I’m a blasty little scrapper in a family of speedsters. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Lu, Te, and even Lucky and Lil to some extent can safely, easily cover a lot of ground, very quickly. Me? I’ve got to use weird combinations of abilities, or stretch abilities in directions they weren’t intended for, to get any semblance of mobility. Especially now, with my cored out nerve tunnels. I should grab something metal, just in case my steely body spell wears off while I’m kiting this stupid hydra around. Where’s a, ah, that’s unfortunate, but it’ll have to do.

I grimace as I swoop down to pick up a bloody fragment of a belt, that happens to include the buckle. It must be from one of the hydra’s victims that were torn to pieces. Stay calm Reggie, stay focused. You can mourn and process later. For now, just tuck this into your own belt, so that you’ve got some spare metal for the spell. The clearing is nearly bereft of bodies, and the hydra is glancing about in seeming confusion. Thankfully, with Rayileklia’s darkened skies, it hasn’t been able to make note of where Teuila has been heading with the bodies.

I think Teuila can make it something like three kilometers in a single leap if she really pushes herself, so there should be plenty of distance between the hydra and those easy meals. It takes her about two minutes round trip, so she’s doing about a hundred eighty kilometers per hour if I’m estimating correctly. That’s something like a seventh of the speed of sound. Someday Te, someday we’ll get your speed back up past the sound barrier. You’re still incredible, My Wings. I should probably focus on the hydra that’s chomping at me.

I need to entice it to follow me, to make myself seem like a viable target long enough for it to realize where I’m headed. Hopefully it will want to either herd me to its compatriots, or protect them from me. Let it get its fangs into me here, and they crack on my armor, cracking my armor slightly in return, but not penetrating my metallic flesh beneath. See that hydra? You can hit me, I’m slower. Come get me. Thankfully, it obliges as I bat myself away with Telekinesis before floating my makeshift surfboard out towards where I’ll be landing. I scoop myself out of the air, and continue floating westward, peppering the hydra with frosty rays that are seemingly beginning to pile up. They don’t stay incredibly long, but it seems like I’m able to start overlapping their impact at the trunk of its torso enough that it doesn’t melt off before the next ray hits any more, or the following one. But the second or third one back melts before I get a third or fourth to land in the same spot.

Progress, sort of, but I’m blowing my S P on this pretty hard. Tiktik can cast a spell of this magnitude just by using ambient mana around her, without tapping into her S P at all, but she’s limited in terms of her higher tier magic being broken up into separate pools that are stricter overall. Hm. I could chance it, I could toss out one of these energy cells, drop my telekinesis from the staff, send a lightning bolt through it, and figure out the resulting explosion’s parameters, to make better use of the second one, but I’d really rather not. Too much uncertainty. Definitely not what it’s intended for. It’s like a gadgeteer setting their equipment to overload, tossing it, running away, leaping off a building and hoping for the best.

As I navigate the treacherous terrain, marking note of all the obstacles I’m free to avoid by levitating, my heart races with a sense of urgency. We have to get this matter in hand, and get it handled sooner rather than later. I’m careful to keep a clear line of sight to the hydra at all times, as my eyes scan behind me, while I rely on my silent sonar to paint a picture of the area around me as I fly through, dodging vegetation.

Thunder reverberates through the air as the drizzle begins to pour just a little bit harder, just that much more forcefully. Berinon’s work on enchanting the clothes I wear is still holding up, thank heavens. I’d really rather not suddenly show up naked after traveling for a while in the acid rain. There are plenty of gaps and scorch marks in the clothes though, especially after the Felgre horde. I haven’t really had any downtime where I’d been able to think about doing something so trivial as mending clothing.

Thankfully, despite the hydra having the home terrain advantage, I’m the one actually benefiting from the uneven terrain. My senses say there are surprise sinkholes, submerged logs, ankle-deep mud, and a whole host of other problems for anything traveling at ground level. I flex my jaw and attempt to stretch my muscles, trying to remind myself to not carry myself with tension. Every little spec of energy I can save by avoiding some pain, or minor injury might be that one last second I need to collect another dragonforce.

If I were running through here, being chased by the hydra, I’d have to make a deft leap over that fallen log, and I’d land smack-dab in the middle of a terribly deep pool of water. That would have spelled doom right there. As it is, I’m barely maintaining my lead on the thing, and I think it’s wising up to the fact that I can maintain my lead. I think it’s also wising up to the fact that I’m making a beeline straight for its kin though, so it doesn’t dare give up the chase.

It feels a bit scummy, to use other creatures as something’s weakness. It’s like threatening a loved one. Hm, do I have a power from Can’Z’aas that I could call on, that could end three hydras at once? Fire seemed counterproductive, at least the low flame we had available, but what if I used a fifty five hundred mana fireball? The exponential nature of expending more mana on a single use of my power would have that thing measuring in the thousands of degrees, or the hundreds of meters across, or both. Or what about a fifty five hundred mana chain lightning bolt? That might do the trick. The hydra seemed to be at least annoyed by, if not injured by my E S Ps, my electro shock punches. Is it worth the risk to my health, to begin prepping for eight minutes from now, to unleash a blast like that?

I’ve got the feeling like that might be the last act I ever do, if I fell back on that much of my Can’Z’aasian power right now. Plus, I couldn’t risk giving it less than my absolute fullest power, because if I attacked with less, I’d still probably pass out, and if it failed to utterly obliterate the hydras, I’d be a sitting duck for when they recovered. Best play it safe, Teuila’s going to let me know if Tiktik’s ready to do at least a few little necrotizing blasts. If she is, great, we should have the matter well in hand in a few short minutes.

