Olimpia

I shuffled to the left of our group, turning my back on them as they were distracting me with their constant judging stairs and questions. To be fair, there was only one person with a judging stair. And her eyes were currently like a pair of daggers digging into my back. Hurring was impassive, only letting out a grunt when directly asked a question, but Franklin was asking every five minutes if I thought we would get into a fight soon.

That was somewhat concerning because I noticed him becoming more jittery and twitchy over the last few days, and his eyes seemed to have more white to them than before. And this wasn't just me imagining things, as I noticed everyone stepping carefully around him. Not that I really had the time to care about other's problems with all of my own right now.

However, I did find it mildly funny as every time I took off on the trail of our quarry, he would perk up, rushing after me. Then, whenever I stopped to search again, he would droop and almost collapse next to me like the strings holding him up were cut.

But in the end, their presence was still distracting, so distance was needed.

Cocking my head to the side like I was trying to hear something faint, I turned my attention inward. It wasn't really a sound I was searching for, though technically… I could say that it's a sound.

All sounds were transmitted by the air because how else would creating a shield around a person stop sound. I read somewhere that if you focused on a shield close enough, you could feel the vibrations of sound beating on its surface.

So, if you thought of the ambient energy of the world as being air, anything that makes it ripple like a sound wave would be a sound, right? And if something caused a ripple that spread out like a shockwave, then he was "hearing" the noise of some casting.

It made sense to me, even if others might not wholly agree. Not that I told anyone yet. What was I going to do, throw my analogy at the feet of the people who had the most experience on the subject? And then let them tear it apart like a pack of starving wolves?

Yeah, no, thank you. Ahh~ shit. I mentally groaned. With all of my random thoughts, I had lost control of the tendril I was trying to form, and it dissipated.

Putting aside the technicality, sad as it made me, I sighed and rolled my shoulders before tilting my head to try again. Fuck anyone who has something to say about it, like a certain fox. It helps me focus. I extended a single tendril an inch from my head and carefully pulled back the shield from its outside.

Over the course of my morning's practice, I discovered something interesting. I could strip the shielding for my tendril to the point that my tendril would dissipate into the surroundings.

It was like trying to find a singular drop of water you put into a pond. Technically possible, but would you really be able to differentiate one drop from another once they are combined?

Once I removed my will shielding from my casting, there was nothing separating it from the ambient energy of the world, and it just blew away like a wind. Which was strange and brought up questions for another time.

Which was a rather annoying fact right now. Because the less of my willpower that was inside a tendril, the easier it could pick up on the ambient energy of the world and anything passing through it. The downside was that the less willpower inside a tendril, the harder it was to manipulate. Which made complete sense but only brought up more questions for me, making me more distracted.

It was similar to when your leg fell asleep, and you tried to walk on it. Things just aren't working as they should, and you could feel that you would hurt something if you tried to run.

There was a middle ground between removing the willpower and feeling the ripples in the ambient energy that was hard to walk. Doing it while I had very limited practice and with the constant scrutiny of the others was only adding to my troubles.

It also didn't help that the ripple left a swirling eddy in its wake, sending vibrations going everywhere when it passed. Yeah, it was what allowed me to first notice it, but listening to echoes coming from every direction wouldn't help with finding the source.

That explanation was misleading, though, as it implied there was some significant distortion in the ambient energy of the world. The distortion was like the difference between a fully drawn bow and one released right before that point. There was a difference, but no one would notice unless you were looking for it.

I only noticed because I was messing around with my new casting technique and perceived a weird fluctuation in the air. It was like a twig tapping on a window in the middle of the night. It was annoying enough to spend some of my time figuring out what was happening, leading me here.

Pushing the thoughts away, I slowly pulled away small layers of willpower from a new tendril. Okay… Now, I just need t—

There! I thought, turning to look to the east. It was like the vibration given off by the weak fluttering beat of a heart.

The moment after I felt the lightest of touches on my tendril, echoes from the ripple impacted the tendril from multiple directions, muddying the waters from where it originated. But it didn't matter by then.

