“It is the definition of insanity to try the same fucking thing over and over and over again, and expecting the result to change. You can make me pray to save my life, but you can never make me mean it. As long as free will is on the table I will take as many choices as I can that keep me away from you.”

Tanya gets ready for time to start again. At least Being X intervening had warned her about the village chief. And if she had to she would stomach singing Being X’s praises if it saved her life. 

The mask floats back to its place on the village head's robe with a faint chuckle.

The village head, Lao Fen, she can judge with her experience in combat.

He's rusty. He may have been quite the deadly combatant at one point, but that must have been long ago. His movements are just a bit slow, just a bit unsure, as if remembering patterns they knew once long ago but have all but forgotten. His body might be very powerful, he may be able to throw fire from his hands, but these are not things he practices every day, or even every week.

And he's a beast hunter. He's not used to killing people, let alone little girls. There's hesitation in his eyes, the same hesitation soldiers have to be trained out of.

Which might give her an opening, if she can predict which way to dodge.

“You said nobody would die while you were here!” She yells at him as she leaps out of the way of where she thinks he is telegraphing a fire blast from his hands.

She doesn’t know the boy is dead, she still hasn’t had the chance to check his pulse. But he easily could be dead and the chief promised he wouldn’t let anyone get hurt. She fucking knew she was right to keep practicing combat! in any case she is both blaming him and trying to throw him off guard. 

“I had to kill the spider-thing myself!”

She has no idea how she is going to take him down. He is a lot bigger than the freshly hatched spider monster, has way bigger reach than her, and probably is much better at dodging a weak wooden spear sized for young teenagers than the spider was. What she wouldn’t give for a gun that she could enchant the ammunition for. A weak artillery spell should take out even a mage as imposing as him since he doesn’t seem to be casting any shields.

This is an adult warrior, even if he is rusty this is actually a good deal scarier than a dumb beast.

He scowls at the miss. Glances at the boy. 

"...Leg wound. No venom on these. He'll live, if I have time to tend to him.

A vicious young prodigy taking apart a spirit beast offspring at the age of eight. I truly do not care about you, little devil. I don't want to hurt you, but I don't want to bother helping you either. You're a wrinkle in the silk. I want this village to be forgettable and boring. So, it is time for you to go. Far away. Find a city. Find a sect that will train you. Forget this place ever existed. Or I will kill you."

The adrenaline is rushing and his fucking superior attitude while being a lazy piece of shit is pissing her off.

“You don’t want to hurt me? You forbade me from practicing with the spear. That spider would have killed him and killed me next before you even got here if I hadn’t practiced. How is that not trying to hurt me? How many more people get hurt because of your lazy attitude huh? Who gets banned from knowing how to fight next? Who else gets eaten by the monsters!. And now you threaten to kill a child! Despicable!”

This self righteous piece of shit, and he was trying to take everything away from her! Not that she had much in this village. But she was fed and was taken care of, and ms. Wen tried her best to raise her in her own way, and that boy was kind to her sometimes, she was useful and wanted and had found a niche doing accounting work for the granary. She didn’t want to give it up because of this jerk. “I try my best to help and you have me exiled! How is that fair! I save someone and you want to take everything away from me!”

Her face is still angry, but she is crying without realising it. The unfairness of it all. She had done her best and instead of being rewarded she was punished. She wanted to punch that fucking superior attitude off his face. But the rational part of her knew he was dangerous, even though part of her irrationally screamed to fire a gun she didn't have at him charged with an artillery spell.

But she doesn’t make any aggressive moves and the irrational part of her feels like absolute shit for being such a coward.

"Fair? It's not. No stupid justifications from me. I'm not doing this to 'give you drive'. I'm not doing this because you 'deserve better than this place', or to 'show the immensity of heavens and earth'. I am a selfish, evil, unfair man. Now. Go away."

She is tempted to start praying for power, so so tempted. But it would just be to smack this asshole around and vent her anger. Not to save her life. If she starts relying on Being X for anything less than life threatening danger then it means he’s won a little. The fact she can get out of this fight, this fight that Being X seemed to have set up deliberately to force her to invoke him for survival, is already a win for her.

She goes over to the fallen boy to check if he is really still alive, in case the old man was lying. And she will place his spear next to him, since it was his to begin with.

She turns to the village head and glares. “I am going to say goodbye to my carer, then I will leave.” Almost daring him to deny her even saying goodbye. Even though her more rational part was yelling to cut her losses and run.

He's still alive. Breathing fast. Combat shock. The village head ignores her and starts channeling light green fire, holding it over the boy's leg wound. He relaxes, and the village head leans down to whisper to him.

Tanya tells one of the other villagers to tell the boy thank you for her, when he wakes up.