Uh oh, telekinesis is fritzing, it’s about to wear out. Crap, should I risk trying out another spell from the staff? It can conjure some pretty powerful elementals, without risking breaking my brain, like my spells would do if I tried to do the same again. Could I conjure some sort of cold elemental? My gut instinct is telling me yes, some sort of coldfire spirit that can sap heat. I could fire off a few lightning bolts from the staff, before committing to another spell, though I’d like to have all three hydras lined up before doing that, and to line them up, I need mobility that I won’t have if I let telekinesis drop, without refreshing it. Fricklefrack, speaking of, ow, ow, ow, thunk, thud, oof. Well, at least my surfboard skipped across the water a bit, and then I got flipped forward, skidding into, well, not dry land, but ankle-deep mud, rather than a fetid pool.

A being springs out of seemingly nowhere, and I’m having a hard time parsing what I’m sensing. A jovial masculine voice asks, “Need a hand?”

I raise my hand to grasp the proferred paw, and accept the assistance in getting to my feet. The bipedal rabbit, no, not quite right, the bipedal hare asks, “Need a hideaway friend? Offer going in three—.”

I turn around and lunge at the hydra that’s lunging at us, meeting it head on, tagging it with a series of E S Ps as I allow my danger wraps’ silent sonar senses to guide my reflexes to take the fewest hits on my way between its flailing necks. I also pull a maneuver that nearly got me killed, so very long ago, at the falls in the swamp on Can’Z’aas. I tug with all my might as I aim my lunge past the hydra, while I grasp it about one of its necks. Thankfully I manage my entire maneuver with internal electrokinesis before I get a random spasm that throws me slightly off-balance.

There’s a quiet, “Huh.” from the other side of the hydra, and I can’t help laughing a bit as the hare disappears into some hole in the terrain. I imagine it’s a baked mud pit, or something similar, like the ones Lil and I used so very long ago now. I’d have probably said the same thing in his shoes, just a simple huh. He must have a camouflaged cap for his hideaway, like we did, because I can’t sense any sign of—. Air holes. There we go. Gotcha. Sort of. My silent sonar tells me there’s definitely some safely dry subterranean hideaway, but I don’t have a sense of its entryway, not that I want to flee anyway.

Let’s take a pause here in a moment between moments. I need to verify some things. Dive into the timeless time, the space between spaces, the non. Huff, okay, take a deep breath Reggie. Breathe air, breathe. Exhale slowly, stay calm, focus. Paint the picture.

Bipedal hare, confident enough to offer help, and knowledgeable enough to realize I was being chased by a hydra. Stance indicated readiness, but not wariness. Trusting, not a loner, not isolated. Conclusion, a party, or family of harefolk live nearby, possibly in the same dugout that he exited from. Are they a threat to the refugees? Pause, deep breath, think for a moment, find the clues that aren’t there, the absence, the non, fill in the gaps.

Family or friends able to remain quiet, willing to let a capable member leave, risking getting caught, risking their dugout being found out by one of the most dangerous creatures in the swamp to help a stranger is a strong clue towards non-hostility. What else? Hints of, hm, the bully frogfolk wore patchwork hare-pelts in their outfits, but they definitely didn’t seem bartered or freely given, more like cobbled together from, eugh, corpses. So the frogs and the hares are probably enemies, okay, I can deal with that as a retrocognitive assumption. I know that a few of the refugees grabbed one or two of the spears, or whatever they could scrounge from the frogfolk bodies, but most left the frogfolk’s spears point down in the muck like a fence along the road. The hares shouldn’t have any problems with the refugees on that front.

Anything else? Awful lot of assumptions Reggie. Yeah, but that’s how this works, paint a picture with missing pieces, and fill them in such that they fit the mold. It does mean that there are various keystone assumptions, that everything falls apart if they were wrong, but I’m pretty positive about those ones. I’m not sure if it’s a power, or just deductive reasoning. I don’t know what that says about me, that I’m not sure if I possess a given type of intelligence, or if some supernatural force is granting me intuition. Both? Both is good.

Focus Reggie, focus. Right, distractibility. Thankfully, a slightly less fatal flaw when the distractions happen during a time that no one can capitalize on them. Anyway, the hares are helpful, but not suicidal, friendly enough to strangers to risk being discovered to offer shelter, trusting enough to make that offer under tight time limits in high stress situations, but also not pushy. Reasoning? There are a lot of hares in total, a community in the swamp. They can slip up aboveground almost unnoticed, and he had pouches at his waist, containing powders. Faint traces of bioluminescent lichen in the powders. Spirits of the swamp. They play a role, spooking travelers, without intending harm, quite possibly to ward them off from becoming prey for the hydra.

The hares have probably been aware of the whole refugee contingent for quite a while now, and are only making an appearance now, because they thought they could save me without risking being found out as a whole. There’s likely dugouts every few hundred meters, maybe every couple of kilometers. Are there enough for the refugees to hop from one to another in a daisy chain to make it through the swamps? Could we leave the hydras alive so that they provide a barrier against the forces of the various apocalypses?

Now *that* would be a solid play. As much as I’d like to get justice for the slain, utilizing the enemy’s presence to stave off other enemies would be all that much better in the long run. I exhale a long, slow sigh in my mindscape that nearly comes out as a whistle with slightly puffed cheeks. Okay Reggie, time for some diplomacy. We were going to sweep west, collect the other two hydras, then swing north, but this might work out for the better.