For once, I was all on my own. We had been trying to catch one of the racoons for over a week now and never managed to get close enough. Their ability to sense opponents was only second to mine, their stealth-ability better than anything Silva could manage, even if I helped her. We had yet to determine just how they managed to beat the concealment magic I was habitually casting on Silva, but they did, leaving us with relatively few options. If we wanted to catch them, we couldn’t move as a group, the more people tried, the easier it would be for them to find us.

Thus, I had decided to try by myself. I had little doubt that I could incapacitate one of them, my Mind Magic had recently risen to twenty-five, which would hopefully be sufficient. If not, we’d have learned something new and I would have to run away. With my ability to conjure up mist and hide myself, that should be almost trivial, unless I was caught by the sun. To avoid such an outcome, where I was forced to choose between moving beneath the light of the sun and getting trapped in a building and swarmed by Undead, we had taken shelter as close to the territory controlled by the racoons as we could, spending the day and moving out early in the night.

The others, alongside a pair of dogs from the Army of Dog, would move with me, until we almost reached the racoon area. Once we got close enough, they’d stay behind, keeping watch and preparing some traps for any potential pursuers, while I had continued on my own.

Now, I was just moving into the area we considered to be controlled by the racoons. It was a little difficult to decide where that actually was, it wasn’t as if there were signs warning us that we were entering racoon country. The closest to a sign we had managed to find was a lack of Shattered, though the few Undead wandering the no-mans land where neither Shattered nor green-eyed Undead tread wasn’t exactly demarcated either. Still, it gave me an okay idea of where to leave the others.

The first order of business was amusingly simple. I had to make my concealment as tight as possible. I knew that creatures sensitive to magic, like myself, could sniff out the magic used to conceal somebody, making the whole thing an exercise in futility, if not actively harmful. It might be a quirk of my senses that I could smell the scent of magic further than I could scent anything but the most odious of smells, though it depended on the intensity of the magic. My concealment would have to be both powerful and, well, stealthy, tightly wrapped around me, so nobody would be able to detect me or the magic I used to hide.

And that was the first order of business. I had considered using my cloak to create the initial layer of concealment but had decided against it, after having Lia use it while I was trying to detect her. The concealment wasn’t necessarily bad but it was far from perfect. I could still detect her, at least if I knew where to look or she was moving, but far worse was that the funky, almost oily, scent of Darkness Magic was strong enough to give away her presence, if not her position. Neither was acceptable if I wanted to remain undetected in the night.

Instead, I carefully drew five runes on myself, three of Concealment, and two of Shadow. It wasn’t a real runic formation, the distances and angles didn’t fit, and the connection between the runes was lacking, but it was something remarkably close to one. The runes would only last as long as I channelled some Astral Power into them, but it would hopefully be good enough. One Concealment-rune on each of my feet, intended to muffle any noise my steps made, the Shadow-runes on each of my shoulders, to blend the magic into my shadow like a cloak would flow around me, and lastly, the third Concealment-rune on my forehead, to hide my presence. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but prior testing with the others had shown promise, in addition to granting me a point in Darkness Rune Mastery and Darkness Magic, bringing both of them to twenty-seven.

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Letting out a slow breath, I carefully moved around the first group of controlled Undead, taking note of the green-eyed one in their midst. Killing it would be so incredibly easy but I wasn’t here for that, I was here to look for answers and racoons, we needed more information, so we could actually make plans that were more elaborate than ‘kill many Undead’. Know the enemy, know yourself, and all that. We didn’t really know our enemy, we barely knew what our enemy was and even that was mostly conjecture. It was distinctly possible that the racoons, which we considered the primary identity of our enemy, were merely another layer, a group used as field messengers and scouts, not the actual masterminds.

Lia argued for that, that the racoons were merely used by another force, basing it on her experience in turning Alex. There was some merit to the idea, the racoon had been in the process of being corrupted by another type of energy when we caught it, but we didn’t know enough to determine whether the energy was internal or if there was some sort of outside source, maybe some pool of alien goop that turned racoons into zombie-aliens or something. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched, we first got the system apocalypse, then the zombie apocalypse so why not add an alien invasion or something like that? Maybe a plague, it would certainly fit the theme of the year we had so far. Luckily, War, at least between humans, was pretty much off the table and would be for some time. There simply weren’t enough people to go to war, making the old hippy motto ‘Imagine there’s war and nobody shows up’ rather poignant. Though, did our campaign against the Undead count as war or as pest extermination?

Shaking my head, I forced my mind back into the game. It was one of the downsides of primarily channelling Darkness Magic, it was far too easy to get lost in thought while in the dark, the unknown invited the mind to wander, to drift through the void and latch onto anything that felt interesting.

Maybe it was that state of drifting mind that allowed me to notice a faint chitter, similar, though not identical, to the not-sound we attributed to the racoons. It didn’t sound like the signals they used on their hunt, making me curious. Finding one of them and trying to trace it back to their base was my first objective, infiltration of the base was the follow-up objective while knocking one of them out and dragging it with me a tertiary one that I hoped to accomplish on the way out.

Following what I was relatively certain was some sort of psychic messaging, I made my way further into the area controlled by the racoons. Soon, I reached territory we had never managed to reach, simply due to the amount of Undead the racoons had always sent against us, forcing us to retreat or get swarmed.

The amount of chittering in the air steadily increased, to the point that it started to become difficult to follow individual signals, the entire area was blanketed. Instead of continuing on my way, I snuck into a dark corner and simply settled in for a bit, watching the area and trying to figure out what was going on.

Curiously, in this area far more of the Undead had the glowing, green eyes I was now becoming familiar with. On the outskirts of racoon city, maybe one in twenty Undead had them, each individual glow-eye leading a group of normal Undead. Here, it was more like one in five Undead, though that didn’t mean that the group size was actually smaller. There were still groups of about twenty Undead, mostly with one or two green-eyes amongst their number, while individual green-eyed Undead were wandering around. I decided against watching long enough to see if these solitary green-eyes had some sort of holding pattern, like their brethren outside, or if they were moving with a purpose.

Instead, I pushed onward, not moving deeper into the area but around it. If I could find some good path of ingress, I might be able to find more information, information that would allow me to make conclusions on what we were facing. I hated the uncertainty, I wanted to be the one keeping secrets, not the one secrets were kept from.

But I had to be cautious, if I was caught in this area, I would have to flee and get lucky, or I would join the Undead. Sadly, sometimes risks were necessary and for now, I was the one who had to take a risk.

Thus, onwards it was.