"That way," I said, turning to look at the others. Franklin just nodded and started moving while Kanieta squinted her eyes at me, looking rather frustrated.

"Can you explain what you are sensing again?" She asked, her tone sounding pleasant and sweet to the ear. Every hair on my body stood on end at her voice. It was far too sweet for her to actually mean anything close to it.

It had to be some kind of trick question, but I learned from my father that trying to be smart when a woman was being pleasantly-not-mad at you only made everything worse. "The ripple running through the ambient energy," I stated succinctly and accurately… for the third time.

"That's not what I'm me—" She snapped, then the bridge of her nose wrinkled in annoyance with her scrunched-up face. It was a rather cute face— nope. I thought, pushing the thought away. The only thing I could think of that was worse than intentionally making a woman mad to see the face she made was doing it to a perceptive woman who could exert actual power over you. She clicked her tongue and said, "I don't see how you are picking up something I'm not."

"If you don't believe I'm picking something up, why are you so willing to follow."

Kanieta gave me the side eye as we moved, and after a long enough time that I started to think she wouldn't answer, she said, "I can detect how your psy reacts to the pulse. Besides, we're wandering around. Until nightfall, this is as good as anything else."

"But with your lack of perception, you can't feel the ripple itself." I said, answering her petty provocation with one of my own before getting serious, “…That doesn't seem right."

She gave a grunt of exasperated agreement, and both of us let the conversation drop. But as I turned away, I noticed a glimmer that sent a shiver down my spine enter her eye, and she started muttering something about spell formations and shadows under her breath.

Ignoring whatever she was doing, I decided to stay quiet. We were in an area where a Crescent Moon camp was located. Half the struggle of staying hidden would disappear so long as we didn't purposely draw attention.

Slowly, I gathered my mental energy and formed a layer over my lower body. While it would offer little protection, it would stop my scent from spreading to plants. And it was good practice for me.

Once a tendril was reshaped and in place, it was like holding any other tendril outstretched at the ready, as long as you were standing still, at least. Shaping a tendril to cover a body part and moving it around takes a constant level of concentration and control. However, once you get used to it, it becomes second nature.

I was no longer used to it.

Not that it became hard or anything. It was the opposite.

It became too easy for me.

I would bring my leg down, and suddenly, the shell becomes empowered by the world, and my foot is now buried six inches into the ground. That was just a guess on my part. As I really didn't feel like checking how deep the hole was with a snickering Kanieta standing above and a mouth full of dust.

Or I would form the small spikes and ridges on the bottom of my feet so I would have purchased as I moved, and they would throw my foot into the air as I lost control of my casting. It was far less embarrassing than the first situation but still just as irritating because it was happening more.

Eventually, I mostly got the hang of it again, though I knew something embarrassing would happen when I was startled or reacted on instinct.

We marched over grass hillsides, across meadows, and through clusters of trees as we moved back and forth through the valley, but no matter where I led, we never seemed to get closer to the source of the ripple.

A few times, I saw signs of us crossing a fresh trail that looked like it was left by people, but I chose to ignore following it for greater speed, hoping to at least get into eyesight of my quarry. Whether my quarry left the trail or not, following it wouldn't do much. Even I couldn't lose my prey, and the trail might not even be it.

Birds chirped in the trees, and the buzzing of insects chorused around us, so no one was all that concerned about being near a large camp, but we all knew that around the next corner, danger could be lurking. So we all kept our heads on a swivel.

The sun rose into the sky as we marched and then began to fall, and I began to worry that we would never find what I was looking for. I was only getting a single direction every ping, and it wasn't telling me how close we were to the source. So, I had no idea if we were any closer.

I mean, I was reasonably confident that the ripple was slightly stronger now than when I first picked it up, but that could just be my wishful thinking. Not that it mattered, as without knowing exactly what I was detecting and far more practice than I had, how was I supposed to know the meaning of what I felt.

