The race was on.
Throwing caution to the wind, Konrad rushed down the serpentine to catch up with Vargas and his men. Or rather, he was in a hurry doing his actual job—countering any magical threat.
'How long 'til they're in range?' he asked Maple in the meantime, but the dragoness scoffed.
'Are you serious?! How would I know? It's already hard to tell if someone's a telepath, let alone what their range is,' she complained. 'It could be anything from a few yards to a thousand miles.'
'Be realistic,' he demanded. 'A few yards would be meaningless in such a role.'
He didn't even want to consider the other extreme. Maple's limit was about a hundred miles, but it depended on who she wanted to reach. What could a designated telepath do, though?
'I suspect this commander had a short range and couldn't connect his men,' she noted.
Which sounded great, but then there was the case of the carriage running away on its own.
If the coachman or one of his guards had telepathy too—but then what was their range?
He decided to run rather than think about it.
'Jam the airwaves,' Konrad messaged, though the wording might've confused his haremette. Good thing she could read his mind to clarify—and protested it right away.
'If I create an anti-magic field, we won't be able to communicate either,' she warned.
And its range was also rather limited. Konrad used them during the tournament—a standard measure to prevent cheating. He needed a lot of adamantite relays to expand his coverage.
Of course, it never stopped powerful casters like Lily or Gabrielle, but come on.
He couldn't imagine that the nomads had telepaths that strong. Not even in the worst case.
'Do it, I'm almost there,' he ordered, running as if his life depended on it.
If only he could warn Vargas.
He had to urge him to bring the enemy commander as far back as possible. But Maple was the only one he could connect with in the area, and he wanted to keep her a secret.
Because when his life wasn't hard enough, he had to make it even more difficult for himself.
There was no response; those often annoying foreign thoughts in his head all cut off.
Which was a good sign.
Now it was only up to his running speed and endurance—and in those, he excelled.
It took him ten long minutes to reach his vanguard.
They didn't even finish disarming their captives by then. And given that he suspected at least one more telepath to be around, he wanted them all gone.
"March them back," he yelled. And that was all the air he still had in his lungs.
He must have been quite the sight, leaning over his knees, wheezing.
Only when he couldn't use it did he realise how handy telepathy could be.
"What happened?" Vargas asked, but thank the spirits, he didn't wait for the answer before organising the march. "We got them all without much of a fight. Saw no runners, either."
"They've telepaths," Konrad gritted out. "Almost in range. Get them out of here. Everyone."
By the time he finished, he almost collapsed.
Those endless marathons with Welf got him only this far. Ten minutes of running—in full gear, per se—and his sides felt like someone stabbed him. He needed to get back into shape.
The captain took over for him, barking orders left and right, not questioning him any further.
Within five minutes, they extracted everyone to march them back to the reserve camp.
'Well, the telepaths I identified don't seem to be in a hurry,' Maple noted. Her voice startled Konrad after that blissful silence. 'Yes, yes, I dropped the anti-magic spell.'
While he needed no air in his lungs to scold her, her reasons were obvious even for him.
He arrived in time, the distance between the commander and his telepaths growing now.
'How far are they?' he asked instead, watching his men march back at a neckbreaking pace.
'About one mile as the crow flies,' she pondered. 'But that's more than three on the switchbacks.'
Now he had a safe range to calculate with—and his next targets too.
'I take it the nomads aren't dumb enough to group them all into a single formation,' he thought.
'How'd you know?' the dragoness laughed. 'Did you steal a glance through my eyes?'
If only he could do that.
It would've made things much easier. But it was way beyond his capabilities, unless Maple projected an image herself. And she could also only do glimpses at a time.
'They're in four groups of three,' she reported. 'Each marching along a company of footmen.'
Things could've been too easy otherwise.
'I thought all the nomads had were horses,' Konrad moaned.
Riders or not, that was another five hundred men he had to face soon.
'Oh, they have plenty back in their camp, and they're already breaking it down.'
According to her, each group had about half a mile between them.
This gave him a good estimate of their range. The last one was already too far from the nomad's camp, but it was only a matter of time until the horsemen caught up to them.
"So we have to take out that group before it happens," he said after relaying this information.
Vargas was staring at a map again, scratching his chin as he listened.
"It'd be better to take them out all at once," he noted. "But that'll be one long dash."
They had no way of reaching the last company before the first one got this far.
No time to clear the signs of battle, either.
At the very least, Konrad had enough archers to spare.
"Set up an ambush in the next hairpin," he recommended. "Five archers, take only the telepaths out. We'll deal with the rest later. The others will take these shortcuts, and—"
"That'll cut it close." Bor pointed at the markings. "Those shortcuts aren't always shorter."
True. To take some, they had to climb in full gear, while racing against time.
"And timing is crucial," Vargas reminded. "If we take out the first group too slow, they can warn the second, and so on. How will we know when to strike without telepaths of our own?"
More valid questions.
Even if he did have his haremettes, he wanted to solve this without them.
"I can, uh, broadcast a signal," Konrad offered, pulling a kitsune coin from his pocket.
It was the older model that he made out of adamantite—encasing a spell into it didn't take long.
"When the first group arrives, and we're about to strike, squeeze this coin, and it'll glow up in the others' hands as well." He could make that work across five miles if he kept things simple.
"That's fine, but how do we even recognize the targets?" Welf asked the real questions here.
And Maple had already said they didn't exactly have 'telepath' painted on them.
'Any way you could describe them to give something to my men?' Konrad reached out to her.
There was a long silence before she replied.
He expected a glimpse of her vision at first, so he'd do the describing himself.
But then he heard her laugh instead.
'Okay, yeah, no,' the dragoness messaged back. 'No particular distinguishing features. Unless you count the fact that they're the only ones on horseback in each formation.'
And well, that made things much easier.