Chương 151: Chapter 150 – Shadowing

The wind whipped at Cole's hair as he flew towards the eastern-most blue glow. Not that he needed a supernatural power to track in the woods. Stealth didn't seem to be in the lexicon of this push, and his senses were many times sharper than they had been during his own tryout. Akira had already navigated a few kilometers into the forest. She had made her way to the river and was following the flow upstream.

Cole matched her pace until he got eyes on the JIRF recruit, who was the only tryout on his side of the valley to drop solo from the get. Being alone didn't seem to hamper the woman, and that weird samurai sword-spear made quick work of the fungal zombies that came sniffing after her. She didn't even reach for her rifle.

He spent another twenty minutes watching her navigate, taking notes in a small book with a compass perched on top as she walked and pausing every time gunfire echoed from somewhere else in the forest. Even with a landmark like the river or the mountain, it was easy to get turned around and lose track of the other tryouts. Cole left after watching her slice open a pair of zombies as naturally as cleaning a fish and looked west. The brothers would be out there too, and twice the crew also meant twice the noise.

They probably had found their fair share of trouble already. He jogged through the woods towards them, then saw the bright red glare of a flare further west." Airborne," said Arley on the radio.

"I see it," said Cole.

"Moving now." Cole burned a charge and launched himself toward the flare. It was on the far side of the valley, but he got a good look at the location, and when he landed, he took off at a run, shaking his rifle awake as he went. Ahead, the terrain sloped down sharply. Cole slid down the incline and into a clearing where McHanley had his back to a tree and his left hand over his gut. His right arm hung limp in a blood-stained sleeve and his rifle had been dropped to the moss. A dead wood ogre lay at his feet.

The tryout tensed up at the noise of Cole entering the clearing but slumped down to his ass when he realized it was Cole.

"Fuck this, man. I can't do this," he said. Cole knelt next to him.

"How bad is it?" McHanley lifted his hand. A ragged series of slashes had cut just below the plate carrier, tearing through the uniform. Cole yanked on the quick release tabs to get the kid's plate carrier off and pulled the aid kit off his pack.

"You're lucky. Didn't penetrate to your abdominal cavity."

"Lucky?! Man, I burned through three mags before that thing went down. Half my ammo, gone and my arm is fuckin' useless." True to his word, several of McHanley's pouches were empty.

"Didn't you have a CQB weapon?" asked Cole.

"Are you for real?"

"Not even a club?"

"What good is a club going to do against something like that, man?" Cole applied clotting agent and bandages to McHanley's abdomen and arm. Something rustled in the thicket to the west, so Cole brought his rifle around. He lowered it as Wayland pushed out of the brush.

"What are you doing, here?" asked Cole.

"Saw the flare. It was pretty close so I figured I could maybe get here faster than y'all. Might have been someone needed help." Cole straightened, wiping off his hands with one of the disinfectant wipes from McHanley's kit.

"Appreciate the attitude, Wayland, but you should focus on your own trial. These three days are a lot shorter than they feel." Arley came out of the forest to the south, breathing heavy. He took in the scene.

"Green on green?" he asked.

"Negative. But he is injured." Stolen story; please report.

"Got it. I'll take him back." Cole wrapped his hand under McHanley's good arm.

"Ready? On three." McHanley groaned through grit teeth as Cole pulled him back up to his feet. Sweat covered his forehead. Cole handed him off to Arley and turned to Wayland as the pair made their way south.

"Seen Burke?" he asked.

"Not since the drop."

"How about Delgada?" Wayland shook his head.

"Sorry."

"It's fine. I heard their guns a couple minutes back so they're still active. Get back to it. Still a few good hours of travel."

"Yes sir," said Wayland. He turned north, toward the mountain and picked his way back through the thicket. The daily rain started not long after. Cole pulled his prismatic cloak hood on and moved through the forest like a shadow, occasionally burning a half-charge to mark hostiles and friendlies. He checked in on Burke, Delgada, and the Attila brothers once each before sunset. A couple hours after that, Cole could smell small chemical stove fires on the wind.

