To be fair, Ryner and Ferris were the ones who had actually come up with the idea. The hero relic's powers were unknown; it had been the subject of petty squabbles between local nobles centuries earlier, but was supposedly abandoned after a truce was struck up. What little information Ryner had cobbled together about it said that it was probably useless, but he and Ferris had really needed an excuse to escape Sion's clutches after days of nonstop work, and hunting for a mysterious-but-harmless relic seemed perfect at the time.
They should have remembered that anything that seemed too good to be true probably was. When Ryner laid his hands on the "harmless" relic, he'd blacked out for a moment.
And then he woke up in midair, fell fifteen feet, and crashed into a tree.
This was definitely Sion's fault.
He was lucky he'd been wearing his armor; the cape was torn badly by the branches he'd tumbled through, and the breastplate was dented from the fall, but he wasn't injured beyond some bruises and scratches. His clothes seemed okay, too.
Well, at least he hadn't fallen into the ocean. This forest looked a lot like the one he and Ferris had traveled through the day before, actually... maybe he hadn't gone so far, after all. Even if the relic had pushed him further, if he walked in one direction long enough, he'd hit a road eventually, and then an inn with a soft, comfortable bed. He could probably catch a ride back to the capital from there and meet up with Ferris... after spending a few nights (and Sion's money) catching up on all the sleep he'd lost lately. Yeah. That sounded like a plan. This was a massive pain, but maybe it wouldn't turn out so badly after all.
Almost two hours of walking later, he decided that he was going to spend a month sleeping in that inn when he found it. The forest led to even more forest, with no end in sight, other than a few small clearings here and there. When he stepped out into another clearing -- this one larger, more like an open field -- he wasn't surprised to see that it, too, was ringed completely by trees.
He was surprised by the man standing very suddenly in the middle of it.
For a moment, he almost thought it was Sion. The man was elegant, regal, with an unmistakable air of nobility and strength about him that most of Roland's nobles had never possessed. The noble who owned this land, maybe? Nobles rarely gave off a feeling of such power, though, let alone handled something like a lone trespasser on their own. And then man had appeared seemingly from nowhere. Ryner had been trained for most of his life to sense approaching enemies; he would be dead hundreds of times over if he wasn't good at it.
The fact that this man's presence hadn't registered with him at all meant that he was more than a minor potential threat. Ryner really didn't feel like fighting, especially not against someone who might turn out to be a real bother, but if he had to... he considered his options.
Kuuri was powerful, but took several precious seconds to cast effectively, even at his fastest -- not good if this guy moved as fast as Ryner suspected he could. He could manage Izuchi in much less than that, with the alterations he'd made to his own version of the spell, but unless he put a dangerously large amount of power behind it, he had a feeling it wouldn't be suited for dealing with this man. And on top of that, it was possible that the man's words meant that he was now in another country, so using Roland's magic could give his nationality away, causing political problems for Sion. He knew enough of other countries' magic to take care of himself in a fight, if he had to, but that wasn't an ideal option, either.
If it came down to a battle, and he wasn't able to overpower the man, he could always flee. Ryner couldn't keep up a sustained chase with the enhancement spells, but putting some distance between himself and this man would be better than nothing. Oh, well. Maybe he'd be able to avoid that altogether. It'd be less troublesome.
All of this flashed through his mind in only a few moments. His sleepy, disinterested expression didn't change at all, even as he was considering which combination of spells would give him the most time to escape in a worst-case scenario.
"Oh...? Coming to greet someone personally feels pretty hospitable, you know... my only intention is to take an afternoon nap, so if you could point me towards an inn, I'd appreciate it."