She walks back to her hut and calmly enters. Not seeming at all phased she is covered in monster blood.

On the inside she is still in turmoil. Hating herself for backing down but also relieved she didn’t have to fight the village head, and sad she has to give up what little life she made for herself here.

If ms. Wen is there Tanya will calmly tell here there was a monster attack but no-one died. Otherwise she just starts washing monster blood off herself and gets a cleaner dress to wear.

Ms. Wen is not in the house at the moment. It might be for the best; She'd probably complain about the beast blood.

After a few minutes she sees the village head come stand in front of the hut, face stern.

She faces the village head, a mask of calm still over her, not wanting to get all visibly angry again. “I wanted to say goodbye to ms. Wen. She didn’t need to care for me so well, but she did.” She is now mostly clean and wearing clean clothes. Tanya had gotten pretty good at scrubbing off blood during the great war.

Tanya goes back inside and packs some supplies into a blanket to use as a sack. She knows how much money and effort her chores have saved ms. Wen so taking these small things is justified.

Then she leaves the hut without looking at the village head, if she does she might be tempted to punch him and take her chances.

Ms. Wen finds her on the path out towards the fields, and throws her latest pouch of hush-money coins at Tanya. "Since you're going anyway, take this useless trash out of my sight. And don't be stupid out there, girl."

Tanya is a little stunned ms. Wen would give her so much. “I’ll pay you back when I can. Thank you for taking care of me.”

She won’t cry. She won’t. It’s beneath her. She definitely doesn’t feel a tear almost escaping the corner of her eye.

"Don't bother with that. Pay me back by helping out some other poor woman whose man is bad to her."

Ms. Wen looks like she's going to go for one of her very rare hugs, but settles for a nod instead. Then sighs and turns around.

Tanya uses her reinforcement spell to rush in to give ms. Wen a quick hug around the waist before stepping back and composing herself again.

Then Tanya realises something. “Uhhm… I don’t… actually know wich direction the city is in…” 

"Oh... Child. Just walk along that road for a ways until you get to the river, then head upstream. At the split, cross and follow the road. You're resourceful. I'm sure you'll be fine. Unlike that boorish and brutal man, if I had any say in the matter!"

“I could have beaten him, the cost just would have been too high.” Her face is dark again when she thinks of the village head. But the fact ms. Wen thinks she will be okay even though she is only 8 is a bit reassuring.

Tanya thanks ms. Wen again and leaves down the road. She doesn’t know how common monsters are out there so she keeps very alert at least for the next few hours.

No monsters menace her for the first part of her walk!

...The mana in the air gets noticeably thicker once she's far enough outside the village. Not immensely so, but noticeably. Perhaps 10%?

By early afternoon, she passes another unremarkable mud-hut village. This one perhaps even smaller and poorer than the last.  There's the corpse of another, junior sized, flesh spider monstrosity tied up to a bonfire. Whatever these are, they may have attacked multiple places at once.

Men tending wheat fields call out to her, Little Yellow, we've heard of you, what are you doing away from home? There might be more abominations about!

“I am heading to the city. For the crime of being strong enough to defeat an abomination and protect another child, I was exiled.” Why not take every chance to badmouth the village head. Maybe he can get away with being a tyrant through strength, but he deserves having a worse reputation at least.

“What direction did the monsters come from? The direction of the city?” She could probably take a few of the smaller spider things on if she was smart about it, but not a whole swarm of them.

Ah. Well. They shut up conspicuously when this is mentioned. (Her reputation has reached here, a bit, too).

Oh, no, the monsters came out of the haunted hills. Only a very brave herdsman takes his sheep out there. They're usually not very common, the wave from yesterday is the worst in a decade at least.

It’s probably none of her business… but she is curious. “Is this herdsman still alive? Or did the wave get them?”

Oh, no, Nobody goes out there, it was a figure of speech.

“Oh” Well, Tanya feels silly now.

Time to pretend nothing happened.

”Does anyone happen to have a spare knife? I can pay for it. I would feel safer with more than a sharp stick.”

Tanya probably won’t actually need it for self defence. A sharp stick probably worked just fine on humans. But having a blade was incredibly useful in most emergencies. What if she got lost in the wild? Even a shit knife made that kind of situation a lot more survivable.

She also had vague ideas of maybe practicing her mage blade spell, and that spell required a real blade to attach to, though she would probably only be able to manage casting mage blade if she kept the knife totally still. Movement would complicate the mental math way too much. 

These villagers awkwardly completely ignore her so called exile, and the fact that she's traveling alone, glancing over toward where she came from anxiously, and at her, a bit fearfully.

One of the farmers will part with a sturdy bronze blade, certainly more a tool than a weapon, for half the coins. It's the metal, see, that's valuable as much as the workmanship.