I heard a prominent, low growl among the yelping. Something even darker than the gloom around me rose from the ground, kicking the ground sideways.
“There you are.”
Its foot had created a clean split in the ground. Thanks to my pit organ, I could follow its movements even in the darkness. It was emanating an unnatural amount of heat, so I wasn’t at a total loss despite my lack of light.
That said, the wolf itself was still invisible to me, just like last time. Not only had my opponent limited my information, but it had the ability to attack from anywhere it liked. Detecting the bundle of essence before me, I tossed a bamboo needle in its direction. It flew through the air and buried itself into the ground.
I suspected the wolf was using its abilities to manipulate the shadows and conceal itself. Even if I focused on perceiving its essence, it was using it to control those shadows, making it difficult to pinpoint the creature itself. The only thing left for me to do was try to pick out anything that seemed strange.
I started to rush through the forest, using the thick trees as my footholds. “Chill out for a bit, monster.”
The wolf’s fangs crushed every tree I jumped to. I forged on with my escape, careful to keep the camp at the center of the large circle I was drawing. Now and then I would pick up on an intense, distracting fear. It probably belonged to the kids who had been chased here. That, or it was the poor little owl whose branches I was disturbing.
I dodged the next strike, fiercer than ever, by jumping toward the ground. As I fell, I focused all my mental energy to detecting essence and parried the shadowy spear piercing at me from below with the flat of my knife. It seemed the wolf tried to snipe me out of the air, but so far, I stayed close enough to the ground for my tail to just about reach it. That meant I was always able to shift my position, even if just a little.
The shadow wolf felled another large tree. The time had come.
“It’s not even thinking about what it’s doing.”
No matter how good it was at manipulating shadows, the easiest way to extend them would be in a concentric pattern. Previously, when I stood in one place, the thorns attacked at me from every angle. When I was on the move, they came from one concentrated spot. All I needed now was to put that together with the information I had gathered while detecting its essence, and I’d know where the shadow wolf was. I increased the essence I was releasing, leaned forward, and started running faster than ever.
Thorns pushed up from the ground—the wolf’s attempt to intercept me. However, I was going faster than I realized and stumbled with a grunt as I tried to avoid them. As I pushed my knife against one of the thorns, I found they were fairly hard, but I should be able to slice through just the one. It was all about focusing my essence, as Sister taught me. Instead of powering my entire body with it, I needed to center it precisely where it was needed, like funneling wire into a tube.
“Hah!”
I managed to push the tip of the thorn away, and it dissolved into the darkness. Increasing my speed, I dodged the thorns that came from either side of me and stabbed through the head of the smaller shadow with my knife. It backed up, paws scraping over the ground, struggling against the force of my momentum before collapsing.
A sigh of relief eased out of me. “Got it...”
I stood up from where I had been grappling with it and tried to pull my knife out of it. The blade didn’t budge. I put one foot on its head, grabbed the hilt with both hands, and tugged harder.
Come on, come on... Nope.
“It’s really tough...” This time, I applied some essence. The knife slipped out easily, as if mocking my previous efforts.
The shadows melted away from the creature, revealing the corpse of an ordinary wolf.
“Wh—”
Suddenly, the forest around me vanished as a shadowy jaw swallowed me whole.
The corpse was a decoy. I’d fallen for it. There was nowhere to run now.
As I screamed at the top of my lungs, I swung my knife at random, as if I had never gone through a lick of training in my life. I released as much essence as I possibly could, consequences be damned, wrapping it around my whole body. They say that the master’s blade is never sharper than when he is on the brink of death. What a load of crap.
I didn’t want to die. Death was terrifying.
I screamed.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.
On and on.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die...
Cut. Dodge. Crouch. Dodge. Jump. Dodge. Block. Dodge. Look. Dodge. Cut again. Dodge.
Time seemed to stretch on and on, so that even one blink could seem like forever. I made optimal decision after optimal decision, so why was my skin being torn and my flesh cut?
By the time I broke away from those shadowy jaws, my body was in shreds, and I was gasping for air. A growl echoed through the forest as the jaws vanished into the ground. It seemed whatever owned them was incapable of creating another set in quick succession. Controlling so many shadows at once must have taken up quite a bit of its energy.
Another growl, another set of thorns flying at me from the darkness.
“Sh...it...”
I jumped to the ground, dragging my limp leg along with me, and rolled to avoid the attack. There was a noticeable pause between me dispatching the shadowy jaws and the next thorny assault. It was as if the creature thought I was dead, then panicked with a follow-up hit when it realized I had survived. For whatever reason, I was occupying a blind spot in its vision. If the shadow wolf had blind spots, that meant it was using sight to locate me. Using essence to pinpoint an enemy wasn’t reliable, which was why I had been fooled by that decoy standing still in the center of the battlefield.
As I jumped up off the ground, the spike of thorns embedded itself into the spot where my head had just been. This fight contradicted everything I thought I knew. When I expected the shadow wolf to target me, it started with a strike on the children’s camp. When I lit torches, assuming the wolves couldn’t bring water, they showed up with those fish. When I spotted what I thought was the shadow wolf, it turned out to be a decoy.
Everything was because of the sudden arrival of a being capable of manipulating darkness and wolves. A being that was all but invisible to me. A being that controlled shadows using sight. That was why it struck now. However, the wolf-shaped form it took had been a fake.
Wait a second...
Another growl emanated from the forest. What if it didn’t belong to a wolf after all?
I stopped trying to detect anything with my essence and opened my third eye instead. Increasing the density of the essence around me, I kicked off a tree and jumped up as high as I could.
I wanted to laugh. This was the first time I had leaped with everything I had. I was two, maybe three, tree-lengths high in the air, the skies above feeling boundless. Rotating myself in midair, I did a backflip and studied the ground. There was a figure some distance away dashing at incredible speeds through the forest. It was probably the dragon girl. Then, there was the wolf she was chasing.
I also saw a group of helpless children being hunted by another wolf. Another group stood hidden with their backs together, and I guessed they were an equal match for the creatures, if not more powerful. Their resoluteness impressed me; it almost put a smile on my face, seeing how much they had grown.
I looked back directly below me, taking a thorough note of the locations of everything giving off heat. I could figure out later what I could do with the information.
Footprints, torch, bonfire, breath, hidden kid, footprints, fire knife, footprints, mouse, rabbit, wolf—
Both my feet hit the ground. Putting the information together with what I picked up from the layout of the forest trees meant I knew where the enemy would likely attack.
“Right here...”
I heard a growl and was able to pick out the shadow wolf’s body.
“Looks like the only thing I got right was that you’re a carnivore.”
The wolf—or rather, the owl—warbled. I had never seen so much as a small bird in this forest, and now I realized how strange it was that there was an owl tonight. That said, it was making quite a threatening sound for a bird. I guessed the reason it hadn’t attacked physically with claws or fangs was because it didn’t want me to figure out what it was. The reason it knew how to deal with my torches was because it had been inside the camp beforehand and had seen what I was doing to counter it. Finally, it seemed to know everything I had done because it actually saw me.
It growled again, sounding just like a wolf. I waited to see what the shadow owl would do, but when I saw shadows in the corner of my eye move in response to its voice, I immediately sliced off its head. The thorns that had come up right behind my head vanished the moment their master died.