[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/T7qbbS2.png[/img] [h3]On the road[/h3] [/center] The next few days on the road were fairly uneventful, sans the occasional spell card duels the Gensokyo ladies got up too, which Rayne joined in on a dodging only basis to get herself used to not being able to blink through projectiles. She got hit quite a lot, the absolute waves of bullets they put out put everything in her world to shame, but better to be hit now than by actually dangerous projectiles. She also attempted to learn how to do their specific kind of non-lethal magic from some of them, but given her power was more granted by the Link and her purchased spell cards (which were entirely different from the Gensokyo’s ones in function, which resulted in unhelpful term overlap) than arcane trained, that was slow going as she had to learn a lot of the basics of spell-casting more or less from scratch. Fortunately, the next time she needed to fight, she didn’t need to put her crash course of spell card education to the test, as what they came up against were swarms of blob monsters that she had no qualms about blasting her own way. Unfortunately the reason she wasn’t ready to use any non-lethal magic was because they ran into that trouble all too soon. - After throwing on her armor and floating to the front just in time to hear about what was going down and how the merchants wanted no part of it, Rayne began to insist “We have to help-” only for Fran to demonstrate how actions spoke louder than words by rushing off to help without a second thought. She was going to do the same before Anne started coming up with a plan, which she stuck around to listen to. When it came to her part of it, the which knight began to object by saying “I’m more useful when I'm up close and-” only to remember one of the cards she had drawn from her deck and nix that line of complaint with a “-never mind, I can work with this,” before flicking said spell card forwards to cast it. At first it did not seem to do anything, but when she darted upwards, pointed a finger forwards to bring up her targeting arrow, and squeezed the metaphorical trigger it became clear what the card had done: replaced her piddly short ranged shots with unlimited range high explosive rockets. She still wasn’t being optimal up there offense wise up there even with that spell card in play (almost all her non-shot augmenting ones where AoEs around herself of one kind or another) but having a steady stream of high explosive shots able to be rained down at any point on the battlefield was nothing to be sniffed at tactically. Firing down from on high also meant that it was fairly easy to avoid any risk of cross fire, and so she did her best to pepper the parts of the horde that were approaching the two defenders of the hamlet, aiming to thin it out at least a little so that they’d have less coming at them. This also left little patches of floating mana orbs near them at the rocket’s impact sites, though if that was of any help to them she had no idea. That said, she couldn’t provide that much aid to them as she might like, because she was also tasked with keeping an eye out for anything that looked like it might be in-charge of the blobs, or if anyone was in trouble. In regards to the latter, those who had already gotten stuck in seemed like they were more than capable of handling themselves without her, and weren't going to be having much issue themselves (she suspected) unless there were nasty surprises laying in store. As such, when it came to weak spots in their ranks, her main concern was the slow moving caravan, which she made sure to stick fairly close to them, and gave the odd glance to check and see if they were moving along ok, or if she’d need to dive down to provide close support. All in all, despite not seeming to be in any danger herself, it was quite the stressful situation to be in, Ryane quickly found, as she kept switching her focus here and there and everywhere to try and work out where she’d be needed, all while worrying she might have missed something important.