Olimpia

The cry of what could only be an eaglekin still rang in my ears and head, even after running flat out for over a minute. It was like I had been marked as its prey, and it was now somehow tracking me while I was under the tree's boughs.

While on foot, I have outrun packs of beastkins multiple times. Not because I could out-sprint or outlast them but because the creatures would lose my trail. They would eventually find me again and start hounding me, but my stalking tricks usually bought me enough time to rest or get out of the area if I couldn't kill them in a fight.

Over the years, I have spent more than my share of time running through forests and along the slopes of mountains being chased by beastkins. In all those encounters, only a single time was a flying beastkin involved.

I think it might have been a hawk, but I really didn't know or care what bird subspecies it was while I ran away. What mattered was it could fly, had good vision, and was working with some feline beastkin while I couldn't fly and had no one.

Over the course of a day and night, it continuously pursued me, never letting me rest for more than a few minutes. Ultimately, I had to jump over the side of a waterfall to bait the bird close enough to shoot it in the wing with my bow before saving myself with some rope.

The point was that it was a single bird without mysterious powers, and I nearly died. Now, there were thousands of wolves nearby, accompanied by nine birds and far more not far off… Yeah, I'm fucked right up th—

I was knocked out of my thoughts when I heard a loud thump echo across the hillside. Moments later, there was a distant crack of something slamming into a tree at a high speed and tearing off a large chunk. Seconds later, the noise was followed by creaking, crackling pops as a tree trunk gave out and started to fall.

I might not know what was happening, but the fact I could hear the whooshing of leaves as they fell through the air and the trunk hitting the ground meant the tree was enormous. More importantly, whatever was happening was out of my league.

Unable to stop myself from throwing a glance over my shoulder, I blinked in surprise as I caught sight of a cloud of dust billowing into the sky through the trees. As I turned around to put some extra pep in my steps, I thought I could faintly make out a second thump. Then again, that could have just been the pounding of my heart in my ears.

At least I knew Markus was still doing his best to return to the Triad. Which was a weight off my mind, as the information we gathered would make it back to the legion, meaning all I had to do now was survive. No reason to waste a valuable piece of legion property with risky actions. I'm sure they have plans for me to die in another place and time.

Which left me with one choice at this point. There was no way I was sneaking out of this forest with the number of beastkins that would soon flood through it. I had to find a hiding spot and wait for the hoard to pass me by. But to do that, I had to get somewhere while hiding was still an option, which was going to be a bitch.

Embracing the gasping pain, I began adding mental energy to my tendril as I reshaped it, forming a thin dome stretching five feet around my body. With the shell of the sphere of perception done, I filled the area with a tenth of my mental energy before flooding my willpower into the casting to hold it together. It was all that I could manage.

It wasn't much, considering it was said that a City Lord could project a perception sphere around themselves for a quarter mile, but it was more than most people could do. Regardless of how much control I had or how big I could theoretically make a sphere, certain facts could not be avoided.

In most cases, the main limitation of a Perception Sphere wasn't the area into which one could project their mental energy and willpower. It was the amount of information they could process. Even I, the lowest of the low regarding raw power, could form and fill a sphere for ten feet around me without passing out from overdrawing my mental energy.

A perception sphere wasn't like a pulse that only showed what it was currently passing over. A sphere showed everything within its radius in the most minute detail at all times. The point of having such information would be so you could react to a nearby threat in time, which meant you had to remain functional when using it. And that was not as easy or simple as it sounded.

The colorless shapes of everything within the sphere pressed into the caster's mind every moment, constantly grinding you down rather than a deluge that tried to wash you away like an earth pulse. The result might be the same, but resisting the pressure took a whole different mindset. For an earth pulse, you had to be flexible and let everything flow through you, while for a sphere of perception, you had to create a rigid shield around your mind.

What was nearly identical between the two was the casualty rate of those who tried to cast it without the right qualifications. Eight out of ten people who attempted to form a perception sphere without a Significant Ranking on what everyone insisted on calling the Psy Reservoir Scale became mindless husks on their first attempt. It was a serious issue for me because I had a Minimum Rank on that scale, which was four levels below the Significant Rank at the very bottom.

