Chapter 90: Lure

Jaxir didn’t run the moment Auren turned toward his hiding place. Instead, he continued feeding the same imperfect flow through Sparkle Thread and allowed the connection to wobble once more, making it seem as though whoever was tracking the Village Head had no idea he’d already noticed.

The dot on Jaxir’s map started moving shortly afterward, first crossing the mansion at a measured pace before cutting through one of the inner courtyards and accelerating toward the outer walls. Jaxir watched the distance between them shrink without changing anything, waiting until Auren had committed enough to the pursuit that holding his position any longer would start becoming genuinely stupid.

Only then did Jaxir let the thread tighten in a way that should have felt like a late mistake, and he widened his eyes as though he’d only just realized what had happened.

"Oh."

He was moving before the word finished leaving his mouth, bursting out of the rented room and vaulting over the railing outside. Twinkle Mana caught against the side of the building during his fall and repelled him across the street, while the reduced weight from his boots turned what should have been an ugly landing into something he could roll through without losing much speed.

Auren accelerated behind him almost immediately, which was exactly what Jaxir had been waiting for. If he’d run the instant the Village Head sensed Sparkle Thread, the entire thing would have looked like bait, but waiting until Auren came close made the mistake feel real and gave him every reason to believe he was seconds away from catching whoever had been spying on him.

Jaxir cut through an alley without looking back, using the dot on his map to judge the gap instead. He kept his pace just low enough to make the chase feel winnable, allowing Auren to gain several meters here and there before increasing his speed whenever the man came close enough to actually become a problem.

People hated giving up when they thought the reward was right in front of them, Village Heads weren’t immune. By the time Jaxir reached the edge of the village, Auren had already chased him through enough streets that turning around without catching him would have meant admitting he’d wasted all that effort.

The moment Jaxir passed the final buildings, he stopped pretending.

Twinkle Mana erupted beneath his feet and threw him forward, then an attraction to a nearby wall dragged him into the next step before a repulsive force from a tree trunk launched him deeper into the forest. His speed jumped enough that the village disappeared behind him within moments, but when he checked the pressure following through Sparkle Thread, Auren was still there.

He wasn’t keeping up perfectly, but he wasn’t falling far enough behind to matter either.

Jaxir continued until even the tops of the village buildings vanished behind the trees, then gradually allowed his speed to drop while choosing a section of forest thick enough to block any easy line of sight back toward town. He wanted the fight isolated, but he didn’t want Auren wondering why the person fleeing for his life had suddenly picked the perfect place to stop.

The Village Head closed the final distance with a heavy impact against the ground, and Jaxir turned as the man stepped between two trees. Most of Auren’s armor fit tightly enough to move in, but the chest plate bulged outward in several thick black-and-gold layers, making his upper body look almost absurdly broad compared to the rest of him.

More concerning was the fact that his hands were empty. Someone wearing that much armor and carrying no weapon probably hadn’t forgotten one at home.

Auren’s gaze hardened the moment he got a proper look at Jaxir.

"You."

Jaxir smiled. "Me. Glad to see I’m becoming such a household name."

Recognition settled completely across Auren’s face as his eyes narrowed. "Jaxir Chance. You were barred from my village before you ever stepped foot inside it, yet instead of learning your place, you’ve made yourself a plague everywhere you go."

Jaxir tilted his head. "You’re the one who put the first bounty on me, so I feel like you have to take some responsibility for the relationship."

"And I should have made it larger."

"See, now that’s not very nice, now is it?"

The air around Auren shifted before Jaxir could enjoy the answer much further, and a familiar screen opened in front of him.

―

Name: Auren

Level: 20

HP: 100,000/100,000

Type: Region Boss

―

Jaxir’s smile tightened as Auren disappeared from where he was standing.

A violent attractive force seized Jaxir through the chest almost at the same moment, dragging him toward Auren while the Village Head accelerated in the opposite direction. The oversized breastplate smashed through a tree between them without slowing, sending wood and bark across the clearing as the charge corrected itself toward Jaxir.

That movement was familiar enough that Jaxir understood it before Auren reached him. He twisted the pull with his own Twinkle Mana and built a repulsive force off his right side, throwing himself clear just before the Village Head tore through where he’d been standing and continued straight into another tree.

Jaxir landed with one hand touching the ground and looked over his shoulder as a third trunk cracked under the remaining momentum.

"Right. Bear."

The principle was almost identical to the Twinkle Twinkle Bears he’d fought inside the Nightmare Dungeon, except Auren’s control made theirs look clumsy. Rather than charging in a straight line and hoping the target stayed where it was, he used Jaxir himself as the anchor and kept correcting toward him like a homing attack.

Auren turned, but Jaxir already had three Casts moving toward him. The first slammed into a chunk of broken wood, the second clipped a spinning branch, and only the third reached the Village Head after losing enough force through the debris that the impact barely shifted his armor.

That was going to be a problem.

The next lock came before Auren even started moving, and Jaxir felt the attraction latch onto him strongly enough that simply stepping aside wasn’t going to work. He pushed against it with raw Mana, creating a repulsion off his left side while attracting himself toward a nearby tree, and the competing forces snapped his body out of the charge path with less than a meter to spare.

Auren tore past him and demolished another trunk, but Jaxir felt the amount of MP he’d spent before he’d even landed. He could overpower the charge if he dumped enough Mana into his own attraction and repulsion, yet doing that every few seconds against someone with 100,000 HP would empty him long before the fight ended.

He clicked his tongue

The forest made the situation worse. Every missed charge filled the air with broken branches, shredded bark and chunks of wood that interrupted Jaxir’s firing lanes, so even when he found enough room to attack, half his Casts were wasting power breaking through debris before they ever reached Auren.

Jaxir ducked beneath a spinning branch and sent Fracture through the opening it left behind, watching the Hex settle into Auren before the Village Head charged again. He twisted around another tree using the same attraction-and-repulsion combination, but the movement was still guzzling a ridiculous amount of Mana.

There had to be a cheaper way to break the lock.

His eyes suddenly lit up.

The answer came when he remembered Rovan. Maybe that stealth spear could be used in more ways than one.

When Auren’s charge locked onto him again, Jaxir stopped fighting the attraction directly and turned his attention inward instead. He smoothed the Mana around his body, stripped away the outward pressure that gave the connection something easy to seize, then forced his control against the exact point where Auren’s Mana had anchored itself to him.

For an instant, nothing happened.

Then the attraction vanished.

Auren’s eyes widened as his charge continued toward the last point where he’d sensed Jaxir, and Jaxir stepped aside rather than spending another chunk of MP throwing himself out of the way. The Village Head smashed through another tree while Jaxir circled behind him, raised his staff and formed a concentrated beam before Auren could recover.

The blast struck the back of the oversized chest plate and hurled him several meters forward.

Jaxir grinned as Wither and Fracture followed, threaded between quick Casts while Auren turned back toward him. "Much better."

Now that Jaxir knew he could break the lock instead of overpowering it, the charge stopped looking nearly as impossible to deal with. Unfortunately, every time Auren missed, another tree came down hard enough to make the ground shake, and the sound was carrying much farther than Jaxir would have liked.

...

Back near the edge of the village, another crash rolled out of the forest while dust rose above the distant treeline. Nick watched several nearby players and NPCs turn toward the sound, then rubbed a hand down his face when yet another tree came down.

"I’ll never have a day of peace again, will I?"