Bound and Broken: An Isekai Adventure Dark Fantasy (Melas Book 1)

old, and my legs were still injured, but in spite of all that, I was doing good on time.
The explosions in the distance rang in my ears, despite my best attempts to ignore it; I put all my focus on my breathing, attempting to maintain a good rhythm so that I wouldn’t have to immediately catch my breath once I arrived.
To be honest, I was not even sure what I could do once I was there. I could not use magic, and I could not fight. I was only a child that only knew how to use mana tools, without actually owning any. And even if I did have a gun of some sort, would it actually help against whoever my mom was fighting? No. No it would not.
But I had to do something! Maybe I would be able to distract them by shouting. Maybe I would even be able to hinder them with some well-timed rocks. Or maybe, I would just die. Whatever it was I could do, I wouldn’t be able to do it if I was not there. So, I ran.
I kept on running as fast as I could. I ignored the pain, ignored the fatigue, and ignored the fact that I could be running to my death. So what if I die? I’ve already died once!
I knew that I was probably being fatalistic; I knew that, but I didn’t care. Even if I could lie to myself and hope for the best, I still had to prepare myself for the worst.
I slowly began to deviate away from the dirt path that led from my house to Villamcreek, cutting through the forest to save time. The lumbering trees blocked most of my vision, but I knew that I had finally arrived. I pushed myself through the branches, exiting the thicket, and then I saw it.
My mom was surrounded by three armed men just outside of Villamcreek. She was injured, a couple arrows sticking out of her sides and back, and with gashes on her arms and shoulders. Despite that, she was fighting back. Two of the Inquisitors looked injured as well, though not as badly as my mom was, while the one with a saber only looked tired. The fighting looked like it began inside the village, but was slowly brought out.
It was a battle, but my mom treated it like a dance. She moved graciously. Almost as if she had practiced these moves all her life. Decades of experience separated her from her dance partners, and it showed as she kept them always one step behind her. And yet, they outnumbered her.
My mom twirled, spinning her scythe in a huge arc around her. The Inquisitors kept their distance, pushed back by the attack. She pointed a finger at the Inquisitor with a shield, firing a purple beam of light at him. As the Inquisitor raised his wall shield to block it, my mom dashed forward at the other Inquisitor with the spear. She raised her scythe to strike the spear Inquisitor, when glowing arrows landed on the ground between them and exploded.
The impact from the explosion made my mom stagger backwards, giving the man with the saber an opportunity to take a swing. His attack grazed my mom’s arm, drawing some blood, but ultimately doing negligible damage. At least, by itself. When the man backed up, and the fighting continued, I quickly understood what they were doing.
They were trying to slowly wear down my mom, getting in whatever hits they could, all the while preventing her from running. It was a war of attrition, and they were winning.
My mom clearly knew this. She knew she would lose this fight if this continued, so she had to break the encirclement. She had to single them out— break them apart from each other. But as long as the archer was there, that would be impossible.
So I quickly scanned the direction the arrows came from, searching for the archer. There. I found her standing just over a hundred feet away from the fighting, inside of Villamcreek. She had arrows nocked and ready to fire, just waiting for the right moment to shoot.
I started heading in her direction, keeping out of her sight as I did; I doubted she would have noticed me even if I did not sneak up on her since she was distracted, but I had to be cautious. The fighting continued behind me, with the occasional spells being loosed by my mom as I made my way towards the archer.
As I walked, I searched for anything that could help me distract the archer. Just like how the archer only needed to act when the time was right, I did too. If I stopped her from firing an arrow just once at the right moment, I know that my mom would escape her predicament.
My adrenaline slowly died down as I got closer to the woman, and the pain in my body returned in full force. It was only tolerable previously, but now I let out a soft grunt with every step that I took. Thankfully, the noise was masked by the clash of metal in the background, so the archer never turned to face me once.
I brought my focus away from the pain, focusing on finding something I could use to distract the archer. I suddenly felt something brush against my sides. It wasn’t something that I could see, neither was it something that was moving. It was something inside my clothes— in my pockets.
I reached in and felt something cool and hard. I pulled my hand back out, and looked at the prism-like object resting on my palm. It was the lighter.
I knew it was dangerous. I knew that the last time I did it, I almost died. But there was nothing else I could do. There was nothing else I could use. So I had to