Just as the Reiko reached the training grounds some of the people approached her with nervous looks on their faces, while some of them just sat still and observed her as she was walking.
She noticed them coming as she was talking with Rica but pretended like she didn't notice them coming. Neither the group approaching her nor the group that observed her knew that she saw them but just turned a blind eye to them.
"Hey there!" One of them said.
Reiko turned as she flushed a smile towards them.
"What is it that's happening outside?" They asked with a nervous voice that almost synced with the nervous look on their faces.
Reiko stayed quiet for a moment as the people watched her closely.
"I don't know yet? But let's just calm down for a bit and". She said but was interrupted by the people before she could finish talking.
"...What? You don't even know what's going on but keeping us here?" One of them said with a mix of fury and nervousness in their voice.
"Is she serious?" Another said as Reiko kept looking at them while keeping her cool, as the whole group that was standing in front of her started talking so many bad things about her. Some of them even called her foolish and unfit to lead them as the replacement leader of the village, while some of them said she was just a child who did not know what she was doing.
Reiko kept looking at them while maintain her smile, but her smile was just a mask to cover up her anger because she was pissed with what the people were talking when they knew that she was not in the village when it was being attacked. Her body started growing a dimed blue light that a thew people noticed but kept quiet the instant they saw it.
'The light that was being produced by her body was her anger but in form of the color of the mana and ana. This was happening because she tried holding her anger in, but even so, her body could not handle the pressure and started to release it in form of visible mana.'
"What are we doing here in the first place?!" Another person on the group said with a furious tone in their voice.
Suddenly, a gust of wind that came from where Reiko was standing, shut the group up while Reiko's face turned dark while her eyes started growing as the wind grew denser.
Rica who was busy with Welt (The baby dragon) and Hajime who just woke up, turned together with everyone to look at where the wind was coming from.
"Huh?" Uttered Rica as she touches Welt by the neck.
"What's going on over there?" Someone far behind a tree asked.
"If you want to leave, then just leave."
"Nobody keeping you here."
"You just seat down all day and now you're acting like you've got something to prove."
Reiko said with a furious voice as the group kept quiet and just watched her with terrified looks on their faces while the others on the same group were just caught by surprise, because they have never seen her this furious.
Then she added.
"If you think you're brave enough, you can just go and see for yourself what's going on There."
With that sentence, she turned away from them and started walking towards Rica, Welt and Hajime.
The group was left speechless; they just watched her leave while she still had that dark look on her face. Everyone who was watching them from the sides started feeling sorry for them.
Meanwhile inside the village, the imperial soldiers kept on looking for people who were still in the village. The skies became darker as the stars arose from their slumber.
"Still nothing." One of the soldiers said as he came out of one of the buildings.
There were blood stains all over the ground, but the soldiers just ignored them and kept on searching each building.
At the main entrance of the village, Rose and the others were still waiting for villagers who they thought would be heading out of the village when they saw one of the soldiers coming towards that with a disappointed look on his face.
"Is he one of us?" The man that looked like he was having a good time said while staring at the soldier approaching them from a distance.
No one answered him, everyone was busy looking at the soldier approaching them.
He reached them and said with a voice mixed with nervousness, "There is nobody in the village, not even the people we shot down earlier."
"What?" Enovi uttered with a surprised look on his face.
"What do you mean by nobody?" Rose asked as the soldier blinked for a second while the man was looking like he was having a good time stroked his jaw for a second.
"Hmmm?" The man uttered while still stroking his jaw. Then he added.
"Then let's go and see for ourselves." while everyone turned and looked at him.
"You two, stay here." He proceeded as he moved away with Rose and the soldier leaving Enovi with his friend he was beating up earlier, they looked at each other and smiled.
Meanwhile at the training ground, Hajime was looking for water to drink since he woke up earlier, So Rica told him to look around and see if anyone have some so that maybe he could drink a little. But even so, only a few people were carrying water, and they were far away from him to get to.
He left Rica by herself and went on looking but as he was walking, he heard some of the people talking about going back to the village, this piqued his interest that he decided to follow them, no one noticed that he was there and the people still on the training ground did not see him either.
"Come on, she said if we wanted to leave, we could leave, that means her barrier is down, and we could do as we please." One of the people who was leaving the barrier said. They didn't know that Reiko's barrier was still on, because in their eyes they did not anything in front of them, not even a flicker of light.
More and more people started following them and one by one they started to get-out of the barrier. As they reached the other side of the barrier where the village was, they found that the village so quiet and they were more stars than usual in the sky.
"See, there's nothing here." They said again while looking at the village. They did not know that the village was filled with imperial soldiers who were looking for them while some of them waited in silence.
Without wasting anytime, Hajime started running towards it, in order to get home and drink some water and then go back to the training grounds.
"Whose kid is that?" One of the people out of the barrier asked as they looked at Hajime run off.
As he was running, he was about to turn on a corner that led straight to his house, but the moment he was about to turn he bumped into one of the imperial soldiers.