Shape their perception and you shape their reality. Truth listened to the furious racket of private guards sweeping through the neighborhood- demons summoned, angels summoned, police summoned, all trying to track him down. A lot of the neighbors were having their doors unexpectedly kicked in, as all the summoned beasts searched the surrounding properties.

At this point, the process felt quite comfortably familiar. He kept jogging, letting the expanding search radius become his friend. Giant, golden colored firebirds swept through the air. Their eyes were considerably harder to evade than the eyes of their human masters.

Had he done enough with the Sung Clan? Enough to move them? Maybe, maybe not. He suspected not. That arrogance went bone deep, and they probably would keep acting like pricks just to spite him, now.

The firebirds were quickly getting to be a real problem. They were moving quickly, checking and rechecking for his traces. Every time their gaze swept over him, he had to find cover and focus hard on being unnoticable. He didn’t even try to assume an identity- the people on the ground were hauling everyone out of their houses and counting noses as they went.

Oh, the Sung Clan was going to be popular after tonight.

He started to get up out of cover, then dove right back in. Incisive was giving him a very unsubtle prod that staying down was good-rat thinking at the moment. He tried to spot what the problem was, and didn’t see anything.

Something was up there, and it was being sneaky too. Or it was just high enough up that he couldn’t spot it. Truth’s ability to see in the dark was now near-enough perfect, so whatever it was, it wasn’t relying on the night to keep it hidden. Worse, it was pretty quick, or there were a few of it in rotation. He could feel the pressure coming and going less than a minute apart.

He could shred a hell of a lot of soldiers in a minute, but given there was a very active, very heavily equipped army presence in town, that sounded exceedingly dumb. Eventually, they would wear him down. Eventually, something would get through.

The watching presence above vanished again. Truth silently counted the seconds until it returned. Forty. He could go pretty far in forty seconds, but the time window wasn’t consistent.

Hey, how is it coming on Earth Folding Step.

<>

Truth thought about it. Trying to tease apart Earth Folding Step was… not simple. There were an ungodly number of variables you had to control for. You could summarize the spell as “Stuff In Your Way * Distance Traveled= Difficulty of Not Exploding * Having Enough Cosmic Energy To Travel The Distance.”

And if you didn’t think that each and every one of those variables didn’t have its own quirks to account for, you were probably one of the meatsplosions that unsuccessfully cast the spell.

The watching sensation came back again. Thirty five seconds, this time.

He looked around. The nearest real cover was the house he was huddled next to. Trying to use Earth Folding Step to get inside of it without leaving a trace was beyond him for now. Was there a manhole cover around anywhere? Yes. In the middle of the heavily watched street. No luck there.

Where was the best way to run? It was looking like the whole city was getting pretty hot. Oddly, slipping north into the active war zone might give him a little more room to hide, just due to the chaos. But no, that was dumb. There would be a ton of surveillance there too. South it was.

From where he was standing, south was in… which direction? He had absolutely no idea. Just pick any random direction and go, figure it out when he is outside the search area? Truth mentally shrugged. He didn’t have a better idea.

The watcher swept past again. Fifty-ish seconds. Maybe fifty and a couple. No apparent rhyme or reason to it. Such fun. Such, such fun.

The locus of the search would be the Sung Clan mansion, so anything that was in the direction of “away” from that was a winner. More people meant more identities to assume and an easier time vanishing. Downtown was… that way?

Truth tried to estimate the distance between him and the next cover. It was a little garden shed at the end of a surprisingly large yard. Not far. He could probably do it in a single-

The watcher was back, barely twenty five seconds had passed. And it lingered for a bit longer this time too.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Nothing like trying a spell for the first time in live-fire conditions. He was just a few steps from cover, so he should be within range of the spell. He could probably clear it in a single long jump, in fact, but…

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He reached for the spell and tried to fix the spellform in his mind. It was a bastard thing- all twisting lines and switchbacks and oddly layered geometries. Truth had the strangest feeling that he was trying to draw a shape that had more than the usual three dimensions. And the shape kept getting nudged slightly. By what, he didn’t know. But something was jostling his elbow.

He leaned into it, pouring more power into the spell. Enforcing his will on the world. It was a struggle, but he got it just about settled down. As he was raising his foot to take that crucial step, the watcher came back… and the spell damn near exploded.

Truth felt the spell shudder and try to disintegrate on him. The spell was suddenly unbalanced, the variables tossing around like a sack of dice in a wagon wheel. He poured more power into it, straining at it to try to hold it together. He didn’t know what would happen if it suddenly sprung loose, but… nothing good.

