They planned to search the area close to the village first. On the first night, they scouted a large region to the east but found nothing. The next night, they headed northeast, starting from the northernmost point of their previous search. Vultressant’s mapping ability was ideal for this sort of thing, as he could mark their progress and note any interesting finds. Even with the mapping tool, they found nothing that night either. They were following a grid pattern with their searches, so on the third night they went southeast. In this sector, they began to find the tracks that resembled those of wolves or large dogs.

“This is really weird,” Taloc said as he investigated a large circular area. “I can see where the smaller animals are coming from and heading to, but these large tracks, which should be easier to follow, appear to start here and end over there.” He pointed at the ground to the right of him.

He and Ewtain searched the area, and they found other tracks that had clear, abrupt beginnings and endings but no discernible tracks before or after. Vultressant had noted the locations on his map and was about to input their newest find when Taloc stopped him. “This is a different set of tracks,” he said. “These are deeper than the others, so this wolf is heavier. Also, there’s a void where a toenail should be.” Vultressant marked the area on his map, but he changed the color of the highlighting feature to differentiate it from the tracks of the other animal.

By morning, they had identified four distinct sets of wolf tracks and found two areas stained with blood, indicating recent kills of small game. As they investigated one of these spots, the first sun rose, ushering in a new day. The wolf tracks quickly faded from view, but the smaller animal’s tracks remained.

“Well, that’s definitely going to make these things harder to find,” Maroftis said as he chewed on a piece of raw meat. Vultressant wondered if the Korak would ever get a tapeworm. For all he knew, he might already have one.

“Why don’t we make camp here and check to see if the tracks return at dusk?” Taloc said.

“I guess, but we might not have enough food. Anyone bring extra?” Maroftis said, looking around hopefully.

“Nothing that you would want,” Vanya said. “You would have more if you hadn’t spent the entire night snacking.”

“Oh, I have more, but I need to snack to keep my strength up,” he said, patting his stomach.

“I thought that reptiles didn’t have to eat as often,” Isla said accusingly. “Don’t alligators and snakes only eat once a week?”

“Maybe I’m a hot-blooded reptile,” he countered. “I drink wine; do alligators and snakes do that?”

“They might if given the chance,” Taloc said, “although I’m sure that some college kids have given their snakes beer.”

“Ah, college,” Maroftis said wistfully.

“Wait, I thought that you were in the military or something and didn’t go to college,” Isla said, looking at him skeptically.

“Go?” he asked. “I didn’t attend, but weekend parties at colleges were the bomb. Nothing but a bunch of girls straight out of high school, alone for the first time and looking to make some terrible decisions. I was there to be one of those terrible decisions. My go-to story was that I was a linebacker on the football team at the school, and that worked like a charm. I got called out on it once when the girl I was hitting on said that there was no football team at the school, so I said, ‘I think you call it soccer in this country.’ What kind of college doesn’t have a football team?” he asked no one in particular.

Ewtain held up a hand as if to ask a question in class. “Is there a linebacker in soccer?” he asked.

Maroftis shrugged. “Hell if I know. She didn’t know either or didn’t care, because she was my hookup for the weekend.”

“Gross,” Isla said, shaking her head. “I liked it better when you could barely speak Common.”

Maroftis spread his arms. “What? Isn’t that what college is for?”

Vultressant had heard this story before and while he knew the answer, he couldn’t help asking anyway, “So what country did you act like you were from at that point?”

Maroftis gave him a side eye but then laughed and said, “Australia.”

It was Vanya’s turn to hold up a hand. “So, you just started speaking with an accent?”

“Yeah, I said it came and went,” he replied. “It probably sounded more like a bad British accent; I watched a lot of Python in my younger days, so I should have said I was from England. I don’t know. I tried to think fast, and... whatever. It all worked out.”

“Okay, okay,” Taloc said, trying to bring the conversation to an end. “You guys figure out the food situation. I need to see the map of where we searched last night.” He motioned to Vultressant, and they went away from the group to study the map.

“The green circles are from the first set of tracks that you found,” Vultressant said after he had projected the map so that Taloc could see it as well. “The blue ones are from the one with the missing nail, the orange ones are from the smallest one, and the yellow ones were from the last one we encountered.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“What do the symbols around the edges of the circles mean?” Taloc asked, looking up from the map after studying it for a few minutes.

Vultressant had used ‘less than’ symbols to show where the tracks began and ended in each area. He took a moment to change them to arrows indicating the tracks’ direction. “Better?”

Taloc nodded. “Yeah, much better. See, the exit point for each set of tracks points directly to the entry point of another set.”

Vultressant checked the distances between the areas for each color, and they appeared to be pretty uniform in distance. “They’re all about fifty feet apart,” he said. “Do you think that they jumped that far?”

Taloc shook his head. “No, there was no sign of them jumping or landing. Any ideas?”

Vultressant thought for a moment. “Flight, teleportation, turning incorporeal like your sword ability, phasing in and out of this world.”

