Chapter 82: Price

Jaxir didn’t move.

He crouched high in the canopy on a branch so thin that even with the Weightless Boots reducing him to a fraction of his normal weight, he could feel it flex beneath him. Wind pushed the leaves around his shoulders and swayed him several inches from side to side, but Jaxir kept his body still while the silent sphere of mana surrounding him moved with the branch.

Below, the bear lifted its nose and sniffed again.

Jaxir watched every movement without blinking, waiting for the thing to look straight toward him and ruin the idea he had only just managed to put together. He was fairly certain he had replicated the principle behind the bear’s field, but whether that field could fool something as physical as scent was another question entirely.

The more he studied it, the more clever the bear’s use of Twinkle Mana seemed.

Twinkle Anchor was the clearest foundation, bending incoming mana away from whatever sat inside the field, but Jaxir could feel pieces of the other expressions mixed into what he had copied. Vacuum drew outside influence toward chosen points, Pulse pushed it away, Rupture caught and twisted what entered the field, while Step changed the relationship between a body and the space around it.

Put together properly, those ideas became something much stranger than a shield.

The sphere around Jaxir wasn’t blocking the outside world so much as convincing everything that passed through it that the space inside hadn’t changed. Mana flowed around him, light reached him without carrying the right information back out, and the little disturbances his body should have created were pulled, pushed and redirected until the region almost behaved as though he had never stepped into it.

Almost.

Scent was the problem.

At the end of the day, scent was physical. Tiny particles left his body and traveled through the air. The bear’s field had done absolutely nothing when branches, bark or dirt crossed through it, which meant there was no reason Jaxir’s imitation should suddenly start blocking something just because it was microscopic.

That was why he hadn’t left.

If the bear was literally smelling him, then Jaxir was wasting time and the thing would find him again in seconds. If whatever it called scent was actually some Twinkle-based perception riding on top of the physical sense, though, then he might have found something far more useful than a way out of this fight.

The bear’s face changed.

Its head turned left, then right, and it shuffled several steps beneath Rovan before lifting its nose again. This time faint Twinkle Mana gathered around its nostrils, and Jaxir felt something tug against the surface of his sphere as though the animal was pulling at the surrounding air and mana at the same time.

Jaxir grinned from ear to ear.

The pressure disturbed the field, but he kept one hand steady against the branch and gently corrected the flow rather than fighting the pull. Whatever the bear was sensing, it wasn’t ordinary scent in the way Jaxir understood it, or at least ordinary scent wasn’t the important part.

That was good enough for him.

Maybe the bear used smell as a focus for sensing mana, or maybe Twinkle Mana let it pull traces toward itself until those traces became something its nose could understand. Jaxir didn’t particularly care which explanation was right when the important part was that the animal had lost him.

He had his escape.

Jaxir shifted his weight carefully, ready to leave before the red dots on his map closed the remaining distance, then stopped as another thought slipped into place. If the bear had been following the scent of his mana rather than his body itself, then disappearing wasn’t the only thing Jaxir could do with what he had just learned.

"Hehehe..."

His eyes moved toward the approaching dots.

They had chased him this far, interrupted his loot, forced him out of Glimmer and very nearly turned one dangerous fight into an impossible one. There had to be some kind of price for all that effort.

**

Marti pushed through the forest ahead of the others, keeping one eye on the tracking display he had cobbled together after losing the Sparkling Third Eye Set. It wasn’t nearly as clean as the Epic set had been, but scouting for Golden Fleece meant he had more than one way to follow a target.

Jaxir’s marker had stayed ahead of them ever since they left Glimmer.

"We’re closing in." Marti ducked beneath a branch and glanced toward the flashes of light cutting through the forest in the distance. "Someone definitely intercepted him."

Borus grinned and tightened his grip on his weapon. "Good. Let them soften him up."

Kaina didn’t answer, but the group increased their pace behind Marti while the sound of impacts grew louder. Luka moved along the opposite side of the formation and Sejan stayed near the center, leaving Marti far enough ahead to keep the others from walking blind into whatever had caught Jaxir.

Then Marti stopped so hard that Luka nearly ran into him.

"What?" Kaina’s voice sharpened immediately as everyone slowed.

Marti stared at the display in front of him, refreshed it once, then again. "He’s gone."

Borus frowned. "Gone where?"

"I mean gone." Marti looked up at them. "He’s not on the tracker anymore."

For several seconds, nobody spoke.

Luka finally stepped closer and looked over Marti’s shoulder as though Jaxir’s marker might reappear if someone else checked. "That’s impossible. Even an Ultra shroud shouldn’t erase you from map detection completely."

"You’d probably need Legendary," Marti muttered, still staring at the empty area where Jaxir had been. "And even that’s just theory. Something like that might not even exist in the game yet."

Sejan’s brow furrowed behind his goggles.

"Not necessarily." The healer adjusted them while looking toward the distant flashes. "There are assassin-type builds that manipulate mana well enough to disappear from normal detection methods without relying entirely on equipment."

Kaina looked toward him. "Could Jaxir do that?"

Sejan hesitated. "If he could, why wait until now?"

Kaina’s eyes narrowed as she looked ahead, and a moment later her expression changed. "Move!"

They scattered just as a plain Cast came through the trees.

The small bolt struck the dirt where they had been standing and kicked up a pathetic spray of soil, barely strong enough to leave a mark. Borus straightened first and stared at the shallow crater while Marti looked toward the direction it had come from.

"What the hell was that?"

The forest answered with a roar.

Branches snapped ahead of them as something massive tore through the undergrowth, and Marti’s eyes widened when a black-furred bear burst between the trees. The red-painted Rovan sat on its back with his spear lowered, and both man and beast charged straight toward the middle of the Golden Fleece party.