There was something wrong with feeling afraid during the day. At night it was normal. The night was made for different things, being afraid was one of those things. But being afraid during the day was something that Aurora could not bring herself to like, to accept.
Fearing the day reminded her of the time in her life where she spent all of her days looking over her shoulders and her nights sleeping with one eye open. She knew her husband always said she should forgive her family, but she would be damned if she could. With a hand on a tree trunk, she waited and listened with those around her. She held her hand up and signaled everyone to stop.
The team scout approached her. She was a lithe woman who looked as if she had dedicated her life to swimming. Aurora kept her attention on the path ahead, kept her awareness of her surrounding as open as Giftedly possible.
“What do you see?” the [Scout] asked.
Aurora waited a moment longer, keeping her eyes ahead. “There,” she whispered when it happened again.
It was a slight movement hidden among the trees. Whatever they were chasing now had an ability to camouflage itself using the light. It did not blend in with the environment, it blended in with the light, somehow refracting it.
The [Scout] looked ahead, peered into the distance. Aurora sighed internally. An S-rank [Scout] was seeing less than her. Then again, she was an SS-ranker so there was an argument to be made there.
As harmless as the forest looked in the daylight, Aurora and her current team knew better. Not more than five miles back, there were corpses and carcasses of wild animals strewn across the place. Lysa’s preliminary study showed the animals had been torn apart by monsters that walked on four legs. It corresponded with the reports from the few isolated villages they had gone through. And, as much as Aurora would’ve preferred a problem where she could simply walk in, smash heads in and walk out, she would be lying if she said she was not beginning to enjoy this. The slow buildup. The thinking. The studying… The hunt.
Sunlight seeped in through the towering canopy in diagonal beams of gold, casting focused illumination on carpets of moss and clusters of wildflowers. Birds sang from branches so high up that Aurora would have to tilt her head back to see. The leaves rustle occasionally from the gentle breeze. They carried with them a scent that Aurora could not say belonged to the forest. But she was not surprised, with all the Chaos Run monsters walking around on earth, a lot of things were beginning to warp. Leaves didn’t smell like leaves anymore, clay soil didn’t feel as it always should. If she was to put a name to the scent of the forest right now, she would say tobacco. Something about the prolonged presence of these monsters was changing the world in ways that Aurora knew was not right.
They waited a little longer but nothing else moved. Aurora looked at the [Scout].
“[Scout],” she said in a quiet voice.
“Lysa,” the woman said.
Aurora bit down on her urge to inform the woman that names were not important, especially since she was the only [Scout] present. Psychology is also a strategy of ruling your soldiers, she reminded herself.
“Lysa,” she said, “I need echolocation.” She pointed. “There.”
Lysa sucked in a deep breath, the skill Aurora had requested for being one of the few skills that required actions to go along with its activation. Then Lysa opened her mouth and a ripple went through the air, pulsing forward.
They waited for a beat before Lysa looked at Aurora and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.
Aurora frowned. She knew what she had seen. And if she wasn’t wrong, that confirmed a new problem. Not only was the creature able to camouflage in the light, but it was also fast, very fast.
They moved forward, eyes peeled, heads on an alert swivel. The others remained silent. It was what Aurora liked about this specific team. Despite all their little flaws—no one was perfect—they had one good trait; they did not talk unless they absolutely had to or unless they were spoken to.
Before long, Lysa raised her hand to halt their movement. Everyone obeyed. She crouched beside a patch of disturbed soil at the base of a massive tree and ran her fingers over the ground. Aurora followed her hand and saw it then. The track was fresh, not human, not entirely animal either. The imprint resembled a kangaroo’s feet at first glance, but something about the proportions were wrong. The toes were too long, the claw marks too deep in the soil, as if it had casually gouged out the earth without even trying—just like the animals left behind them.
“Heavy,” Lysa muttered, picking a pinch of the soil and rubbing it between her fingers.
“Heavy how?” Aurora asked, unsure of if she was talking about the animal or the soil.
“The beast.” Lysa brought her stained fingers to her nose and sniffed gently. “Whatever it is, it’s heavy and powerful.” She sniffed again and frowned, then looked back at Aurora. “Tobacco. Do you know of any monster that smells of tobacco?”
“Too many to help you.” Aurora cast her mind from the monsters. She had been in too many portals and stood against too many Chaos Runs. Off the top of her head she could think of eleven monsters that smelled of tobacco.
Lysa looked past her. “What do you think?” she asked the others.
Bran, thin shouldered and calm, carried a crossbow that was almost five feet long. He held it casually, as if it weighed nothing. He was a wielder of the [Titan] class that looked nothing like a titan.
Amara was the youngest among them. She watched the surrounding woods with restless alertness, as if she feared something would jump her at any moment. Aurora had no problem with her because the woman’s restlessness was only in her eyes, and her eyes still saw everything in their restlessness.
