Chương 11: Flag

"So," Eydric said, once we'd put the clearing and its seven tenants behind us.

"How does anyone actually find a flag in here?" Nobody answered right away. The forest had opened into a shallow stretch of thinned-out trees, the ground softer underfoot, and we were walking in a rough triangle with Eydric on point and Rael trailing just behind my left shoulder. The map was open in Eydric's hands, and it was, as promised, not helpful. It showed terrain, extraction points and the jagged outline of the grounds, and nothing else.

"We could walk," Rael said.

"Pick a direction and walk until we stumble over one."

"That's the worst idea you've had so far," Eydric said without looking back, "and we've only been in here for ten minutes."

"It's not an idea. It's a floor. We set the floor and then we propose better ones." I thought about it.

"The flags have to be hidden in specific places, right? Not just scattered. Sartheon wouldn't put one in an open field where anyone could trip on it. They'd put them somewhere that takes effort to reach, or that takes a puzzle to open, or—"" Or," Rael said, raising a finger, "we let somebody else find one for us first." Eydric stopped walking.

"Hear me out." Rael stopped too.

"The moment any team touches a flag, every other candidate in these grounds sees their number light up on the map. Including us. So we don't have to find a flag at all. We have to find a team that has found a flag, and relieve them of it."

"Relieve them?" Eydric repeated.

"It's a strategy."

"No, it's a mugging, Solenne."

"It's the cleanest strategy in the exam, and I'll tell you why. A team that just grabbed a flag is running at full tilt toward an extraction point with a fourteen-hour day ahead of them, and we know exactly where they are at all times. We don't even have to chase them. We go to an extraction point, find a good position in the trees, and we wait. They come to us, they are exhausted, they are expecting ambushes from behind and not in front of the finish line, and by the time they see us, BAM!"

He clapped his hands, smiling with obvious villainy.

"We are already on top of them." Eydric and I both looked at him. Rael looked back at us, spread his hands wider, and did not seem to understand why we were quiet.

"What?" …He really is a Solenne.

"Honour," Eydric said flatly. I agreed with him entirely.

"Yes, it's not good."

"You guys have a better idea, then?" Eydric's jaw worked for a second before he said, "No."

"Ha!" Rael said.

"There it is. There's the real answer. Neither of you does, which is why we're all still standing in the same patch of dirt arguing about it." He ran a hand through his hair and his voice came down a notch, more serious.

"Look, I know how it sounds. But we have to be practical. You both think the teams who actually find a flag are going to walk it to extraction in peace? Every other team in here is going to do exactly what I just said. We're not inventing anything. We're just being honest about it first." Eydric didn't have an answer to that either, then they both turned to me. I took a second before speaking, because the idea was still forming, and I wanted it to come out clean.

"The flags are tracked," I said.

"The moment a team touches one, their team number lights up on every other map in the grounds. That means the flags are marked in some way the wards can read. And the only thing the wards are reading, at that distance, is mana." Rael's eyes sharpened.

"So if the wards can sense the flag by its mana, so can we. Not as clearly, probably. But the flags are likely to be holding a mana signature that doesn't match anything else in the forest. Background mana is messy, so a flag would be the opposite of messy. It would be a clean, structured signature sitting in one spot with nothing around it that looks like it. So we don't need a map, we just need to feel for the anomaly."

"Oh," Rael said, and then, slower, "Oh, that's... okay, that's good." He seemed to think about it for another second.

"But then how do we deal with the ones who come after us when we grab it?"

"I don't know yet." Rael looked at me for a moment.

"Okay…" Eydric cleared his throat.

"I thought about this, but the issue with what he's describing," he said, "is that it requires a Mana Sense advanced enough to isolate a single clean signature out of the noise of an entire forest. Most of us can feel mana at close range, and feel crude shapes at medium range, but scanning a forest for an anomaly at distance is a different skill. It would burn through most candidates' reserves in less than an hour."

"He's right," Rael said.

"Same problem. I can probably hold a shallow sense for a few minutes at a time before the cost outweighs the information, and I'm decent at it. This isn't a matter of wanting to, but rather one of not having the range." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. I said, "I'll do it." They both looked at me.

"You'll do it?" Rael repeated.

"Yes." There was a small pause.

"Sure," Eydric said.

"Sure," Rael repeated The technique was simple in principle and ugly in execution. I'd done it a handful of times in the training hall with Bellos standing over my shoulder and correcting me every few seconds, and I'd done it twice on my own in the sealed wing to see how far I could push it, and the results of those two sessions had been a nosebleed and a very long nap. You let mana out of your own core.

Not a lot — too much and the signal drowned in your own output — but enough to push an expanding shell of your own presence into the world around you, slow and thin, and then you listened for what came back. Mana was sensitive to mana. When your shell brushed against something that wasn't empty, the shell echoed, and the echo carried a signature.

A tree's ambient mana was a soft blur, a living creature was a small dense knot, a spirit was something else entirely, and a flag, if my guess was right, would be a clean structured ping that didn't match any of the natural shapes around it. But that was the simple part. The hard part was that the technique had two problems, both of which I had already bumped into, and both of which had limits I didn't know how to fix yet. The first was range. A single expansion didn't cover a forest.

