“These people are crazy. I would never stop in a shithole like this if it weren’t for the wargs. Our destination was Shaku. Do you know if my goods are safe?” Asked a scrawny middle aged woman with more wrinkles than a crumpled paper.
“How did you escape the wargs?” Lith couldn’t care less about their cargo.
“We didn’t escape. They ignored us.” Said a lean man in his late fifties, with grizzled hair and beard. “They were too focused praying to pay us any attention.”
“Praying?” Lith was even more incredulous than he sounded.
“Well, they were kneeling on the ground, doing nothing but chanting some gibberish.” The man shrugged.
“It wasn’t gibberish, master Dihel, but magic.” Said a young man about Lith’s age who looked more like an artist than a wannabe merchant. He had handsome features and arms so thin Lith doubted he had ever lifted something heavier than a toothpick.
“How can you be so sure?” Lith asked.
“I was the one standing guard. I noticed the wargs because of the light they emitted. They were divided into groups of six. Each group was engulfed in a magnificent golden light that formed a circle.”
“Golden light?” Lith echoed as his stomach churned.
‘Six points inscribed inside a circle?’ Solus’s stomach was nonexistant, but she felt like puking nonetheless.
“By chance did it look like this?” Lith opened his right hand, making a Silverwing’s Hexagram the size of a towel appear.
“Yes! It was exactly like that, at least as far as I remember. What does it mean?”
‘That we are royally fucked.’ Lith thought.
“Nothing, don’t worry.” He actually said.
“You have helped me a lot. Just a few more questions. Did the monsters have something unusual about them? Anything at all?”
They shook their heads, making Lith inwardly curse.
‘I hoped they had seen the wargs shapeshift, or at least in the company of humans. That way at least I would know where to start looking. My usual bad luck.’ He griped.
“Where did you spot them, exactly?” Lith took out a map from his pocket dimension and had the merchants point out the location to him.
Before he left, he gave them enough food and water to last for a couple of days. Lith also barred the door and took all the keys with him. Then he called the Baroness.
“I’m leaving Maekosh, so I need you to stand guard and call me if anything happens. Trust no one but me. No one can know of my absence.”
“What? That is unacceptable! Your duty is to defend the city, how can you leave?” Fear and outrage fought in her voice, but fear prevailed lowering it by one octave.
“The merchants saw the wargs practicing arrays.” Lith lied.
“If we allow them to increase their numbers, they will be able to destroy the city from the outside. They need to be culled.”
‘It’s actually much worse than that.’ Solus quivered in anxiety.
‘Someone has taught them the impossible array we used to practice true magic. can share the experience they gain by practicing individually, they could master it even with their limited intelligence.’
‘Even worse, they are learning how to use every element instead of just two. Can you imagine the threat a tribe of Awakened that spawns as fast as monsters do could pose to our lives? On Earth there was traffic because anyone could drive a car.
‘Magic is rare and Awakening is even rarer. Yet those things are breaking all of Mogar’s rules we’ve learned so far.’
Lith Warped to the same spot he had fought the warg warrior, checking his surroundings for enemies. Neither Life Vision nor mana sense perceived anything so he flew at full speed toward the place the merchants had pointed out to him.
‘I know where they trained and where they were going. If they didn’t fly, I can hunt them down by following their smell!’ Lith enhanced senses allowed him to even track a person’s scent.
It was useless inside a city. Too many people and too many strong odors coming from every direction would easily mess with his senses. After all, Lith wasn’t a trained dog, he had neither the instinct nor the skill to isolate a single smell among many.
In the wilds, though, especially during winter, there weren’t many odors. Lith took out a piece of the warg to sniff it. It smelled like a wet dog after rolling in a pile of dirty sportswear and sweaty socks.
The stench made his eye water, but it also gave him a scent to follow strong enough that only an open sewer could mask it. The fair weather of the last few days also helped him greatly.
The snow preserved most of the tracks the warg left since they didn’t bother to hide them in any way.
‘I know how those poor bastards must feel. Practicing magic, hunting to eat, sleep, rinse and repeat. That’s how I became strong. If we can, we need to capture one of the wargs alive.
‘I want to learn the secret behind their mutation and kill the idiot responsible for this abomination!’ Lith inwardly snarled.
He was unaware that if the Master knew about the magnitude of their failure, they would be the first to kick their own ass to the moon and back.
Lith could have reached the monsters’ den in a few minutes of flight, but his paranoia slowed him down. He couldn’t know that the wargs were still at odds with their newfound intelligence. They continued acting as predators, not prey.
Hence they had no caution while moving unless they were planning an ambush.
Lith was forced to keep his best spells ready and check his surroundings whenever he entered a good spot for an ambush. Nothing happened, but the tension of the hunt weighed on his nerves.
While facing an unknown enemy on their own turf, the line between hunter and game was paper thin.
‘Their warrior didn’t hesitate to commit suicide to hide its pack’s location, yet they did nothing to cover their tracks. My enemies go from smart to plain dumb like they suffer from split personality.’ He had no idea how close to the truth he was.
‘I counted at least 30 adults and a dozen kids. What are we going to do about them?’ It wasn’t the first time they dealt with younglings, but Solus had never come to terms with what had to be done.
‘Kill them. Or would you like me to wait a couple of days so they turn into adults? I can spare them, but are you willing to take responsibility for every life they will take?’
Solus didn’t reply. It was an old unsolved argument of theirs. To her heart, giving the cubs a second chance was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, her common sense found it simply idiotic to let them go just to kill them a few days and many victims later.
That was one of the rare moments she was happy to not have a body, so the choice was out of her hands. Lith followed the smell until he found a well camouflaged cave at the base of a small hill a few kilometers from Maekosh.
He had used the Hush spell to cancel the noise and darkness magic to hide his smell the moment Life Vision had picked up a faint signal. The cave went deep into the ground and the surface of its walls was too smooth to be natural.
‘Fuck, they have already grasped earth magic. Worst case scenario, they used it to be aware of my arrival and they will negate my spells with the Hexagram. Let’s hope I’m not stepping into a frigging trap.’
