Faint voices drift through the branches, carried close by the playful rustle of the breeze. Low murmurs, drowned by the rushing river. Bursts of laughter. I still can´t see their owners, hidden from my view by the dense undergrowth. But I can see the smoke of their campfire. It whirls lazily through the forest, carrying with it the sweet, nutty, and briny notes of grilled fish. My hunger stirs. I catch myself taking a step closer without thinking.

No, no, stop! I need to know if those people are after me or not.

I try to pierce the ambient hush with my ears. To catch the fleeting words slipping through the shadows. But I can´t make sense of the snippets of conversation reaching me. I need to get closer.

How can I get closer without revealing myself?

I´m an idiot. I can use body runes now.

I take out my bottle of goat blood and open it. A slightly rancid and cloying odor assaults my nostrils. I grimace. It is starting to spoil. It still buzzes faintly with mana, but it won´t last much longer. A week, maybe.

I paint one of my new silence body runes on each of my ankles and wait for the smelly blood to dry on my skin. It feels inert, without mana. A simple tattoo in brown-red. This is not how I ever thought a rune should look. Only a faint shimmer reveals that there is some mana in those strokes.

I inject some of my mana into the feeder, and the rune starts to shine. It glimmers softly with a barely perceptible inner light. Embers hiding underneath ashes or the tender radiance of the moon behind a veil of clouds. A light still feeble enough not to give me away, at least during the day or if I cover it up. That is more like it. But does it work?

I step on a twig. It snaps into two pieces, but no sound reaches my ears.

Laughter bubbles up inside me, abrupt and uncontainable. I slap my hand over my mouth to stem the noise down. The last thing I need is for those people to hear me now. Will they? How far does the effect reach? I kick a bunch of leaves up, no sound either. More laughter bubbles up. There is no need to repress it. I let it burst out, shaking and choking, in complete silence. The absurdity makes me spill wave after wave of more silent laughter. I can´t hear anything. Even the birds and the wind, the whole forest has grown quiet.

Slowly, I calm down my excitement. Well, this may be a problem. I need to turn it down, or it will be useless. After all, I want to be able to hear myself. I throttle the stream of mana that I am feeding it down into a slow trickle, barely anything. I try to break more twigs. My steps are still soundless, but I can hear the chirps and rustles of the forest again. It is almost like there exists a sphere of silence around my feet, centered on the rune. There comes no sound out of it. No sound exists inside. Depending on the mana I feed it, the radius of the sphere only covers my feet and up to my thighs, or I can make it cover me entirely. But that leaves me unable to hear the outside anymore.

A waft of mouthwatering smell of the grilled fish reminds me of my hunger. I sneak closer to the campfire, keeping to the shadows and the dense undergrowth.

The dense smell hangs heavy in the air. I can catch wisps of other aromas, garlic, and citrus-like acidity. It reminds me of Sundays. Of temple priests, with their woven baskets, feeding the masses.

“You can say what you want, but it feels wrong to have to kill some girl.” I can see them now. A trout on a spit is slowly roasting over the smoldering embers. Two men are sitting on low stools nearby, warming their hands over the fire. Their clothes are strange, long, and flowing.

“You think I like it? I don´t, but what can we do? The young master has ordered it.” Wait, what are they talking about?

“Yeah.”

“You know that if we get that compass, there can be no witness left to rat out that we have it. It could put our clan in peril.”

They are talking about me, are they not? What is up with this stupid compass? Who even are these people? I´ve never seen men with buns and long hair before.

“You think we have a chance to get it before the others? There are more factions arriving each day. It´s a race. The word has gotten out now.”

“How should I know?”

A bowl of white steamed rice appears in the hand of one of the men conjured out of thin air. What was that? Does he have a spatial storage artifact? How rich are they?

“Eehw! Did you fart?” asks the man holding the bowl.

“What?” The other one looks at him, frowning. “No?”

“Never mind, I thought I smelt something, but it´s gone now.”

I flinch. Shit! He smelt me, probably. Well, my clothes. They still stink of sewers from my breakthrough. I take a few steps back, deeper into the bushes. I can still see them, but their voices seem distant and muffled again.

I should probably make myself scarce. Change valleys again and continue my way. They want to kill me.

But the smell of cooked food is so enticing.

I shake my head. I did nothing to them, and they want to kill me. Only because of something I have. They are just like common bandits. Even If they babble about not wanting to kill me, they do. I´ve heard the same speech before from half of the guards in the city whenever they brutally beat up some street kid. “I´m just following orders.” “I´m just enforcing the law.” Things they say to convince others that they are not monsters. They think that they are better than the enforcers of some gang. Lies! They are just part of the biggest gangs there are. Whose leaders are strong enough not to need to hide, strong enough to dictate what they want the laws to be. To make the rest of us cower and obey.

