Chương 127: Chapter 125: The Ocean

The next morning, we break camp and head to the shore. It's not far, and we make it there within about an hour of leaving camp. I don't know what I expected. I think I was half expecting to find a dock or something, some evidence that she had taken a ship out into the ocean. If she did that, then there was no way we were going to find her. You can't track on the open sea. But there is no dock, no sign of a boat. No evidence that she took so much as a canoe onto the open water.

There's just a beach, stretching in both directions as far as the eye can see. The sand is smoother here, unless you get right up to where the water laps away. If you get up to where the waves crash and the tide rises and falls, you find shells by the thousands. Sea shells from creatures of all sorts, with sea glass and pretty stones worn smooth by the rolling waves. What you don't find are tracks. I had used Find Path to try to follow her trail, but all that ended when we set camp.

This morning, there was no trail to find, so nothing to follow. Which makes sense; we were walking across sand, and the wind would erase our passage after a few steps. There wouldn't be anything left of her passage after three days.

"What do we do now?" Vincent asks. He floats just above where the waves come in. If he was on the ground, his feet would be getting wet. The rest of us are just a few feet back, the water coming close to our boots but not actually hitting them.

"Do we pick a direction and just hope that we're right?" I don't really know the answer to that. I'm not sure if that's what we should do or not. I mean, it's a fifty fifty chance that we're right, but that also means a fifty fifty chance that we're wrong, whichever way we go. We could in theory split the party, and send a message if we find evidence of her trail so that we can get back together. Maybe that's the way to go. But something feels off. Something feels wrong about the whole situation.

"She was heading to the setting sun," I say.

"She should have gone out to sea."

"In what?" Ash asks.

"There are no trees nearby big enough to be made into a boat. And besides, going into the ocean in a canoe or a rowboat is kind of suicidal, isn't it? I mean, what if there are sea monsters?"

"This is kind of the end of the line," El agrees, looking down the coast and watching the waves crash. I look out at the horizon. Maybe there's an island that we can see if we look carefully enough. An island might be worth swimming out to. It couldn't be more than a few miles. We could swim a few miles. I've swam a mile before, back when I was human. I wouldn't be that concerned about swimming four or five of them right now. And much more than that would be sunk below the horizon, so there'd be nothing to see.

But if we can see evidence of an island, then maybe she went there. But that doesn't feel right either. And I don't see any islands. All I see is the ocean. Beautiful, vast, and blue. Stretching out to fill half the world from where I'm standing, and endless expanse of water. Ash is right; there'd be no point in trying to go out there with a canoe or a rowboat. You'd need an actual ship. Something that could handle days or weeks at sea. Still, there's something telling me that she didn't go out to sea.

I can't put my finger on it. I assume it's some kind of pattern recognition thing. I've always been pretty good at that. I can usually tell what's happening even if I can't put my finger on why or how it's happening that way. There's just something that doesn't feel right about her going out into the ocean. But that same feeling tells me that she hasn't gone north or south, either. That same feeling tells me that she came to where we are right now, and then she stopped. She hasn't gone anywhere else.

But if she hasn't gone anywhere else, that can only mean that she's still here. Or that she turned around. But if she had turned around, we would have crossed paths with her. We would have seen her, or some sign of her at least. It seems so strange to me. We're chasing a ghost, more or less. We have only recently come to know anything about her, and even what little we know is still mostly guesswork. She was heading this way for some reason, but we don't know the reason.

She is an elf, we think, but she might just be using that cloak that makes others think she is something different. Or it might not be a cloak. Maybe she has some kind of disguise ability, and actually does pretend to be different species depending on who she talks to or where she goes. Maybe the centaurs were just an unhappy accident. That doesn't feel right, either. We're chasing someone who doesn't know she's being chased. Why would she go to such effort to hide her trail?