Regardless, I achieved the feat and survived to tell the tail. This meant that as long as I didn't overly strain myself, I would be fine. Usually, that is. It still nearly knocked me on the ass every time with a migraine for an hour or two. But that was when I was in optimal condition, which I was not…

On the bright side, I could just think of this as more training that I didn't have a choice to complete. That was good because I was used to torturing myself like this by now. There are ways those of us with less… power could push ourselves to become more. So long as you were willing to take the risk of death and suffer through the pain.

Risks that have allowed me to become what I am today. I may not have raw power, but I can achieve feats not even Markus can compare to. Who did he turn to and ask to find the beastkin hoard quickly and relatively safely? Me, that's who.

The facts remained the same, however. If you wanted what could be considered a large sphere of perception, you needed a lot of mental energy. There was no other way around it.

And while you can slowly increase your mental energy pool with time and training, it's the equivalent of spending an entire year's worth of effort to add a single drop of water to a bucket. Because after adolescence, there are no significant spikes in one's mental energy reservoir.

This is an unfortunate fact for me because I have read compelling scholarly works that theorized there is a correlation between handling the mental load of a larger perception sphere and bigger mental energy reserves. They suspected that the larger an individual's reservoir was, the lower the pressure differential becomes from handling castings that output information into the caster's mind.

A lesser strain placed on the mind means that less willpower is required to make up the difference, meaning that more of their focus could be given to processing information and moving their body. Also, the scholars hypothesized that the size of the reservoir affected how information was received and organized before ever reaching the caster's mind. But that was beside the point.

Whatever the reasons were, it made an impossible task for most people little more than an afterthought for those with proverbial mountains of power. Begging the question: Why was it the case that people no more intelligent than anyone else could accomplish stuff no one with less mental energy could ever hope to duplicate? However, I had better things to worry about than a scholarly question with no apparent answer that everyone seems to enjoy arguing about, like running through this forest while leaving as little of a trail as possible.

"Little as possible" was the key phrase there. No one who was running through a forest while being chased by beastkins in the air and on the ground had the time to ensure they weren't leaving any trail at all. If the one being chased was smart, they wouldn't blaze a path through the forest, but leaving no signs of your passage was impossible. But that didn't mean I couldn't minimize my trail.

A telekinetic tendril snapped out of my elbow to wrap around a branch and bent it as I approached, preventing it from brushing my clothing. Under the evenly distributed force of the tendril, the branch bent past the point where it appeared the limb should have snapped before bounding back undamaged as I retracted the casting.

My next step became a half-stutter step as I leaped forward over a decaying log covered in moss that my perception sphere showed me couldn't hold my weight. I landed on the balls of my feet as I danced around twigs and patches of grass, searching out the clear ground or rocks just under the detritus making up the forest floor. At the same time that I was leaving as little of a trail as possible, my mental energy was layered over the bottoms of my feet and legs, preventing a scent trail along the ground.

It was not perfect, as my sphere was not large enough to pick out an ideal route, and I had little to no time to react as I ran. Often, I was left with no way forward without leaving a footprint in the soft patch of soil, scuffing some leaves, or breaking a stick.

Depending on how much of a mess I made when I fucked up, I either left it hoping it would go unnoticed or spent a few precious seconds leaping about, trying to make it unclear which direction I had gone. Minutes passed as I continued to run downhill through the forest, passing oak and beech trees while slipping around the grasping branches of small bushes.

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I tried to stay under the thickest canopy with every step as I struggled to make more distance, but in the back of my mind, I could feel my time running out, and soon, it wouldn't matter what I did. Every beat of my heart was an instant closer to a beastkin appearing next to me. Because, at this point, they had to have found my trail by now. Even a casual inspection of the mountain ridge on the beastkin's part would reveal the scent of an elf.

I couldn't speak for Markus, but my concealment castings slipped for a while there as I found it hard to think. Not to mention that right now, I wasn't bothering to do more than the most basic scent concealment, leaving a pretty obvious trail.

Reaching the bottom of the valley, I ran for a minute or two longer before coming across a shallow stream mostly hidden by the trees. A definite patch running down the center was bathed in the blighted sunlight, but it was hidden enough to justify moving faster… Right?

Only hesitating on the bank of the small stream for a second, I jumped down onto one smooth river rock and then hopped to the next, quickly moving my way downstream next to the shore while still in the shade. Occasionally, I would have to tug my body one way and then another with my harness to keep my footing on the slippery stones, but it didn't slow me down much.

After splashing downstream for five minutes, the creek's banks became little more than a large step, and the eastern bank started calling out to me, offering safety. It was asking me to hop over it and into the welcoming embrace of the shadows under the superior tree boughs.

