Emily turns to fully face Oscar, taking in his nervous shifting as she waits for him to elaborate.

“Please come translate for Ivor. He’s trying to tell us something and my sign language isn’t good enough to understand him properly.”

“Sure,” Emily agrees, stepping past Oscar to approach Ivor.

Ivor makes eye contact with her as she walks up, and she instantly notices the confusion in his gaze.

“What’s up, big guy?” Emily signs as she comes to a halt before him.

“I think something’s following us,” his first sentence sends a shiver down Emily spine as she glances into the fog concealing the trees behind their group.

“What do you mean think?”

“I’ve felt something odd the last three scans I’ve done. I can’t tell if it’s the movement of a beast: it doesn’t feel like footfall. At first, I thought it was nothing, so I ignored it. But this time I’m certain I felt something moving in our wake, even if I still can’t tell what.”

Emily frowns and activates earthen detection after his explanation, focusing her senses on the trail behind them. Standing with her eyes shut and her full attention on the scan, she notices a faint buzzing near the edge of her detection range, but it vanishes the moment she feels it. She keeps her attention on the area where she felt the buzz, but finds nothing after a minute of watching.

“There’s something there for sure. I wouldn’t even have noticed it if you hadn’t said something. But whatever it is, it stopped moving the second my scan reached it,” Emily says with concern, turning to Oscar. “It’s able to sense our earthen detection. How about I go out alone and have a look?”

She taps her eyes, activating infra-sight and letting its warm orange glow convey her intent. Oscar frowns at her suggestion.

“No way am I letting you set off alone.”

“I’ll still be within detection range: you can get Ivor and Enzo to watch my back from here. I’m faster than any of you, and if something happens, I can defend myself for long enough for you all to reach me!”

Oscar looks unconvinced, but acquiesces with a sigh.

“Fine. It’s not like I have any better ideas, and I sure as hell don’t want an unknown beast following us.”

“Great,” Emily says with a grin, setting off towards the back of the chattering group. “Also, if you don’t want things following us, maybe shut them up.”

Leaving Oscar to consider her suggestion, Emily takes off back along their path. She dashes and weaves between trees, approaching the area where she felt something amiss. Coming to a standstill, she looks around for any warmth in the area and finds nothing. She pulses earthen detection a few times, attempting to find the buzzing again, but nothing shows up.

As the eerie silence of the forest closes in around her, Emily frowns and scours the area, pushing bushes out of the way and searching for anything out of the ordinary. After five minutes of searching to no avail, she heads back to rejoin the group. She breaks through the fog, emerging next to Matteo and startling him as she passes.

Ignoring his grumbled complaints, Emily walks up to Ivor and Oscar, informing them of her fruitless search.

“Nothing?” Oscar asks dubiously.

“Yep, not a leaf out of place. Whatever’s following us is either a ghost, or so good at hiding we’ll never find it.”

Oscar’s face twists in a confused mix of fear and anger.

“Shit. We keep going. Whatever it is, it will have to reveal itself to attack us. You guys stay on guard.”

Emily shrugs at his commands and returns to the head of the group.

He’s not wrong. As long as we’re careful, we should be fine. I can always reset and check again once we know what we’re looking for.

They continue, heading deeper into The Glade. The relaxed state the group had fallen into vanishes, with the fear of the unknown once again hanging over their heads. Everyone keeps moving, sticking to the formation as usual, but several people repeatedly cast anxious gazes behind them, checking for phantoms in the fog.

By lunch time, they have run into three more small groups of beasts, and the odd tremors following them persist. As they take a break to eat, Emily, Ivor, Enzo, and Dante, set up at the edge of the group, facing the unknown pursuer.

“Should we really keep going?” Enzo asks with his signature scowl.

“Why not? If a beast wants to attack us, we’ll just burn it!” Dante confidently answers.

Enzo rolls his eyes at his friend and turns to Emily for a reasonable response.

“As much as the pyro’s answer was stupid, he’s not wrong. It’s like Oscar said: whatever’s following us will have to reveal itself if it wants to attack us directly.”

“Yeah, but you’ve noticed our encounters with beasts increasing the further we go, right? What if whatever’s following us is smart enough to coordinate the beasts and it’s giving away our position?”