Why would she work so hard to make it difficult to find her? She doesn't know we're following her, doesn't know we're chasing her. How could she? Wait. Could she? Could she have figured out that she was being followed, even as far behind as we have been? If she had figured that out, what would she do? Would she change her path, choose a different direction, in order to throw us off? Would she lay in wait for us to pass her by, so she could start following us? Would she watch us and try to figure out what we wanted?

Could she be nearby even now, hidden in the sand somehow?

"What was the point of coming to the ocean?" Gigi asks.

"For her, I mean. Why would she come to the edge of the ocean, if she knew that she had no way to keep going?" That's a good question. A great question. Maybe there had been a ship waiting for her. Maybe there was something else. My eyes go skyward, and I start looking for a dragon. That would make sense. Maybe the dragon met her on the edge of the shore and flew her somewhere else. Maybe she has continued her path westward, and is just doing it on the back of a dragon. That would be something we couldn't follow.

You can't track someone through the sky. But that would mean that we've lost. That there's no way for us to catch up to her. No way for us to follow her. I don't like that. Go back to the idea that she might have turned the tables, that she might be following us. I look around, really staring at the ground nearby. I look for any sign of disturbance, for a different coloration in the sand, for any sign of movement.

Maybe she has an advanced version of blur and is able to stand just a few feet from us without her seeing it. My awareness should give me a better than average chance of seeing through her sneak, no matter how good it may be. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Skills still advance at a normal rate. They don't benefit from the death cycle. So it's unreasonable to think that she has hundreds of points in all her skills.

If she is like me, then she has a bunch of skills that are in the thirties or forties, but nothing much higher than that. She doesn't have anything in the seventies or eighties. Vincent has at least one skill that high, and I'm pretty sure Ash does as well. But they both focus all their attention on very few skills. It's like they said: they're specialists. The god slayer us more like me. She's a generalist. So she shouldn't be able to sneak around all of us, not anywhere close.

That means she must have some distance on us. But where could she be? Maybe she's out in the surf. She wouldn't have to go that far to be hidden. Just deep enough for her to be able to crouch down and have only her head out of the water, that would be effective. She could be spying on us from maybe twenty or thirty feet out. She could be listening to us talk right now. Wherever she may be, if she has turned the tables on us, she probably wants to listen to us talk. She wants to know what we want, what we're doing.

The more we talk, the more likely it is that she'll get closer. The more likely that she'll give herself away.

"There might have been a dragon," I say.

"Maybe she figured out a way to summon them to her, and convinced one to fly her onward."

"That would suck," El says.

"We can't follow her if a dragon scooped her up." I look around at the sand. A dragon would probably disrupt the way the sand is laying, even after time passed. It would have gouged deep furrows into the sand, and those furrows might have been covered up, but they would've left a sign of their existence. They would've left indentations in the sand, or a clear patch without shells, or something like that. Am I grasping at straws?

"I don't see her able to summon a dragon," Ash says.

"It's too convenient. I don't put it past her to convince a dragon to take her onward, but I don't think she could just snap her fingers and have one appear."

"So maybe she waited here until a dragon saw her?" I offer. Ash shakes her head.

"That doesn't fit with what we know of her. She seems to be someone who has a plan. She's careful, methodical. She figured out the death cycle in the tutorial, and she intentionally used that loophole to grow in power. She had a tutorial god, which means she would've known to go to the park, or wherever the final location was, from the jump. She had to choose not to go through the portal into this world. She chose to die and to try again, over and over and over. That speaks of a methodical mind.

She planned everything. No way she would give that planning over to the hope that a dragon might possibly see her on the shore and decide to swoop down and talk to her. That just doesn't jive."

"Jive?" El asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Did you really just say jive?"

"Shut up," Ash says, giving an embarrassed smile.

"Okay," I say.

"So she had a plan. What was that plan? Did she know there would be a dragon or a ship waiting for her? Did she start swimming?"

"Swimming is a profoundly stupid idea," Vincent says.

"I don't care how strong and tough you are; the ocean is tougher." I look at him and watch an ambitious wave peter out under his feet, the little bit of water flowing past him and all the way up to the edge of my boots.