As I finally succumbed to its call, I moved into the cursed light and instantly felt a gaze stabbing into the back of my head, sending a shiver of dread down my spine. There was no need to look. I knew what I would find, but I couldn't help myself.

Up in the sky, so high that he looked no larger than my index finger, was what looked like a miniature human figure with wings and golden feathers hovering in place. The gold-feathered bastard looked like a lord sitting on his throne overlooking his city and all its subjects. Specifically, me. Shit… I did not like the arrogance in his gaze as he looked down.

As the figure turned, a screech rang out over the forest, and the very air seemed to shake from the cry's power. Like a rabbit startled into flight by a snapping twig, I bolted from the river and into the forest, but not before I flipped off the bird brain with both hands.

My feet attempted pounding the leaf-covered ground into submission as I ran, and any thoughts of obscuring my path were shoved out of my head. My eyes darted from rock to tree, desperately seeking shelter. I needed distance and time, and I was not going to get either by a half-hearted flight.

Even if the bird could catch sight of me through the trees, there was no way it could dive down on me through all the limbs."Bloody crows take you all!" I mentally huffed at the beastkins as I ran, trying to stop my sword from slapping against my waist with every stride while my other clenched my bow in my fist.

For the briefest moment, I thought about dumping everything and seeing how far I could run at a dead sprint, but the thought left as fast as it came. I knew the beasts would catch up sooner rather than later, and when they did, I would go down swinging like a legionary should.

I ran down the valley parallel to the river, angled so that I would ever so slightly climb up and out of the valley's eastern slope. Not that I thought I would make it to the top, but the western slope was closer to the hoard, so it should buy me more time moving toward the eastern.

Without a doubt, I would be considered fit. You couldn't hike through forests and up mountains every other day and not be. And that fitness was proving to not be enough. Forming my mental energy into a tendril, I decided it was time to assist my flight and pick up the pace.

It was simple in concept and not much more complicated in practice, considering everyone in the legion was expected to be able to perform the casting. The challenging and mentally draining part came into the equation when you were expected to hold the casting for hours of marching over a scorching day.

All you had to do was form a tendril and use it to pull forward and up slightly on your standard-issue legion harness. Depending on the willpower and mental energy you infused into the casting, you could make yourself a few pounds lighter up to entirely weightless.

If there was a time to burn my mental energy as I ran through the rolling woodlands that comprised the Northern Forest, it was now. My speed increased to nearly that of a cantering horse, and my body began screaming from the strain and need for air. Only crazy people ran up mountains for fun. I mentally complained as I sucked down a coppery breath. There had to be beastkin wanderers out here somewhere, but just because they were out here didn't mean they were pursuin—

A howl echoed across the valley, causing my steps to stutter in a primal moment of fear. I already knew I was being hunted and didn't appreciate this latest reminder. It was hard to tell exactly how far the howler was with the noise echoing off the valley's slopes, but didn't that mean it could be a mile away? Maybe a mile and a half if I was lucky.

As if they heard my thoughts, all around the valley, dozens of howls sounded, combining to make a chorus. "Fuck~!" I moaned. Sighing to myself, I slowed my pace and started searching my surroundings for a place to make my last stand… as I was pretty confident I wouldn't be leaving this valley alive.

While running, I hadn't taken the time to closely inspect my surroundings, but now that I was looking, this area was strange. There were a lot of blocky rocks scattered around the trees in piles. It was almost as if…

A crooked smile spread across my face, and a barking laugh exploded from my throat. Now? Of all the times in my life… I find one now? I thought sardonically.

I inspected the trees growing around and within the piles of overly large moss-covered square stone blocks scattered around me. With every one I quickly spotted, I picked out two more half hidden by decomposition and the passage of time nearby.

Turning on my heel, I traveled toward the thickest ruins and soon found myself walking on level ground. With my admittedly limited experience in the area, it looked as if someone had gathered all the stones that were once scattered around the entire valley and tossed them here in random piles long ago.

As I continued to scan the area, searching for the densest clusters of rocks and walking toward them, my plan of going deeper into the ruins was going great. After a few hundred feet, I could hardly take a step without tripping over the corner of a stone protruding from the ground.

