Breath in.
Breath out.
With each breath, I draw in more mana from my surroundings, pushing my mana network to its limits. I feel like a balloon about to pop, but progress is never easy.
I hold the extra mana within me for thirty seconds before channeling it into my right hand with part of my own mana pool. Then, slamming my hand down against the large log I’m meditating on, I release all the stored mana in one quick burst. Pushing so much mana into the long-dead branch tears apart its inner structure, causing fractures to radiate from where my fingers meet wood.
“Having fun?” Tabitha asks, jumping fifteen feet up next to me.
“So much fun,” I mirthlessly chuckle. Since deciding to treat this excursion as an adventurer and a training exercise, I've started to work small bouts of magic practice into my daily schedule whenever possible.
Every time we stop for our mid-day break, I try to work through my mana exercises, like just now when I was testing how much mana my body could hold. It’s hard because I don’t have much time to practice, but that only means I need to get creative.
I've found one of the best ways I can practice using Mana Manipulation is while we walk by trying to divert the mana currents in the air without touching them or letting them brush up against Mana Skin. Unfortunately, I can only cause small ripples a few feet around me, but one day I hope to be able to control the mana around me like the magic tool Reel used to spy on me.
“They still watching us?” Tabitha asks, offering me a drink from her waterskin.
I take the water and take a sip. “Probably,” I tell her before handing the water back.
Tabitha and I both look south. Closing my eyes, I stretch my mana senses as far as they will go in one direction, while Tabitha keeps watch. It takes a lot of concentration, but I filter through the abnormal ambient mana and search for mana signatures related to animals. I can't sense anything below a specific size, but even then, the forest lights up like a Christmas tree.
Focusing southward, I scan for anything hazardous, but in the end, I land on seven signatures roughly 1,400 feet away, near the edge of my perceivable range in this state. The seven goblins were huddled closely together, roughly a quarter of a mile away from us, just as they had been for the last few days.
We've been dealing with them nonstop since we ran into that group of goblins a week ago. They’ve tried to ambush us four times since we first sent them packing, and it was only recently that we learned that this small group has been tailing us.
The group of goblins watching us made sure to stay well hind us the entire time, so it wasn’t until I tried to quantify Sense Mana’s range with Tabitha’s help that we realized we were being shadowed.
With Sense Mana at level 79, I've long known its effectiveness at certain ranges. But after missing the goblins in the trees, I decided I needed to know exactly how far I could sense things and to what clarity. And thankfully, Tabitha seemed keen to help me.
She was instrumental in helping me judge distances by acting as a human beacon, and with her help, I learned the base range I can sense things is 94 feet in every direction. However, I can only sense minute things like an item’s internal mana structure if it's within 12 feet of me. And once she moved outside of 95 feet.... things started to get fuzzy.
I can still trace large mana currents and find hidden life signs of medium-sized creatures up to 237 feet, but things only get vaguer after that. Once Tabitha moved 238 feet away from me, it became clear I could only sense her because of her mana pool and all of the enchanted gear she was wearing, which is why I couldn’t sense the goblins when they first attacked us. Despite living in such a mana-rich environment, all the goblins I've seen so far have had little to no mana. But I digress.
I could follow Tabitha's movements up to 582 feet, upon which I lost her and could no longer pinpoint where she was. That was the extent of Sense Mana’s capabilities when not boosted by Meditation.
Though, when I did use them together, my output was stretched by a whopping 280%, and I could track Tabitha all the way up to 1,630 feet. Or something like that; we had to guesstimate the exact distance, but we were confident we were close.
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To no one’s surprise, my skills worked best in combination with each other; however, there was one big drawback I had to be aware of. To reach those far distances, I had to limit which direction I was focusing on rather than covering a radius, leaving me open to attacks. Therefore, Tabitha and I had to take great care of our surroundings while testing my limits, and the only reason I could do that in this environment was that I trusted her with my life.
It was a good thing that I did because while tracking Tabitha with my skill, she stumbled upon the evidence that we were being followed. The goblins had already fled, so she didn’t see them herself, but once we suspected they were there, we only had to wait for me to use my newly quantified skill to determine that, indeed, we were being trailed by a goblin scouting unit.
Tabitha and I have tried to take them out multiple times since we discovered them, but each time we move to do so, they scatter like roaches, and we only end up killing two or three of them. Then the goblins would reform, seemingly with more scouts. Finally, it became apparent that we were wasting our time backtracking, so it was my job to check in regularly on their positioning.
“Any more of them?” Tabitha asks me while I’m still in a meditative state. Her voice messes with my concentration, but I would’ve needed to divert my focus anyway to let her know they were still maintaining their distance.
“Nope, still seven of them,” I tell her. “Though…?”
“What is it?” Tabitha shoots me a curious look.