“Let’s assume for now that those are the only possibilities,” Taloc said. “Each of these exit points aligns directly with the next entrance in a straight line. Teleportation might be the only option that requires a straight line. The visible prints didn’t follow a straight path, which means the creatures aren’t forced to move in a straight line. When I’m a shadow, I can go wherever I want, so the incorporeal option seems unlikely unless they are simply choosing to move straight. Flight should have no restrictions at all. If by phasing, you mean there’s another world overlaying this one where they still have to walk, that wouldn’t require a straight-line path either. However, if phasing means they shift from one spot to another instantaneously, then it’s essentially the same as teleportation.”

“How can we kill something that can teleport at will?” Vultressant asked, genuinely concerned about how they could defeat such a foe.

“I don’t think they can teleport whenever they want,” Taloc replied. “Look at the map.” He pointed to the areas marked with tracks. “These zones where we found tracks vary in size, but each has a lot of tracks. If teleportation is an ability, it likely has a cooldown period.”

“Even so, we’ll have to kill them quickly—otherwise they’ll escape.”

Taloc considered this, then shook his head. “We know which way they’ll teleport based on the direction they face when it happens, and we know the distance is fifty feet, or maybe that is the max range. You just need to send out one of your light globes in the direction it teleports to. You can probably leave some out while we search if you have enough mana to do it and still maintain enough for a battle.”

Vultressant nodded. “I should be fine. Did it look like the wolves were staying in each area for the same amount of time?” he asked.

“I can’t know for sure,” Taloc replied, “because the number of tracks in each area varied. The area with the blood had the fewest tracks left in it, but it looks like the animal stopped to kill and possibly eat its kill, so that would account for a lower number of tracks if the times were actually the same.” He thought for a moment. “There was another one with tracks from the beast with the missing nail on its paw that looked different. There were fewer tracks, but it had paused during its time in the area.”

“How do you know that?”

“The prints in this spot were a little deeper and more flattened, indicating that it stopped and likely shifted its weight while stationary. Maybe it was looking around or maybe smelling the air given that it’s some sort of canine. The other areas all had about the same number of tracks. I didn’t make an accounting of them, but that was how I remember it.”

The knowledge that the Ranger displayed was astonishing. Vultressant knew for a fact that Taloc had had no tracking experience prior to coming to this world, so all of his ability could be attributed to his tracking skill. Well, maybe not entirely, Vultressant hedged; he might have gained the initial knowledge and developed it by using the ability here. Vultressant contemplated his own magical abilities. “While I acquired my initial knowledge upon entering this world, I’m less certain about what I’ve learned since then. I feel like I’ve been involved in gaining new knowledge, such as learning how to summon Elida. For that, I received some instruction, but much of it was intuitive and built upon what I already knew about magic and mana. Let’s say that I’m able to send the light in the direction of one that is running from us; they’re going to be much faster than we are. How do we take them down?”

“With arrows and your fire bolt spell. Hopefully we can injure a leg or two before one tries to flee. If the things are armored like the ballowsan, then we will have a hard time downing one that wants to run, but if they’re like normal dogs, we should be fine.” Taloc must have recognized the look of concern on Vultressant’s face at the mention of the ballowsan, because he held up a hand and said, “The ballowsans have plates that protect their lower legs, and the bottom-most plates touch the ground. There were no tracks that would match that sort of plating on these wolves.”

Somewhat mollified, Vultressant nodded and said, “I could summon Elida to help us look for the wolves or wait until we find them and have her follow them if they run. The spell is pretty mana-intensive. What do you think?”

“What does the spell cost?”

“It’s almost a quarter of my mana to cast, and there’s also an upkeep. At first, it’s only five MP per minute, which is no problem, but the upkeep cost escalates radically after five minutes. I get back my mana more quickly if I’m not casting or maintaining any spells, and the rate that I get it back increases as time goes by without casting. It’s probably more efficient to cast the spell and use her for just the first ten minutes, but I’ll also need to not create any light globes during the times that I’m getting my mana back, or it’ll put me back to the slow increasing of mana every time I do it.”

Taloc nodded in understanding. Some of the games that they had played had similar mechanics, so it wasn’t a foreign concept to him. “You have that thing where you can refill your mana, so use her until you get to maybe a fourth of your total mana, then dismiss her and wait for your mana to get back to full. It may burn through your mana faster, but if the mana return rate amps up as time goes by, then it won’t be too bad. That way, if we run into anything, you’ll essentially have at least 125% of your total mana.”

“I prefer to be at 200% of my total mana,” Vultressant replied a bit more sullenly than he had meant to. “I like to win convincingly, but we never seem to do that here. At least not on our first attempt.” He thought a moment. “I guess that the first group of Gnolls went down easy,” he conceded. He had been thinking of the more recent encounters. They had done very well in the Crystal Devourer caves after they learned how to fight the creatures. They had correctly decided to avoid multiple elite versions, but almost every other encounter had tested the group. He wanted something easy.

Taloc nodded, sharing the same thoughts at the moment. “Maybe this will be like the Gnolls we ambushed.”