Chapter 88 – Into the Forest Again

Chapter 88 – Into the Forest Again

Emily steps into the treeline, her friends close behind, feeling the dense mana wrap around her like a comfortable blanket. She takes a deep breath, appreciating the weight pressing on her shoulders and the lack of rain to start their journey, before glancing back at her friends. Dante, Enzo, and Ivor barely react, but the other three show signs of discomfort, with Tom’s reaction being the strongest.

I see. The higher your circle and the more mana you can control, the more at home you feel in areas of high mana density. The slight oppressive feeling I got last time I stepped into The Glade is completely gone for me now.

She gives her friends a few moments to adjust before continuing into the trees. As she walks, Emily summons two balled-up bird scouts and tosses them into the air. They rapidly unfurl, flapping their wings to stabilise their rotation before floating down to land on Emily’s shoulders.

“You made any more like Harold?” Juliana asks, referring to the bird Emily made and gifted her for her seventeenth. “Why are you letting them out here?”

“These guys are a little different from Harold,” Emily explains, cringing slightly at her girlfriend’s chosen name for the poor clockwork bird. “For him to work, you have to wind him up, then he’ll fly around for a bit before landing, right? Well, I’m controlling these guys, and they have surveillance arrays inside to let me see through their eyes. They’re very useful scouts.”

“Woah!”

Juliana reaches out to pet one of the birds as Emily puts her hands into the pouches at her hips, pulling out two dark bronze contraptions with cuboid bodies and four thin, multi-jointed legs. She lifts them towards the birds, under her friends’ curious gazes, and places them to the scouts’ chests. Immediately, the legs curl around the birds, clasping the contraption to their chests and letting out a small orange glow for a second at the connection point.

“This attachment - I call it a thermal pack - adds my infra-sight spell to their surveillance arrays.”

The birds spread their wings and take off, disappointing Juliana. Emily sends one of them into the air above the canopy, and makes the other weave between the trees ahead of them, before offloading the control and observation of both to one core and temporarily designating it the scout core.

“Why don’t you just include thermal vision in the original surveillance spell?” Enzo asks as the birds vanish above them.

“Thermal vision makes them power hungry. I’m gonna have to refill them every few hours now: without it, I could fly them for a day before needing to. Also, making the array modular like this means I can give them other augments like night vision or mana tracking instead,” Emily explains, happy to talk about her creations.

“Wait, mana tracking? You can do that?” Hester asks.

“Yeah. I’ve been messing around with mana detection crystals to try and add their properties to surveillance arrays. So far I can only use it to see rough outlines of mana signatures within short distances of the array though, so it’s kind of useless for the birds.”

They keep walking through The Glade, the casual conversation and calm confidence exuding from Emily and the three forest veterans slowly easing the unease of the newcomers. In the early evening, a couple of hours before they should arrive at the first clearing to set up camp, and a few hours after the start of a torrential downpour, Emily’s scout core alerts her to motion ahead.

She quickly focuses on the feed of the bird above the trees, seeing a few faint orange shapes moving towards them a few hundred metres ahead. She sends the lower bird closer before switching focus to its view, stopping at its maximum range from her of just over a hundred metres. The shapes soon come into view, and Emily sees three ocelax sprinting towards them.

“Three ocelax a hundred metres ahead of us,” she calls over the loud rainfall. “Jules, Hester, Tom, you three deal with them.”

The three call out acknowledgement as Emily stops and lets them pass her to confront the cats. Enzo, Dante, and Ivor all come to stand next to her, watching the three newbies setting up in silence.

Hester and Juliana both start chanting, conjuring a half-moon blade of water and a barely perceptible arrow of wind respectively that hover in front of them at the ready. Tom raises his new pistol, bracing it with both arms fully tensed before him.

His form’s awful. I’ll have to teach him properly later.

“They’re here,” Emily calls out lightly, tracking the ocelax with her birds the whole time and never letting them out of her sight.

As if on cue, the first of the three cats leaps from the bushes, racing towards Tom. He pulls the trigger, his aim shaking at the recoil and sending a bullet into the cat’s shoulder.

At least he didn’t hesitate.

The cat tumbles to the ground, groaning in pain. Tom fires a second shot, this time nailing it in the head and ending the beast’s suffering. Juliana and Hester on the other hand, both release their spells at the same ocelax, piercing its chest and splitting its head in half.