It covered a sphere around me, maybe forty or fifty paces at the widest I'd ever held one, and the cost of holding even that much for more than a few seconds was not small. Even with my reserves. The forest was enormous, so to sweep a meaningful portion of it, we'd have to walk, and I'd have to cast the technique once, rest, cast it again further along, rest, and repeat until I either found the anomaly or collapsed trying. I was hoping for fewer than ten sweeps, but I was not confident about that number.

The second was clarity. Even within a single sphere, the information came in all at once and unsorted. Every tree, bird, small warm animal burrowing through the leaf litter, every pocket of wild mana in the soil, every stray trace of a spirit that had passed through three days ago… all of it hit me at the same time, in the same instant, as one enormous overlapping wash of signal.

Picking the one anomaly out of the wash was the skill, and I had never been particularly good at it, because compartmentalization had never been my strength. My strength was reserves. You couldn't reserves your way through a sorting problem. Which was exactly why I wanted to try it now. [Focus] was sitting in my active skills slot at Level 1, brand new, untested, and the only way to find out what it actually did was to put it under real load and watch.

A first attempt at sorting signal from noise, with a forest of ambient mana to sort through, was the kind of load I wanted. If [Focus] was what I hoped it was, the sort would be cleaner than anything I'd managed before. If it wasn't, I'd know that too. So I closed my eyes, exhaled, and breathed in.." What are you doing?" That was Rael's voice. I decided to not answer, as I would lose my momentum.

To be honest, I didn't know if regulating my breathing would work, but I felt like it was the best way to use my new skill. In. Hold. Out. Slower than normal. Deeper.

"Howl, what are you—""Shh." That shh was Eydric, I almost said thank you, but I had already begun. In. Hold. Out. Something suddenly shifted in the centre of my head. Mana moved up out of my pool without me telling it to, travelled through channels I didn't usually feel it use, and settled in a warm thin layer behind my eyes.

I could feel the exact shape of where it had settled, a band running from temple to temple across the back of my forehead, and the moment it was in place, everything around me stepped into sharper definition. Rael's breathing came in clearly on my left in a shallow inhale, long exhale, and small hitch between. He was still coming down from the pack fight, I realized. Eydric's heartbeat was a slow steady thud behind him, and I could hear it from two paces away, which wasn't something I should have been able to do.

My collar pressed against the back of my neck. I could feel the exact point where the inner seam met skin. The bag strap was a weight on my right shoulder. A pulse ticked in the pad of my left thumb. The air carried burned hide off my sleeves, and under that, wet earth, leaves, and a thin sweet note from a flower somewhere ahead that I hadn't seen. Wow… my own thoughts had gone quieter too, or maybe clearer.

The distinction between the two was fuzzy, and I didn't have time to chase it, but the mental noise I normally navigated around had dropped away. What was left was just me, sitting behind my own eyes, looking out. That was [Focus], I supposed. So I let the mana come out of my core. One pulse, clean, expanding in a shell around me going out faster than any sweep I'd ever managed before, and when it hit the limit of its range it came back in an echo I could read.

Eydric was first, two paces to my right, a small dense knot of clean disciplined channels. Rael was behind my left shoulder, same type of feeling. Past them, the forest. There was a faint pulse of mana about twenty paces ahead, low to the ground, not much of a signature at all, probably some small creature with just enough of a spark in it to register. Off to the north, the deep slow steady weight of something I recognized from years of training sessions in the estate gardens. A tree.

I knew what a tree felt like, this one was large and old and its roots ran further than most. Further out, past even the tree, there was a single faint human signature, the same kind as Eydric's and Rael's, but fainter only because of distance. The second my shell brushed it, it was gone. I held the moment in my head. Account for the distance, and whoever I'd just touched had been running a denser channel than either me or the boys. Huh, probably a proctor watching us.

And beneath and around all of it, dozens of smaller signatures, each one distinct and different from the next. I couldn't place most of them. I just knew they were there, and I knew they weren't the same as each other, cleanly and reliably, and that was the part that had always eluded me before. Compartmentalization. The thing my reserves had never been able to brute-force. [Focus] was doing it for me. But as exciting as this experience was, there was nothing I recognised as a flag.

Nothing in the sphere had the clean structured signature I was looking for. Nothing that felt made rather than grown. So I let the pulse dissolve, and the mana dispersed. What I'd pushed out of my core was gone, dissolving slowly into the air around me and carrying my own signature on it for a few minutes before the forest would absorb it and turn it back into the same ambient hum as everything else. And with [Focus] no longer being in use, the collar of my tunic stopped announcing itself.

My thumb went quiet, and the usual scattered chatter returned to the space behind my eyes. [Focus: Level 1 (100%) > Level 2 (1%)] Mana Pool: 400 > 380 (-20) The cost was fine. I'd been expecting much worse. I'd also been expecting the level-up to feel harder to earn, and then I remembered that new skills always levelled quickly at the start, the first few levels were the easiest and the curve steepened afterward. A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth before I could decide whether to let it.

"You found something?" Rael asked, leaning in.

"No." The edge dropped.

"No, not the flag. I just—" I shook my head, because I wasn't going to explain the skill thing out loud in the middle of a forest, and there was no clean short version anyway.

"Nothing in range. We should look somewhere else."