Chương 16: Tonic

Our plan was simple because we didn't have time for a complicated one. Rael carried the flag and the token together while Eydric stayed within ten paces of him as a close guard, and I moved ahead through the canopy with Focus running, sweeping for anything coming our way before it arrived. If I found something, I dealt with it before it reached them. If I didn't, I kept moving. That was the whole strategy. [Focus: Level 3 (1%)] [Mana Pool: 328/415] The first twenty minutes were, ugh, rough.

[Focus] at level three gave me a clean read out to about fifty paces, but the edges of the sphere were grainy, and holding it while jumping between branches cost me a kind of attention I hadn't trained for. I could do one or the other well. Both at once meant the sweeps came back muddier than I wanted, and twice I had to stop on a branch and re-sweep because I wasn't sure whether a signature at the edge of my range was a person or a dense patch of old mana in the soil.

By the time Rael called for the first rest, I was glad for it. [Focus: Level 3 (14%)] I pulled [Focus] back and sat in the fork of a wide oak while the ache behind my right eye loosened. Five minutes. Rael and Eydric were somewhere below me, I could hear them breathing but not talking, conserving energy the way smart people did.

I closed my eyes and let my channels settle, and when I opened them again the ache was mostly gone and my pool had recovered a thin margin from the passive trickle that came back on its own when I wasn't spending. So we moved again. The second stretch was different.

Somewhere around the twenty-five minute mark, the graininess at the edges started to clear, not all at once but in the way that fog lifts; I'd sweep, and the edge of the sphere would come back a little sharper than the last time, and the signatures I was reading would hold their shape a fraction longer before dissolving. I started being able to tell the difference between a bird in the canopy and a squirrel-sized creature on a branch without having to re-sweep to confirm. Small distinction, but it mattered.

[Focus: Level 3 (37%)] Second rest. Five minutes. The ache came back slower this time and left faster. I noticed that my breathing had changed without me deciding to change it; the in-hold-out pattern that had started as a conscious effort had become something my lungs were doing on their own, as if the body had figured out what [Focus] wanted and was supplying it without being asked. Third stretch.

Forty minutes in total now, and the sphere was holding at fifty paces without effort and pushing past it on the harder sweeps. I caught a signature at sixty-two paces, clear enough to count the channels, and recognized it as human before I'd finished the exhale. Two more behind it, further back, same heading. A team, moving in formation. [Focus: Level 3 (58%)] I filed the team away; they were heading southeast, away from us, so not a threat.

But I had read them at sixty-two paces, and a half hour ago my ceiling had been fifty. Third rest. I sat on my branch and watched the proficiency climb. [Focus: Level 3 (71%)] The ache behind my eye was barely there now. I could still feel where it had been, a faint warm pressure in the same spot, but it had stopped being as painful as before. Fourth stretch, and the world opened up. I don't know how else to describe it.

One sweep came back at fifty paces, the next came back at fifty, and then on the third one the edge of the sphere just... went further, and suddenly I was reading signatures at seventy paces with the same clarity I'd been getting at forty an hour ago. Rael's breathing pattern was as clear to me as if he were sitting on my shoulder. Eydric's heartbeat was a slow drum I could track without concentrating on it.

A rabbit-sized creature was sitting in a hollow log at sixty-eight paces, and I could feel the tiny rapid flutter of its pulse inside the larger signature of its body, which was a level of detail I had never reached before. [Focus: Level 3 (100%) > Level 4 (0%)] The notification was almost an afterthought, because I had already felt it happen. I exhaled slowly, and smiled. [Mana Pool: 288/415] Then, at the far edge of my new range, three signatures lit up.

They were moving fast, coming from the northeast on an intercept line. Human. All three channelling, burning mana to close the distance, and the angle they were on would put them across Rael's path in about… ninety seconds. Yeah, that seemed about right. I didn't signal to the others. Instead, I dropped out of the canopy, hit the ground at a run, and closed the distance in silence.

They were moving in a loose triangle through a gap between two ridges, focused on the map in the lead boy's hands, looking at our flag's position, focused on getting there first. None of them were looking up and none of them had their mana sense extended, which told me everything I needed to know about how tired they were. I came in from the side. The lead boy's badge was pinned over his heart the same as everyone else's.