Even with NODs, Curahee was difficult to navigate at night due to the rain, mist, and cloud cover, so most of the others would be making camp. Unlike a mission where he was fighting tough monsters, traversing Curahee felt more like exercise than exertion, now. The breadth of his side of the valley was only a few kilometers wide and no one was hugging the outside edge." Airborne," called Morganstern.

"Send it," said Cole." I'll take over the west side for a few hours. Get some shut-eye and take back over at 0200."

"Good copy," said Cole, setting his watch. He found a nice, thick tree mostly free of fungus and shimmied up to a comfortable crook, leaning back against the trunk. After a quick protein bar, he settled back and shut his eyes. 0200 came almost immediately, it felt like. The vibrations on his wrist woke him up. With the offset day length on Curahee, the sun was just beginning to climb over the horizon. The tryouts should already be up and on the move north. He keyed his radio.

"Morganstern, any developments?"" Morning, Airborne. One washout on Ketchup's side. No fatalities, yet. They're all yours."

"Good copy." Cole dropped down from the tree and shook out his joints, stretching in the brief period of sun above the mountains before it could slip behind the cloud cover over the valley. The tree had kept him dry throughout the night, even if his neck was stiff from dozing in a plate carrier. Back to it, then. Burning a charge of Meteoric Leap, Cole launched himself into the air. Spotting most of the friendlies pretty quickly, he burned one more half-charge and arced northwest.

He'd go in reverse order, this time; check on Burke and then make his way back toward the river. He landed, angling himself toward the northwest and pushed up until he spotted Burke. The paranoid-about-his-partner tryout had found himself an otherworld armament already. A long-hafted axe with the same orange and blue coloration of the fungal infestation rested across his shoulder and a single glowing orb hovered around him in a slow orbit. Cole tilted his head. Burke was definitely classed, then.

Was that Deadlight's ability? It looked similar enough, though the orb was much smaller and dimmer. Without his enhanced Acuity, he might not have noticed at all. No worries on this front, then. He pushed inward toward the river at an easy pace. An hour later, he caught up with Wayland. He got within about seventy meters before Wayland startled and turned in his direction.

"Morganstern? That you?" He called out.

"Airborne?" Cole allowed himself a small smile as Wayland tried and failed to pick him out of the scenery. The man had sensed him after all, but at a much closer distance than Wayland had been able to sense Burke the previous day and he was having trouble pinning down Cole's exact location. That meant the prismatic cloak must have been working against whatever psychic blood-sensing ability the Kevlesh rescue had.

Wayland pulled out a knife and pressed it to the inside of his forearm, drawing a thin, red nick as wide as his pinky nail across his skin. Cole leaned against a tree and pulled his hood back, which caused Wayland to jump, but key in on his location immediately. The Kicker tryout jogged over to him.

"Jumpy, much?" asked Cole.

"Kevlesh is mostly desert, and so was the part of Nevada where I grew up. I'm not used to the woods, man. It's creepy. By the way, you're a lot closer than I thought you were. Ability?"

"Item," said Cole, fingering his cloak.

"And bushcraft. I grew up in the woods."

"Yeah, that don't surprise me."

"What enhancement level are you now?" asked Cole.

"Just hit level 5 about an hour ago. Hoping to get my secondary class here after a few more fights."

"Alright," said Cole, grinning.

"Just put up a flare when you decide it's too tough." Wayland just scoffed.

"Don't you got actual amateurs to check on?" Cole waved and headed east. He found Delgada and shadowed her for a bit. If she was classed, she had no visible signs of it. But she'd found herself what looked like a lever-action rifle that she'd decided was apparently better than the SCAR-H now strapped to her pack. Well, good on her. He was a bit surprised neither she nor Wayland had linked up with any of the others, yet.

But chances were good they would come across each other while searching for a route around the Silk Forest. He continued on until he picked up the trail of the two smoke jumpers that weren't so much traversing Curahee as carving through it. He hadn't intended to make contact, but when he crept close enough to get eyes on the pair of them, he had trouble believing his own enhanced eyes. He burned a half-charge to mark targets, tilted his head in confusion, and made his presence known.