Chapter 497: Liars

To his immense surprise, Aubrey didn’t gloat or boast about winning. If anything, she seemed upset with him. He didn’t know why, and when he tried asking, all he got in reply was a loud huff before she walked away.

It was so odd, usually she would never lose an opportunity to tease him or to gloat about her victory, yet she didn’t. He probed her aura with his own, feeling suspicious that something might be wrong. There was even a chance that this wasn’t actually…

“What are you doing?” She swung her head back around to glare at him.

“What?” He acted innocent.

“Why were you probing my aura like that?”

He stayed silent and pretended that he didn’t hear her, walking by her as he searched for a token or any treasures hidden in the bodies.

“Wait, did you think…” she trailed off and rolled her eyes. “You are such an idiot,” she finished and shook her head.

“Rude.”

He didn’t understand women.

***

“Found it!” He said, exhausted, and sighed in relief. The stench was really becoming too much for him. Aubrey was lucky because she was using her clones to search the bodies, but all he had were some mana constructs stuffed in his nose, which were annoyingly insufficient in blocking out the smell.

The fact that a good number of them were burnt didn’t help matters, but he endured it, and because of that, he found a token stuffed inside the chest of one of the dead monsters.

Aubrey quickly came running over to him with an excited look on her face. He threw it over to her, and she reflexively caught it mid-air. That was a mistake, though. The token was covered in the monster’s revolting fluids.

“Ack!” She shouted and dropped the token to the floor.

He laughed at her reaction, but failed to react when she decided to wipe her hands all over his neck.

“Motherf—”

This time, it was her laughing at him.

“Touche,” he said with a conceding nod after he used some aura to clean his neck.

She cleaned the token off and fiddled with it in her hands. “So what now?” She asked him.

“I don’t know. Keep on looking for more tokens and treasures seems like the only real option. We both have two now, and I feel like we will get more as long as we continue to head toward that pillar of light,” he answered.

“Sounds good. Maybe we can find Derek and Edgar along the way, too,” she added.

He nodded. “Yeah, hopefully we come across them. Let’s deal with these people before we head off, though.”

She scrunched her brows in confusion. “What people?”

“The people who have been watching us for the past couple of minutes,” he said with a shrug.

“Are you just telling me this now?” She asked him with a disappointed frown.

“They didn’t seem to be interested in attacking us, so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” he said with a shrug.

“Well, how many of them are there?”

“Four,” Julius said simply and nodded in their direction.

Aubrey tightened her lips and looked around her, trying to see if she could find these four people.

Julius had already locked eyes with the mage who had been hiding them, so it didn’t matter. They knew that the jig was up and revealed themselves.

Julius was a little suspicious. He didn’t get a good feeling from these people. However, he had been surprised more than once in the past. Who knew? These people might have been friendly and he was wrongly judging them from their appearances.

These four people were all guys and the one in front held a massive shield at his side. However, despite the shield being so large, he moved silently and with grace.

Julius could tell right away that this one was pretty strong.

“See? I knew they spotted you,” one of the other guys with a bow teased his teammate.

“Yeah, you really need to improve that stealth skill if you can’t even hide us from a kid,” another jumped in. He was tapping his sword against his thigh as he spoke.

“You guys can use your own stealth skill next time if you want to whine about it. Oh yeah, you can’t, they either suck or can’t hide all of us at once,” the mage said snarkily.

“Mine doesn’t suck,” the swordsman muttered.

“Hmph, yeah, it does,” the archer scoffed and said without hesitation.

“Do you guys need something?” Aubrey interrupted their little comedy routine. She wasn’t friendly to these people at all.

“Oh! So cold,” the swordsman said with a fake pout.

“Yeah, we were just waiting for you guys to finish. We didn’t want to interfere in your fun,” the mage added.

Julius could feel ripples in their auras. They were lying.

“Oh yeah? So then why were you hiding?” Aubrey asked with an expectant look. She didn’t look like she believed them either.

”Better safe than sorry,” the shield warrior said with a deep grumble. Julius didn’t detect any ripples from his aura. Either he was telling the truth, or he was good at controlling his aura. Neither was good news.

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“We came over because we wanted to see if you wanted to team up or something,” the swordsman said with a practiced smile. His teeth were perfect, beautifully straight and white pearly teeth.