Pikawon’s ears twitched and his nose scrunched. His entire face twisted into a lupine snarl. His heightened senses were delivering a hundred pieces of bad news. He heard heavy footsteps, the echoes of shouted orders, and the sounds of a dozen types of beasts.
He clutched the anti-tracking talisman under his shirt, feeling at its mana. If the talisman was opposing some kind of magical tracking, he should be able to feel the runes burning mana. If it was overwhelmed but high level tracking, that would be even more obvious.
Pikawon took a deep breath, pushing back against his constant, instinctive resistance to Bestial Instincts. He needed information more than he needed his hang ups and insecurities right now.
In a blending of his mana and physical senses, he smelled a whiff of magic on the group hunting them, with an incredibly familiar scent. Checking one time to be sure, he confirmed it. They had a spell that smelled just like Dyani.
To test his theory, he pulled his talisman from around his neck and put it around hers. Immediately, he felt the anti-tracking runes activate.
“Pikawon, what’s going on?” Dyani whispered, touching the talisman, “What is this?”
“I need to get out of here.”
“Alright, let’s run.”
Pikawon shook his head, looking down at his friend, his only friend, then towards the approaching group. There was no way she’d agree to leave if he told her the truth. She’d insist on standing and fighting, as if this was a book where a couple of kids could beat a group of trained fighters.
With their ability to track Dyani disabled, the city guards would surely try tracking him, their real target. Without his talisman, it would work. Dyani couldn’t be here when they found him. Pikawon could accept being caught. At this point it was inevitable, but what he couldn’t accept was taking down his only friend with him. He’d been keeping her down in the dark with him, away from her real dreams, for long enough.
He tried to think of a clever lie, some carefully crafted betrayal that would break Dyani’s heart enough to get her to leave, but she was so saints-damn trusting that he was sure she’d see through it.
There was only one thing he could do.
He readied the concentrated version of the sensory-dampening, Rat Back Poison he’d managed to create. The only other poison he had stored would be useless for this. With quick, efficient motions he stabbed a single claw into the base of Dyani’s neck and injected her with enough poison to leave her deaf and blind long enough for him to run.
She cried out, more in surprise than pain, hand pressing over the puncture wound.
“I’m sorry,” Pikawon said, but that was a lie. How could he be sorry for saving her? She’d saved his life the first day they’d met. He was just repaying an old debt.
***
Dyani scrabbled at the ground, searching for a clue about what was going on, but her skin felt too tingly and numb to make sense of anything. It was like a limb had gone to sleep, except it was her whole body.
Her spiritual senses were unimpaired, but all that meant is she could feel the mana burning in the necklace Pikawon had forced around her neck. She was tempted to tear it off in anger, but even if she could manage it with numb, uncoordinated hands, she didn’t know enough about what was going on to make that decision.
Things looked bad. Pikawon had sensed something, something worse than any monster they’d ever faced, and instead of facing it together, he’d struck her down and fled.
The obvious explanation was that she was a sacrifice, wounded and vulnerable, meant to distract the oncoming threat long enough for him to escape, but Dyani refused to believe it.
But even if she didn’t want to believe it, there was still a threat, and she was still alone, and if she wanted to live past the next few minutes, she wanted to be anywhere but here.
If only she had some kind of skill that could cleanse poison.
* Name: Dyani Farlight
* Level: 2.2
* Experience: 49%
* Attributes:
* Mana Capacity: 0
* Mana Regeneration: 1
* Magic Power: 0
* Strength: 0
* Speed: 0
* Endurance: 0
* Vitality: 1
* Mind: 1
* Toughness: 0
* Perception: 0
* Talents:
1. You gain two skill slots per level, instead of one. You cannot absorb skills.
2. You have increased sensitivity to and intuitive understanding of skill structures. You may alter and reshape your internal spiritual structure more easily and with reduced risk.
* Talent Skills:
* None
* Skill Slots:
* Mana Jump (Exceptionally Rare)
* Type: Mobility
* Affinity: Force
* Range: Self
* Cost: Low Mana
* Effect: Propels the user in a desired direction.
* Crystallize Distilled Mana (Exceptionally Rare)
* Type: Conjuration
* Affinity: None
* Range: Short
* Cost: Moderate Mana
* Effect: Distills and condenses the user’s mana into single affinity mana crystals, based on its predominant affinity. Available mana affinities include: Pure, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light, Shadow, Life, Death, Force, Metal, and Mind.
* Thermostat (Exceptionally Rare)
* Type: Passive, Defense
* Affinity: Heat
* Range: Self
* Cost: Variable Mana
* Effect: Consumes mana as needed to keep the user within a safe temperature range.