“Ha. If it’s that smart, we’re already dead! It would have to be at least third circle for that, and a third circle beast that good at hiding is a death sentence,” Dante says dismissively.

“Okay that’s fair.” Enzo sighs. “But still, that doesn’t mean it won’t wait till we’re exhausted to attack.”

Emily and Ivor nod at his words.

“True. We’ll just have to stay on high alert then,” Emily agrees. “What’s got you so concerned though? You don’t normally strike me as this nervous?”

Enzo flinches slightly, staring into the fog while shifting uncomfortably.

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“It’s hard to explain. Something about whatever’s following us just feels wrong.” He turns to face Emily as he continues. “You’ve tried detecting it, haven’t you?”

Emily nods silently, wondering what about the scans is making Enzo so nervous.

“Well, you remember how I couldn’t tell what the mudscraps were?”

“Yeah, they distorted earthen detection.”

“Yeah, well this thing is doing something similar. I didn’t notice it the first few times I scanned it because it’s scarily subtle, but it’s not going still every time we try to locate it. It’s distorting the scan somehow to stop information getting to us. The mudscraps changed what the scan read by messing with the earth they stood on, but this thing’s messing with the spell itself.”

Dante puts an arm around his shivering friend, to reassure him, while looking to Emily and Ivor.

“Have you guys not felt this?”

Ivor nods in agreement, and Emily frowns.

“I haven’t. Give me a moment. Both of you stop scanning if you are.”

After receiving two nods, Emily shuts her eyes and channels earthen detection with her full focus. She watches the outskirts of their path, feeling around for the buzzing she felt before. She locates the problem area quickly, so she focuses on feeling exactly what signals her spell is sending back to her cortex.

The returned information is faint, coming back to her as a blur, not providing the usual clarity earthen detection offers. It feels weaker, fragmented even, as if the intended return has been ripped to pieces and sent back in a jumbled dump of data. The information dead zone, as Emily chooses to designate it for now, covers a large area, a circle of ground at least fifty metres across, completely indecipherable to her magical senses.

Opening her eyes again, she nods to her friends.

“Yeah, I see what you mean. There’s a dead zone where I can’t gather any valid information. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe a high level earth spell?”

“I don’t know.” Enzo shrugs, standing up and gesturing towards the shifting group behind them with his head. “I just hope it reveals itself soon, otherwise we won’t sleep soundly tonight.”

They set off again. Emily, walking at the head of the group, distractedly consulting her knowledge of magical beasts to try and work out what’s following them. The afternoon is long. They’re attacked every hour, sometimes multiple times an hour. Emily runs out of silent bullets a few hours before they make camp, switching to throwing conjured blades at enemies above instead.

By 9 pm, the group is exhausted, everyone having used up over half of their mana reserves, when Emily calls for them to stop again.

“How many this time?” Oscar asks tiredly, to which Emily raises her hand asking for silence with a look of concern on her face.

Well that’s not good.

Flickering in the fog, Emily spots a catlike form before it steps back and fades into nonexistence.

“Fog cats!” she hisses, dropping infra-sight and double-casting earthen detection.

In sync, four scans fill their surroundings, mapping the footsteps of their approaching foes on all sides.

“Twelve in front, six to the right,” Emily says, almost wincing at the numbers as she waits for Enzo and Ivor.

“Six on the left flank,” Cormac vocalises for Ivor.

“Eight behind,” Enzo warns.

Glancing back, Emily sees her groupmates’ faces falling in despair. With a sigh, she makes eye contact with Oscar.

“How far off is our next camp?”

“We moved slowly today. An hour without interruptions. Two at our current pace.”

Nodding, she turns back to the front and reaches for her bandolier.

“Use grenades, then move quickly. We can’t waste the last of our mana here, we won’t even reach camp.”

Then, before he can respond, Emily charges two grenades with machina and lobs them far into the forest ahead.

“Shit. Carriers, three grenades to the back and sides!” Oscar shouts hurriedly.

The luggage carriers scramble into motion, reaching into their packs and producing grenades to hand to the mages beside them.

“Brace!” Emily calls out while sending a small stream of mana into her earrings.

