“That’s not one of ours, is it?” I had to ask Luna, looking at the small, furry critter in the clearing ahead. Normally, the question wouldn’t have been necessary but given that said critter looked like a rabbit but where a rabbit should have fur, this one had an arguably better camouflage, being covered in a dense-looking shell of brown rocks. Given that our experiments had involved more than a few rabbits, the silly things were fairly easy to catch and had managed to spread at an incredible speed in the months since the change, I couldn’t discard the possibility that we had successfully inundated one of these experimental subjects with Earth Magic. If so, we might get something looking like the rabbit in the clearing ahead, though I was almost certain that the Earth Rabbits hadn’t looked like that.
“I don’t think so, it looks a little weird. And too powerful for something we made in these last two weeks,” Luna admitted, her eyes flickering with the silvery light of the moon for a moment as she studied the creature.
“Want to find out if we can make it better?” I asked, curious what might happen if we magically infused an already elementally biased creature with more of that element. Or maybe a different element, would we get a Magma Rabbit if we infused it with Fire, or maybe a Crystal Rabbit or something like that? Or maybe we could use Water and get a Mud Rabbit, the visually closest thing to a chocolate bunny we could find during the apocalypse. The boring thing to try would be to use extra Earth, though it might be a good, first test, just to see what would happen. Would the flesh of the rabbit turn into earth, or would its claws become stone? There were quite a few possibilities and I was quite curious which was true, even while knowing that it was likely the rabbit would simply perish.
“Maybe we should find out where it comes from first, there might be more of them,” Luna argued, making me realise that she was right, where there was one rabbit, there likely were many more. The silly things bred like, well, rabbits. A moment later, another realisation struck me, making me frown for a moment. As her Mother, I was supposed to teach Luna how to be a productive and responsible adult, a task that was made even more important by the rate at which she matured in body and mind. In a way, I had succeeded in teaching her to indulge her natural curiosity and constantly further her knowledge but I had a feeling that some people would consider the means she employed to be morally reprehensible. Did that make me a good mother, or an atrocious one?
It took me but a moment to shake off the question, it was ultimately unimportant. There was no society these days unless I counted the group we were travelling in. Given that moral standards were formed by the perception of the society forming them, it meant that without society, there couldn’t really be morality. So, given that Lia and Alex were performing similar experiments, just that they were working with various alchemical materials and creating strange substances, I doubted that they’d see our research as wrong. That left Silva as the only one who might have a moral objection to our actions but given that she was happily sniffing out additional test subjects for us, she didn’t seem to mind.
As if reading my mind, Silva let out an incredibly soft huff, as if insulted by Luna’s insinuation that she wouldn’t be able to track down the rabbit’s burrow and origin if we decided to take it down here and now, bringing a grin to my face. With our trusty hound on the trace, we would be able to have our experimental subject and find more like it, giving us the best of both worlds.
Focusing on the stupid critter that hadn’t noticed us yet, I connected myself to the shadows of the forest, sneaking a tendril of darkness from my own shadow to one that was right next to the rabbit, allowing me to strike it with Mind Magic from point-blank range.
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The moment I struck, it looked almost as if the rabbit’s head was surrounded by a cloud of inky blackness, the combination of Darkness Magic and Mind Magic a fairly powerful sleeping spell, allowing us to capture our subjects without any hassle. Sadly, this wasn’t the case with this subject, as the earthen coat of the rabbit suddenly developed cracks, as if struck by tremendous force, before crumbling away, leaving the rabbit completely unharmed and already running for its life.
Somewhat surprised at my failure, I quickly sent another blast of Mind Magic at it, this one a lot less focused but as I didn’t have the shadowy connection to the fleeing critter, brute force had to suffice. Only, it didn’t, maybe it was due to the distance, maybe it was due to the rabbit’s highly agitated state, or maybe it was because the rabbit was simply hardier than expected, whatever the case, the fleeing rabbit managed to shrug off my magical blast with merely a stumble, bolting into the undergrowth before anyone of us managed to do more than glare at it. The thing was incredibly fast for a creature of Earth, almost as swift as the Wind Rabbit we had created before.
“Impressive,” I muttered as we walked the rest of the distance to the clearing, curious if the crumbled shell the rabbit had left behind was something interesting or not. Either way, investigating and following its tracks started where it had just sat.
Looking at the broken shell with my magical sight, I was fairly impressed. I had used Ice Magic to cover myself in a solid layer of Astral Power before, and it had been the primary fighting style of a previous student but seeing that a rabbit had managed to create a shell that wasn’t just a layer of physical armour but also worked to block hostile, non-physical magic was a sight to behold. There were some traces of my own Mind Magic interlaced with the Earth Astral Power the shell was composed of, making me wonder how exactly this sort of protection worked and making a mental note to find out if I could create something similar. Protecting myself from hostile magic that didn’t need a physical component to affect its target sounded like an excellent idea and if I could make the protection passive, or even incorporate it into a secondary effect, I would be incredibly pleased.
Maybe I could rework the magical cloak of shadows I had used before making the physical variant into something like a thin layer of magical Ice, keeping me nicely cool, maybe block some physical damage and block magical attacks, like the earthen coat of the rabbit. Thickness might be a problem but given that I was looking at almost half a centimetre of earthen shell, there had to be a way around it, the rabbit certainly had found one. Something to try figuring out later, for now, I had to study the fragments as much as possible, given that they were already fading back into the Astral River.
Finishing my investigation with a shrug, I expectantly looked over to Silva, nodding for her to proceed. She happily started towards the shrub the rabbit had disappeared under, her nose on the ground, making me quite happy at her canine abilities. My high Intuition and correspondingly high sensory abilities might have allowed me to follow the scent but I was far less adept at keeping my nose on the ground. And less experienced when it came to non-magical scents, I had no idea what to really look for. Another thing I should put on my list of things to figure out, train myself to take in all the information my nose and ears were giving me. I should be more perceptive than Silva, even with the boosts she received for being a canine but when it came to sound we were roughly even but she had a better perception of mundane scents.
In this case, we were following the rabbit’s trace across stick and stone, past various trees and shrubs, always trying to make sure it was the actual trace we were following and not some sort of distraction. The rabbit was apparently quite adept at those, as we noticed when we reached a second large and thorny shrub the trail led under, only for two different trails to lead back out. Whether the rabbit had run out from beneath the shrub and doubled back, creating a stronger trail to follow or if there was some magic involved, we didn’t know but we had to pick one of them and it turned out to be the wrong one, ending just a couple dozen metres further, next to yet another shrub we had to investigate, before we moved back to the first one and followed after the other track, looking for the crafty rabbit.