Edd was squatted low, hand resting gently on a tree as if relaxed, but Aurora noticed how his free hand never strayed too far away from his dagger. She knew the weapon. Crafted by an S-rank [Crafter], it had the ability to expand into a longsword or a greatsword. It made it difficult to face the man in a close quarter fight.
All three shook their heads.
“I ran into a [Crut] in a portal in asia last year,” Bran said, his voice a kind soprano, “smelled like tobacco and was very flammable. But it had hooves,” he nodded at the track, “no claws of any kind. And it was light, built for speed.”
Lysa nodded at the piece of information before looking to the others. They shook their heads once more. They had nothing to offer.
Lysa sighed, her frustration spilling out through the action. As a [Scout] she was forced to regress back to her basic scouting non-Gifted abilities. For some reason whatever they were chasing did not leave behind any kind of mana signature. She could use one of her [Scout] skills right now, with the track in front of her, and it would not even recognize the track itself. It made things difficult.
They had been tracking these monsters for almost three days now. Three days of broken branches, half-eaten carcasses, frightened rumors from the villages they had passed, and game killed for sport instead of sustenance. Everything was just wrong. Then again, it wasn’t like monsters had a hard rule that they had to follow.
Aurora paused, pointed into the distance, at something caught in her periphery. “What’s that?”
In an amateur team all heads would’ve followed her finger, but not in this team. Only Lysa’s head moved while the others kept their attention on their surroundings. She looked away from the others and settled her attention on the thing in the distance. She squinted, as if to see better, despite her rank and what it would’ve done for her perception considering her class.
A small smile stretched her lips. “We’re close,” she said.
“How close?” Aurora asked.
Lysa pointed at the same thing Aurora had just pointed out. “You see those?” she asked. “They are marks.”
Aurora focused. What she was looking at was roughly three miles away. It was a specific line, diagonal across the trunk of a tree. She’d only noticed it because its almost orange color was sharp against the tree’s bark. A [Scout] of her rank would probably be able to pick it out without even looking for it. It was the interesting thing about being Gifted. Even at her rank, there were attributes of hers that were less than that of a B-rank of a specific class. But while her eyesight was not the best among the Gifted, it was still good enough.
“Something’s marking its territory?” Edd asked in a clear baritone. Aurora wondered if it was worry she’d heard in his voice.
“Nothing marking,” Lysa corrected. “It’s already marked its territory.”
Lysa stood up. She squinted some more and smiled. She was seeing something that Aurora was not seeing. She kept her eyes moving, trying to pick out other things as she walked forward. That she didn’t stop until they got to the mark on the tree told Aurora that she saw nothing of consequence.
When they got to the mark, Aurora discovered what Lysa had seen to make her smile. A few trees away was another mark, as clear as the one they were at, and Lysa followed it.
The markings continued southeast then were suddenly gone. But Lysa wasn’t bothered, she seemed to have picked up a fresh and clear set of tracks. Aurora decided that she no longer needed to assist the [Scout] in her duties and focused her attention on their surroundings and manufacturing a plan in the event of an ambush.
They followed Lysa as she followed the tracks for several yards before stopping again. There were more signs now, scratches on barks, broken ferns, fresh mud. The new trail wound deeper into the forest. The trees grew older as they advanced, thicker, taller. Sunlight became scarcer as the canopy became thicker, the trees growing larger. The air cooled. Slowly the forest felt quieter.
Aurora noticed it, her senses sharpening to the reduced presence of life.
“Do you hear that?” Amara asked, a light trepidation in her voice.
Everyone stopped.
Lysa shook her head. “Hear what?”
“I don’t hear anything,” Bran offered.
Aurora grinned a little with excitement. “Exactly. That’s the problem.”
There was nothing to be heard now. The forest hadn’t just gone silent; it had gone dead. No birds tweeted, no insects chirped. Not even the leaves on the trees rustled. The entire forest had gone still. It was the stillness that came before the chaos, a calm before a storm.
The realization before an ambush, Aurora thought, eyes moving about, carefully. If they were really about to be ambushed, the last thing she wanted was to inform whatever was strong enough to ambush her that she was aware of it. Why? Because while she would survive, she could not guarantee the safety of this team.
Calmly, in a gentle voice, she said, “Stay alert.”
Bran’s moved his crossbow a little. It was a minute thing, but enough to make sure its mouth was no longer pointing to the ground. It was interesting to watch everyone still like the forest around them, as if blending into the motion of everything around them while retaining full control of themselves.
“Move,” Aurora instructed. “Carefully.”
The group obeyed, continuing forward. They walked with the awareness that they could very well be walking within the clutches of whatever they now realized was hunting them. Lysa continued to follow her tracks while Aurora thought about the team’s ability to handle monsters en masse. After all, everything they’d seen so far implied more than five monsters.