Two loud bangs rip through the group, drawing a few yelps of pain from those too slow to cover their ears after Emily’s warning. Emily herself feels the thundering sound in her chest, but all she hears is a muted pop. A few shards of shrapnel fly past them, but none hit the group, most embedding themselves in the dense trees between their detonation point and the group.

Emily reactivates infra-sight, checking for any approaching fog cats while her teammates fumble to use their grenades. She spots a few crumpled beasts lying between trees, their heat bleeding out onto the floor around them.

Six weaker bangs go off around the group. A few shards of shrapnel are caught in the water barriers protecting everyone, further adding to the defensive mages’ burden.

“Check for movement!” Emily calls, now completely unconcerned about making more noise.

She sets off two earthen detection scans herself, finding three fog cats still moving in front of the group and two on the right.

“Three on the left.”

“Five still behind.”

Clicking her tongue, Emily glances at her resource reserves.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Mana:] 2150/3540

[Machina:] 3153/3540

_____

I can easily manage alone.

“Everyone stay on the defensive, I’ll deal with them,” Emily says before sprinting into the fog ahead, unconcerned about the group’s reaction.

Dropping one of her earthen detections, Emily’s hands quickly weave a set of hand signs as she runs. A pale blue glow envelopes her as a complicated magic circle forms around her. She carefully positions herself, lining up the footsteps of the fog cats in front of the group.

She halts in position, slamming her hands together to finish forming the spell then pointing her right arm out, lining up her enemies with two fingers.

“Bang,” she mutters with a grin, as the magic circle around her blazes to life with the crackle of electricity.

A bolt of lightning tears a path through the fog, ripping the magically enhanced haze from existence. Three of the fog cats fall to the ground, smouldering, as Emily quickly pulls out her revolver. She tells her second core to switch from earthen detection to infra-sight as she brings the gun up to bear.

The air before her is filled with dissipating heat, but she still easily spots the final fog cat on this side, quickly racing towards her after her flashy attack. A single pop and crack signals the cat’s demise as a lightly crackling bullet flies from the barrel of Emily’s gun into the beast’s skull.

Front clear.

Emily turns on her heel, dashing towards the right flank of the group where the fog cats have closed in on her group. She sees two cat-shaped red forms stalking the edge of the barriers, throwing themselves against them periodically and fading back into obscurity after each failed strike. She raises her gun. Two machina-charged trigger pulls fell the beasts as she continues circling the group to approach the left flank.

Three shots left, three cats.

Lining up her firing angle, Emily pulls the trigger three more times. Two more cats drop, but the third reacts in time, jumping suddenly as Emily shoots.

“Tsk.” Emily clicks her tongue, dropping the revolver into its holster and charging forwards.

The fog cat, realising its cover is useless against Emily, races to meet her. At the last moment before their collision, Emily tilts her body sideways, slipping past the cat as her hand flashes out, slitting its throat with her Claw. Emily continues moving, cleaning the Claw with a small spark of machina then retracting it again.

As she rushes to the back of the group, Emily’s hands move with mechanical grace, blurring through the motions of another spell. Flying lightning forms around her right arm as she reaches her last five opponents. All five turn to look at her, and, as if in recognition of the slaying of their pack mates, switch targets and move to surround her.

Emily takes a deep breath, releasing it slowly through a manic grin. Time stretches as she watches the first cat leap towards her. She whips her weapon, stabbing the cat through the eye with a shocking impact. With a quick twist, she rips the blade clean and sends it flying backwards, slashing past another attacking beast and paralysing it with a spark.

The other three beasts reach her, coordinating their attacks as they bite and claw at her legs and throat. With acrobatic flair, Emily springs up, spinning in the air with flying lightning’s wire trailing behind her. The wire brushes past the beasts, stunning them with lightning before the following blade slashes them to pieces.

Emily lands in the centre of the three bleeding beasts and calmly stands up. She tosses flying lightning into the head of the cat she only stunned, before dismissing the spell. Leaving the corpses behind, she rejoins her group, finding them standing together tensely, with the defensive barrier mages panting in exhaustion.

“Everything’s dead,” Emily calls as she retakes her place at the head of the formation. “Now, let’s get the fuck out of here!”