Chapter 16. Tonic

Our plan was simple because we didn’t have time for a complicated one. Rael carried the flag and the token together while Eydric stayed within ten paces of him as a close guard, and I moved ahead through the canopy with Focus running, sweeping for anything coming our way before it arrived.

If I found something, I dealt with it before it reached them. If I didn’t, I kept moving. That was the whole strategy.

[Focus: Level 3 (1%)]

[Mana Pool: 328/415]

The first twenty minutes were, ugh, rough.

[Focus] at level three gave me a clean read out to about fifty paces, but the edges of the sphere were grainy, and holding it while jumping between branches cost me a kind of attention I hadn’t trained for. I could do one or the other well. Both at once meant the sweeps came back muddier than I wanted, and twice I had to stop on a branch and re-sweep because I wasn’t sure whether a signature at the edge of my range was a person or a dense patch of old mana in the soil.

By the time Rael called for the first rest, I was glad for it.

[Focus: Level 3 (14%)]

I pulled [Focus] back and sat in the fork of a wide oak while the ache behind my right eye loosened. Five minutes. Rael and Eydric were somewhere below me, I could hear them breathing but not talking, conserving energy the way smart people did.

I closed my eyes and let my channels settle, and when I opened them again the ache was mostly gone and my pool had recovered a thin margin from the passive trickle that came back on its own when I wasn’t spending.

So we moved again.

The second stretch was different. Somewhere around the twenty-five minute mark, the graininess at the edges started to clear, not all at once but in the way that fog lifts; I’d sweep, and the edge of the sphere would come back a little sharper than the last time, and the signatures I was reading would hold their shape a fraction longer before dissolving.

I started being able to tell the difference between a bird in the canopy and a squirrel-sized creature on a branch without having to re-sweep to confirm. Small distinction, but it mattered.

[Focus: Level 3 (37%)]

Second rest. Five minutes. The ache came back slower this time and left faster. I noticed that my breathing had changed without me deciding to change it; the in-hold-out pattern that had started as a conscious effort had become something my lungs were doing on their own, as if the body had figured out what [Focus] wanted and was supplying it without being asked.

Third stretch. Forty minutes in total now, and the sphere was holding at fifty paces without effort and pushing past it on the harder sweeps.

I caught a signature at sixty-two paces, clear enough to count the channels, and recognized it as human before I’d finished the exhale. Two more behind it, further back, same heading. A team, moving in formation.

[Focus: Level 3 (58%)]

I filed the team away; they were heading southeast, away from us, so not a threat. But I had read them at sixty-two paces, and a half hour ago my ceiling had been fifty.

Third rest. I sat on my branch and watched the proficiency climb.

[Focus: Level 3 (71%)]

The ache behind my eye was barely there now. I could still feel where it had been, a faint warm pressure in the same spot, but it had stopped being as painful as before.

Fourth stretch, and the world opened up.

I don’t know how else to describe it. One sweep came back at fifty paces, the next came back at fifty, and then on the third one the edge of the sphere just… went further, and suddenly I was reading signatures at seventy paces with the same clarity I’d been getting at forty an hour ago.

Rael’s breathing pattern was as clear to me as if he were sitting on my shoulder. Eydric’s heartbeat was a slow drum I could track without concentrating on it. A rabbit-sized creature was sitting in a hollow log at sixty-eight paces, and I could feel the tiny rapid flutter of its pulse inside the larger signature of its body, which was a level of detail I had never reached before.

[Focus: Level 3 (100%) > Level 4 (0%)]

The notification was almost an afterthought, because I had already felt it happen. I exhaled slowly, and smiled.

[Mana Pool: 288/415]

Then, at the far edge of my new range, three signatures lit up.

They were moving fast, coming from the northeast on an intercept line. Human. All three channelling, burning mana to close the distance, and the angle they were on would put them across Rael’s path in about… ninety seconds. Yeah, that seemed about right.

I didn’t signal to the others. Instead, I dropped out of the canopy, hit the ground at a run, and closed the distance in silence.

They were moving in a loose triangle through a gap between two ridges, focused on the map in the lead boy’s hands, looking at our flag’s position, focused on getting there first.

None of them were looking up and none of them had their mana sense extended, which told me everything I needed to know about how tired they were.

I came in from the side.

The lead boy’s badge was pinned over his heart the same as everyone else’s. I hit him with a low wind push that sat him down hard on his back, and while he was still trying to understand what had happened I pulled the badge off his tunic with two fingers and kept moving. The girl behind him spun and got a barrier up, which was good instinct, but I was already past her; I hooked the badge off her chest on the way through with my free hand while her barrier was still forming in the wrong direction.