It was an unpleasant few seconds, trying to hold it down. Then the watcher moved on, and the whole thing bucked and shook again, because now it was overbalanced compared to the original set up, and Truth had an unpleasant time trying to carefully ease out some of the energy from one part of the spell form, and put it back in others.

Then the watcher came back again…

The next few minutes were highly educational for Truth, particularly in the field of applied profanity. Every time he thought he had the energy levels balanced in the spellform, something would come along and upset them. And since he didn’t really want to test out his body’s durability the hard way, that meant he couldn’t move out of the area where his spell was getting disturbed.

Adding to the “fun” was the sound of the spellhounds getting closer. It was already a decent sized search radius, but between the cops and the Sung Clan, they had the budget for the search.

More by luck than skill, he found a tiny island of stability when the watcher had moved on. He took a step- and he was next to the shed. He ducked inside of it as soon as he got there. He needed a minute to recover.

I... Was just over there. I was just over there. Then I was here. The disorientation made him nauseous. He pressed a hand to the wall, trying to ground himself. I was there, then I was here. Which was exactly one step away, even though it wasn’t really. He had seen where his target was. He had an intuitive grasp on the distance between the two points of his journey.

His mind just couldn’t reconcile the gap. Something was supposed to have been between A and B, but wasn’t. Not even time. Or, well, there had probably been “time” but not enough time. Even at top speed, it would have taken him a second or two to close that gap. With Earth Folding Step, it was literally one step.

He focused on his breathing. On feeling his body. The plastic texture of the wall. Trying to connect where his mind thought he was supposed to be to where he actually was. The hit on his energy reserves was more than he would like. He probably couldn’t do that more than a few times, at least not at this stage of mastery. He was dumping too much power into the spell, trying to do with magical muscle what should be done with skill.

Worked though. That was significant. That mattered. First time he cast this spell, and it worked. It had been a while since someone called him dumb, but now he almost wished someone would. He would make them eat their words. Literally, if possible.

He gathered himself again. He was in good physical condition. All that body cultivation hadn’t been for nothing. He could see how a lack of cultivation would shred someone, though. That dislocation, those twisting bands of magic. The way the Shattervoid spaghetiffied that shuttle. The Earth Folding Step Might not be dangerous to others, but it was plainly dangerous to him!

And just when he had pulled himself together, the damn watcher flew over the shed!

Truth stuck his head out of the shed and took a quick look around. There was a porch with a big awning about ten meters away. He could be over there in just a couple of seconds-

The watcher flew past yet again, this time shortening his window to barely twenty five seconds. There must be a dozen of the little bastards up there, flying around like swallows hunting flies.

He sighed and got ready to do it all again.

It took him four hours to fully escape the search radius. If he had been running, he would have been clear in less than five minutes. Still, it was worth the suffering. It was slow going, but he was absolutely certain he left no traces of his passing. There wasn’t so much as a footprint for them to follow.

It was, therefore, with distinctly mixed feelings that Truth managed to make his way to a suburban big box furniture store and collapsed on the showroom sofa. His energy had run low, his mental exhaustion had run high, and he was altogether seriously reconsidering the wisdom of the day’s activities.

Had he said anything that would help Jeon track him down? Probably not, though the intel weenies would be downright orgasming over having anything resembling an actual political plan of his to work with. Balanced neatly by his declaration that “there is no plan.” That should keep the lights on all night.

What was that old joke? Be afraid when the fried chicken delivery places near the Ministry of Defense suddenly get slammed with orders? Something like that.

It’s just… he couldn’t stand being helpless. He could put up with a lot of things. Endure a lot of things. Just not that. Slim hope, sure. Faint, desperate, single thread of hope? No problem. Lived with that for absolutely years. Just so long as he had something. Some faint shot at a decent future.

Those kids in the factory had no hope. And he had no hope of saving them. Not by himself. Not now, not after the collapse. He was capable of a lot of things, but not feeding, clothing, sheltering and educating tens of thousands of kids in a world with sweeping food shortages, no clean water, no new clothes… no anything. A world that had to relearn how to make tools.

He had to use the existing powers. He had to start thinking like a wasteland survivor- how do I turn the scrap of the old world into the useful and necessary tools of the current age?

It was like he told Radz. Today was an experiment. Could you persuade the old money that their future lay in those Level Zero nobodies? It sounded like they had been thinking about it already. Now… just what was the endorsement of the Hell Prince worth?