"What is your name?"
"Pardus."
The Witcher's answer was incredibly weak; he knew he had kicked a steel plate, but there was no other way out now.
"Where is your accomplice?"
Asa remembered that the ones he saw a few days ago were like two big light bulbs.
"He is in the town ahead."
"Who ordered you to assassinate me?"
"It was a half-elf Wizard named Rience. My lord, our goal was not to kill you. That half-elf said you needed to be half-dead, not dead. I had absolutely no intention of harming you."
Pardus finished speaking in one breath, using his last bit of strength to fight for a chance to live.
"Talking nonsense again."
Asa snorted coldly, and green, malicious magic erupted from his fingertips, drilling into the Witcher once more.
Begging for mercy? At this moment, are you joking?
Asa ignored his pleas, throwing out a few more questions, and his confusion was already resolved.
That mysterious employer named Rience came from the Ban Ard Academy for male Wizards and was an excellent graduate. He maintained contact with the two Cat School Witchers via magic carrier pigeons, and even the Witchers did not know where he was at the moment.
He wanted to kidnap Asa, and this task had been pending for years, until Asa appeared.
But, he sent two weakling Witchers?
The trail ended here; to track down the whereabouts of that half-elf, he had to find the remaining bald one.
After asking the last question, Pardus had no more value to extract. Asa channeled his magic, and the green, malicious light drilled into the Witcher's body again. The bald man didn't even have time to scream before his entire body turned into a pool of blood, completely vanishing from this world without a trace.
A system prompt popped up; experience points jumped by thirty.
The experience this guy gave wasn't bad, only twenty points less than the Leech Queen Marcus, barely counting as a mini-boss.
However, for the current Asa, this kind of trash was no different from the small fry on the roadside.
It was just that these people were too confident; daring to come and capture him single-handedly, they really took him for a green apprentice.
He pondered in his heart and quickly figured out the crux of the matter. The problem probably lay in his face. The style of male Wizards was always to make their appearance look mature and steady; words like "youthful" and "sunny" never belonged to them.
Any Witcher who knew something about the world of Wizards would, upon seeing Asa appearance, likely think he was just a wet-behind-the-ears kid who had just graduated from Ban Ard, rather than some hidden old monster.
In the end, they suffered from empiricism.
Fishing successful.
Aside from the Cat School medallion, the silver sword for slaying monsters, and the cloak that allowed him to sneak up behind Asa while invisible, there was almost nothing valuable on the bald guy.
Asa put the magic equipment into his system inventory and burned the remaining junk with a single fire.
In fact, as early as when the caravan was besieged by Ghouls, he had already sensed that there must be other enemies hiding nearby.
The reason was simple. The dragon medallion carried the power of a dragon, and ordinary monsters dared not approach it. Greater Ghouls were considered the most intelligent of the scavenger species and knew better than common Ghouls how to avoid harm.
The fact that they unusually launched an attack despite the dragon's power could only mean that something was manipulating them from behind.
No matter how carefully planned, there are always loopholes.
Do not try to make an enemy of a prepared Wizard; this is a lesson learned in blood and tears by countless predecessors. Especially when this Wizard had spent ten years burying his head in books on Thanedd Island and was bursting with spells, just looking for a place to test them.
Asa swung onto his horse, and Grape let out a long neigh, galloping off in the direction of the next town.
There was still one bald one left to clean up; he absolutely could not let that guy slip away in the night.
The night was like ink, and only the sound of Grape's hooves echoed in the silence of the wilderness.
Asa held a ball of light in his left hand, and the bright but non-dazzling light illuminated the dirt road ahead.
Grape's mane fluttered in the night wind, and the cloak on Asa body was whipped up by the airflow, snapping loudly.
A miscalculation.
The caravan arrived at the town a step before Asa. As soon as the Witcher heard that Pardus's plan had failed, he immediately jumped on his horse and fled the town.
How could Asa allow this ticking time bomb to continue living in this world? He immediately unleashed his perception and pursued him along the trail of his escape.
In the Witcher world, the wilderness at night is the true purgatory.
Once the sun sank below the mountains, those things that lay dormant in the shadows during the day began to emerge.
Ghouls, Drowners, and a few scavenger creatures whose names he didn't know wandered aimlessly in the distant wilderness.
Wraiths, Alghouls, Nightwraiths, and the ghostly lights of Banshees flickered in and out of sight in the forest.
This was still considered a relatively peaceful time; Asa found it hard to imagine how those unarmed farmers would survive on this land after the war broke out.
Traveling through the starry night, the dragon's power emitted by the dragon medallion kept ordinary monsters from approaching. Occasionally, a few blind ones would get too close, and he would casually conjure a bolt of lightning to take them out, reaping a few experience points while also clearing the road for Grape.
Perhaps head-on monster hunting was not the specialty of Cat School Witchers, but stealth and escape were definitely their forte.
Asa pursued for nearly two and a half hours, and the bald man's escape trail finally became clear.
The firelight on the top of the hill ahead revealed two figures embedded in the night.
One of them was the shiny bald head, which could be recognized at a glance even from a few hundred meters away.
The other person was sitting by the campfire, wearing leather armor, with a full head of white hair, and two long swords carried parallel on his back—the steel sword for killing humans, the silver sword for killing monsters.
The sound of hooves startled the two people who were resting. The white-haired Witcher only looked up at the road behind him before continuing to poke at the fire in front of him.
When the bald man turned his head and saw the silhouette of the black cloak on horseback, his expression immediately turned very grim.
He had left the town two hours early; how could he still be caught up with?
Since when did Wizards have the senses of a Witcher?
"Geralt, I want to hire you to deal with this Wizard with me."
The bald man said.
The white-haired Witcher by the fire did not look up, just shook his head, his magnetic voice low:
"The Wolf School only accepts contracts for hunting monsters."
Geralt didn't want to say the second half:
Why should I listen to a piece of scum, a traitor, and an executioner like you among Witchers?
The bald man's face darkened. Before he could try to persuade him again, the tall brown horse had already carried the rider up the slope.