* Stamina Burn (Unique)
* Type: Enhancement
* Affinity: None
* Range: Self
* Cost: Low Stamina
* Effect: Slightly increases the cost and effect of any ordinary bodily functions that use stamina.
Jumping, mana crystals, and heat resistance were obviously out, which just left her newest skill.
Dyani had made a bit of progress with stamina based skills, but not enough to create anything very useful. All Stamina Burn did was push a little extra stamina into anything her body normally did. It made her a bit faster and a bit stronger, at the cost of exhausting her more quickly.
It didn’t seem to apply here. The body healed with health, not stamina.
But maybe, she could tweak the skill a bit to get what she needed. She dove into her spirit, the lights of her skills a blessed relief after scrambling in darkness.
Dyani was normally careful when testing out skill changes, especially anything as extreme as what she was planning. But there was no time to waste, no time to iterate through tiny changes to see what worked best.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
It was a single change to a single component, something she wouldn’t even have noticed was different at first glance. She pushed energy into the skill before she could second guess herself.
As the name of the skill indicated, Stamina Burn was fueled with stamina. The gate at the very beginning of the skill only accepted stamina, except now, it wanted something else.
Dyani felt her body protest as her health was sucked into the skill. For a horrid moment, all she felt was the growing weakness of exsanguination.
The skill structure wasn’t designed to use health, so every twist and turn, every modifier resisted the flow of crimson energy, but Dyani didn’t stop pushing. Parts of the skill warped, some broke away and dissolved, but finally something came out the other end.
Her heart started racing. At first she assumed that was just the stress of the situation, but the beats came faster and faster, so loud in her ears that she could hear it through the poison.
Her veins ached and screamed as the pressure rose, blood tearing through her body like a storm.
Dyani did her best to hold back a scream. She thought she succeeded, but maybe she did scream and she just couldn’t hear it.
The darkness retreated and the cotton cleared from her ears. Her nose started singing its familiar protest against every sticking part of the sewers. The edited Stamina Burn shattered before the poison was completely cleared from her system. That was for the best, since she’d already burned through half her health.
She was functional and one step closer to safety, which was all she could reasonably ask for.
“When I find you, Pikawon, I’m going to dunk you in sewage.”
***
The tracking stone pulse arhythmically. The line of light that stretched out from it spinning like a ship lost at sea before sinking back into the stone. The whole thing went dead in Nymin’s hands.
“No, no, no!” Nymin cried, shaking the stone like it was a broken piece of artifice. It remained as dead as before. She considered discarding the stone, since all it was now was a physical object that prevented her from phasing through walls to search, but she held onto it, as well as the hope that it would reactivate.
As an intangible being, Nymin rarely had to think about things like physical obstructions when she wasn’t at her, now former, job, where everything was warded. Being restricted by something as mundane as dirt and stone was infuriating.
Even after she decided to go to Pikawon’s base to look for clues, and with perfect knowledge of where it was, it took twenty minutes of doubling back and around obstacles to get there, interspersed by occasional moments where she dropped the tracking stone and poked her head up through the street to get her bearings and scare nearby pedestrians.
Scaring people was something she normally took great pains to avoid, but right now she had more important things on her mind. If she wasn’t so focused on the danger to Dyani, Pikawon, and herself, she might’ve even found their little jumps and shrieks funny.
She scoured the base, spending mana like water to throw things around and out of the way. The crate that normally stored non-perishable food was nearly empty, with only a few dented and unmarked cans. Pikawon’s cot was still there, along with the empty crate that he used as a table, but the chairs were missing.
The only thing completely undisturbed were the runes on every surface, glowing faintly blue and giving the room an otherworldly air. Nymin usually relied on her interface’s impressive database to identify runes, but there were only a few varieties here, all of which she knew from memory.
* Rune of Cleansing (Common):
* Description: Removes unwanted substances or energies from a designated area or item. The exact substances or energies removed can be modified through mana affinity or additional runes.
* Rune of Mana Gathering (Common):
* Description: Gathers and stores ambient mana. The affinity, speed, and quality of gathered mana is dependent on the mana initially used to charge the rune. This rune is most often used to power connected runes or alter ambient mana affinity.
* Rune of Mana Distortion (Common):
* Description: Warps nearby mana within the targeted area. The exact effect can be altered to warp the affinity, intent, organization, or level of the targeted mana.
* Rune of Mana Storage (Common):
* Description: Stores and preserves a sample of mana. This rune can be used as a mana battery or a mana affinity reference for other runes.
The cleansing runes were set up to keep the area clean, a necessity down here, with most of the gathering runes pulling in water mana to keep them powered. The mana distortion runes were less frequent but had a more complicated design, one that Nymin took a minute to puzzle out.
