[Engineering, Magic, and Kitsune] Chapter 77: Probing

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John really should make upsizing the hoverdisc a higher priority. He kept finding himself in situations where he was crammed onto the thing with Yuki. Even if he wasn’t afraid of falling off, there was far too little room to move without hurling himself off the contraption that might as well have been a flying manhole cover. It wasn’t as if his kitsune companion would let him fall; her reflexes were far too sharp. Still, he’d appreciate some extra leg room.

Tick.

John looked down at his wrist, his Mage’s Compass revealing a contact toward the east. With a lazy twist of his foot, he angled his flying disc toward the source and flew headlong toward it, idly sweeping the area ahead of him with his Nameless detector.

“Another read,” he muttered to Yuki, the towering kitsune leaning over his shoulder to keep track of the compass with sharp eyes. “Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long to find as the last one.”

“You seem to be getting used to it. It only took half as long as the first to track it down,” she gently reassured, although John couldn’t help but roll his eyes.

“It took me nearly half an hour to realize that the reason the signal kept ‘moving’ was because there were two separate hits, and one was in a blind spot directly below me,” John grunted in response, double-checking the charge on the disc’s capacitor through the handy-dandy display he had installed into the top plate. Still plenty of charge, it seemed, after their last five minute break to let it top up.

“And that is better than your first attempt,” the entirely too smug yokai quipped back.

John didn’t rise to the challenge lest she get him all wrapped up in another conversational game and instead focused on his work. He could already feel the limitations of the device creeping up on him, and if he had more time to redo this crude device, he would.

Mostly majorly, it needed to read out far more angles if he ever needed to use it under pressure. The purely eight directional display made it nearly impossible to tell the exact location of a distant target at a glance without some fiddling. Sure, it may “only” delay him when he was on the hunt, but what about in a situation where he was pinned down and trying to pick enemies out in a treeline? Knowing whether they were in the pine on the left or the will on the right could be the difference between coming out without a scratch and getting eaten by his own shadow or whatever bullshit the world decided to throw at him that day.

Maybe, if he refined it enough, it would allow for combat without direct line of sight. Most of his premier ranged options already hardly cared about most obstructions, and he had to actively restrain their range to avoid causing dramatically more damage than he planned. The only thing that really stopped him from using it as such right now was a lack of targeting capability.

The day would come when they had to storm the Nameless’ tunnels, and if he could clear out a few pitch black tunnels full of body-snatching spiders without walking headfirst into an ambush, he might save himself a heart attack or five.

Man, fighting the Nameless and Kiku sucked. Why couldn’t the local town be besieged by something simple, like a gang of bandits? Hell, maybe the tax collectors could have just been thugs playing dress up. Life would have been so much easier if he could just swoop down, scare them off, and then get to rebuilding the local economy.

He couldn’t wait to get to that once the spiders were dealt with…

Well, once he dealt with whatever came from the ‘Transcendent Alchemy’ incident, too. It’d be stupid to assume that nobody noticed the two giant pillars of impossible colours; it would absolutely get investigated.

Then he had to deal with any further revenge seekers linked to the Unbound they had fought against.

Not to mention that the tax collectors were probably still government officials, even if corrupt, and any investigation into the slaughter of them might turn up Yuki’s true origins.

John sighed, already feeling exhausted from the mere thought. Maybe he could offload some of this onto the kitsune if he ate one of those mushrooms from his first year in the forest and made himself sick for a few weeks.

“Two and a half o’clock, between the gnarled tree and the boulder,” Yuki helpfully chimed in, a large arm emerging into his vision from beside his head to point.

Narrowing his eyes, John could just barely see the telltale mound of disturbed earth from a recently buried Nameless. Unlike some of the others they had found, this one was uncomfortably close to the road. While not in direct line of sight, he did not doubt that it was within range to scent valuables.

John aimed, carefully lining up the sights on his knuckle. He adjusted his fingers carefully, double-checking the cone’s power, range, and size.

He breathed in, holding onto it like a life raft for just a moment before releasing, easing the air out of his lungs to keep his aim steady. Then, he twitched his fingers, firing a blast of impossible cold through the air like a missile. 

The moisture in the air turned to ice on the spot, tiny, glinting crystals dropping from the sky like a rain of stars. The leaves in the beam’s path simply disintegrated in the breeze, flash-frozen husks brittle as the early morning frost.

Below, the mound twitched once as the Nameless recognized it was being attacked for but a second before being no more, its aegis soundly punched through as a thick sheen of frost covered its surroundings.

“Good eye,” he responded, checking his wrist.

Tick.

Of course, the creature’s body was still fresh enough to respond strongly to his tracker, as much as he wished the reading disappeared the second his target was dead, so he had to carefully make sure it was the only thing he was reading. Idly, John piloted the disc around the corpse in a wide circle, watching carefully for any other Nameless.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Cold sweat dripped down John’s spine as he whipped around, searching for the sudden danger that the sensor detected all around them, but there was nothing. On instinct, John threw his disc into a quick reverse, reversing them out of the incoming damned ambush, and—

Tick.

Suddenly, only the corpse below him was reading, not the space right in front of them, which was screaming moments ago.

What the hell?

“John?” Yuki’s voice was level, but Yuki’s furred hand grasped around his shoulder like an armoured gauntlet, and two of her tails wrapped around his lower half like the tassets of some samurai.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” He breathed deeply, tapping his chest to slow his racing heart. “For some reason, my tracker started going insane the second I flew us over there. I thought that we were surrounded and were about to get ambushed.”

“We’re safe. If the Nameless were going to attack, they would have tried to salvage their plan once they realized we knew they were there,” Yuki confidently stated. “Is it a fault with the device, perhaps?” Yuki curiously leaned in, peering over John’s shoulder.

“I wouldn’t be surprised; this is the first time I’ve used this thing,” John sighed, glancing down at his wrist. “I mean, if something seems to work flawlessly the first time around, that probably means it has faults you haven’t noticed yet.” A frown split his face as he fell deep into thought. Even then, it was an extremely simple device, and all the detection hardware was already proven technology. What could have caused it to fail like that? “Maybe it’s something with the corpse? I could see if it repeats if we fly back in.”

“I shall be on guard,” Yuki said, uncoiling her tails from around her legs.

Well, that was probably the best he was going to get. The kitsune would doubtlessly notice anyone below trying something before he did. It was another good reminder that he had to make a bigger and better alternative to the hover disc, though. It’d be a lot more comfortable flying over Nameless territory if he were inside something built like a tank, complete with mounted weaponry and thermobarics to drop.

John pulled his handheld Nameless sensor from his pocket and pointed it toward the corpse.

Click.

Well, that seemed to be working fine, at least.

He then pointed it towards where his Sentinel System was going insane, scanning along the ground in a grid, but nothing read. Just in case, he pulled the Nameless filter off the device, too, but it still didn’t read above background levels.

Hesitantly, John drifted the disc forward, inching through the air like a burglar creeping through an alleyway. With every passing moment that nothing happened, John tensed more. Was it just a one time event? Why hadn’t it—

Tick-tick-tick!

There! There it is again, at the same spot, too! What the hell could be causing it? Now no longer buried under an avalanche of panic, John’s analytical mind spun up. 

He glanced at his wrist, and, indeed, the entire dial was lit up like a Christmas tree as the alarms blared. Pulling out his magic detector, he—