Chương 371: (364) 5.60. Hide and Seek

After so many horribly lethal fragments back-to-back, getting the chance to run through a calming meadow and breathe in the fresh air was a real gift. The longer they traveled through the newest fragment, the more confident Vin felt that this fragment was the one they were searching for. The weather was warm. The animals were normal enough. And most importantly, nothing tried to kill them out of the blue. Well, other than the occasional monster. But that was just a fact of life on Edregon. New monster discovered!

200 exp gained." Grass Spikes!" Shia shouted, impaling the loping monster as it charged them and stopping it in its tracks. The monster looked like a large, furry salamander, its body long and flat with three claw-tipped legs on either side. Because it was so low to the ground, however, Shia's Grass Spike was more than enough to take it out, skewering the monster rather thoroughly and ending its life. The group walked over to peer at it, and Shia kicked it with a foot.

"If this is the worst the fragment has to offer, it's not a bad pick at all," she said, raising her brow approvingly.

"This monster strikes me as the kind that would do some serious damage if you let it get close enough, but simple enough to take down before that."

"It would be a bit of a menace for petians, though," Scule said, looking worried.

"You're sure that tree talked about petians like they were here, now, right? Not in the past tense?"

"Yeah, it just saw some the other day," Shia nodded.

"In fact, I think it was trying to tell me that they had something to do with those mushrooms you grabbed." Naturally, Vin wasn't about to leave a potential key to discovering a new magical affinity just lying there, so he'd plucked a couple of the mushrooms and tucked them away within his pouch. He didn't want to risk putting unknown magic within Lumel's Dimensional Pocket or Scule's cape, so for now, he was keeping them with him.

"Well, that's just one more reason to find them," Vin decided.

"Not only to ask them about the orcs and beastkin moving in, or to make Scule some new friends, but to learn about dream magic."

"Hey! I can make my own friends, thank you very much," Scule scoffed, putting his hands on his hips.

"I met you idiots, didn't I?"

"Actually, you tried to poison us," Shia reminded him.

"Then when you failed and I threatened to eat Reginald, we hired you for a job. Then you just kinda… stuck around, I guess."

"Exactly, just like friends do!" he said, beaming at them.

"Alright, let's keep moving," Vin chuckled, leaving the furry monster behind as they took off once more. The next few hours were spent roaming around the fragment, hunting for the people who lived within. They checked sprawling meadows, ran through small clusters of sparse forests, and even traveled up and down a few rivers they found going through the fragment. But by the time the sun began to set and the temperature dropped, they'd still yet to see a single sign of any petians.

They'd been attacked four more times by the same weird furry salamanders of course, each one taken out in an instant by Shia and her Grass Spikes, but no petians.

"Alright, I've got half a mind to just cast an empowered Sense Soul and sweep the fragment for them," Vin finally decided, frowning as they paused in the center of the fragment.

"It's almost night, my boon will reset soon enough anyway. I don't understand how we haven't found them by now, we checked everywhere!"

"Petians are pretty hard to find if we don't want to be," Scule admitted, looking a bit depressed that they still hadn't found any of his people. His earlier excitement hadn't completely vanished just yet, but it was definitely diminished.

"One of the perks of being so small compared to everything else."

"If they're hiding, your spell is probably our best bet," Lumel agreed, hopping off his back and stretching her legs.

"Though there's also the option that they aren't intentionally hiding from us. Maybe they live secluded lives to stay safe from the large monsters, like in trees or underground."

"We're not moles," Scule scoffed.

"We live like regular people!"

"Don't forget these petians might not be the same as the ones from your world," Shia warned.

"We've met other elves who didn't have my teeth after all. I'm pretty certain I saw one of the ones in the citadel eating a salad of all things," she added with a shudder.

"Alright, I'm going to do it," Vin decided, making up his mind as the sun touched the horizon and warm colors started to spread across the sky.

"Fingers crossed this doesn't kill me." Taking a deep breath, he threw together the empowered runic formation and cast. As always, it took a few seconds for the mana to race all the way across the fragment before bouncing back to him. The moment it did, he gasped, holding his head in his hands as he was hit with a wave of information.

"Vin!" Lumel shouted, grabbing his arm.

"Are you okay? Did it trip your divine boon?"

"No, but I wish it did," he grunted, clenching his eyes as his head pounded.

"It wasn't enough to kill me, but I think it was pretty damn close. I got a read on their souls."

"You're bleeding," Shia said, taking an offered rag from Scule and wiping the blood from his nose before sweeping Renewal across his head.

"How many souls?" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"A good couple hundred of them," he muttered, letting out a sigh of relief as the healing magic got to work. As much as his head hurt, he knew it wasn't anything permanent. If the backlash from his spell had been powerful enough to actually maim him, his divine boon would have kicked in.

"But there is one thing that doesn't make any sense…"

"What, are they not petians after all?" Scule asked worriedly.

"Huh? No, their souls are tiny, I could sense that," he confirmed, snorting as Scule pumped a fist in the air.

"What doesn't make sense is their location."

"Where are they?" Lumel asked.

"According to my spell, they're back in one of the earlier forests we ran through," he explained.

"Maybe they do live in the trees like you said and we just missed them."

"Not likely. Birds live in trees," Scule said matter-of-factly.

"Maybe these petians aren't terrified of birds," Shia suggested.

