“Come on! Keep running! He’s catching up!” I shouted behind myself as I nearly tripped over a log that was smack dab in the path ahead of us. I vaulted over and immediately fell in to a pool of mud. My shoes were absolutely caked in dried mud now. We hadn’t had much time to stop and clean ourselves off in almost two hours. I skid to a stop and turned to face where I’d come from. There was a dense stretch of trees spanning all around that made it almost impossible to see anything through. Thankfully, my eyes were good enough to spot a bit of rainbow coming towards me as high speed.
In a matter of moments, the owner of the bandana burst forth from the trees. Viktor looked like an absolute wreck. The scrawny nature apprentice was absolutely covered in scrapes and mud, his overalls no longer even slightly resembling their original color. His white shit was more of a torn mess of red and brown at this point. He had bags under his eyes much like myself. However, unlike my cursed and observer’s eye, Viktor’s powerful eye was currently active, the pattern having shifted as he zoomed through the forest at high speeds.
Viktor had said before that he wasn’t all that adept or inclined to ever really use his powerful eye since it didn’t have much of a place in his fighting or magic style. However, if there was anything that had improved a lot in these past two days, it was traits that we never thought we would have to use. For Viktor, that was his speed-enhancing eye. For me, it was the ability to manipulate life energy inside of essence. I had known before that essence was the energy of life, but I didn’t really know how literal that was until I had to manipulate it.
Three days ago, Viktor and I had been in a pretty good place with our mission and life in general. We’d just finished communicating with Exfernerous and Camp I, which meant we had only one more camp and Master to visit before it was time for us to confront Zeraph. Now, ordinarily, having to confront the literal embodiment of destruction wouldn’t be something that someone would put very high on their list of things that makes for a good life, but with the mission going well, it all felt really good.
Unfortunately, that came to a pretty quick end when I decided that we needed to butt our heads in to the matter of an elder dragon which she clearly had handled. Damien, the stupid psychopathic blood murderer who was currently chasing us had attacked Ilicity, the fire elder dragon on top of Mount Fernous and when we arrived, things got sticky, so she decided to erupt the volcano in a spectacular fashion. That amount of force was too much for the platform we had been on to handled and it exploded with the volcano.
I had been sent flying on a piece of it and when I woke up a few minutes later, I found Viktor passed out next to me on a similar piece of the platform. We had been hurtled several thousands of feet in to the air, so I knew I had time to save him before we landed. Unfortunately, I greatly underestimated how fast we were flying through the air and I had almost lost him. Thankfully, I did catch him and get us safely to the ground. We were both pretty injured and really low on essence, but I had found us a place to stay for the night that was relatively safe.
When we woke up, we checked our essence compasses on our hands to find the rest of the group, Julian and Lilith. Thankfully, they seemed to be either with each other or very close to it. The only problem was, we had no idea where we were other than a forest. Thanks to Viktor, we had a vague idea of where we were based on the type of trees around us, whose names I couldn’t even begin to try and pronounce, but it meant we were pretty far away from Malfuim where Julian and Lilith most likely were.
Another very unfortunate realization came in the morning too though, where we had landed, so had Damien, the last person we wanted to be near. We were pretty sure that we wouldn’t be able to track us and we would be able to get out of the forest before he even knew we were here, but it had been two days and we were still here. We had tried to avoid and evade Damien in so many different ways, but we just couldn’t seem to. Every time we turned around he was behind us ready to strike.
Once we had realized we were potentially going to be stuck here for a while, Viktor came up with a plan to try and evade him as much as possible during the day and get whatever food we could so that we could practice manipulating the life energy inside of essence during the night. Thanks to that plan though, we had only gotten around six hours of sleep in these past two days. Luckily for us, Damien was pretty weak in the speed department and didn’t seem to be much of a tracker, so we hadn’t had any super nasty run-ins with him thus far.
I had been doing pretty good with manipulating my life energy inside of my essence so far, but pretty good wasn’t going to cut it. Viktor was only barely able to break out of Damien’s control back on Mount Fernous when he was focusing on four people and exhausted. Now that there were only two of us and he was most likely resting pretty well, we were at a significant disadvantage until we could better control our blood.
Damien had years of experience with killing as a massive amount of blood on him at all times to be able to use as a weapon, so even if we were able to break free from his control, we would still need to work together to be able to finally take him out. Unfortunately, since it was still the day time, all we could do right now was to run.
