Just like I was worried about raising my voice with only half a mile of distance separating our unit from the enemy, the noise made by those humans quickly proved to be the best disguise for any sound that we made while approaching.
Everything went pretty well, all the way up until the point when we encroached on the huge group of humans, reaching merely a hundred steps away from their rear guard.
"They know," Syie suddenly whispered as she froze a few steps ahead of me and Fay. She turned her head and looked me straight in the eyes. "They know we are coming. Someone strong is..."
'Dodge.'
It wasn't a conscious thought. It was a scream of my soul, uttered when my brain calculated stimuli faster than I could consciously perceive it.
'Shit!'
Jerking my body up, I leaped away in Fay's direction, crashing into her on the go and causing the both of us to stumble away. The very moment I wrapped my around her, I gritted my teeth and channeled my aura into nearby shadows, using them as moving bumpers to push the two of us away even faster.
BOOM!
A hole suddenly appeared where the two of us were just a split second earlier, with the ground formerly within that hole now shooting in every direction as an invisible attack nearly found its target.
'Wha...?!'
This only made sense. If my own abilities were the dead giveaway and everything I learned about aura so far served as further hints... Then I still failed to understand the most important quality of how the existence of aura affected fights in this world.
It was something I missed thus far because of my overreliance on the guns... But how exactly do others utilize aura? How could a mage control the weather to the point of summoning a powerful storm all on her own? Or how could yours truly somehow materialize elemental darkness just by infusing it with aura?
I knew not the answer to those questions. But the very importance of this answer finally dawned on me, when an invisible attack nearly claimed my life or, more importantly, hurt Fay.
'There's no telling just what kind of abilities people will have in this world!'
Heck! Save for a vague feeling I've gained through the use of our bond, I had no clue how Fay's own abilities worked! For example, I learned that she could turn herself into a semi-temporal form to traverse the distance at great speeds by slipping through the fabric of the world's aura...
I only learned about this ability of hers when she first displayed it to my eyes, back when I asked her to show off before Makary. And while I've gained some basic, rudimentary understanding of how it felt for Fay to use it thanks to our bond, the actual theory about the principles of this skill of hers was nothing more but my conjecture.
Thud.
The boost from the piston-like footholds could only last us so far. Ejecting the two of us any harder would only make it impossible for me to control our descent while likely sending the two of us off to crash into some random tree.
Eye of time. A skill that raised my already high intelligence, allowing the gears of my mind to spin even faster, processing information at some ungodly rate.
Darkness core. Something that I've assimilated and that now allowed me to channel aura through elemental darkness. And right now, it has become the very foundation of the makeshift plan I developed on the spot.
And ultimately, the kiss of death that developed "Blood and Love" inherence within my bond with Fay.
In what had to seem like an instant for others, unaffected by the effects of my skills, a sea of tiny, extremely narrow, and fragile strands of elemental darkness grew out from the shadows within the undergrowth.
Within the single frame of time that I operated within, the world suddenly turned checkered, with every square inch of space marked by its four corners with a tiny strand of vertically rising darkness.
'Now, let's duke it out, you fucker,' I thought, gritting my teeth as I lifted my blood tribute and closed my eyes.
"Hon?!"
Fay freaked out, instantly realizing what I'd done. When she lashed out and slapped the enemy spell away, she inevitably lost the focus necessary to maintain our bond within a choke-hold. And so, as the lust from our deep kiss translated into a wild lust for blood, her ability to keep our bond in check only degraded.
And now, regardless of how small the prize of using my blood tribute for a little bit was, Fay still felt it.
"It's okay," I muttered, keeping my eyes closed as I focused all of my attention on the sea of strands of darkness within the endless ocean of the world's aura all around.
A second passed. Then another one. And then...
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'There you are!'
The outermost layer of my strands of darkness crumbled when another attack flew our way.
My tiny strands of darkness had no shot at stopping the attack. But that was never their purpose.
'Now!'
Releasing my hold over the darkness, I filled it with aura and just a single intention.
To follow the path of the least aura resistance.