"Just a thought."

"Either way, let's run back to the forest and give it a more thorough search," Vin said, getting nods from his friends. Once Lumel had climbed onto his back again, they took off back the way they'd come. It was only two miles away, so it didn't take them too long to make it back to the forest.

"Alright, they should be here," he said, letting Lumel down as he peered at the closest tree.

"I picked up a few hundred tiny souls scattered around in this forest, so I feel like we should be able to find at least one or two." The team spread out while still staying within visual range of one another, peering through the forest and using an assortment of abilities to look for their targets. Shia swept Sense Life here and there, frowning when that didn't reveal anything sentient before switching tactics to try grilling the trees making up the forest itself for information.

Scule relied on Reginald's nose, the two of them scurrying around the upper branches, even going so far as to shout at a few small birds and scare them off as they hunted for others of his kind. Lumel searched along the ground, following up on her theory that they might live underground as she hunted for burrows or other such entrances. And Vin stood there with a confused look on his face as smaller, repeated casts of Sense Soul returned zero petian-sized souls this time around.

"I don't understand," he said after they'd all regrouped in the middle of the forest.

"I felt a few hundred souls hiding within this forest, but now that we're here and I'm using smaller casts of the spell, I'm not picking up anything. Either they've hidden their souls from me somehow, or they're not here anymore."

"I highly doubt an entire village's worth of people just got up and left in the couple of minutes it took us to rush back over here," Scule pointed out.

"Shia, what did the trees say?"

"That's the weirdest thing…" she said, looking more than a little concerned.

"None of the trees told me anything. As far as I can tell, they're… sleeping?"

"Huh? Is that normal?"

"Certain plants can enter something akin to a deep sleep when specific criteria are met, but I'm normally able to wake them up with a little prodding," Shia explained.

"But the trees of this forest, it's like they're all collectively in a deep slumber. Like they took sleeping medication or something. I've never felt this before."

"That feels a little too coincidental, seeing as we're trying to find people that specialize in dream magic," Lumel said.

"Maybe they put the trees to sleep?"

"Why in the forest would they do that?" Shia scoffed.

"It doesn't make any sense!"

"It does if they knew you were a Druid," Vin said slowly, realizing this fragment might not be quite as harmless as he first thought.

"But that would mean they've been watching us," Scule said, shivering at the thought.

"Come on, the four of us all have our second prestige class and great focus attributes. There's no way we wouldn't have noticed someone spying on us all this time."

"I'm going to cast my spell again," Vin said, moving into the middle of his friends to be safe.

"Here it goes." Firing off yet another empowered Sense Soul, Vin gasped as the mana rebounded back to him, revealing the location of the few hundred tiny souls once more. Located directly in the center of the fragment, exactly where he'd cast his spell the last time.

"They're toying with us," Vin said, letting out a sigh of relief as he thanked Lumel for the cloth and dabbed at his bleeding nose.

"But I think that's a good sign. I don't know why they're messing with us, but it's better than attacking. They all collectively moved over to where I cast the spell the first time."" All of them?" Shia blinked.

"What the hell do they gain from this?"

"I don't know, but I'm starting to think they aren't petians," Vin admitted.

"At the very least, I don't know how a few hundred petians would have evaded us so easily. Not unless they've all got animal companions like Scule does."

"Maybe they've got tamed birds," Lumel suggested.

"Then they definitely aren't petians," Scule snapped, crossing his arms.

"So, what now? Do we run back to where we started and hope to catch them this time?"

"If they're watching us somehow, there's not much point in doing that," Vin admitted.

"Part of me thinks we should just leave them alone, but seeing as they purposefully moved from here to where I first cast the spell, this feels more like a challenge than an attempt at staying away from us. Not to mention we need to ask about the orcs and beastkin potentially living here."

"So a bunch of mysterious, maybe-petians are throwing down the magical gauntlet, as you Earthers say," Shia muttered.

"What's the plan? Set some sort of trap for them and cast the spell a third time?"

"I may have an even easier solution," Vin admitted.

"It's sort of cheating, and I know the Goddess told me I needed to take it easy with my class ability, but we're on a bit of a time crunch here. If I fall into another coma, would you guys mind watching over me until I wake up?"

"Vin…" Lumel warned, frowning at him.

"Are you sure? I can't say I'm a big fan of watching you continue to put yourself in comas time and time again."

"I think it'll be fine," he smiled, taking a deep breath.

"Here it goes." Focusing on his class ability yet again, Vin looked Beyond the Veil once more, not really looking for any one thing in particular as he turned in a full circle. It was almost like unfocusing his eyes, and he let the blurry colors and distorted shapes of the world bleed through his vision. Half of him expected his idea to be a bust, but he could have sworn he'd seen something back when he was looking at the magical mushroom, and if his hunch was correct…

Turning completely around, Vin froze as he came face-to-face with two brand-new faces, each one hovering in the air behind them with small, delicate wings jutting out of their backs that beat lazily. They were in fact petian-sized, if not a tiny bit smaller, only looking to be about four or five inches tall. They both wore clothing that appeared to have been woven from strands of grass, and from how they shared the same tiny facial features, he could only assume they were related in some way.

Vin had met quite a handful of different magical beings during his time on Edregon thus far, but it was still a bit of a shock to find these two hovering behind them. He'd certainly never met pixies before.