Me, Merlin, Greg, and most of the village’s administrators stand in the map room as we wait for Charlie and the commander to arrive. No one knows what is going on yet. Moments later, he arrives and I keep silent, to not add to the cacophony the headless chickens are creating.
In a booming voice, the commander yells.
“SILENCE!!”
For a moment everyone imitates me, shutting their mouths and stopping all movement. We are still clueless about what is happening, but Charlie wouldn't have called for an emergency meeting if it wasn’t important. And as he starts speaking I come to realize that even my worst predictions are short of the situation.
“We don’t have the time for pleasantries today. Now everybody shut up for a few minutes. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have called even half of you for a meeting, but these are unprecedented circumstances. We started getting reports about disappearances from people near the high level zone. There are scouts heading to investigate and learn more at this very moment. It’s not some distant possibility, but a real certainty that there is something really serious going on.
“So far we learned about 16 people from 9 different villages going missing and every single one was in the vicinity of the high level zone, or as some other villages started to call it, the HLZ. There is a lot we are still piecing together, but we are probably dealing with at least one aspect of what the robot told us about.”
Without thinking, I call out:
“Automaton.”
Everyone looks at me. Realizing I interrupted everyone’s train of thought with the unrelated fact, I just carry on and get it over with as quickly as possible. “It’s his race, some find ‘Robot’ offensive.”
Charlie shakes his head and the commander chimes in.
“Our working theory at the moment is that either the mobs in the HLZ are no longer strictly confined there, or people are somehow being attracted inside. Within those, there are a lot of subcategories, but further speculation is not a good use of our time, not without more data. Nash, can you find out more?”
“What do you have in mind?” I ask, not caring about the potential for exposing my capabilities to more people in the face of a threat with such destructive potential.
“You can sense stuff from a distance, right?
“Yes, and it got better since the attack on Max’s village, but what exactly do you have in mind?”
“Go through a few stops and see if you can find anything.”
I scrunch my face and say, “A couple of days ago I heard of 2 people missing in the village selling paint. I looked through the rough area they must have been in, but such a vast area is hard to cover in short amounts of time, especially without knowing what I’m looking for.”
“Do your best. We are accelerating a few programs like seed planting with the help of other villages and sending a lot of scouts out. If you can look around a bit to check that they have access to mana for the flying crafts like they are supposed to, I would appreciate it.”
“Done.”
“We called you just for that for now, the rest is mostly details we will have to handle.”
I nod imagining he thought I would need to go back out, but I don’t need to do that and instead walk to a corner and sit. With a larger inner world, I can reach the outside even through the strange special anomaly that is the town hall. I just have to be careful not to let my perception field look at the spatial runes making the space inside the town hall be bigger on the inside than on the outside.
For another few minutes, I keep part of my attention on the meeting, but he was correct that they are just dealing with details where my expertise wouldn’t be very useful. I look at the two pages of notes delivered to me and concentrate my efforts there. In an almost meditative state, I send my perception field back and forth over one of the smallest areas delineated as the probable disappearance place from one of the groups. A 4-mile strip less than 200 miles south of the black panther's territory where a trio went missing.
I look for metals, pieces of cloth, blood, and anything else that may indicate something happened there.
In the meantime, I turn on the mana tap for Aspen at full blast and he goes from a couple of points a second to 50 focusing fully on growing the network underground. Completing the circle has just become priority number one and I would not wait for even a moment more than necessary.
Even after completing the circle, I will still be limited in how much ground I could cover with the perception field and setting up runes to detect anyone or anything closing in on the barrier is a must to find where to send my perception field, but the first steps come first.
Aspen focuses on growing his roots as I continue working on the 4-mile strip sweeping each inch for anything even remotely out of the ordinary.
On my umpteenth pass, I find a spot just inside the high-level zone with marks on the ground. Familiar marks, though in a different shape than usual. A small overturned spot from something accelerating really fast with the help of mana infusion.
The ground has an almost magical ability to avoid actual damage from even the strongest of us running, but with mana infusion or similar skills sometimes there are marks left behind. So it doesn’t matter whether you are walking or pounding the ground as if it deserved to be pulp, all that is left is a light footprint for scouts to follow.
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I look at the surroundings, looking for the smallest broken branch, more overturned earth, or some claw mark from a beast and after a few minutes, I find small indentations in the ground. Like someone was dragged just outside the limit for a few meters though I can’t tell in which direction.
I open my eyes and look at the meeting, now with only a couple of people as most of them left given they would add little after they had their tasks assigned.
I walk to the table, still keeping the portal open for Aspen though it takes some concentration while inside the town hall. Interrupting them, I say:
“I found something.”
Everyone looks at me expectantly.
“It doesn't answer a lot, but there is a stop right here,” I say moving the map to the spot and zooming in. “Here is a mark in the rough shape of a paw with signs of mana infusion to accelerate movements, and here is a drag mark, in this angle, though I don’t know in which direction.”
“I can take a good guess,” Greg says, but one of the oldest scouts still at the meeting gently admonishes him.
