Chapter 16

Candis East Highway

The Voidlands outside Maston

Kate eyed Myles’ wound as she worked. Maintaining the wagon’s construct was more work than they had anticipated. Kate finished stacking the last of the ogren cores in a neat pile while Myles worked on improving how the construct was fed, drawing runes on Kate’s knife to use as a catalyst.

Myles was explaining how it worked, but Kate tuned him out. The edges of his wound had started turning the particular shade of yellow that indicated monster infection. When left untreated, Kate knew that it could be deadly.

“I’m going to step out a bit, try to find something for your wounds.”

Myles looked taken aback. Kate wasn’t sure whether it was because she had interrupted his explanation of his construct or whether it was because she was going out of the comparative safety of the wagon into the voidlands, in the dark. Regardless, Kate didn’t stay long enough to find out.

The moment Kate turned her back on him, she let her face contort in pain. As she crept further from the wagon, the pain faded and Kate felt herself take a breath of relief, her first one in hours. Kate hadn’t felt pain like that in over a month, not since she had left for the academy.

This time, she probably deserved the pain, it was her who had overestimated the team’s fighting ability and led them into this mess, but Kate didn’t bother chastising herself. Kate knew who she was. When faced with a choice of enduring intense pain or saving someone’s life, Kate was content to run away. It was the whole reason she was here after all.

Kate returned her mind to the matter at hand. She would need to gather several herbs. Most of what she needed was just basic grasses, things to balance out the strong properties of the one herb she really needed: bliteroot.

Bliteroot concoctions were one of the few things her mother taught her during the rare times she had managed to force Kate into her clinic. Kate kicked a rock in anger just thinking about that foul woman. She never had believed that Kate was anything other than a lazy girl. Not even when Kate had cried out in pain, grasping her arm just where a patient had broken theirs. Not even when a farmer had been carried in with his side shredded and Kate had clawed at her own side. Not even when a barfight broke out and the stupid son of some soldier had…

Kate stopped that train of thought in its tracks. Right now, she needed to be focused. In the past month, Kate had been taught about the basics of each of the local monsters, including how to identify their tracks. Now, Kate put that training to use, watching the ground, reading tracks, and taking the path with the lowest chance of death.

Kate kept up her patient approach and managed to find much of what she needed, but she eventually ran into a problem.

Among the many tracks that crisscrossed the ground, there was one set that presented a major problem. Vexenaughts were an exceptionally dangerous monster. Kate had thankfully never seen one before, but she knew their tracks from both her time gathering ingredients for her mother and from her studies at the academy. It was common knowledge that the monsters sought out bliteroot. It was one of her mother’s rules of foraging to never risk harvesting the stuff when a vexenaught was nearby.

When boiled and mixed properly with other ingredients, bliteroot was a powerful cure for infection, but in its natural state, it was highly poisonous. Despite their naturally occurring fire mana, Vexenaughts had little interest in boiling bliteroot. Instead, they used it to coat their teeth. The poison from the plants stained the monsters’ teeth a deep black color and it stayed on their breath, causing anyone who came close to risk poisoning.

Poison was the least of your worries if you came close to the creature though. Unlike ogren who could conceivably be killed without even accessing the aether space, vexenaught were strong enough to fight off an entire squad of the provinces trained soldiers. In the bestiary Kate had been given to study, ogren were considered a tier zero threat while vexenaught were considered a tier three threat.

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The longer she waited, the worse state her teammates would be in. Kate cautiously started off in the direction of the vexenaught’s tracks. She saved her mana. Considering how well they had handled the ogren, her level of mana would be useless in a fight against a vexenaught, but if she used it carefully, she might be able to sneak around it enough to get what she needed.

Kate pulled a pair of thick gloves out, wrapping her hands in them. She wasn’t willing to take the time to properly harvest the bliteroot, not with a vexenaught nearby, but the gloves should keep her safe enough from the poison. The gloves would be ruined afterward, but she could live with that.

Kate stalked along the trail, keeping all her senses finely tuned while knowing it would likely be useless. Vexenaughts had powerful noses, strong enough to smell someone long before they came into sight. Kate felt an involuntary chill. If they hadn’t kept the smell of their blood contained, they all would have been sniffed out.

