Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 23: 23 - Blind Spots

Adrien went in under the first line of trees alone, and Umbral Root came together in his hand before he had gone ten paces. The staff drained him the whole time it existed, and against what he had in his core that barely felt like nothing.

Absolute Mana Sense went out with the next step, pushed harder than he had ever pushed it, and presence after presence began arriving in his head with a position, a size and a density attached.

’Okay. This is basically a sonar.’

The comparison was stupid enough to almost make him smile, and it worked. He could not see through trees, and he knew perfectly well that something was moving eighty paces to his left, and that something else lay further ahead under the ground, motionless except for a slow pulse of mana.

Ariane was nowhere in range, and neither were the elves, so he kept walking. He believed something had driven the mountain beasts down the slope.

The first creature he avoided was easy. Absolute Mana Sense caught it long before his eyes could, pacing between two trees ahead of him and slightly downhill, and Adrien changed direction before he reached the ridge and kept a thick wall of pine between them. A few minutes later he got a look at it through the branches: six legs, grey hide, and a mouth that opened considerably further down its neck than any mouth had business opening.

’Yeah. I’ll pass.’

He circled wide enough that it never lifted its head. The next one wanted more care. Its mana was denser, enough that he stopped the moment it touched the edge of his range, and it moved in short fast bursts before going motionless again. He got down behind a fallen trunk and waited.

Something black crossed between the trees ahead of him, near enough the size of a horse, with hooked claws on four limbs and eight pale eyes set across a flat face.

’That seems familiar.’

One of the things from Greymoor. It stopped close enough that he could hear its claws going into the soil, and killing it would cost him considerably more than he wanted to spend on the way to somewhere else.

’And you’re very likely one of the things that put holes in Garrick. I’ll come back and say hello later. Right now, my sister.’

He memorised where it was standing, waited until it moved off east, and slipped west between two trees.

The deeper he went, the more Absolute Mana Sense stopped feeling like a talent he switched on and started feeling like another sense entirely. He knew when something was coming before the branches moved, when a creature had stopped behind him, and when two predators ahead of him were circling each other and had not decided anything yet.

So instead of fighting his way through that forest, he walked through the gaps between the things living in it. Once he went halfway up a bank because three of them were converging below. Another time he spent five minutes inside the root ball of an overturned tree while something with enough mana to make his arms go cold passed within thirty paces. He never saw that one and was content to keep it that way.

Several hours in, Adrien stopped beside a narrow stream and pushed his senses out ahead of him, and got nothing back. He frowned and pushed further and got nothing again. Behind him the forest was crowded, six creatures inside his range without trying and two more off east. Ahead of him there was an empty patch hundreds of paces across.

’That’s weird.’

He crouched at the water’s edge and watched for a while, because a forest this full of predators does not go empty over property lines. Going forward slowly, the emptiness continued. Nothing crossed overhead, the insects thinned, and the tracks in the softer ground disappeared entirely the closer he came.

’Why is nothing going in there?’

That was a much better question than asking why nothing lived there, because it had an answer. Something was keeping them out.

He worked along the edge of it rather than walking into the middle, because if somebody had gone to the trouble of building a safe area, arriving from the obvious direction was an efficient way of introducing himself with an arrow in the chest.

He went round the rim until his senses caught something. Human-sized presences, a great many of them, too tangled at that distance to separate.

’Well. That’s new.’

He got low and went in closer, and the smell reached him before anything else did. Smoke, cooked meat, sweat, and something chemical underneath that he could not place. Then the voices.

Adrien stayed down until the trees thinned enough to see through, and found a camp in the middle of the empty ground. Calling it a camp was generous. Rough tents strung between trunks, fires inside rings of stones, and a perimeter of wooden stakes nobody had bothered to straighten. Metal cages near the centre of it, with people inside them.

He shifted behind a patch of brush and let his senses map the ground while his eyes worked along the bars. Three humans in the nearest section. One was a young man he had never seen. The second was older, early forties at a guess, bearded and gone to nothing inside clothes that had once fitted him.

Something in the borrowed memories moved.

’Wait.’

He knew that face. The man had served Alaric, and Adrien could not pull the name and could see him clearly enough standing behind his father at a distance of years, armed and quiet and always four feet back. And according to every memory in his head, that man had disappeared before the trial.

His attention went to the next cage, and there were elves in it, which on any other day would have been the most remarkable thing in the forest.

One was a young woman, very pale, with long ears coming up through pale blue hair tied high with a dark red ribbon. Pink came through the blue whenever the firelight caught it, and even at that distance her eyes were an unmistakable magenta. Her travelling clothes were filthy and had been good, and she was sitting close against a smaller figure beside her.

Another elf stood in the neighbouring cage. Blond, hair cut short and even exhausted and locked up he had the sort of face Adrien assumed was stamped on coins somewhere. Behind them both, a small elven girl had been walled in almost completely by the adults around her.

’Of course the elf looks like that.’

Adrien’s eyes went along the cages one last time and stopped at the far end, on dark hair and clothes he recognised and dried blood down one sleeve, on somebody sitting with her back against the bars.

His grip on Umbral Root tightened until the wood creaked.

’Ariane.’

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