Chapter 11. Flag

“So,” Eydric said, once we’d put the clearing and its seven tenants behind us. “How does anyone actually find a flag in here?”

Nobody answered right away. The forest had opened into a shallow stretch of thinned-out trees, the ground softer underfoot, and we were walking in a rough triangle with Eydric on point and Rael trailing just behind my left shoulder. The map was open in Eydric’s hands, and it was, as promised, not helpful. It showed terrain, extraction points and the jagged outline of the grounds, and nothing else.

“We could walk,” Rael said. “Pick a direction and walk until we stumble over one.”

“That’s the worst idea you’ve had so far,” Eydric said without looking back, “and we’ve only been in here for ten minutes.”

“It’s not an idea. It’s a floor. We set the floor and then we propose better ones.”

I thought about it. “The flags have to be hidden in specific places, right? Not just scattered. Sartheon wouldn’t put one in an open field where anyone could trip on it. They’d put them somewhere that takes effort to reach, or that takes a puzzle to open, or—”

“Or,” Rael said, raising a finger, “we let somebody else find one for us first.”

Eydric stopped walking.

“Hear me out.” Rael stopped too. “The moment any team touches a flag, every other candidate in these grounds sees their number light up on the map. Including us. So we don’t have to find a flag at all. We have to find a team that has found a flag, and relieve them of it.”

“Relieve them?” Eydric repeated.

“It’s a strategy.”

“No, it’s a mugging, Solenne.”

“It’s the cleanest strategy in the exam, and I’ll tell you why. A team that just grabbed a flag is running at full tilt toward an extraction point with a fourteen-hour day ahead of them, and we know exactly where they are at all times. We don’t even have to chase them. We go to an extraction point, find a good position in the trees, and we wait. They come to us, they are exhausted, they are expecting ambushes from behind and not in front of the finish line, and by the time they see us, BAM!” He clapped his hands, smiling with obvious villainy. “We are already on top of them.”

Eydric and I both looked at him.

Rael looked back at us, spread his hands wider, and did not seem to understand why we were quiet.

“What?”

…He really is a Solenne.

“Honour,” Eydric said flatly.

I agreed with him entirely. “Yes, it’s not good.”

“You guys have a better idea, then?”

Eydric’s jaw worked for a second before he said, “No.”

“Ha!” Rael said. “There it is. There’s the real answer. Neither of you does, which is why we’re all still standing in the same patch of dirt arguing about it.”

He ran a hand through his hair and his voice came down a notch, more serious. “Look, I know how it sounds. But we have to be practical. You both think the teams who actually find a flag are going to walk it to extraction in peace? Every other team in here is going to do exactly what I just said. We’re not inventing anything. We’re just being honest about it first.”

Eydric didn’t have an answer to that either, then they both turned to me.

I took a second before speaking, because the idea was still forming, and I wanted it to come out clean.

“The flags are tracked,” I said. “The moment a team touches one, their team number lights up on every other map in the grounds. That means the flags are marked in some way the wards can read. And the only thing the wards are reading, at that distance, is mana.”

Rael’s eyes sharpened.

“So if the wards can sense the flag by its mana, so can we. Not as clearly, probably. But the flags are likely to be holding a mana signature that doesn’t match anything else in the forest. Background mana is messy, so a flag would be the opposite of messy. It would be a clean, structured signature sitting in one spot with nothing around it that looks like it. So we don’t need a map, we just need to feel for the anomaly.”

“Oh,” Rael said, and then, slower, “Oh, that’s… okay, that’s good.”

He seemed to think about it for another second.

“But then how do we deal with the ones who come after us when we grab it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Rael looked at me for a moment. “Okay…”

Eydric cleared his throat.

“I thought about this, but the issue with what he’s describing,” he said, “is that it requires a Mana Sense advanced enough to isolate a single clean signature out of the noise of an entire forest. Most of us can feel mana at close range, and feel crude shapes at medium range, but scanning a forest for an anomaly at distance is a different skill. It would burn through most candidates’ reserves in less than an hour.”

“He’s right,” Rael said. “Same problem. I can probably hold a shallow sense for a few minutes at a time before the cost outweighs the information, and I’m decent at it. This isn’t a matter of wanting to, but rather one of not having the range.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I said, “I’ll do it.”

They both looked at me.

“You’ll do it?” Rael repeated.

“Yes.”

There was a small pause.

“Sure,” Eydric said.