Chapter 12. Conflict

Thirty minutes in, my head was starting to hurt.

[Focus] was doing exactly what I’d wanted it to do, which was the problem. Every sweep came back cleaner than the last, more detail resolved, the signatures separating more easily from each other, and somewhere around the third pulse I’d begun noticing things I hadn’t known were there to notice.

The proficiency climbed with each sweep, seven percent, then twenty-two, then forty, then sixty-nine, and the ache behind my eyes climbed with it. On the fifth, the gold text flickered again.

[Focus: Level 2 (100%) > Level 3 (1%)]

Hah! But that was the good news.

The bad news was that each sweep cost me twenty mana and a small but real piece of whatever held the inside of my skull together. I’d been pacing myself, walking twenty or thirty paces between pulses to let my head clear, but the clearing was taking longer each time.

And the map had started to move.

The terrain was still terrain, but now there were numbers on it. Three of them drifting slowly across the parchment, each one at the centre of a small coloured pulse. Team six, team eleven, and team twenty-two. Three flags claimed.

The three numbers sat on our map and on the map of every team that didn’t yet have a flag, while the three teams who carried them could see nothing of each other, nothing of us, nothing but terrain. Rael wouldn’t stop pointing out the cruelty of it.

“Rael, stop looking at it.”

“I’m not looking at it!”

“You’re looking at it.”

“I’m appreciating it. The map is a work of art, Eydric. I’ve never seen ward work this fine in my life. I should thank the Sartheon cartographer personally when we get out of here.”

“You were swearing at the map four minutes ago.”

“I’m allowed to do both?”

We’d had one useful encounter in those thirty minutes. About twenty minutes in, we’d crossed paths with team eleven, two boys and a girl I vaguely recognized from the plaza, the flag already in the taller boy’s hand. Seeing us had caused a short tense standoff, the sort where every hand was halfway to a casting and nobody knew whether the next three seconds were going to be a conversation or a fight.

It had turned out to be a conversation. The girl had been the one to lower her hands first. She’d glanced at me, recognized me in the same silent way everyone seemed to, and said very quickly that they’d found their flag in a hollow at the base of a grey stone ridge about five minutes back the way they’d come.

Maybe, she said, we’d have better luck over there. The two boys with her didn’t object. They didn’t do anything, really, except keep glancing past our shoulders into the trees behind us, their hands still casting ready, their eyes moving constantly. The whole exchange lasted maybe forty seconds and every one of them was thinking about the ambush that could be coming at any moment from any direction, including from us.

Rael, to his discredit, was looking at them like the villain he was. I was about ninety percent sure the only reason team eleven made it out of that clearing with their flag and their faces intact was that Eydric was standing between Rael and the nearest direction team eleven could run in, and Rael had clocked it and decided not to test the alignment.

They left at speed anyway.

And when we had gone and searched at the hollow, there was nothing there but a faint residual trace of mana that belonged to the flag.

Six minutes after we started walking away from the empty ridge, I glanced at the map and team eleven had now become team seventeen.

Rael had looked at the map and said, quietly, “See? I told you.”

Nobody had argued.

Two fights had fit themselves into the gaps. A trio of small low-slung things that Rael had dispatched with a clean pair of wind cuts, and a single larger creature that Eydric had managed by letting it charge, pivoting at the last second, and putting a glyph into its side as it passed.

Two points for Rael, one for Eydric. I hadn’t contributed to either fight because I’d been halfway into a sweep both times and couldn’t have shaped a glyph if my life had asked it of me. Both of them had been unreasonably understanding about it.

So that was the state of things: thirty minutes, five sweeps, one level of [Focus], two fights and sadly, no flag at all.

I sat down on a flat stone at the edge of a small clearing and put my elbows on my knees, letting my head hang for a minute.

“Aaaaaaah, you two are killing me.”

Rael sat down on the stone beside me, and put his head in his hands.

“It’s not even virtuous. I want to be clear about that. Nobody is testing your virtue out here. There is no old woman in the trees keeping score of which of us has the purest soul. There is a forty-point assessment and a fourteen-hour clock and two of you being allergic to the only strategy that actually works, and I—” He lifted his head. “—I understand Eydric. Eydric I understand completely. Eydric is straight the way a donkey is straight. You ask him for a shortcut and he walks into the wall the shortcut was avoiding.”

“Thanks, Solenne.”

“You are welcome, Vael. It’s one of your better qualities and also the worst thing about you.”

Eydric sat down on my other side.

“But you,” Rael said, turning toward me. “I don’t get you.”

“There’s nothing to get.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I was so confused….

“Sure there is. You just said stealing a flag was, what, not good. That was your whole answer. Come on.”

“It wasn’t. It isn’t.”

I said Yes, it’s not good, to be precise.

“Stop it. You are the last person in this forest who gets to frown at a clever ugly plan, and we both know it.”

“What?”

“You were smiling, Howl.”

“Me? When?”

“When you launched at those creatures. Back in the first clearing. I saw your face.”

I blinked. “No, I wasn’t.”

Eydric cleared his throat. “You were.”