Overpowered Wizard

Zarian had spiders nearly everywhere around Ride-or-Die Village. Even when there was too much distance for him to receive pings or observe through an individual spider, the spiders could act without him.

Their primary objective was to serve as scouting backup for the two hundred and eighty-nine youngsters who were the core members of the Ride-or-Die Guild.

Zarian and his fellow Floridians hadn’t opened up to the guild for more members yet, since they were still focused on the development of the youngsters. That didn’t mean the spiders wouldn’t help foreigners and visitors in need, but the spiders had their top priorities set on guild members.

Now that he was in the area, he could feel ping alerts much easier, although he’d felt them even from as far out as the Blood Prairies. Spectral Spider Network +2 was indeed a vast improvement, especially when it was a mainstay in his alpha skill section.

Zarian shifted his observation to the most pressing alerts.

To the south of Ride-or-Die Village, a patrol of fifteen girls and boys came across forty ragged looking men. Zarian entered a spider that was one of several in the area who were monitoring the event.

The spiders sent updates to key personnel back at the village and other patrols outside of the village. There was one spider sitting on a girl’s shoulder, which Zarian also patched into for multiple point-of-views, something his Fractured Mind could handle easily.

Zarian recognized Eleanor Sawyer as the one leading the teenage patrol. The sixteen-year-old with a brown ponytail and high cheekbones had a rare class like the other kiddos.

While she was Level 42, which was at the lower end among the boys and girls, the Star System had deemed her exceptional upon her First Class Advancement. She’d gained an extra free point.

There weren’t many who were deemed exceptional and had 6 Free Points per level. Better yet, Eleanor further proved she’d deserved the exceptional recognition by taking a leadership role.

Her class was Lightning Amazon. That didn’t seem obvious until she filled her body with lightning and grew two feet taller.

Her body shape filled up, making her seem older, more powerful, and more womanly for a sixteen-year-old. A lot of the girls envied her.

Eleanor handled her position and privileges with a cool head, even when standing tall across from some ragged men who were in the Level 20s or low-Level 30s.

They were all Foot Soldier Grunts. No officers among them. All common classes, pretty much the bottom of the barrel for combat classes.

Zarian could assume them to be renegades. Maybe they were bandits. Or maybe they were just desperate men in search of a place to rest and recover after escaping the civil war somehow.

They were all in the neutral alignment, so these interactions could be a roll of the dice, going either way.

Maybe, just maybe, they were decent men.

Then the one at the front opened his mouth.

“Under the all-knowing eyes of Good Good Lawkeep, what the Hidden Hell you think you’re doing, girl?” the man snarled, a Level 34, the highest among the forty raggedy grunts. “Are you a weed to be removed or a flower to be picked? Get us to your village or stand out of our way!”

The air around Eleanor cackled, snapped, and popped with intense electrical energy. When she turned up the juice, her body sounded like the high-voltage whine of a running generator. Her armor had enchantments that juiced her seven-foot body even further as she looked down at the rude grunt.

She tapped the reddish gator emblem on her black leather chest-piece. Then she traced a finger across the motto written in fancy pensive that read, ‘Fuck Around and Find Out.’

“If you are coming this way, then you must know which lords, ladies, and princess we serve,” Eleanor said with a youthful, girly voice.

The hum of her lightning-juiced body quieted as she spoke, making her sound clear despite the lack of bass. “I promise we are very much stronger than you are. We’ve had more dedicated training in months than the likes you’ve seen in years. It will not end well for you to challenge us, so it’ll be best if we find a more amicable agreement.”

“What hogwash are you speaking, girl?!” the Level 34 grunt shouted. “I know your type. You used to belong to our garden. It does not matter what lords or ladies you serve, you are acting out of place!”

Eleanor continued, as if the ragged man hadn’t spoken. “We will gladly escort you to our village as long as you answer to me, who is the current authority present, unless Lord Zarian Darkrun is watching. Then he is the highest authority present. It is also possible that the other lord, ladies, and our dear princess can be watching if they are near enough. If so, then they are the highest authorities. If none of them decide to intercede, then I’m the highest authority, and you must adhere to my orders.”