Kate stopped before she even crested the top of the hill. The tells were subtle. A lack of fresh tracks, a quieting of the land around her. These subtle tells were the clues she had been studying for the past month though. Just beyond the hill, she would find the vexenaught. Her teacher had repeated time and time again that the best way to know a strong monster was around was to notice the absence of weaker ones.

Kate evoked a thin coating of pure mana around her body. It took concentration to keep so much mana evoked at once, but she wouldn’t need it for long. As much as Kate wanted to wrap her whole body in pure mana, she couldn’t. Pure mana blocked every force it came across, including air. If she wrapped her whole body, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

Kate crawled up the last portion of the hill. It was a steep incline and was covered in strong grasses that poked into her stomach. She didn’t feel the grasses through her mana, but she could feel her mana drain just the tiniest bit every time one poked into her.

When she finally reached the top of the hill, she almost curled into a ball and rolled right back down the hill. The vexenaught was clearly asleep which was good, but it was also the biggest creature Kate had ever seen. It looked like a fox if a fox was twice the height of a horse and covered in gleaming black fur. From the bestiary, Kate knew that its black fur was dense enough to shatter spears and supple enough to ignore a blow from a sledgehammer. She also knew that the embers that spewed out from its nostrils with every exhale could be turned to a great stream of flame, one that would turn her into a bonfire in an instant.

Kate took one deep breath before rising to her feet and coating her body entirely in pure mana. With the thing right in front of her, Kate was far more interested in not waking it than she was in being able to breathe freely.

It took a great deal of control to climb down the hill slowly, but the last thing she needed was to make a mistake that would wake the beast up. Still, Kate managed the descent flawlessly, reaching the edge of the clump of bliteroot that the beast was using as a makeshift nest. She was able to pull a fistful of the grass out and start back up the hill.

She was halfway up with her lungs eagerly looking forward to taking a breath when disaster struck. Kate saw movement over her shoulder. At first, she thought it was the great beast, but no, it slept on, none the wiser. The movement had come from underneath the vexenaught’s tail.

In the darkness, it took Kate a moment to realize what it was; a vexenaught pup. The pup gave out a low snarl and started racing after her. Finally reacting, Kate turned and raced up the hill, giving up on keeping her mana evoked.

It was immediately clear that Kate had no way of outrunning the monster, but she still made a dash for the top of the hill. If she had to fight, she wanted to at least be out of sight of the sleeping vexenaught. As she reached the top of the hill, Kate felt intense heat coming from behind, and she hastily evoked mana along her back, pouring the bulk of what she had in her well into the defense.

Even gushing out mana, the flame burnt through and Kate hastily stifled her scream with a wisp of pure mana. Heat coursing along her back, Kate threw herself down the other side of the hill in a roll. Before she regained her feet, the vexenaught pup leapt on her, claws extended.

If the vexenaught was anywhere near as big as its parent, Kate would have been dead in an instant. Instead, Kate managed to grapple the creature and throw it off her, using what was left of her mana to minimize the damage she took from its claws as it windmilled them about.

As smoothly as she could, Kate executed the falling javelin, leaping into the air and crashing down, putting the full momentum of her jump and all of her strength into a single point on her heel that crashed into the vexenaught pup as it got to its feet.

The result was far less impressive than Kate was expecting. Protected by its fur, the vexenaught was able to shake off the force of the blow and throw itself backwards. Instead of pouncing on her again, the vexenaught pup quietly began circling her.

Kate had a hard time keeping up with the vexenaught. It ran around her faster than she could turn, and its black fur made it hard to focus on amidst the darkness.

There was one advantage to this situation though. If the beast was circling her, it meant that it was studying her, waiting for an opening. As the beast circled her yet again, Kate seemingly turned just a hair too fast, snagging her feet and falling backwards. The monster took the bait, charging forward for the kill. Using the second step, Kate swept its legs then grabbed its neck and twisted hard. The monster’s fur might be able to break blades and stop blows in their tracks, but its bones weren’t nearly as strong, and its neck gave out under the strain.

Kate didn’t waste time grabbing her things, applying every bit of mana she could to block off the smell of her burnt back, and making a hasty retreat. She was halfway back to the wagon when she heard a great howl sounding out.

The beast didn’t seem to follow her path, but as she found her way back into the wagon, Kate could swear that each howl seemed just a little closer than the last. Even with that unease, the wall of pain that hit her when she climbed into the wagon almost made her turn around and head back into the voidlands.