Emily clicks her tongue, summoning a small throwing knife and whipping her arm forwards, sending the blade careening into the third cat’s skull, dropping it before it can try to attack the others. All three of her friends turn back to her, Tom triumphantly, the other two sheepishly, embarrassed by their mistake.

“Nice try. Tom, well done on not freaking out when the cat approached you,” she says, making the boy’s proud grin grow. “However, your form isn’t the best, and you almost missed your first shot. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you a bit once we set up camp and we should fix that quickly.”

Tom nods, reining in his confidence quickly.

Enzo and Ivor acknowledge her plan and move to help set up tents. Emily turns her full attention to her little helpers. She has three birds and one spider, all clung to different parts of her body: the birds on her shoulders and head, the spider on the back of her left hand with its legs wrapped around her palm.

She summons three thermal packs for the birds, clipping them onto their little chests, and a much bulkier pack for the spider. The spider’s pack is twice the size of the thermal pack, and contains an earth stone and the runes to add earthen detection to the scout.

Unlike the thermal pack, which simply overlays thermal sight onto the existing vision array in the birds, the vibration pack is much more complicated. It fully reworks the surveillance array to remove the visual aspect and focus on building an image through detecting vibrations.

With the normal earthen detection spell, the mage who’s casting in recieves basic information on any strong vibrations nearby, and they can use that to infer what’s approaching. But, the new array Emily has designed still does that while at the same time allowing the spider to tap its legs, releasing a small burst of earth mana in the form of an imperceptible tremor, and track the movement of the vibration caused to see its surroundings.

Emily drops the spider to the floor, settling it down in the centre of the clearing for best coverage. The three birds spread across the clearing, vanishing into the trees above to watch their surroundings for heat.

Finished with her set-up, Emily moves away from the tents her friends are setting up and pulls out the ocelax corpse.

“Tom, leave Hester your bag and come over here!”

He follows her instructions, quickly hurrying over to join her. She pulls out a knife and shows him how to skin and butcher the corpse before handing off some chunks of meat to Dante to cook. He happily obliges, setting up a small campfire and grabbing cooking utensils from Hester, who quickly takes over after noticing his lack of cooking skill.

Emily moves on to give Tom some light firearms training as the smell of sizzling meat and spices fills the clearing. She finishes her crash-course moments before Juliana calls them over to eat.

“Food’s ready!”

“Coming,” Emily responds, watching Tom slide his pistol home smoothly into its holster. “Perfect. That’s everything for now. Practise quick-draws when you have free time to make sure you’ll be able to react to an attack in time, and you’ll be golden.”

“Thanks, Emily. I really don’t know how to repay you,” Tom says sheepishly, scratching his cheek. “You’ve gone out of your way to bring me along, even though I won’t be much help.”

“Ha,” Emily chuckles, patting him on the shoulder and walking past him. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just happy to have made some friends.”

You made my time in The Dome more enjoyable. That’s worth a few hours of my life to help you at least.

They join their friends around the campfire, eating the surprisingly tasty ocelax meat.

“This is so much better than before!” Dante says with glee, ripping apart a chunk of meat with his teeth.

Emily, Ivor, and Enzo all nod in agreement.

“It’s crazy what you can do when you actually bring seasoning. I’m honestly surprised Oscar didn’t,” Emily comments, looking to Hester with gratitude. “Thanks for cooking for us.”

“No problem. Dante looked like he wanted to throw the meat into the fire without even using a pan. I fear for what we would be eating right now if I hadn’t taken over,” Hester says dryly, making the pyromaniac blanche.

“Hey! I’m not that bad!”

They all laugh, and their meal quickly passes. Afterwards, Emily and Hester clean up with a few casts of cleanse, before everyone starts heading towards their tents.

“I’ll wake Ivor for second watch, then Enzo’s on third, and Dante’s on fourth. Sound good?” Emily asks before they turn in.

Receiving nods of approval from everyone, Emily turns towards the edge of the clearing to find a nice tree to climb up, but Juliana follows her.

“What are you doing? You should go to sleep,” Emily says, deciding against scaling a tree and instead sitting down with her back against one, facing her girlfriend.

“Nope,” Juliana chirps quietly, dropping down against Emily’s side and laying her head on her shoulder. “I may not be able to help much, but I’m at least sitting through your watches with you.”

Emily smiles and slips her arm around Juliana. She plants a silent kiss on Juliana’s head before leaning her cheek against the same spot and sending two of her cores to sleep, ready to wait out the night.