I hit him with a low wind push that sat him down hard on his back, and while he was still trying to understand what had happened I pulled the badge off his tunic with two fingers and kept moving. The girl behind him spun and got a barrier up, which was good instinct, but I was already past her; I hooked the badge off her chest on the way through with my free hand while her barrier was still forming in the wrong direction.

The third one saw me coming and actually threw a cast, a compression bolt that I sidestepped without slowing down, and I caught his collar as I passed, pulled him off balance, and took the badge off him while he was stumbling. Three badges in my left hand. Three candidates sitting in the dirt behind me, disqualified, no longer a problem on the return trip. I tucked the badges into my pack and went back up into the trees.

Suddenly, I heard a high-pitched and ragged screaming so I shifted on my branch and pushed a sweep out in that direction, and the picture came back immediately: one human signature, small, moving fast, and two larger signatures behind it, gaining. Beasts. The same dense predator-knot I'd learned to recognize from the Thornwood pack, though these two were bigger. The boy they were chasing had a mana pool so depleted I could barely read him against the background noise.

He broke through the brush below me and to the right, cutting across our path at an angle, a skinny kid with dark hair plastered to his forehead and one arm tucked against his side. His tunic was torn across the shoulder and he was running roughly the same direction we were heading, which meant the beasts behind him were about to cross right through the space between me and Rael and Eydric. The first beast came through the brush after the boy, fast and locked onto his back.

The second was wider, taking a flanking line, and its trajectory was going to bring it right on top of Rael and Eydric's position below.

"Eydric!" I shouted. I heard the sharp crack of his cast before I finished the word, it was dense and fast, hitting the flanking beast and sending it tumbling through a stand of ferns. It didn't get back up. The other one was still on the boy, who tripped. His foot caught a root and he went down hard, rolling, the arm against his ribs giving out. The beast closed the last ten paces in a flat sprint, jaw already open.

I dropped out of the tree and the staff came down with me, reinforced, both hands on the grip, and I brought the stone end of it down onto the top of the beast's skull with everything I had left in my arms. The skull cracked under the impact, and the beast's legs folded, and it went down half a pace from the boy's feet. I stood over it, breathing hard. My arms were shaking from the vibration of the hit still running through the staff. The boy was staring up at me from the ground.

His eyes were wide, his chest heaving, and clutched against his injured side with his good arm was a folded square of cloth with a coloured pulse stitched into the corner. A flag. I reached down and offered him my hand.

"Hello, can you stand?" He flinched away from me, scrambling backward on one elbow, and his grip on the flag tightened until his knuckles went white.

"Please," he said.

"Please don't take it, I've been carrying it for two hours, my team got separated at the ridge, I've been alone since then, please—""We're not taking your flag." That was Eydric, walking up from behind me where he'd just put the other beast down. The boy's eyes shifted to him.

"We have our own." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Rael came up beside Eydric a few seconds later, one hand resting on the bulge in his jacket where our flag sat. The boy looked at the three of us, one after the other.

"You... have one?"

"We do," I said.

"We're heading to extraction. Same as you." The panic drained out of his face slowly, in stages. His grip on the flag loosened. His breathing was still ragged but it wasn't the breathing of someone about to be robbed anymore.

"We should stop for a bit," I said, looking back at the others.

"I need a rest." Nobody argued with that. We found a flat stretch of ground under a cluster of old trees and sat down without needing to discuss it. Fifteen minutes this time. Nobody argued for less either. I leaned back against a trunk and let [Focus] drop. The ache behind my eye came in on cue, gentler than before but still there, and my arms were still feeling the staff impact from the beast's skull. Sweat had soaked through the back of my tunic and was cooling against my spine.

"I would give almost anything for something cold right now," I muttered, though I hadn't meant to say it out loud.

"Me too," Eydric said, eyes closed, head against bark.

"Me three," said Rael, who was lying flat on the ground with his arms spread. I chuckled at that, and then the boy, who had been sitting a few paces away with his knees drawn up and his flag still pressed against his chest, cleared his throat very quietly.

"I, um... I have some tonic. If you want." The three of us looked at him. He was already reaching into a small leather pouch at his hip, barely the size of his fist. His hand went in up to the wrist, which should not have been possible, and came back out holding a glass bottle of pale blue liquid with tiny bubbles climbing up the inside of the glass. He reached in again and pulled out a second one.