Three times they found evidence of the creatures, not just tracks. Once in the form of a lion carcass stripped almost completely clean. Some things had been hungry. The second time it had been as a cluster of footprints at the edge of a muddy streambank. The third time, it was a ruined pride of lions—probably the pride of the lion they’d found earlier—these ones hadn’t been fed upon like the previous simply killed and slaughtered. Whatever they had faced, they had not stood a chance.
Lysa stopped at the bodies, studied everything around them for nearly ten minutes. The ground here lacked grass, leaving behind clear footprints to study. With every passing minute her frown grew darker. She walked around trees and studied the death of the pride, squatting, standing, sniffing. The others stood guard, her protectors in her small ritual.
“I don’t like this,” she said.
Bran snorted. “What’s not to like?” His voice was light; he was trying to lighten up his own mood.
Whether Lysa knew this was anyone’s guess, because she did not return his light joke. “The tracks,” she said seriously. “The footprints, the claw marks.” She gestured around with each word, pointing out corpses. “They may not look like it at a glance, but they are all the same.”
“The same,” Aurora mused. “So we are hunting one type of monster.”
“Yes,” Lysa answered, “but that’s not what worries me. When I say they are all the same I mean they are all the same.” She pointed at two lions, even in the dimmed light of the forest, everyone present could still see what was in front of them clearly. “these claw marks. The injuries are longer but the width, barring stretches are the same.”
“Longer gashes but done by the same set of claws?” Edd asked.
Lysa nodded. Then she stepped back and pointed at a few set of footprints, they overlapped each other chaotically, monsters running over each other’s footprints. “These too,” she said. “The same. The weight is different but the length and breath of the feet and the claws aren’t.”
“So, what are you trying to say?” Amara asked. “Monsters from the same litter?”
“Possibly,” Lysa answered, but there was doubt in her voice, uncertainty.
Aurora did not like uncertainty, and yet, she liked the uncertainty of what was happening. The greatest beauty of war lay in the uncertainty. One could not call it a war if the outcome was already certain, if they knew how it was going to end.
She fought back her pleasure, her hunger.
“Think they are nearby?” Bran asked, eyes ever watchful.
Aurora could not help but smile. “Definitely.”
“What?” Bran blinked in surprise, he had probably expected the response to come from Lysa. “How can you tell?”
Still smiling, Aurora pointed. She’d seen it just before the man had asked his question. At first nobody noticed, then Lysa nodded.
“There,” she said in a soft voice, eyes fixed on it.
It was the slightest movement, a silhouette slipping between the trees far ahead of them. Gone almost as immediately as it arrived, as if popping in and out of existence.
Fast, Aurora noted. But alone. Tall too.
Whatever the creature was, it stood on two legs, humanoid in its stance. However, when it moved, it seemed to hunch, as if intent on running on four.
Aurora raised her hand. Nobody moved. Lysa hunched slightly, like a grappler preparing to tackle their enemy.
“Prepare yourself,” Aurora told them. “It’s coming.”
“It’s observing us,” Lysa noted.
Aurora almost chuckled. “Not observing,” she corrected, “merely pondering.”
“It can’t take us alone,” Edd said, confident.
“More than one track,” Aurora reminded the man. “It doesn’t have to.”
“Then maybe its waiting?”
That would definitely be a problem. They could not allow it wait until the others were present.
“Maybe.” The words barely left Aurora’s mouth before something sharps tore through the air. “Duck!” she ordered, tilting her head to the side.
A spike as long as her forearm pierced the air where her head should’ve been and buried itself halfway into a tree behind her.
Another spike came out of nowhere, missing Bran’s head by a hair’s breadth. Everyone scrambled into action as more spikes leapt from the trees.
“Cover!” Bran barked, returning fire from behind a tree. “Where the hell are they?! Can anyone see them?”
With the monsters proving themselves to be immune to being tracked with skills, Aurora wouldn’t be surprised if skills wouldn’t do anything to point them out here. To follow them, one would need a high enough perception stat.
The group remained scattered. Spikes hammered into trunks and dirt, ruining trees. They carried enough force behind them that five blasts actually felled a tree. Bran took advantage of it immediately. He rolled behind the fallen tree and placed his crossbow atop it. There, he fired from the cover.
Still standing in plain sight, Aurora dodged with gentle movements, a step to the side here, a tilt of her head there. All the while, her eyes followed the trajectories of the attack. It was a curious thing. The spikes always came from wherever the creature left. Always two bursts in passing. Either its ability to fire the spikes was significantly better than its movement speed or she was missing something.
It was peppering them, figuring them out. Perhaps Edd was right. Maybe it was observing them. But something wasn’t adding up. All the way from the starting point until now, no victim had suffered ranged attacks, there had been no spikes left over.
