Kai's successful farming session was rudely interrupted when four armed elf guards finally showed up at the wooden cell.
Lyra stood up straight and quickly adjusted her leather top, trying her absolute hardest to look like a strict scout instead of a flustered girl who just spent the last hour getting relentlessly teased by a human prisoner.
She unlocked the root door and pointed her hunting knife right at his chest.
"Get up right now, human," Lyra ordered, completely refusing to meet his eyes because her cheeks were still glowing pink.
"The High Priestess is ready to pass her judgment on your trespassing, so you need to keep your mouth shut and walk."
Kai stretched his arms high above his head and walked slowly out of the open cell door.
He purposely stepped a little too close to her on his way out, letting his chest brush right against her shoulder.
He even let his fingers lightly drag across her soft waist for just a second as he squeezed past her in the narrow doorway.
Lyra gasped out loud and jumped back like she had been burned by a hot iron, her pointy ears instantly turning bright red again.
"Keep your filthy hands to yourself!" she said angrily, gripping her knife tighter and glaring at him.
"My bad," Kai lied smoothly with a totally unapologetic smile on his face.
"The moss on the floor is just really slippery in there, so you actually caught me right before I fell over and hurt myself."
[Target flustered.]
[Strength +0.5]
'Man, she is just too easy to tease,' Kai thought to himself, happily banking his free points as the armed guards escorted them down the path toward the centre of the settlement.
The middle of the elven village was massive and built directly around a giant tree that glowed with a bright silver light.
Hundreds of elves were gathered around the wide wooden platforms, and they were all staring at Kai like he was some kind of weird zoo animal that just escaped its cage.
Kai looked around and noticed that all the male elves were standing perfectly straight with their hands behind their backs, looking completely stiff and incredibly boring, just like he predicted earlier.
He gave a friendly and highly exaggerated wave to a group of beautiful female elves standing nearby, and they immediately started whispering to each other behind their hands while looking him up and down.
"Stop making a scene and keep walking," Lyra snapped from right behind him, giving him a hard shove between his shoulder blades to keep him moving forward.
They finally stopped at the base of the giant tree, where an old but beautiful elf woman was sitting on a carved wooden throne.
She had silver hair that reached all the way down to the floor and eyes that looked exactly like white moons.
Three elder elves wearing long white robes stood right beside her throne with very serious expressions on their wrinkled faces.
"This is the stray human you found wandering in the outers?" the High Priestess asked, her voice sounding calm but carrying perfectly across the entire noisy platform.
"Yes, High Priestess," Lyra answered quickly, bowing her head deeply to show her respect.
"He fell right out of the sky and claims he was dropped by a feral monster, but he reeks of strange magic, and he completely refuses to show proper respect to anyone."
The High Priestess looked down at Kai for a long, silent minute while the whole crowd waited for her reaction.
"A human surviving a fall in our woods without a single broken bone is highly unusual," she said slowly.
"The corruption in the local mana lines has made the beasts highly unpredictable lately. We must see if his soul is tainted by the dark magic spreading through the valley before we decide his fate. Elders, read his mana core and tell me what you see."
The three older elves stepped forward at the same time and raised their hands toward Kai.
Kai suddenly felt a weird tingling sensation in his chest, and he knew they were trying to scan his stats to figure out exactly what kind of powers he had hiding inside him.
If they actually saw his pathetic level four stats and realized he was practically defenseless, they would probably just toss him back out into the woods for the horny direwolves to deal with.
But right before the strange elven magic could actually dig into his private status screen, a massive red warning completely filled his entire vision.
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM ACCESS DETECTED.]
[INITIATING FIREWALL PROTOCOLS.]
[ERROR CODE 404: HOST DATA ENCRYPTED.]
A loud sound echoed across the wooden platform, sounding exactly like a thick branch snapping in half.
The three elder elves were physically thrown backwards by an invisible wall, stumbling over their own long robes as their glowing scanning magic completely shattered into tiny blue sparks in the air.
The entire elf village started murmuring and pointing in total shock.