"Side objective," he said, noticing me looking at him.

"The pouch, not the tonic. It's a dimensional storage thing, I found it in a shrine. I only have two bottles, though, so... sorry."

"Are you kidding me?" Rael was sitting upright before the boy had finished the sentence.

"Two bottles is two more bottles than we had five seconds ago. I'd kiss you if you were a girl, man. What's your name?"

"Tomás."

"Tomás. You are a hero. A genuine hero. They should write songs about you." Tomás went a little red but he smiled, then he handed both bottles over, and Rael grabbed the first one and twisted the metal cap off with a sharp psshh that sent a small jet of blue foam up over his knuckles. He didn't seem to care.

He tilted the bottle back and drank four or five long swallows with his eyes closed, and when he brought it back down his whole body seemed to loosen, shoulders dropping, head tipping back, a long breath leaving him through his nose. Then he burped. … It was not a small burp. It came up from somewhere deep and it echoed off the trees, and Rael looked mildly surprised by it for about half a second before his face settled into pure satisfaction.

"That," he said, "is the good stuff." He passed the bottle to Eydric, who took it, wiped the rim with his sleeve, and drank. Eydric didn't make a sound, but his eyes closed the same way Rael's had, and when he lowered the bottle his face had the same looseness to it, the same quiet relief, and he sat there holding it for a moment like he was considering whether to finish the whole thing before remembering other people existed.

"Good?" Rael asked.

"Mm." Eydric passed the bottle to me. Tomás had opened the second bottle himself, more carefully than Rael had, and was drinking from it in small sips, and the colour was coming back into his face between each one. I looked down at the bottle in my hand. The liquid was pale blue and full of tiny bubbles that kept forming at the bottom and rising to the top in thin streams. I brought it closer and smelled it.

Sweet, faintly sour, and something else underneath that I couldn't place, something that tingled in my nostrils the way mana tingled against skin but wasn't mana. I lowered the bottle without drinking. Rael, who was now on the second bottle that Tomás had passed his way after a few sips, looked over at me mid-swallow.

"Why aren't you drinking?"

"I don't... what is this, exactly?"

"What do you mean, what is it? It's tonic."

"I know it's called tonic, but what is it? It has bubbles in it, and they keep moving. When I tilt the bottle they change direction. And it smells like..." I sniffed it again.

"I don't know what it smells like. It smells like nothing I've had before." I looked up, and found the three of them were staring at me. Rael had the second bottle frozen halfway to his mouth while Eydric's eyebrows had gone up by about a full inch and Tomás was… just blinking.

"What?" Even Eydric looked surprised, which was saying something.

"You've never had tonic?" Rael said, and the way he said it made it sound like I'd just told him I'd never seen the sun.

"He said he didn't even know what it was," Eydric said quietly." What?"

"I grew up in a sealed wing," I replied.

"My meals were planned for me. Every day, every portion, on a schedule I had no say in. Meat, grains, vegetables, water, and after training sessions I got a standard revitalisation draught and it was clear with no taste or colour. That's what I thought tonic was going to be, and this—" I held up the bottle "—is not that. This has bubbles in it. Would that not do something to your stomach?" Rael put his bottle down veeery slowly.

"Howl."

"What?"

"Tonic has been around for about twenty years. A mage in the western provinces figured out how to carbonate a mana-infused sugar base using a cold compression glyph, and it became the single most popular drink in the kingdom within about three years. Every tavern sells it. Every market stall carries it. Children drink it at festivals. My grandmother drinks it, Howl, and my grandmother doesn't trust anything that was invented after she turned forty.

The bubbles are carbonation, they are completely harmless, and they are, in fact, the entire point."

"The entire point?"

"Yes, the entire point! The bubbles are what makes it good. The mana in it gives you energy, the sugar gives you taste, and the carbonation gives you the—" he gestured vaguely at his own throat "—the thing. The feeling. I can't describe the feeling. You have to drink it."

"Just try it," Eydric said.

"Slowly." I looked at the bottle. The bubbles were still climbing. I brought it to my lips, tilted, and took the smallest sip I could manage. The first thing was the cold. It was colder than anything I had ever put in my mouth, colder than well water in the eastern courtyard in winter, and the cold went down my throat and spread across my chest in a line I could trace with my eyes closed. The second thing was the sweetness, not like honey or fruit but something unique. The third was the carbonation.

