To the northwest of the empire of Xandria laid a small village close to the desert.
The village was far away from any other civilization and could only be seen through the railway tracks up in the mountain to the south.
Ning appeared in the air, above the same village.
"This is it?" he wondered as he looked down at the village with only a few people outside.
While the village looked like a normal, poor village, it was actually a base for the notorious Great Raiders group that was known to steal cargo from trains and merchants.
They were basically the bandits of this day and age.
"I wonder how they didn't get caught until now," Ning wondered.
Ning let go of his flight and simply strengthened his body as he dropped on the village like a bomb.
The raiders heard a loud sound and quickly came running to see who it was.
Ning walked out of a small crater as he dusted off the dirt on his body. He shook his hair to get rid of the dirt as he thought, 'I shouldn't have done that.'
He looked at the men that had walked out and asked, "where's your boss?"
The men looked at each other in confusion and didn't know what to do.
Ning snapped his finger, immediately creating a loud noise that hurt the people's ears. They dropped to the floor while covering their ears as the ringing noise got a little too loud for them.
"Don't make me ask again," Ning said to the men. "Where is your boss?"
A man walked out of the biggest house in the village, followed by a few other people that seemed to have just woken up from an afternoon nap.
"What's going on, boss?" they lazily asked the man that walked upfront.
The man was about 170 cm tall, had rough facial hair and a bald head. His body was near twice the width of Ning and looked to be around 50 years old.
He looked at Ning with a look of surprise and slight fear.
Ning looked at him and smiled. 'He recognizes me,' he thought.
"I will make this easy for you," Ning said from far away. "Tell me who made the order and I will leave."
The boos looked at the floor with his subordinates barely trying to get up.
He shook his head and turned back to Ning. "How are you still alive?" he asked.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Ning asked. "It can't be that you expected your little group to kill me, right? They barely even had an Aether Magister with them."
The old man got a little angry. Of course, they didn't have any Aether Magister to send away. The ones they did have were already sent to the capital to kidnap the first prince.
He had wondered what had happened to that group since they never even contacted him back. There were moments when the boss assumed that they had just run away.
However, it had turned out that they had died after being defeated during their task, and were then killed.
Ever since then, he had been waiting to get revenge, but he himself couldn't go, so he had sent his best assassins.
However, it didn't seem like they were alive either.
"How did you find us?" the boss asked, ignoring Ning's questions for the moment.
"It was easy. Your cronies gave me the location after I found them," Ning said.
"What did you do to them?" the boss asked.
"The same thing you wished to do to me," Ning said, not cowering in front of the boss.
"Good! Good! At least you came to die here. Men, attack him!" the boss shouted.
Both the sleepy and the hurting men started attacking Ning in any way possible.
Some shot bullets at him. Some burned him in the fire. Some dropped multiple giant rocks on him the size of his head.
Some also tried to tear him apart by using their telekinesis on him.
Ning waited for the charade to be over as he watched them in contempt while they did any damage to him at all.
The boss looked at him, knowing there was no way he would be hurt at all.
So, he took out a crossbow from his storage and created a very sharp-tipped arrow before loading it in.
He targeted Ning with the crossbow and shot it.
For the first time since coming here, Ning saw something hurt him. The especially sharp arrow had managed to give him a bit of scratch. That was it.
The boss looked in horror when he realized that the person they were messing with was no ordinary man.
"You all, retreat!" he immediately shouted, but the sound of the barrage made it impossible for the boss's voice to reach anyone.
The boss grabbed someone and shook him really hard to get his attention. "RUN AWAAY!" he shouted.
The man was a little surprised, but he did what the boss told him to. Seeing one of their members run, the others stopped attacking and looked towards the boss.
"Runaway!" the boss shouted now that the sound was down. "Runaway before he g—"
The boss stopped mid-order as he couldn't speak. The air around him and inside of his stopped moving, suffocating him.
The other men were the same. They slowly started dropping to the ground. However, the boss remained standing.
In fact, despite being suffocated, he didn't look as suffocated as the rest of the people.
When Ning tried to check why that was, he realized that the man was actually using Aether to create air directly in his lungs. That way, despite not getting any air in, he was still breathing.
However, that wouldn't last very long. As the air outside was unmoving, if the boss kept creating air, he would either burst his own lungs or go unconscious from the amount of carbon dioxide his body was creating in his lungs.
"You and your men will die soon if you don't answer my question," Ning said. "Who gave you the order to kill me?"