It was an anti-tracking ward, not the best one she’d seen, or the most traditional, but it must’ve been effective, given how long Pikawon had remained hidden.
Most tracking magic relied on the principle of sympathy. The technical definition was something extremely complicated that only spellcasters and magic researchers wasted the time to understand. But it all boiled down to the fact that similar things had a connection, which tracking magic could follow.
The tracking stone Hoss had conjured used a source of Dyani’s mana, which was similar to the mana inside her right now, and thus had high sympathy, to reach out and find her.
There were plenty of explanations for why it had suddenly stopped working, some good, some bad. Dyani’s mana could’ve been radically altered, becoming dissimilar and thus non-sympathetic to the sample Nymin was tracking. Nymin didn’t know of anything that could change someone’s mana in a moment like that, besides some talents, but there were plenty of natural treasures and elixirs out there she didn’t know about.
She could be dead.
No spirit meant no mana, nothing to track.
Pikawon’s anti-tracking rune formation gave her hope that wasn’t the case. Instead of completely shielding against mana leaving an area, it used mana distortion to warp any mana leaving the area that matched the sample of Pikawon’s mana in the storage rune, so it was just dissimilar enough to not register with most tracking. It was the difference between hiding something behind a wall or behind a tinted window.
If he’d inscribed similar defenses around Dyani, then she was likely safer than if Nymin was there with her. With the number of people after her, being invisible was better than being defended.
Neither was good enough for her mother. Nymin wanted Dyani invisible, defended, and on another continent, but she needed to find her to make that happen, and the tracking stone was useless.
Nymin focused her spiritual senses on the stone, pouring over its structure to find some obvious damage that she could fix. While physically, it was one continuous piece of solid material, spiritually it felt more like a ball of yarn, wrapped tightly around a burning spark.
She didn’t understand the spell’s structure, and her interface couldn’t do anything but identify it as a tracking stone. Even if she found something wrong, Nymin wasn’t confident she could repair it without breaking it. The stone had already lost energy and stability just from existing. It wasn’t made to last forever.
The only part that she could affect was the spark in the core, which she recognized immediately as the sample of Dyani’s mana now useless.
Nymin glanced around the walls, searching for what she needed.
She was no spellcaster, but she was a first rate mana manipulator. Mana was her literal lifeblood.
She spotted the rune she needed, but she identified it just to be sure. She held the tracking stone in one hand, and placed the other over the mana storage rune that contained Pikawon’s mana.
She took a deep breath she didn’t need, except to calm herself, and drew the mana in before she could doubt herself.
Normally, mana she absorbed was converted to her own mana signature, so it wouldn’t contaminate her mana pool, but she deliberately repressed that ability, pulling the mana through her channels without entering her mana pool, until it filled the hand holding the tracking stone.
Nymin could feel that the mana signature was the foundation of the tracking spell, and would break down without it, so she couldn’t do anything as simple as suck Dynai’s mana out and push Pikawon’s mana in.
With a hand on either side of the stone, Nymin pulled from one side and pushed with the other, removing and replacing the mana in a constant, equivalent stream.
The tracking stone shimmered, reevaluating its contents, but went dead again. Nymin told herself that was due to the two mana signatures mixing.
If Dyani was shielded from tracking, Pikawon might be as well, but there wasn’t anything she could do with that explanation, so she discarded it.
Nymin repeated the process, finding more mana signature runes to replace the spell’s mana, getting closer and closer to pure Pikawon.
Her hand trembled over the last mana signature runes. All the other runes were powered by external mana, which had diluted Pikawon’s personal mana well past usefulness. This was her last chance.
She wanted to move slow, with delicacy and care, but that would only give the mana more time to mix. She needed speed.
In a rush, she replaced the spell’s mana, and waited with every muscle clenched tight. The spell shimmered and went dead. It didn’t even search for longer than before, stretching out the dramatic moment.
It just searched and returned with nothing.
Nymin wanted to scream, but she knew that it would come out with all the force of Banshee’s Wail, which was something plenty of the guards searching down here would recognize. She wanted to smash the tracking stone to bits, but that was also foolish.
If Pikawon and Dyani were both still alive and shrouded from tracking, it was possible the stone could find them when they eventually left.
Nymin floated disheartedly though the illusionary curtain that hid the base.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, the tracking stone shimmered, glowed, and shot a line of light straight ahead.
Nymin had pinned all her hopes on a tracking stone, in the middle of a room warded against tracking. Without the mana signature runes, the mana distortion runes would default to warping all mana that passed through them. The only way she could track anyone inside would be if they were right there with her.
“Goddess strike me down.”