Her eyes glanced to one of the spikes embedded in the trees. It was still there, firm, unmoved. That answered one question. The spikes did not disappear. Which meant the spikes had never been a part of the fights the monsters had involved themselves.
The lions weren’t a threat.
That meant that the monsters knew and were having fun. Having fun was the realm of intelligence.
Aurora turned, evading another spike and following the movement of the monser. An A-rank monster?
Monsters were not generally intelligent, but as ranks went up, intelligence went up until a monster could boast of intelligence on the level of pets like dogs. But this?
She slapped a spike out of the air just before it slammed into her.
“I can’t hit shit!” Bran barked. He had changed positions, probably because the creature had been trying to flank them.
Aurora looked at him and found the others hiding, watching, dodging. They were relatively calm, but she could tell that they were working hard not to get hit. It made the skin on her forehead crease in thought.
Her eyes moved over to Bran once more. An S-ranker can’t hit it.
That was another clue she focused on the surface of her mind, putting the pieces together, understanding helping her to figure a few things out. Her attention returned to the creature in time to take a step back and avoid another spike. This one had been aimed at her foot, perhaps intended to pin her in place.
Interesting.
It was thinking, actively for that matter.
“Bran,” she commanded, “I need you to take a shot at exactly three o’clock when I say.”
Bran turned, avoiding another attack. “Got it!”
“Now!”
Bran moved with the speed and alacrity of an S-ranker. He stepped out into the open, took aim and fired.
The monster, darted to the side, avoiding the attack. In return an attack of its own came blasting forward. Three spikes this time. Aurora blinked in surprise.
“Everybody, stand back!” she declared. “I’m going in.”
No objections went out, no one complained.
This was something Aurora felt she would be interested in. A monster that moved faster than the average S-ranker’s eyes could track, possessed a significant level of accuracy and possessed enough intelligence to play with its prey.
Now she had just discovered the latest piece of information. The monster had dodged Bran’s shot even before Bran had squeezed the trigger of his crossbow.
It understood human language, but what was worse was its intelligence.
It knew what three o’clock was.
Aurora’s grin left behind an afterimage as she crossed the distance, moving through the trees and finding herself where she needed to be. Her hand shot out at the last second and grabbed the creature by the neck before it could dart away.
She caught a flash of a fang, a snout and orange eyes before, to her surprise, it was gone from her grip, standing a few paces away from her.
It tilted its head to the side, a very human expression, sizing her up. Aurora was too intrigued to be worried. Interestingly enough, it had the face of a lion but lacked the mane that signified its gender to be male. But the rest of its body was… confusing. As if it did not know what it was supposed to be.
It had the required feet and its fingers were clawed. As to where its spikes were coming from, Aurora could not find anything that stood out.
“You speak human language,” she said, knowing that the others were approaching with caution. She had told them to stand back so she wasn’t surprised.
The monster said nothing in response, tilting its head the other way instead.
“Are you willing to share your rank?” she asked.
Again, no answer.
“I see.” She took a step forward and it didn’t move. “Then you will not be against dying.”
The creature charged her, claws extended and ready. Aurora met it head-on. It leapt. She sidestepped and swung a casual blow. The creature twisted in the air, landed on all four, and leapt at her again.
“Duck!” Bran’s voice called out.
Aurora stepped to the side and an arrow whizzed past her. It was red, covered in the man’s mana. The creature sidestepped it, evading very quickly. Then, unbothered, it rushed Aurora once more.
She ducked the first blow, blocked the next and checked a low kick with a raised leg.
“Interesting,” she mused. “You fight like a—”
The blow came out of nowhere. It cracked her square in the jaw, faster than her brain could think.
Aurora stepped back, stunned in disbelief. Then a new truth hit her. What she’d thought was her stepping back was not.
She staggered once more. Then dropped on her ass.
Sat there, there was nothing but shock left in her as the others came to her quickly. The creature was gone. She would’ve said that it fled, but something told her that she would be wrong.
It had to be an S-rank at the least to have been able to hit her so cleanly in a fight.
No, she disagreed. SS-rank.
“Come on,” Edd said, moving quickly to her side. “Help her up.”
Aurora allowed them as they pulled her to her feet. Her mind was still in a daze, struggling to figure out what exactly she had been hit with, just how strong the creature was.
“S-rank, you think?” Bran asked Lysa.
Lysa shook her head. “I can’t tell. If it could knock an SS-rank down like that, then maybe SS?”
“No,” Aurora said, the others who’d helped her up releasing her. “It’s probably—”
Something strange happened. She staggered again and the world swirled. She tried to blink it away but swayed.
She placed a hand to her head and asked herself a question she had not thought she would be asking herself anytime soon.