They have started to eat now. I watch them throwing half-eaten fish heads

onto a mountain of vegetable peels and discarded snippets of some roots I can barely make out from this distance. I sigh longingly. My stomach growls, making itself known. Maybe I can wait until they continue. Search through what they leave behind.

I feel like a scavenger waiting for scraps. A scrawny alley-cat, hiding behind the dumpster, stalking the merchants at the end of a market day.

Can I rob them? Maybe, but it is tough to come up with a plan. There is nobody else to distract them while I cut the purse. They don´t even have a purse. There is no crowd to disappear into. There is only me and them.

Can I get close without them seeing me? Risky, I stand out too much. Even when they sleep, they can keep watch in turn. They could have an alarm. Even if I could get close, the spatial artifact most likely is a ring. How can I get that off without them waking up?

I would need to overwhelm them, to beat them up. I have to snort. Yeah, not likely. They have the advantage of numbers. The advantage of advancement, most likely. You need to be at least copper-grade to be able to use spatial artifacts due to needing to inject mana into them, that much I know. Are they copper-grade? Silver? They also have better equipment. I saw good-quality spears leaning against a tree trunk beside them. There are also scabbards of short swords hanging from their belts.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

They are the type of people I would never mess with if I could choose. But I can´t choose, can I? I need to do something now that I still have some strength left. I need to do something before I wither away.

How can I stack the cards in my favor?

I need to surprise them somehow. My best advantage is that I am aware of where they are, but they are not aware of me. I have runes. I can choose the terrain if they play along a bit. They were following the stream upwards. I can check out what is ahead in that direction.

I slowly creep around the campsite in a wide circle, out of sight, trying to step on stones, to not leave tracks, to erase those I do.

Can I neutralize them without killing them? Maybe. It seems even more risky. Why does it bother me? They are going to kill me if they catch me. Why shouldn´t I kill them?

Maybe it bothers me because right now, I could still choose to walk instead. It´s not like I am driven into a corner.

But I may get cornered someday if even more and more people appear in the area to hunt me. And then I won´t be in control.

Maybe they have something in that spatial artifact that can help me escape, or at least something that I can use to disguise myself, apart from steaming rice.

My mouth waters again just thinking about it.

Something coils and curves, darting between the crevices and gaps at the border of the river. A serpent, going back into hiding because the sun isn´t shining anymore onto her boulder. I follow her with my eyes until I can´t make her out anymore. An idea is blooming in my mind.

They will come past here tomorrow, won´t they?

I crouch down, take out my bottle of goat blood, and paint a silence rune on the side of the boulder the serpent was sunning herself on.

I watch my work critically. It is visible. I dig for some stones in the river and arrange them over the rune. Trying to make the watermarks coincide with the surroundings. Finally, I am satisfied. There is only a barely discernible glow filtering through the stone left. You don´t even see it if you don´t know what to search for.

Satisfied with my trap, I continue. I need to prepare a few more.

I´m back next to the campsite, perched up high among the sturdy branches of a chestnut tree, trying to ignore the smells.

I wait. I wait for them to break up camp, but they are taking their time.

Night falls, and they still haven´t moved on. Instead, they go to sleep. But not after first setting up a glowing circle around the camp. If I had any ideas of sneaking into their camp left, they are gone now.

I press my back against the gnarled bark and massage some blood into my numb limbs. The leaves around me rustle faintly in the wind. Wrapped up in my enchanted cloak, I don´t feel the cold. But I still envy the crackling fire down there. The laughter, the companionship. I incline myself forward until I´m comfortable on a solid tree limb. I brace my arms around it and tie my wrists loosely together with a piece of sturdy string. The night gets darker. I try to relax by listening to the crickets. The warm flickering rays of the campfire dancing with the shadows lull me into sleep.

They wake up in the morning without any hurry. I watch them eating breakfast jealously. Finally, they lift camp. As I thought they would.

They go towards the river, as I thought they would.

They go upstream, still entranced in their chatter, as I thought they would.

I can see the serpents in the distance, warming themselves like I thought they would be.

But now the two men are crossing over to the other side of the river to continue upstream, which makes them bypass all of the traps I set yesterday evening.

“Fuck.”

I watch them, dumbfounded. They are still animatedly chattering away.

The sun shines warm and bright, making the always-present birds flutter and chirp, happy and excited. I lean onto my staff, cursing under my breath.

Did my plan fail? Not really. I can´t know. They just evaded it without even realizing it was there!

I track back and scale the canyon I encounter until I reach the top. I skip between low olive-green bushes to get ahead of their position. I scale back down, way upriver of them. And now I´m setting up my traps again, this time on both sides of the river.

The serpents hiss at me, but I keep them away with my staff whenever they come too close. Drawing runes with one hand frantically.