Look how much our kiddies have grown, Naomi. Damn, I feel proud of them, Zarian thought, as he stayed in the background.

Naomi had made it part of her duty to establish a new leadership doctrine with an attitude that was militant, hierarchical, and duty-bound.

She drilled Roland first, who naturally had the background of an officer with some noble bearing. It wasn’t hard to change his approach to things and have him teach everyone else how to act when holding a position of authority.

If it wasn’t Eleanor, the other fourteen teenagers in her patrol could take her place. Not all of them were the most excellent leaders. But they were all decent enough after four months of doctrine training.

At the very least, the boys in Eleanor’s patrol were in the high Level 40s. One was Level 51. The girls were in the mid to low Level 40s, similar to Eleanor.

The kiddos had done more than leadership training, or they all wouldn’t have their First Class Advancement.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The North Crown Peak region had fallen to dragons and kobolds. The evil reptilians weren’t waiting around for the mythical regional event to continue without satisfying their thirst for blood and carnage. Their patrols liked to skirmish, after all.

Then there were all the random beasts and monsters of the region along with those from the Blood Prairies coming down. Someone had to cull all of those.

The two hundred and eighty-nine youngsters of Ride-or-Die Village had seen more combat than most veterans of their former war-struck kingdom. All within these past four months.

None of them had the scars or injuries to tell the stories, however. They had decent healers now, each of which had Gilbert’s approval, although they’d studied way more than the Knighted Healer to get this far.

There was a rare Support Healer in Eleanor’s group, in fact. She was a Level 44 girl who looked just as fierce as the others.

Eleanor looked the fiercest while upfront, of course. She rested her right hand on the war hammer hanging from her gear-belt. She rested her left hand on the pouch holding her shrunken golem.

She tapped the fingers of her left hand over the golem, which only patrol leaders would get to carry.

Zarian wondered if she was going to deploy it. Eleanor was practicing a lot of patience while the Level 34 grunt ranted at her like a lunatic. The forty raggedy grunts were closing the distance, too.

There was a hundred feet between the two groups at first. Now there were fifty feet. The grunts were spreading, some getting off the road, arcing around to cover the flanks.

Eleanor remained calm. The others in her patrol acted the same.

The Level 34 waved his chipped sword around in Eleanor’s direction. “Strip down and give us your gear. Everything. You don’t get to tell us what to do. You’ve lived in the walls. I know it. You were an acolyte. All well-bred and well-fed.”

The crazed man grinned fiercely at her. “We’ve fought and bled for our kingdom. You ran off to be an evil monster’s whore like the bad weeds you are. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do what I say, and maybe I’ll make a flower out of you that’s worth picking.”

“Your boots don’t match your gear, soldier,” Eleanor replied, sounding as calm as a a still lake. “I’ve also noticed your men have an assortment of items that don’t fit them. Did you practice banditry on your way here?”

The Level 34 and his comrades hesitated.

Eleanor drew her war hammer. She scooped the shrunken golem ball from the pouch. “As the highest authority here, I judge you as unfit to visit our village, and unfit to remain among the living.”

The villainous grunts lunged into the attack. They tried to cross the rest of the distance and attack the teenagers from the front and the flanks.

Zarian watched with a grin on the face of his original body as the teens fell back to their training. They used overwhelming power to the point of overkill, which Eleanor started off by throwing the golem ball to her left.

The glove on her left hand glowed with sophisticated enchantments. The golem flashed with similar enchantments before expanding to being three feet wide while pulsating with kinetic force and a hint of Eleanor’s lightning charge.

The descendant of the original Roller Golem flew like a ball out of a cannon. It slammed the ground with an explosive and electrical force amid the grunts attacking from the left.

Just like that, fifteen men died.

Another fifteen died in the next five seconds as fourteen teenagers slashed, burned, hammered, eviscerated, and outright slaughtered the grunts to the right.