The third one saw me coming and actually threw a cast, a compression bolt that I sidestepped without slowing down, and I caught his collar as I passed, pulled him off balance, and took the badge off him while he was stumbling.

Three badges in my left hand. Three candidates sitting in the dirt behind me, disqualified, no longer a problem on the return trip.

I tucked the badges into my pack and went back up into the trees.

Suddenly, I heard a high-pitched and ragged screaming so I shifted on my branch and pushed a sweep out in that direction, and the picture came back immediately: one human signature, small, moving fast, and two larger signatures behind it, gaining.

Beasts. The same dense predator-knot I’d learned to recognize from the Thornwood pack, though these two were bigger. The boy they were chasing had a mana pool so depleted I could barely read him against the background noise.

He broke through the brush below me and to the right, cutting across our path at an angle, a skinny kid with dark hair plastered to his forehead and one arm tucked against his side. His tunic was torn across the shoulder and he was running roughly the same direction we were heading, which meant the beasts behind him were about to cross right through the space between me and Rael and Eydric.

The first beast came through the brush after the boy, fast and locked onto his back. The second was wider, taking a flanking line, and its trajectory was going to bring it right on top of Rael and Eydric’s position below.

“Eydric!” I shouted.

I heard the sharp crack of his cast before I finished the word, it was dense and fast, hitting the flanking beast and sending it tumbling through a stand of ferns. It didn’t get back up.

The other one was still on the boy, who tripped. His foot caught a root and he went down hard, rolling, the arm against his ribs giving out. The beast closed the last ten paces in a flat sprint, jaw already open.

I dropped out of the tree and the staff came down with me, reinforced, both hands on the grip, and I brought the stone end of it down onto the top of the beast’s skull with everything I had left in my arms.

The skull cracked under the impact, and the beast’s legs folded, and it went down half a pace from the boy’s feet.

I stood over it, breathing hard. My arms were shaking from the vibration of the hit still running through the staff.

The boy was staring up at me from the ground. His eyes were wide, his chest heaving, and clutched against his injured side with his good arm was a folded square of cloth with a coloured pulse stitched into the corner.

A flag.

I reached down and offered him my hand.

“Hello, can you stand?”

He flinched away from me, scrambling backward on one elbow, and his grip on the flag tightened until his knuckles went white.

“Please,” he said. “Please don’t take it, I’ve been carrying it for two hours, my team got separated at the ridge, I’ve been alone since then, please—”

“We’re not taking your flag.” That was Eydric, walking up from behind me where he’d just put the other beast down. The boy’s eyes shifted to him. “We have our own.”

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Rael came up beside Eydric a few seconds later, one hand resting on the bulge in his jacket where our flag sat.

The boy looked at the three of us, one after the other.

“You… have one?”

“We do,” I said. “We’re heading to extraction. Same as you.”

The panic drained out of his face slowly, in stages. His grip on the flag loosened. His breathing was still ragged but it wasn’t the breathing of someone about to be robbed anymore.

“We should stop for a bit,” I said, looking back at the others. “I need a rest.”

Nobody argued with that.

We found a flat stretch of ground under a cluster of old trees and sat down without needing to discuss it. Fifteen minutes this time. Nobody argued for less either.

I leaned back against a trunk and let [Focus] drop. The ache behind my eye came in on cue, gentler than before but still there, and my arms were still feeling the staff impact from the beast’s skull. Sweat had soaked through the back of my tunic and was cooling against my spine.

“I would give almost anything for something cold right now,” I muttered, though I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“Me too,” Eydric said, eyes closed, head against bark.

“Me three,” said Rael, who was lying flat on the ground with his arms spread.

I chuckled at that, and then the boy, who had been sitting a few paces away with his knees drawn up and his flag still pressed against his chest, cleared his throat very quietly.

“I, um… I have some tonic. If you want.”

The three of us looked at him.

He was already reaching into a small leather pouch at his hip, barely the size of his fist. His hand went in up to the wrist, which should not have been possible, and came back out holding a glass bottle of pale blue liquid with tiny bubbles climbing up the inside of the glass. He reached in again and pulled out a second one.

“Side objective,” he said, noticing me looking at him. “The pouch, not the tonic. It’s a dimensional storage thing, I found it in a shrine. I only have two bottles, though, so… sorry.”

“Are you kidding me?” Rael was sitting upright before the boy had finished the sentence. “Two bottles is two more bottles than we had five seconds ago. I’d kiss you if you were a girl, man. What’s your name?”