I can already hear distant conversations coming closer. There is no time to hide the runes. Thankfully, in the bright midday sun, the whole river shimmers and reflects the light like thousands of mirrors painting ephemeral rainbows, and the runes don´t stick out in that light spectacle.

I barely have time to hide under the dense, hanging branches of a willow before I see them coming around the corner. I activate my silence body runes.

They stroll past. I hold my breath and tense in anticipation.

The first man enters the effective zone of my trap. His unsteady strides take him close to the serpent, oblivious. The serpent also seems oblivious. But then the man steps onto her body, and she snaps around and bites down. The man jumps back. He tries to kick the serpent off of him frantically, waving wildly with his arms. He screams in silence, but there is still no sound, and his companion doesn´t hear him. He skips and jumps around, but the boulder he is on isn´t that big, and he steps into the water. The current catches him, yanking him down. He bashes his head violently against the stones and goes limp. The roaring river drags him down. He is slapped from boulder to boulder in a wild tumble.

That went way better than I expected.

Finally, his companion realizes what is happening. He runs after him screaming and poking with his spear, impaling the serpent against the ground.

“Take an antivenom,” he screams, but his friend can´t hear him with his head trapped underwater. He starts to run even faster. Slipping and stumbling between algae-covered boulders, trying to reach his friend before he is washed away. Yeah. I can´t let you reach him.

I dart towards them, silence rune still activated. I hop and skip and balance myself over the boulders. Running towards them from their backs at top speed. The second man isn´t aware of my presence, still engrossed in trying to fish his unconscious or dead friend out. I´m about to reach him without him realizing it. I hold my staff high behind my back to accumulate momentum and swing out with all the force I can muster. The staff starts an arc towards the back of his head.

My left foot impacts against a stone, kicking it into the air. It flies outside of my silence-sphere and clatters against a boulder. The man is turning. My staff is already whirling towards his head, but it catches him on the side of it. There is a sonorous crack, and the staff vibrates in my hands from the impact. But part of the force must have been cushioned by his movement. He wobbles drunkenly. Then he whirls around, and I see a metallic flash flying towards my face. I´m barely able to step back. His sword misses my throat by millimeters. A strand of my hair remains behind, cut off, floating softly to the ground. He looks at me, confused, still wobbly on his feet.

“It´s you, isn´t it?” he accuses me. “It was you… You will pay for what you did!”

His sword starts to glow. What is this? Fuck! I jump back. He closes the distance and strikes out with his sword. The tip of my staff goes flying, leaving it a palm shorter. I didn´t even feel the impact. It just cut through like a razor. I take a step back, another, frantically balancing over the boulders. My beaten rubber soles prevent me from falling. He follows me, swaying from side to side, closing the distance again. He raises his sword, threatening to cut my head off this time. But then he slips on the slick, algae-covered stones, falls over, and crashes shoulder-first into a boulder, sending his sword flying. I stop retreating, snap out with my shortened staff, and smash it into the side of his head, again, again, and again. I scream and hit him again.

I stop, panting. He isn´t moving anymore. A gasp escapes my lips. What have I done?

My stomach gnaws in pain. I pat all over the body, searching for loot, but there is nothing apart from the sword.

In a trance, I trudge towards the first man. He has a ring. I pull it off his swollen fingers and put it on. After injecting a bit of mana into it, it shrinks until it fits snugly. A maybe twelve cubic meter big space opens inside my mind, full of random stuff I don´t care about right now. I just care for the food. It is there, piled up in a corner. How do I get it out?

I imagine one of those bowls of rice appearing in my hand. I feel a sucking sensation on my core. Then it appears. Warm and comforting. I take a handful out, shove it into my mouth, and moan. Nutty, sweet, and starchy, like the soft embrace of the caretakers of the orphanage I lived in before it was shut down.

My mind drifts back to how I got this meal. To the dead bodies that float into the distance. Now the rice tastes bitter, and my appetite wanes.

I sit down, still munching on the rice. My disgust at myself warring with my hunger.

I watch the water flow, enthralled. I´m a killer now, a murderer. In the moment of truth, I valued my life over theirs, almost like a noble would do. Is it the arrogance that comes with strength?

They had nothing personal against me. They were just following orders. They are all just following orders like soldiers.

Soldiers kill, while mages and other nobles who give the orders just sit back in their fancy armchairs, sipping on some fancy imported liquor. Watching people die like it is a game. Sending people to kill and to die for some stupid treasure, some money, a piece of land. For them, none of us matter. We may as well be cattle.

Will there come more after me? Should I run next time? I have supplies now. I should be happy, but everything seems hollow.

Let us move on before someone else arrives. I store all my belongings in my new ring and start walking.

I scale another wall. The canyon at my feet is like a serpent that slitters away into the ocean of leaves, into the shadows. I sit down at the mouth of another cave. Waiting for something. Listening for noises in the wind, waiting for movement. But there is nothing, so I turn around and collapse into the cave.