I noticed a new cut that had formed on Viktor’s lower abdomen. I frowned as we continued to run, but chose not to mention it for now. I would wait until tonight to ask while I was patching him up as I did every night. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up or that he couldn’t dodge. He just seemed so fixated on taking out Damien before he could get to both of us. I kept telling him that he needed to stop, but he wouldn’t listen and would only say that he had to. But anytime I would ask why, he would go silent.
Sometimes Jester would laugh inside my head and tell me that I was such an idiot, but I couldn’t understand why. They seemed to know something about Viktor that I didn’t which didn’t really make any sense to me. If they’d come from Sylak and I’s minds together, I should know what it was unless it was something that Sylak had picked up on that I didn’t. That didn’t really seem very likely since they had never been too good with emotions that weren’t negative or malicious until very recently. It just didn’t make any sense to me.
I stopped cold in my tracks, catching Viktor before he made the mistake I almost did. In front of us, stretching out for several miles was a massive ravine. It looked like a giant scar in the earth from where we were standing and I could see all kinds of rocks and vegetation lining the side of it. I looked down. It was only about a two-hundred foot drop to the very bottom which would sound like a lot if I couldn’t float to the bottom easily.
I turned to Viktor. “Alright. So, Damien doesn’t have much in the way of detection without either of our blood and so far he hasn’t managed to get much of ours for tracking, so if we go down here and hide, we should be able to lose him for a bit,” I said.
He nodded and I noticed he was panting pretty hard. He was clearly pretty exhausted. We had done more running today than ever before and Viktor had engaged Damien twice without my knowing. He’d engaged a third time that I’d actually been part of that one. It hadn’t gone very well for either of us, but we’d been able to get away.
I grabbed Viktor’s hand and jumped, floating us down to the bottom of the ravine were I found a cavern. I ducked inside, leading Viktor along with me. I took a look down at my hand and found that we’d been running away from where we needed to be going. It felt like we’d made no progress at all since we got here. We just continued to be pushed back further than we were going forward. It was utterly infuriating, to say the least.
Viktor collapsed against the cavern wall, panting heavily. I moved over to him, opening my bag and pulling out some leaves I had pulled off some plants while we’d been running earlier in the day. They were pretty easy to grind up with just my bare hands and once I had them in to a cluster of powder, I sprinkled them in to Viktor’s newest wounds. The leaves were from a plant called a Baylio which, when crushed up, helped with the increased blood flow to areas that were injured. They were really helpful and they were all over this forest. Without proper equipment, I wasn’t able to properly bring out their full restorative properties though.
“Thanks for the help, Avien…”
I nodded and slumped down next to him. “We need to change tactics. All we’ve been doing is running. This is our third day being hunted by that psycho and we’re no closer to getting to Malfuim than when we started.”
“Yeah… We really haven’t made any progress. You and I on our own aren’t really making much progress and progress with controlling life energy has been really slow. I may have an idea though.”
I sat up a bit, intrigued. “Yeah, what is it?”
“Well, Damien has been able to track us basically anywhere we go, so he must be tracking us. Considering we’ve made sure he hasn’t gotten any substantial amount of blood from either of us, he must be finding us another way and I think I’ve finally got it. Most likely, he has a massive seal placed somewhere underground that can sense everything in a pretty wide area above it and he’s been occasionally activating that to check our position. Such a massive location requires a lot of essence for long periods of time, but if you do it in bursts, it can conserve a lot less energy, especially if he has one massive permanent seal place so that he doesn’t have to keep remaking the seal.”
“I see… I would have never even thought of that. I’m still really new to even wind magic, so other types are still pretty far beyond what I can even think of doing.”
He shook his head. “That’s totally fair though. This stuff takes a really long time to learn.”
I nodded. He was right about that, but I still felt like kind of a drag sometimes. “Anyway, what’s your plan?”
“So, if he is using a specific area, you should be able to spot it with your observer’s eye. You wouldn’t have seen it the other times you’ve used it since you were just looking for auras of blood apprentices, right?”
I nodded and immediately flicked my fingers over my eye. I had to try and find a blood seal which would emit a specific kind of aura. I hadn’t had much practice searching for seals, but the concept wasn’t all that hard. I concentrated on the specific structure and energy of seals and then narrowed my search to blood. I looked down first, but found it wasn’t below us, so we were safe. When I looked up, however, there was a massive red glow. I could see it stretching on in to the distance for miles with the center being in some very far off location.
“Well? Do you see it?”
I deactivated my eye and turned back to Viktor, swallowing hard. “Yeah… And it is absolutely massive. We can probably escape it in a day, but avoiding him to do so will definitely prove to be a bit of a challenge.
Viktor smiled in a way I did not find fitting to the situation nor empathize with. “Well, what are you waiting for, let’s go, Avien.”
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