Even guns were of no use against such enemies.


    Therefore, Diana asked her soldiers to retreat the moment she confirmed that the group couldn''t be taken down through their normal methods.


    "Zach…we might have…a small problem."


    Zach turned all his attention towards the flustered sounding Diana. He had been monitoring the situation all this time through the earpiece but this was the first problem since the soldiers began to execute the strategy.


    "What is it? What happened?" asked Zach curiously.


    "It''s nothing…just that our weapons are ineffective against the core group of the pirates. This group has rather powerful overall strength and peculiar defensive methods. We can''t handle them on our own."


    Diana called for heavy firepower without a thought. She didn''t want her soldiers to die in a pointless struggle when they could easily kill their enemies without incurring any losses on their end.


    "Copy that…don''t waste time and engage other groups instead. I will make arrangements for this one."


    Zach ordered Diana to retreat as well. Just like her, he didn''t want any pointless casualties.


    Zach tapped his earpiece with a finger before enigmatically asking, "Are the two of you ready yet?"


    "Of course."


    Two solemn but determined voices sounded in his earpiece at the same time as if they had been waiting for this question all their lives.


    Since they were ying at their home ground, Zach didn''t want any extra losses but at the same time he wanted the soldiers to experience another battle after having trained for so long without a chance to showcase their abilities. He was treating it like field experience for his soldiers to get them hands on with the new tech.


    Still, he wasn''tpletely out of his mind when he decided to y around with his enemies. As a safety precaution he had already detailed Christina and ra to remain on call at all times in case the enemy had some high level mages as back up.


    "Good…it''s up to you two now. Our soldiers can''t handle the high-level mages with their current loadout. Help them make a sessful retreat and then take down those mages as fast as possible."


    The two were already on the move as they nodded subconsciously after listening to Zach''s voicemand.


    Zach had been keeping them up to date about the entire situation. Therefore, they already knew the current location of Diana and her team.


    ra had been secretly jealous of Diana who was the center of attention during the entire operation but she couldn''t say anything as Diana had been themander of the Special Ops team since the very beginning.


    Now that Zach asked her to help Diana and her team, ra was smirking with smugness visible on her soft visage.


    While Christina was practically floating on the ground with her magic, ra was pushing through with sheer force as she damaged the ground behind her to propel herself further to get abreast Christina who was rtively stronger when it came to mana control and mana propulsion.


    Like a model strength oriented mage, ra was oveing the gap between her and Christina with sheer brute force and nothing else.<novelsnext>I think you should take a look at </novelsnext>


    …


    ckbeard was truly angry after losing so many of his crewmates on a useless mission like this. He wanted to tear apart the Smith family who bore the prime responsibility for the current but pathetic situation of his crew. But the anger he felt towards Hogan exceeded even that, for Hogan had fed him false information that led to the current scenario.


    The target had yet to show himself and more than half of his forces had already been wiped out. This was too heavy a loss and the Smith family had turned out to be not as useless as Hogan had stated them to be.


    He still remembered how Hogan had told him about the useless Smith family that would fall apart the moment they lost their leader Zach. As such, he hadn''t taken as much precautions when making anding on the ind. Resultantly, he ended up losing so many men for a mission that wasn''t going to pay him as much.


    But out of necessity, ckbeard put all of that to the back of his mind and tried to take down as many of the enemy forces as possible even though each and every one of them seemed to be extremely skilled at escaping and hiding. While the girl leading them kept blocking his path, the rest of the men kept retreating at a fast pace.


    He had to ept that it was a good strategy to slow him down to let the weaker ones escape. But he was in no mood to y with the girl who looked more tender than trained.


    The girl kept switching between two tube like weapons that he had seen for the first time. The one with a longer tube shot out metal projectiles with a high pration power while the short one burst out several projectiles at the same time with high explosive power.


    Diana kept using the sawed off shotgun to push back ckbeard whenever he got close to her while tailing her and used the rifle to target him as she moved back to provide cover for the rest of the soldiers.


    The water shield that ckbeard conjured up for defense was enough to stop the metal projectiles in their path but he was unable to do much else other than defense.


    This enraged ckbeard because it was a humiliation for him to stumble aftering across a seemingly soft and homely looking girl. He brought out the vast amount of mana in an unending stream and began topress the water element into a thin stream capable of piercing diamond at its best.


    The soft body of a girl like Diana who had never trained her physical body like ra would undoubtedly suffer a fate even worse than pration. Her body might directly be cut apart aftering into contact with it.


    Just when ckbeard was about tounch the deadly sh of water with a swing of his hand, he heard a crunching sound near himself and then felt a bone breaking pain in his left arm.


    ckbeard looked down towards his hand instinctively and found his forearm dangling from the elbow onward like there was no bone left in his arm. One look and he knew that his arm had been rendered useless.


    His eyes narrowed dangerously and his focus shifted towards a petite looking girl who had appeared out of nowhere right beside him. The greatest danger he felt came from the fact that he hadn''t felt her overwhelming presence until the moment she struck him with that punch that broke his arm from the elbow joint rendering the attack he had wasted so much mana on,pletely useless.


    The petite looking girl who had broken his arm bone was none other than ra whose main focus in magic studies was physical augmentation that allowed her to break past the strength limit of normal humans.


    ckbeard grew wary of the harmless looking girl and cursed his luck foring across two terrible opponents who didn''t look the part at all. Not only was he being beaten ck and blue, unable to fight back, the shame he felt at being the punching bag of two boneless looking women was even greater.


    Since Hogan had asked ckbeard to deal with the Smith family and not the Windsor family, he had never given any information regarding her to ckbeard. As a result, ckbeard ended up paying the price.


    As a strength specialist, ra was so powerful that even Hogan had to devise an alternate n to lure her away from the Windsor residence in order to get a powerful criminal like Jack to abduct Violet. Being an elemental mage, Jack wasn''t willing to take on a strength oriented mage who could stter him to the ground with a single punch.


    From the get go, closebat with a strength oriented mage with an indomitable physical body was a folly. But ckbeard was unaware of the overall strength of the girl with a cold look on her face. Although he was wary of her due to her sneak attack, he didn''t expect her to have such a level of strength.


    Therefore, when the newest addition to his crew, a B rank mage tried to attack ra on his own, ckbeard didn''t try to stop him.