Wrapped up in the discovery of my lifetime, I walked like I was in a trance. Some part of me still heard the howls behind me and to my sides, and it noted they were getting louder and coming more often, but I didn't care. I just wanted to see what was at the heart of this place. At least I'm in an overgrown area with trees and plenty of cover. No way that stupid bird can see or get to me. As a shriek of annoyance overhead sounded, I smiled as it was music to my ears.

A gust of wind washed over my back before moving deeper into the forest, shifting the leaves as it swept forward like it was heralding my advance. Squinting, I looked through the shifting shadows as I thought I could make out a clearing a few hundred yards before me.

As I started to take a step, I heard the scrape of claws against stone, followed by the clatter of falling rocks to my rear. Acting on instinct, I dived headlong into a roll to dodge the attack that I knew was coming.

Feet having left the ground, I remembered in excruciating detail, thanks to my sphere of perception, where exactly I was. Well, not so much where I was, so much as what I was above… However, I was pretty sure I also knew where I was.

But that wasn't the point. Reveling in the moment of discovery, my thoughts weren't focused on the present. The fact pointy stones covered the ground and rolling over them would be a monumentally painful and stupid idea never crossed my mind until it was far too late.

Having put myself in an impossible position, I yanked my body to the side and lessened my landing with a tendril as I gritted my teeth. The first rock wasn't that bad. Sure, it bruised my kidney, and I was pretty sure I would be pissing out blood for a while, but then I rolled toward some tall grass that looked to be a nice and soft cushion. It was a damn lie. At the end of my semi-graceful roll, I hit the boulder hidden by the tall grass with my shoulder. Thrown to the side, I landed on a stupidly pointy rock that jabbed me in my bottom right rib.

Trying to suck in the breath that was knocked out of me, I flopped to my stomach. Even as the world still partially spun and pain flooded my thoughts, I drove my hands onto the ground, quickly clambering to my feet with a moan and a curse. Annoyance flared inside as I looked up and scanned the area around me.

I was right. There was a male canine beastkin behind me. Two actually. Well, one was a woman, but who cares about semantics. What there was not was an arrow or spear lodged into the ground right in line with where I was moving before I… dodged. The bastards didn't have any ranged weapons at all. I hate both of you. I thought as I squinted at them with wrath-filled eyes.

Sighing, I rolled my shoulder and leaned to the side, stretching my back with a moan, trying to loosen the knot that had suddenly formed for some inexplicable reason. Then, I started shuffling towards the pair of beastkin that decided to charge at me on all fours from both sides.

Dropping my bow to the ground, I drew my blade as I casually took one step after another, my balance and positioning perfect for reacting to any unexpected threat, but none appeared. When I was ten feet from the leading beastkin, my eye twitched, and four arrows lept out of my quiver as I controlled them with tendrils and fanned them out to each side.

When the wolfkins were less than a body length away, I drove two of the arrows at the faces of the creatures, making them rear up and knock the projectiles out of the air with their claws as they continued toward me. At the same time, the other two arrows swung around their sides to puncture their trailing feet, pinning them to the ground for a moment.

The beastkins plunged into a tumble as they ripped the arrows out of the ground with their momentum, losing their balance. With impassive eyes, I watched them come to a stop, my body already starting to move, at which point my eye twitched in annoyance. Somehow, they had missed all the rocks strewn over and under the ground and ended up smashing their unusually small muzzles into patches of soft mulch. Lucky bastards.

Before the pair could come to their senses, I was lunging forward with my gladius leading the way. With a tendril wrapped around the hilt, adding extra force, my blade drove through the throat of the male and exited out its back. Ripping the sword out with a twist, I tore open the beastkin's neck.

Eyes flicking to the side at a snarl of rage and sorrow, I saw the female wolfkin a moment before the latest arrow skewered her through the eye. Turning to walk back to my bow, I used the end of the tendril to spin the arrow and wiggle it around, scrambling her brains.

Sheathing my sword, I used a tendril to scoop up my bow and bring it to my hand as I ran toward the clearing. I had barely made it halfway to the light before the incessant howls of the canine beastkins sounded much closer and more aggressive.

Pushing my legs to move faster, my eyes flicked to the deep shadows of the forest around me as I imagined snarling beastkins leaping out of them. The closer I approached the grassy clearing I could see ahead, the more I felt pressure on my mind telling me to turn away. Telling me something was wrong.

But those emotions were drowned under the surging need to escape my pursuers. And then I was stumbling to a stop just past the tree line. As I looked around the glade, an awestruck smile crept over my face as I gazed up in wonder.