Chương 57: [B2] Chapter 15: Foxfire

The reunion lasted exactly as long as it took to confirm nobody was seriously injured, and then the quest window interrupted it before any of them had finished exhaling properly. Tournament Update 10% of teams have completed Leg 2 Leg 2 objective status (Team Zero): Incomplete. Viria read it twice, her ankle still favored but no longer swollen, three days of nutrients supplied by Root-Waking finally showing in her color.

"Fifty teams have already finished, and we haven't even started the actual fight yet."

"We are not the slowest team in this competition," Zero said.

"We are also not among the fastest. That is simply where we currently stand."

"That's not reassuring."

"It was not intended to reassure you." Miho sheathed her sword, the motion unhurried despite the number sitting in the air above them.

"It's good to have you back, Zero."

"We are not ready to face that thing again," Viria said, and nobody argued the point, because the alternative was pretending the near-miss at the river hadn't happened at all.

"We went in with an eagle's worth of experience and got handed something the system wouldn't even put a number on. If we go back now, at the same level we were at three days ago, we lose the same way."

"Then we do not go back at the same level," Miho said. Zero considered the shape of the decision, weighing competitive pressure against the certainty of walking underprepared into something Identify had already flagged as unquantifiable.

"Fifty teams finishing ahead of us costs us nothing directly," he said.

"Points outweigh speed in terms of how this system scores a leg. Dying to something we were not ready for would cost considerably more than a slower ranking."

"So we level up first," Viria said.

"Properly. Not the acquisition that happens by accident while running for our lives. The kind we choose."

"Agreed," Miho said, and that settled it more completely than a longer conversation would have.

They spent the rest of the day hunting. The territory obliged them within the hour, the way jungles that had gone unvisited for however many years this one had tended to offer up more danger than any team actually wanted to find. A cluster of armored boar-things, tusked and low to the ground, broke from cover near a game trail and came at Yukito's flank before he'd finished registering the rustle that preceded them.

His shadow caught the lead boar mid-charge, a crude lash that didn't hold the animal so much as redirect it, and Miho's blade finished what the redirect started. [Level Up! Lv. 44 → Lv. 46]"I got two levels," Yukito said, checking his own window a moment later.

"From boars."

"From boars we were prepared for, rather than a serpent we were not," Zero said.

"The distinction is the entire point of this afternoon." They moved deeper into the territory as the day wore on, deliberately now, hunting rather than merely surviving, and the levels came the way levels always came when a team stopped simply reacting to whatever the jungle produced and started choosing what to engage.

A cluster of stinging insects, smaller and far less coordinated than whatever true swarm the deeper jungle might have produced, cost them nothing worse than a few welts and returned a skill level neither Viria nor Zero had expected. [Skill Level up: Novel Marksmanship Lv. 4 → Lv. 5] If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Multi-target tracking while continuing fire logged. Draw speed increased.

"I am becoming disturbingly competent at something I refused to touch for over five years," Viria said, examining her own hands like they belonged to someone she was still getting to know.

"You are becoming competent at something you are choosing to touch now," Zero said.

"That is different."

The pack found them at dusk, and it was immediately clear these were not boars. Four of them, lean and dark-furred, moved through the undergrowth with lupine coordination that told Zero everything he needed to know before he'd finished running Identify. They didn't rush in together. They spread, silent, cutting off two separate lines of retreat before any of the four contestants had finished registering the threat as more than rustling leaves.

"They're flanking," Miho said, already turning to track the second pair rather than the one directly ahead.

"This is not instinct. This is a plan." Identify: Duskfang Lycan Level: 38 Classification: Hungry Traits: Pack Hunter, Coordination-based tactics Threat: Moderate (Single), High (Pack) The fight opened badly. One drove Miho back into a position where a second could have taken her flank cleanly, and it was only Yukito's shadow, imprecise but present, that bought her the half second she needed to recover her footing.

"There are two more circling," Zero called, plating already thickening along his forearms as he moved to intercept.

"They are not attacking in sequence. They are waiting for an opening."

"Then don't give them one," Miho said, breathing hard, blade catching a third strike at an angle that cost her more effort than it should have.

She was cornered for one genuine half second, with two lycans closing from angles her blade couldn't cover both of at once, and something in her chest reached for an answer before her conscious mind had finished searching for one. Foxfire gathered at her fingertips without her deciding to call it, pale blue-white and cold rather than warm, and it did not simply burn.

It bent around the nearest Duskfang's perception the way light bent through water, and the creature's charge, which should have taken her exposed side, veered instead toward a version of her that existed nowhere except inside its own momentarily convinced mind. The Duskfang's jaws closed on empty air a full body's length from where she actually stood, and Miho's blade found its flank before it had finished understanding the mistake. [New Skill Acquired: Foxfire, Lv. 1] Illusory flame manifestation.

Creates sensory hallucinations in targets of comparable level and sufficient intelligence to perceive them as real. Effectiveness scales inversely with the level gap between caster and target. She stood over the fallen Duskfang a moment, breathing hard, staring at her own hands like they'd done something without asking her first.

"That was not a sword technique," Zero said, arriving beside her once the remaining three Duskfangs had broken off, unwilling to press an engagement that had just cost them a packmate to something they could no longer trust their own eyes about.

"No," Miho said.

"It was not."

They made camp once the light failed fully, and Zero ran a status check on all four of them, as he'd learned to do only very recently. Team Status Check Zero: Lv. 49 (Growth Modifier: Race Evolution) Viria: Lv. 50 Miho: Lv. 51 Yukito: Lv. 50"I am the only one still under fifty," Zero observed, reading the discrepancy without any particular alarm attached to it.

"You'll get there," Viria said.

"You always do. Just apparently on your own schedule." Miho sat with her sword across her knees, turning her own hands over in the firelight, the same way she had after the Duskfang fell.

"I did not know that I could do that," she said quietly.

"The illusion. I knew that foxfire was available once I gained my second tail, but I never was taught how to use it. I wasn't holding out on you."

"Didn't Ninefold sponsor you with something?" asked Viria.

"Like a manual of your clan's teachings?"

"You're right," Miho nodded.

"With everything that happened, I completely forgot about it." They were close now. Close enough that the river's direction no longer required guessing, and close enough that whatever waited there would need to answer to four contestants considerably better equipped to ask the question than the two who had first stumbled into it by accident.