"You can fly," I point out.

"Yeah," he says.

"It drains mana every second, but I regenerate fast enough for that not to matter." I nod.

"Plus you have plenty of mana to drain." I'm pretty sure Vincent's presence is above 200, which would put his mana at close to five digits. That's a long time of flying.

"What if she has the same spell? What if she can levitate above the ground, and above the water?"

"She could probably keep heading west then," Vincent says.

"But if she didn't know there was a destination out there, it would be suicide. What if it takes more than a few hours to find what she's looking for? How long could she really go?"

"We know she's at least level seventy two," Ash says.

"If she has three hundred in all her stats, as Caleb keeps suggesting, then she has at least twenty thousand mana. That's good for at least six hours at one mana per second, right?"

"And that's assuming she doesn't have regeneration too," I say.

"She might regenerate all three categories. She's gotten enough talent points for that."

"I would've, if I was planning on killing a god," El points out.

"I regenerate stamina and hit points, but even I would've added mana to the list if I thought I was going to kill a god."

"And we've established that she is methodical and a planner," Ash says.

"So that makes sense. Maybe she just floated off to the west, out into the ocean."

"Well fuck," I say. That sounds possible. I don't think it's right, but it sounds plausible at least.

"What are we supposed to do now? Even if Vincent goes out after her and does find her, what then? He can't just send for the rest of us. We'd have no way of getting out there."

"Even with regeneration, she'd only go out there if she knew there was something on the other side," Vincent says.

"Something relatively close. The spell can last almost indefinitely, but it does require concentration. You can't sleep while floating."

"Which means there's a definite limit as to how far out she went," Gigi says.

"So yeah, it makes sense that she would have to know that there was something waiting for her, somewhere she was headed, like an island."

"And it would have to be close. No more than a hundred miles off shore." Vincent says.

"Even that would be stretching it." It would. Assuming she actually went out to sea. But the more we talk about it, the more sure I am that she didn't. She's nearby. I can almost smell her. I take a deep inhale through my nose and try to sort through all the scents. The ocean overpowers most other scents, but I can sift through that and find the other smells underneath. I can smell each of my companions, and I can smell myself. Is there another scent there, or am I imagining it? I really think she's close by.

"Do you have a spell that would actually turn you invisible?" I ask Vincent.

"Like, full stop invisible, undetectable to the naked eye?"

"I don't have such a spell," Vincent says.

"But I know that the spell exists. It's a very rare spell, but it exists." How close could she be? Is she standing a few inches away, or is she a dozen feet away? I can't hear anyone breathing over the sound of the crashing waves, so that won't help me.

"I don't think she went out into the ocean," I say. My hand rests on my sword. If she's invisible, she might be deciding whether or not to attack us. I want to be ready if she does.

"Then which way?" Vincent asks, looking up and down the beach.

"Your guess is as good as mine." I shake my head.

"No, I don't think she went either way."

"So, what, you think she's still here?" Vincent asks, a bit of laughter in his voice. Suddenly, El has her sword in her hands. Gigi and Ash both have their weapons at the ready, and they're looking around. They're taking me seriously. They believe me. I nod at Vincent.

"I think she's right nearby," I say.

"I think she's watching us right now. Listening to our conversation."

"If that's true, then activate Mab's Rage," Vincent says.

"Invisible isn't invulnerable. The ice shards will show us where she is." I shake my head, and hold out a hand to stop him from casting the spell himself.

"We don't want to fight her," I say.

"That's not the goal, remember? We just want to talk. We just want information." I look around, raising my voice.

"Do you hear me?" I ask.

"We don't want to fight you. We just want a conversation." I gesture to the girls to lower their weapons. They lower them, but they don't put them away. I guess I can't really blame them for that.

"We mean you no harm," I say, almost shouting the words.

"We won't attack you unless you attack us first. We just want to talk."

"Okay," says a new voice, maybe ten feet to my left.

"Then let's talk."