“Probably a good guess, but we can’t assume anything, if we stop looking for clues and just look for stuff to confirm what we think, we are screwed.” Everyone nods and I continue. “Either way, like Richard said, someone or something in this region either left the HLZ or attracted the group inside.”
“I will send a pair to check it out. When they are near, can you focus and act as another safeguard? We will have people monitoring the situation but it will give me peace of mind.” Richard asks me.
“Sure. Just tell me when and I will make a few formations at the place. Won’t be anything fancy like in the village, but it will be another layer of protection.”
“Doesn’t anyone else see that this is a bad idea?” Greg says.
“I’m sending a pair of level 70 scouts to the area. They have the speed and strength to escape just about anything,” replies Richard. “And we need this information.”
I leave as they finish hammering out a few details and the cartographers take over the map, as we no longer have any need for it.
I look back and see them looking at the edges of the HLZ for any signs like the one I spotted, though they probably won’t find anything. At least there will be more eyes looking through the place instead of having to rely only on me trying to track the movements of the beasts.
The thin and patchy place has only a few needle-wide tendrils weighing less than a gram per meter. Trying to work with any scale of runic formations will require a lot more mass, so with Aspen’s help I focus fully on increasing the mass and I even absorb a few trees in the vicinity, but they won’t be any big help given their placement in relation to the small clearing the scouts are headed to.
But as I fatten the tendrils up and continue to grow and intertwine more thin hair-like roots through the network underground, runes begin to form surrounding the place and the trees become mana batteries a little closer for me to use should they be needed.
The maximum mana throughput sits far too low for my comfort even with the smaller distance, but it’s better than nothing.
I take my wooden armor from the inner world and connect the comm that will indicate I’m online to the control panel of the comm center and sooner than I would have liked, barely 3 hours afterward, I hear a voice.
“It’s time. They are approaching the place.”
“Tell them to not move out of the area I designated except if it’s to escape,” I instruct.
“Already did so. Too many people went missing already, we are going at it really cautiously.”
I pull another pair of runic formations and this time the holographic screens just like the ones in the library pop up. I send the feed of the scouts approaching the place with a couple of runic ‘cameras’ surrounding the place.
As everyone else stares at the video feed from the screens, I directly tap into the feed and my vision is replaced with an overview of the spot they will approach. Burges and the others have been hard at work on the design of the camera and it finally pays off.
As they approach I speak to the commander:
“Ask them to wait another two or three minutes.”
“Why?
“I’m setting up a redundant line for communication to the place, it’s going for hundreds of miles and any single interruption in the chain will cut communications, mana, and any help not only for them but for anyone else in the chain. Before now it wasn’t really critical… But if they are going to poke the bear…”
“Say no more, I will tell them to wait.” He says being slightly relieved at the precaution I was taking.
I stop everything else and send my full focus to a good 300 miles further south, as I grow two tendrils in one another’s direction reaching to cross the gulf. One from a village and another from the tendril circling around the HLZ. I rub my temples from pushing so hard, but I finish in three minutes, still within the time limit I set.
“Done,” I say. As the scouts sitting some 100 meters away from the barrier listen to my words they start moving.
They keep their distance, a good 10 meters away from the high-level zone as I guide them, and they expertly look at it like trackers, much more experienced than me. I have a little skill in the area given I lived on Pando for so long and even if only by osmosis you pick things up.
I didn’t actively hunt and never developed the skill properly, but it was a base for me to learn more about after coming here. I only started to pay a little more attention to it because of how useful it was in tracking wolves. Though it has been a while since I hunted them and that will probably continue to be the case unless things change.
As they brush the few leaves off the spot I guide them to, one of them kneels and the other stands guard paying attention to everything around them including especially the HLZ. Their side was supposed to be safe, given they could handle the strongest monster we encountered this side of the line with eyes closed and hands tied behind their back, but they wisely are taking all possible precautions.
I look closely and even ‘zoom in’ one of the runic cameras as the kneeling scout's face is inches away from the scratch mark on the ground, looking at it from all angles.
“Whoever fell here was dragged in this direction.” He says pointing at the HLZ.
“How certain are you?” asks the standing scout.
“Very.”
I hold my breath as I watch them approaching the dividing line and they look over the other spot I indicated, this time by growing two roots beside it to knee height.
They look on and the same scout kneels before inching along trying to get the closest look he can without entering the high-level zone and squints his eyes going up and to the sides at the disturbed soil about 2 meters from where they entered.
I feel my heart pumping blood as I extend my awareness around the place to act quickly if some beast comes running over.
The scout mumbles to himself, but I ignore him only paying attention to the place beyond, though as he takes a few steps back I relax a little again and take a deep breath.
“Definitely mana infusion damage and it looks to be from a big paw.”
Richard, the commander, asks:
“Do you feel like risking calling the beast over to confirm whether it matches the paw print?”
“It won’t be like a fingerprint, we can only compare rough shape and size, but yes, I think it’s worth it.” Says the standing scout and the other steps back.
“So call the beast,” Richard says and they prepare themselves.
Both take their spear from their back. The older scout who was on watch inches forward to cross the line passing his spear until one of his hands is inside the HLZ.
All they have to do now is wait. Wait for the beast to come over.