“Mostly looks the same.” I watched them from beyond the wall of traps, staying as far away as possible.
The kids who attacked the dragon girl went about their business without a hint of guilt on their faces. I’d thought they would be ostracized for attacking a peer, but they must have pinned all the blame on us.
The camp was now far more developed than ours, especially compared to its first days. I wasn’t surprised. Not only were some of them better with their hands than me, but they had way more manpower.
There was an isolated patch of black, withered grass on the ground, probably a result of the miasma emitted by the snakeborn girl’s corpse. Her companions were still among the children, meaning they considered the dragon girl and me as the enemy.
I carefully concealed any signs I was ever there. The kids would only raise their guard if they realized how close I had been. I took as much of a detour as I could before heading toward our own camp, careful not to let it get so long that I ended up lost. It was easy in the forest, where visibility was poor. I also made sure not to let my essence go out any further than it could handle, but I otherwise pushed it to its limits.
As I went the long way around, I came across a river. I didn’t know if the water was drinkable or not; it was the fish that intrigued me.
“It’s freezing!”
I hadn’t considered temperature with all the thick greenery around, but it had gotten significantly colder since the training started. Perhaps winter was approaching. I reached out, waiting for one of the salmon-shaped objects to slip between my feet. Just when I felt one against my fingers, it spewed out a jet of water and zoomed away over the river’s surface like a sideways bottle rocket.
“Figures.”
I couldn’t underestimate anything in this forest. While our instructors gave us meat, we never had fish, so the sight of one after so long lowered my guard. I should’ve remembered that none of the creatures in this world were normal. Then again, I wasn’t a normal kid either.
The temperature of the river current got in the way of my pit organ, but I could still detect essence to pinpoint where there was life.
“Come on.”
Still soaking wet, I pushed my fingers below the water’s surface, then suppressed my essence as much as possible. It dropped close to zero, blending me in with my surroundings. That was when I spotted wriggling masses of essence pushing forward amid the current. They were swimming against it, going upstream. Now and then, one would collide with a rock. I kept my vacant eyes on the surface. When I felt scales against my ankles, I charged my essence to its limits, hooked my fingers into the fish’s eye sockets, and flung it ashore.
The impact knocked it out. I speared it with a stick, ready to take it home. That was when I heard a distant howling. I snapped my head up to see that the sun was already setting.
“Uh-oh.”
The forest at night was the perfect hunting ground for wolves, who could see well in the dark. While they had prowled around aimlessly at a distance before, it was now time for them to make a move. Their presence among the trees grew heavier. I quickened my pace, anxious to get back to camp. I could feel the beasts behind me, sticking closely. And there wasn’t just two or three of them—from the pack emerged a smaller presence that ran ahead of me and blocked my path.
The wolf growled. It was a type that produced currents of air; I could feel its wind blowing in my direction. I was trapped. They had probably been waiting to catch me out on my own. It would explain why they seemed to predict my movements. I was going to have to fight my way out of this situation with nothing but an extra-sharp knife.
“And after I just got over that hole in my stomach too,” I grumbled, pulling out my secret weapon: the dragon girl’s shed scale.
I had turned it into an arcane tool. With my current skills, I was only able to enhance a quality inherent to the object already. I could make needles pointier, wood chips harder, and knives sharper. Dragonborn scales had the ability to store essence.
I crushed the scale in my grip, and the essence stored within it overflowed. It was mine, so I should be able to control it. With no guarantee it would work, I drew it around my body.
The wind wolf blocking my path growled warily as the other wolves caught up at last. I was pincered by the creatures from the front and behind. I kept every one of them in sight as I jumped to the side, making use of split step to reach top speed immediately. The wind wolf was the only one that didn’t lose sight of me, racing after me.
Got it.
The moment it started running, I caught a nearby tree trunk with my tail and flipped onto my back so that I slid under the wolf. I thrust my knife upward, slitting the beast open from the neck down through the torso. The extra sharpness glided right through its thick pelt, dealing a lethal blow by sinking into the animal’s stomach. I rotated to land safely on the ground, then started my escape in earnest.
Though I concentrated my essence in my legs as I ran, the pursuing wolves were also getting faster. Now and then, I would remember the traps and try to use them as a shield, but the beasts seemed like they could see them and avoided them with ease. I jumped up onto a branch, but I could feel the masses of essence approaching from behind at high speed.
I gasped as the moonlight revealed black thorns reaching up toward me from the ground. I went to jump, only for the thorns to snap the branch—which was as thick as my torso—with ease. Despite the glow of the moon, I couldn’t make out the creature itself. Only when it growled quietly was I able to pinpoint its essence and confirm it was there in the first place.
In my mind, I dubbed it a shadow wolf. The shadow launched its thorns at me a second time—they lined up like fangs set in a large jaw, blocking off my escape route. They may have looked like thorns, but the fact they severed that branch told me they had the cutting power of a metal blade. Their blackness made it difficult to judge their distance as well.
“Great.”
I tried to jump to another tree, only for another wolf to tackle it and send it falling. This one had grotesquely bulging muscles, and I understood how it felled the tree through raw strength.
Just as I accepted my fate, the black thorns froze mere inches from my face, as if there were a glass wall between us.
“It really is a shadow,” I said in realization.
The thorns didn’t extend into the patch of moonlight in front of me. I surmised that light rendered the shadow wolf powerless. The muscular wolf—the “power wolf”—had inadvertently saved me. Not only that, but it seemed speed wasn’t its forte, as expected from its appearance. I ran through the moonlight, increasing the distance between me and the wolves.
Another howl resounded in the distance. This time, it was so chilling that it seemed to zap my skin with electricity.
“Dammit,” I gasped.
They knew where I was. The shadow wolf’s nature probably aligned with its abilities. It was devious and persistent.
I ran back in the direction of our camp, trying to think of a way to bring my pursuers into contact with the dragon girl.
“I had to abandon my salmon too,” I sighed. “This sucks.”
That might have been what upset me more than anything else. I sheathed my knife with another sigh, then sneezed. It was likely due to the combination of my soaking body and the night wind cooling it down.