"I can't be sure, but I think two goblins are different from this morning. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but I think they've switched guards since last I checked."
“Makes sense,” Tabitha doesn’t seem all that surprised by the news. “They have to switch guards at some point, or how else will the village know where we are.”
“Village!?” My eyes widen.
Tabitha nods to me before glancing again in the goblins' direction. “There has to be one nearby.”
She makes sense, the groups attacking us have been increasing in number. The first four times we were attacked, the goblins numbered between ten to fifteen at most, but yesterday they numbered twenty-four.
Tabitha handled the majority of them, but needless to say, I've been getting a lot of chances to redeem myself lately. They have yet to try attacking us today, but it was only a matter of time before we ran into another group.
“Check the other directions; see if any more are set up nearby," Tabitha instructs me.
Closing my eyes, I reenter my meditative state and start scanning. Starting from where I know the goblin scouting party is, I slowly start sweeping the area around them. It’s challenging to do, the best I can describe it is like I’m looking through binoculars, but instead of seeing a clear image, it's nothing but shapes and colors, much like looking into a kaleidoscope.
I also need to focus on a much smaller area to see that far, so it isn’t like I can scan quickly, either. Plus, it takes time for me to decode what I’m seeing. The trees are my biggest hurdle, they’re practically pilers of dense mana and are good at obscuring anything hiding in their branches, forcing me to take my time.
“No extra goblins,” I bring my hand up to my head and massage my temples after twenty minutes. Scanning that much area for that long leaves me with a severe headache. If I didn't have Mental Resistance, there was no way I'd be able to hold out for as long as I do. But at least once I stop, my skill helps me recover quicker than I would otherwise.
“Nothing of significance?” Tabitha questions me.
“I wouldn’t say that; I spotted a few things,” I tell her while holding out my hand.
Tabitha takes my hand and helps me up. The first thing I do is shake out my legs. I had been sitting for almost forty minutes cross-legged without moving, and while my stats keep my legs from falling asleep, doing some light stretching after sitting still for so long is still beneficial.
Once I feel lessened enough, I start pointing out everything major I saw in a 1,600-foot radius. “The goblins are 1,400 feet south of us. There’s a pair of forest lions in a den 1,050 feet southwest of us. They appear to have three cubs with them, so best to avoid them. Then, there's a flock of blood bats sleeping in a tree to the east and another silent falcon in another tree to the west."
Tabitha follows along as I point out the exact location of everything, using the code names I’ve come up with to identify the various animals we’ve encountered so far. Admittedly, my codenames were a little on the nose, but that ensured we wouldn't accidentally confuse anything if we were to run into a similar but different animal in the future.
The forest lions were the same as the one we ran into a week ago, the morning after my fight with the silent falcon. I decided to name the bird as such. After all, it was silent and well because it looked sort of like a falcon. But, hey, I never claimed to be good at naming things.
The blood bat swarm was honestly the most concerning thing I saw, even when compared to the goblins, but not for reasons one would think.
The average blood bat was the size of a fox and had a ten-foot wingspan. I call them blood bats because the red fur on their chest makes them look like they’ve been dripping blood on themselves.
Funnily enough, blood bats don’t actually drink blood, or at least we’ve never seen them. Instead, like most bats, blood bats feed on insects, and their favorite food is star dragonflies which are the bioluminescent dragonflies that come out each night. So the bats were harmless to Tabitha and me; however, it wasn't their physical attacks that were worrying.
Blood bats were similar to regular bats in many ways but also magic beasts. Like the silent falcon, the blood bat's abilities were sound related, but while the silent falcon concealed itself with its abilities, the blood bats used theirs as an attack.
Blood bats release a sound wave in the form of an ear-piercing screech. The sound stuns their prey allowing the bats to swoop in and pluck up their meal with little hassle.
Tabitha and I could deal with a handful of them hunting around us, but hundreds? Thousands? There was no way we could get any sleep with a colony of blood bats nearby.
“The bats sound like a pain,” Tabitha frowns.
I wait a moment, trying to read Tabitha’s face to see if she made the pun on purpose, but her poker face skill is too high. Coughing awkwardly into my hand, I decide now would be a good time to tell her the only good news I have.
"Yeah, we need to watch out for a lot of stuff, but I think I spotted a water source to the northwest, away from the bats.”
Finding water was essential. We had found a small stream early on in our journey and followed it for two days, but then the goblins started to attack us, and eventually, the stream led straight into a highly dense mana region. We were forced to pick our battles and the amount of mana even gave Tabitha pause, so we changed directions at the cost of leaving our source of water behind.
We could source small amounts of water here and there thanks to the survival skills my father taught me, but we needed to fill up our waterskins if we wanted to move faster.
It was time to make a much-needed supply run in the deadly jungle. What will we find?