Winters stuffed the dagger and the small package into his bag and continued toward the stone table where he and Bard had been resting.

The sound of heavy running approached; it was Bard running over. Bard was shocked to see Winters covered in sweat, his left hand under his right armpit, and his right arm completely drenched in blood.

"I heard the whistle… What happened?" Bard hadn't expected bloodshed so soon after he had left.

"There was a thief," Winters felt slightly dizzy, probably from blood loss, "she came from the school side, armed with a dagger, and a woman at that. I set her hair on fire, and then she ran away."

"What? A female thief? Where did she come from?" Overwhelmed by the flood of information, Bard spoke with a sense of helplessness, "Never mind the thief for now, you need to tend to your arm. Which way did she run?"

With his hands otherwise occupied, Winters could only point with his head.

"Are you sure it was the thief's hair you set alight?" Bard asked, looking toward the direction the thief had escaped.

"Unless the hair growing on her head isn't actually hair," Winters didn't understand why Bard would ask such a foolish question.

But immediately, he too was stunned.

The sky was now stained red with flames.