"This was really close" I thought to myself once I got out of sight from the forest path.
"No, this wasn't close, it was a total fail" I realised. I lost multiple seals, some of them were used for nothing, and lost my greatest bluff.
Actually two of them. First one is that I know how their military works, that was by getting hit in my arm. I pad my shoulders for this exact reason.
Looking at my arm now, there was blood coming out of my shoulder but I still had some feel in the rest of the arm. This clearly signalled that I knew that their procedures for disarming mages were to aim for the shoulders. This tactic was surprisingly simple yet effective so not many mages lived to tell their allies. I however knew this and fully took advantage of it.
Second bluff is that I'm a spellsword, or a really good parody to say at least. Magic is usually really complex, people dedicate their entire lives to study it. Not many people have the will or talent to master any sort of martial arts or using weapons. The few that could achieve that were dubbed as spellswords, they were usually only found in military but there were a few exceptions.
"They now know that I can also attack physically."
"But I need to focus on getting somewhere safe." And looking at my arm also tend to it before it gets worse. The padding stopped the worst but that doesn't mean my arm is basically unusable now.
After some time I finally got into what looked like the dense part of the forest I was looking for. "There should be an emergency stash." I thought to myself. I made a few in case that something like this happened, some more food, basic stuff for quickly fixing any injuries and maybe some more seals.
A quick search confirmed my thoughts, I recognised this are fairly well. Just a few turns here and there and I should arrive at the place.
The secret stash wasn't anything fancy. Just a few clues no one would probably notice all leading to a single lump of somewhat out of place moss. Under it however was a relatively large chest. Locked with a simple rune. It both kept the chest safe with a layer of mana around it and made it so that anyone without some basic control of mana couldn't open it easily. I placed a thin strand of mana on the top right part of the rune. Silence for few seconds.
!click
A quick and relatively quiet click suddenly came from the rune. Since it was reusable ( at least a few times ) the rune remained in place, but the chest could now be opened without any problems.
Inside was everything I remembered I put there. I quickly took out bandages and a bottle of alcohol. Since alcohol was pretty hard and expensive to brew, I had to settle for one you could normally buy. Which of course didn't make it ideal for medical applications but it was all I had. It hurt a lot but it was probably still better than having my shoulder bleed constantly. Then I used the bandages and tried to roll my shoulder in them, which was understandably pretty hard with only one hand. But after some time I finally sort of succeeded. "I should probably stay here for at least this night." I set up humble settlement for the night. By humble I mean a really nice looking patch of moss, another patch of moss serving as a pillow and a simple light seal. Next step was ensuring that no one will get to me through the night.
I put a flat rock in the middle of my "temporary shelter" and placed a rune on it. I also reached for my bag which had both seals and components, which are used to modify how a spell works. Some spells don't even work without them. I pulled out two capacitors and one area nozzle. Capacitors can store some mana in them for some time and depending on how they're tuned, they slowly release the mana bit by bit. The ones I had prepared should be slow enough to run through the entire night. The area nozzle can make a spell take a specific shape, something you can only do with spells without it. I set capacitors on the entry points of the rune and the nozzle in the center.
Suddenly a thin looking barrier appeared with a radius of about 2 meters. It's main purpose wasn't defending against attacks, but the barrier concealed both my smell for search dogs and any heat signature.
With that I was hopefully set up for the night. I can only hope they will also postpone their search for the day.
I stayed up for a few more hours before the sun fell. Once it was dark I made sure to take out the light seal and then went to sleep.