Eleanor herself moved straight ahead. She walked like a terminator and took on ten by herself, including the Level 34 grunt.

Strings of lightning crawled over her arm and down along her hammer. When she swung her weapon, she struck with thunderous force and turned men into hot splatters of gore.

It was overkill. It was like using a lightning bolt to pop pimples. Zarian loved every bit and watched from multiple angles because of his lurking spiders.

Eleanor’s expression remained calm and focused, like it was another day at the office for the Lightning Amazon. She smashed aside every weapon swung at her from pitiful and desperate grunts. She blitzed around with swift steps to take advantage of easy openings.

She even kicked a man into the sky with her superior Strength. When a few men started begging for their lives, she struck down with no mercy. She had the authority, and she was exercising it to the fullest.

Then she reached the Level 34 grunt who was trying to backpedal out of her reach.

“Stop it! Under the witness of the Good Goods, you must not strike me!” shouted the Level 34 grunt, nearly tripping backward.

He looked up with wide eyes and a pale face as Eleanor towered over him with strings of lightning covering her amazonian body.

“We hold respect for four gods currently.” Eleanor grabbed the man by the throat. Her touch paralyzed him.

She easily lifted him off his feet with one arm and gave him his last lesson. “The one I know best, Lovewar, is not on your side. Besides, we are of the freedom alignment. I stand for free good, in fact. So I’m not too inclined to bring the matter of gods into what is a rudimentary cleaning of my community, not when I serve a lord who can eat the gods at his leisure.”

The last living grunt tried to fight. He tried to resist the lightning paralysis. But there was nothing he could do.

His years of service couldn’t withstand the four months of intense training and killing Eleanor had experienced.

With little fanfare, Eleanor closed her grip on the man’s throat and snapped his neck. Then she tossed him aside like a dirty towel.

She turned off her skill and shrank back down to a petite size, appearing as a young girl instead of a super woman.

“That was a brutal way to kill a man, Eleanor,” said one boy. “You sure the whole amazon class hasn’t gotten to you?”

Eleanor pouted. “I have to establish my authority by being brutal. That’ll lessen the chance of others making the same foolhardy mistake of thinking themselves above that.”

“But they’re all dead. We don’t have any witnesses for that.”

Eleanor looked about at all the dead men. The Advanced Roller Golem returned to her side and contracted to its smaller form. She placed it back in the golem pouch on her belt and continued to examine the blood-soaked remains of the forty men.

“Well, I will do better to leave a witness to set an example,” Eleanor said. “I suppose I’ll report my failing to Lady Instructor Washington when she returns.”

“Can we not?” asked a girl. “If one fails, we all fail.”

“If we don’t report, and one of them is currently watching, it’s even worse,” said a different boy.

“I won’t tell,” Zarian said through all the spiders in the area.

He smiled with his true body while all the way north, seated in a comfortable parasite saddle strapped to a giant bestial gnoll’s back. He watched how all the teenagers stood straight and turned their expressions blank, showing no fear or emotion. He caught one or two shivering a little before correcting themselves.

They were doing very well, honestly. Even if Naomi could be such a hardass on them.

Is this what it feels like to be a proud dad? Zarian wondered. Or maybe more like a proud leader of a military unit.

He hadn’t had a great time while in the Marines, but maybe he could make up for that here. These kiddos kept growing on him.

“There are enough spiders in the area to deal with the bodies,” Zarian said through his spiders. “Continue your patrol. I’m the only one who held witness. Great work, Eleanor. While it seemed excessive, they weren’t the type of men we’d like at our village or left alive to roam the lands. We wouldn’t want them preying on the helpless, would we?”

“No, milord,” Eleanor said.

“Then you did a great job. Now if you’ll excuse me. There are more of you doing great things in the name of freedom. But before I go. Let me get an oorah.”

“Oorah!” shouted Eleanor and her patrol members.

“That’s the spirit!” Zarian chuckled before turning his attention elsewhere in the snowy lands around Ride-or-Die Village.