The bubbles hit the roof of my mouth and the back of my throat at the same time, and it was like being bitten very gently by something that meant well. A tingling, fizzing feeling that moved through my teeth and up into my sinuses and made my eyes water for about half a second before settling into something that was just... pleasant. Very pleasant. Oh, startlingly pleasant. And underneath all of it, was the mana. A slow warmth rising through my chest that was nothing like a revitalisation draught.

[Stamina: 84/200 > 167/200] I lowered the bottle and stared at it.

"So?" Rael was leaning forward with both hands on his knees.

"How is it?" Eydric asked, and he was watching me too. Tomás had his chin on his knees, looking at me over the top of his flag with wide expectant eyes.

"I lo— UUUUURP —ve it." The burp came out of nowhere. It rose from somewhere behind my ribs and exited my mouth before I could do a single thing about it." YES! He loves it!" Rael managed from the ground, laughing.

"He loves it! The Axiom of House Aridis! The pride of the kingdom! First tonic of his life and he burps like a sailor in a tavern!" Eydric and Tomás were also laughing out loud at my burp.

"I told you," Rael said.

"I told you it was the greatest drink mankind has ever produced. I have been saying this for years. Nobody listens to me. Nobody ever listens to me."

Fifteen minutes came and went, and we finished both bottles between us, and by the end of it the four of us were sitting in a comfortable silence that felt earned. Tomás had stopped clutching his flag like a lifeline and was holding it loosely across his lap. The colour was back in his face. His ribs still looked like they were bothering him, but he'd stopped wincing when he breathed.

"Ready?" I said. The three of them nodded, so we moved. Same formation as before: me in the canopy, Rael below with the flag, Eydric at his shoulder. Tomás fell in behind them, and to his credit he kept up, though I could hear from the canopy that his breathing was rougher than theirs and his footfalls were heavier. He was running on tonic, willpower and not much else. I made a quiet note to keep my sweeps wider on his side in case something came at the group from a direction he couldn't react to.

[Focus: Level 4 (12%)] An hour passed. Two more rest stops. One more team that I intercepted and stripped of badges before they got within forty paces of Rael; they were so tired they barely put up a fight. A single beast that Eydric put down without breaking stride. The extraction point was getting closer on the map, and the closer it got, the quieter the forest became, which was not a good sign.

"Stop," Rael said, during our fourth rest. We stopped.

"We're about twenty minutes out." He had the map open on his knees and was tracing the last stretch with his finger.

"And I need to say something none of you are going to like, which is that there are teams sitting at that extraction point right now, waiting for us." Nobody spoke.

"I know this because it's exactly what I would do. It's what I proposed this morning, actually, before you two made me feel bad about it. Find a good position near the finish line, let the tired flag-carriers come to you, and hit them when they're too exhausted to fight back. It's the smartest play in the exam if you don't have a flag of your own, and by this point in the day, most teams don't."

"So we're walking into our own plan," Eydric said.

"We're walking into my plan, yes, which means I know exactly how it works, which means I know how to break it." The villain looked up from the map.

"The teams sitting near extraction are watching the map. They can see our flag coming. They'll pick their positions along the last stretch, probably in pairs, and they'll wait until we're close enough that we're committed and can't turn back. That's the trap."

"So?"

"So we don't walk into it. We take it apart before we get there." He looked at me.

"Howl, how far out can you read people exactly?"

"Seventy paces. Maybe more if I push it."

"That's more than enough. You and Eydric go ahead without the flag. I go invisible behind you with it. The map shows the flag moving, but nobody can see who's carrying it, and the two of you are scouting ahead. Howl finds them before they see you, and you and Eydric take them out while they're still sitting in their ambush, confused to see the flag on the map but nobody in sight."

"We ambush the ambushers," Eydric said.

"Exactly." Rael seemed to be enjoying this.

"Tomás. Put your flag down somewhere hidden before we get close. Buried, under a rock, stuffed in a log, doesn't matter. Once it's out of your hands it's off the map, and nobody comes looking for it." Tomás nodded. That part he understood. Rael folded the map. T'was time to end this, finally.