For all I knew, I was feeling something on the other side of the Broken Peaks, and I was just making an idiot out of myself with all of this.

Then again, and I might be deceiving myself again, it could be that the source was really, like, less than a mile close. And every time I tried to cut it off, it would dodge out of the way almost immediately. With this wooded valley, we could be two hundred feet away without knowing it.

Over and over and over and over again.

Why might I think this?

Well, I can say with great surety that I am not the most well-traveled in the world. So, I don't know what the fastest living creature or construct is. But I doubt something that can move hundreds or thousands of miles in the span of forty or so minutes exists.

It could be a shorter time frame, but that was the interval that I was stopping and reforming my detector. And every time I detected it, it was in a new location.

Rather than assuming some terrifying thing is on the other side of the Broken Peaks, releasing a pulse only I can feel and is able to move to a forty-five-degree angle from where it was the last time I checked, I would go with the far more likely situation.

A situation that involved assuming a prick could somehow anticipate or detect our movements, so we could never catch sight of them because of a hill or clump of trees blocking our view… Ah, fuck. I thought, then slumped slightly, disrupting my latest attempt to form my casting. I may have to rethink this.

Even this wouldn't be an insurmountable problem, except that I couldn't use a pulse. It wasn't even that I was unwilling.

My irritation at being outmaneuvered had long reached the point that I was fine with passing out because I released a massive pulse to find this bastard.

However, Kanieta told me she could detect me detecting the signal when she was looking. That was good to know, as it meant that casual use of mental energy would be able to go undetected by most.

You just don't want to, say, release a pulse designed to travel as far as possible and send echoes back to its origin.

I don't know about the Kin, but if I detected some strange pulse in the middle of nowhere, I would go check it out. Even if I had to take my entire party on a winding trap through one valley and into the next one over the course of most of a day.

That is a purely hypothetical situation, of course.

And in that hypothetical situation where the Crescent Moon came searching from the source of the pulse, I doubted I could skirt detection for this long, not with how I currently was. Once I have full control over my abilities, it will be a totally different situ—

"I can find them," Kanieta said smugly, causing my eyes to pop open. I was trying to hold my tendril long enough to detect the pulse, but I was having trouble focusing for some reason. No idea why.

"What are we waiting for then?" I asked, disbelief at her claim dripping off every word. Popping to my feet, I moved toward where she leaned against a tree and gave an expectant wave of my hand, motioning her to start leading us.

Her lips twisted condescendingly as her tails gave a smug flick behind her, causing my heart to sink. I'm not sure how I knew that the flick was smug, but I did. My scow in reply only made her throatily chuckle before winking at me and turning to glide between two trees.

"You know, Green," Franklin hissed in a whisper, a chuckle bubbling between his words, "there's a saying among the Kin. 'The best way to attract a fox's attention is to fail gloriously.' It's just never the type of attention anyone wants."

Hurring started huffing in a way that sounded almost like a laugh. Oh, now you're not impassive. I snapped my mouth shut on the words to my defense as I refused to look back and acknowledge them. By this point, everyone was amused by my constant direction changes and growing frustration. Even Franklin's twitching was settling down as he sat back and watched me.

Kanieta led us through the woods, and a little way up the side of a hill away from where I last detected the ripple before cutting across its side. I had no idea where she was leading us, as I saw no trail she followed.

It was to the point that I was starting to doubt my own scouting skills because Kanieta was moving with such surety and confidence she had to know where she was going.

Then she stopped, her tails curved to the left like the curling of a wave as she stood in place like a statue mid-step.

I stopped when I got next to her, my eyes roving the ground and then the area around us. Seeing nothing, I turned to mock her to her face, then felt the life go out of me.

Right where her tails were pointed, through a perfect gap in the trees, was a line of figures that were moving up the valley's hillside. As I watched, I saw them suddenly turn and head back into the forest. We just happened to be on a high enough rise to see them through a gap in the trees.

"How in the living fuck did you do that?" I asked, only getting a pealing laugh of superiority response.