Chương 207: The Rattle of Cannonfire

After my conversation with Old Mo, to my relief, he seemed considerably more comfortable with me than before. He stopped awkwardly eyeing me from the corner of his eyes, and he seemed less on edge than before. The strange tension in Old Mo's actions wasn't something I had noticed before, but now that it was gone, it was abundantly clear that the oddity of myself and my friends had put Old Mo at least a little on edge. He also seemed more than a little curious about Anise, Sallia, and Felix.

However, he didn't seem disturbed - which was a relief. I was fairly certain that the process of dying and reincarnating was something every soul went through. But even so, Old Mo could have been a little afraid of the idea that we had somehow retained our memories from before.

It would be pretty unnerving to see a kid and know that they had more experience and memories than you did, and I could also see some parents believing I had 'replaced' their child or somesuch, even if I was pretty sure that wasn't how souls worked. But Old Mo just seemed curious - he would occasionally pull Sallia or Felix aside when there was a good time for it and ask them about the greater multiverse, but he never seemed afraid of us.

Sallia and Felix mostly stuck to basic topics when talking with Old Mo, and never shared the full details of their abilities with him - but they seemed willing to discuss the broad strokes of our lives up to this point. Old Mo also tried to pull Anise aside a few times - but Anise was currently obsessively reading through her new books and poking at her orb, and wasn't particularly interested in talking to him or doing anything else.

Even during meal times, Anise would just cram as much food as she could into her mouth and get back to her books, and only occasionally responded to the three of us during conversations or when I stopped her from tripping over her own feet while walking. I was a bit concerned with the fact that Anise was trying to read and walk at the same time, but Anise made sure to steer clear of any sheer drops or ledges, so I decided to just keep a close eye on her and make sure she didn't hurt herself.

We spent nearly a week traveling through the mountains after the conversation with Old Mo. As we continued marching through the mountains, my mother's seizures seemed to get better and better. I hoped that meant that my healing abilities were outlasting the Fizz addiction - but at the same time, my mother's lucid phases didn't become any more frequent than before. I had hoped that she would be mentally present most, or all of the time, as her drug dependency disappeared.

I had been honestly hoping that confiscating her drugs and fleeing the city might somehow make everything better. And unfortunately, that wasn't the case at all. I could only hope that, with time, it would be fixed - but I was starting to second-guess whether depriving my mother of her drugs had been a good idea at all.

I had heard before that only the person could really resolve themselves to quit once they started a drug habit, and while I wasn't sure if this situation was quite what other people had been referring to, it certainly didn't feel like things were improving as much as I had hoped they would. My mother still seemed to crave Fizz and had withdrawal symptoms, and still wasn't mentally present for the majority of each day. It was… not what I had envisioned.

A week later, however, we were forced to stop and reconsider our actions. Because as we continued traveling, we came across the rather ominous sound of cannons booming in the distance, as well as the distant sounds of explosions. I frowned, and stopped. Old Mo seemed to notice that I had stopped, and frowned as he scanned our surroundings.

"Miria?" he asked, sounding confused.

"Why did you stop?" I realized that Old Mo couldn't hear the cannonfire yet. He had just stopped because I had stopped.

"I thought this route was supposed to be free from both armies?" I asked.

"It should be. I can't imagine why either army would bother stationing troops in the mountains - it's cold, hard to lug cannons through, and hard to supply. Why are you bringing this up?" Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. I realized that I, perhaps, hadn't given quite enough credit to the upgrades to my ears after my fourth rune had been created. They were better than I had thought they were.

"I can hear cannons in the distance," I said.

"But they sound pretty far away…" I saw the parents tense up at that statement, and Old Mo started cautiously scanning our surroundings.

"Are your ears… special?" he asked quietly, after a few moments of confused scouting. I nodded.

"My hearing is very good. Very, very good." Old Mo's eyes settled on my ears, as if he was trying to figure out what I meant by 'very good.' Now that I had discussed the Market with him, I could practically see the gears whirring in Old Mo's brain as he put my statements about the abilities of the Market and my very good hearing together. If I could hear cannonfire in the distance, it definitely wasn't a good thing, because it meant that we had run into one of the armies we were hoping to avoid.

There was simply no other way that we would run into cannonfire while traveling through the mountains. But me hearing it didn't necessarily mean we were completely screwed yet. The battle could be happening several kilometers away, depending on the acoustics of this region of the mountains. It meant that we still potentially had time to avoid the battlefield if we were careful.

"Let me know if it gets louder," said Old Mo.

"For now, let's keep moving. Let's get a little closer to the battlefield and see if maybe you're just picking up the sound of a battle from outside of the mountain range. It's unlikely, but still worth checking." I nodded, and we continued moving. Half an hour later, I started to wince. I had been hoping the cannonfire would end, but it was definitely getting louder. A prolonged battle meant more soldiers participating in it. And we were also definitely getting closer to the battlefield.

Old Mo was also starting to frown more and more as I constantly updated him, until eventually, he simply stopped us from moving forward at all. He turned towards the four of us.

"Do the four of you… have any scouting abilities?" he asked.

"I could probably do it as well, and before learning about your… abilities, I was planning to act as the scout for the group. But now I'm seriously revising my opinion about who is capable of what." I nodded.

"I do, and Sallia kind of does." While Sallia hadn't had much of a chance to use it yet, her seventh rune's ability to combine her previous abilities together was still very much an option for scouting. Her ability to look through bullets as if they were scrying spells would be incredibly useful for spying on soldiers that I might miss with my own detection methods. I noticed Anise and Sallia's parents giving me strange looks, since my ability to heal other people was now very well known to everyone.

The idea that I also had scouting abilities would sound strange to them. But right now, I felt that holding too much back might put us all in far more danger. Old Mo nodded thoughtfully.

"All right, could the two of you scout ahead a little bit and let me know if you see anything?"

"You can't just ask a six-year-old to scout!" said Sallia's father, sounding more than a little angry. Old Mo turned to him.

"Do you know anyone else in this group who has drunk an ability potion? The whole reason I think these two would make a good scouting team is because I saw what they did to the first group of soldiers that tracked us down." Sallia's father stopped dead in his tracks, before he shut his mouth and sat back down. Nobody else objected.

"We'll do it," I said. Five minutes later, Sallia and I set out. Not that it took too much scouting to find the problem. Another hour away from us, we found exactly what we had been hoping to avoid. Just next to the mountains, thousands of Vernese and Coalition troops were fighting. The Vernese didn't have many cannons with them, and looked like they were being driven deeper into the mountains.

The Coalition army was somewhat better equipped, but for some reason they had decided to pursue the Vernese directly into the frozen, heavily wooded mountain peaks instead of just trying to let the Vernese freeze to death. There was no way this was the entirety of each army - I only saw a few thousand troops from each side, and I knew that tens or even hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been conscripted from across Verne.

But even though we had still dodged most of the army, we certainly hadn't dodged the entirety of it. The battle was right before us.