Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 39

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“I don’t want to do this,” Father said.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Mother told him.

“You can do it, Dad. You practiced a lot,” Senica added.

He turned to look at me. I shrugged and gestured for him to get going. We were going to need at least three hours to travel, probably more considering Senica and I were both children with short legs and low stamina. The sooner we got started, the sooner we’d be done.

“I really don’t think I’m ready,” Father tried.

“Just go,” Mother said, giving him a shove. He took a step forward, windmilled his arms to keep his balance, and shot her a glare. The tip of one foot hung in open air, but he’d managed to stop short of going over the cliff.

“I cannot believe you just did that!” he told Mother.

“What happened to all the enthusiasm you had this afternoon?”

“That was before I had to jump off a cliff!”

Bored of the banter Father was trying to drum up to stall, I wrapped the rest of the group in my magic. Three applications of feather weight to Mother, Senica, and Nermet, and one slightly cheaper weight reduction for myself later, I summoned a gust of wind to blow us all out into the open air, where we began drifting down to the ground below while Father stood there, slack jawed and gawking at us.

“A little warning would have been nice!” Mother snapped as Senica clung to her like a wet cat trying to claw its way out of a tub.

“Sorry,” I said, though my voice was carried away by the wind. That was fine. It was a lie, anyway.

Above us, I felt Father’s mana twist into his own weight reduction spell a moment before he jumped over the side. It wasn’t perfect, being both inefficient and at only about two-thirds full strength. He started catching up to us rapidly, and we all landed about the same time. Father hit significantly harder than our own gentle touchdowns, but he didn’t say anything about it.

“Which way is it back home?” Mother asked. “It all looks so different down here.”

I silently pointed ahead and to our left. There wasn’t really a road this far out from the village, but I’d confirmed that the cart’s wheels had left a trail in the dirt and dust. It was faint after days of exposure to the wind, but it would still lead us back home. If for some reason it failed, well, it might mean wasting some of my mana, but one way or another, we were getting back tonight.

“We should get going,” Father said. He glanced around the wastes and added, “Before something finds us.”

We had good odds of walking back without encountering any problems, but since Father was not able to hide his mana, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up having to kill an aggressive monster that sniffed him out. As long as it was only one or two, it probably wouldn’t be a problem.

Our speed was hindered by Senica the most, and my parents took turns carrying her to help speed things up. Father offered me a ride, but I declined. I might be taking two or three steps for each of theirs, but I had a basic invocation keeping me going. Senica didn’t have that option and sooner or later she would become the person holding us back as my parents’ strength flagged a few hours into the march.

I didn’t complain about the frequent breaks. As much as I wanted this to be over, I wasn’t willing to spend mana to speed up our progress, not tonight. It was a gamble, and I was betting that we wouldn’t encounter trouble on the way, at least not so much trouble that it would have been more mana-efficient to help.

I spotted the beast stalking us on our third break. It was a few hundred feet back with a shaggy pelt the same brownish-yellow dust color as the rest of the wastes. About the only thing I was sure of was that it wasn’t a mana sniffer. Those had quite distinctive faces. This looked more like a badger or maybe an overgrown mole. It might not even be a monster at all, though I’d need to get closer to examine it if I wanted to know for sure.

Mindful of my mother’s admonishments to keep Senica protected when dealing with trouble, I caught Father’s eye with a slight wave of my hand and tipped my head toward the beast. He glanced past me, following the direction I’d pointed him in, and I saw a brief surge of unfocused mana course up to his eyes.

He tensed for a moment when he saw the creature, but then relaxed almost immediately. I took that as a good sign that he recognized it and that it wasn’t all that dangerous. He confirmed that a moment later when he said, “Arbor gopher. Territorial, but it won’t follow us and it won’t attack as long as we stay away from its home. Probably has young’ins nearby.”

“Nothing to worry about then?” I asked.

“Not by itself, no. We shouldn’t linger, but we weren’t going to anyway.”

“That makes it sound like there could be a problem if we stay.”

“It’s not about the gopher so much as what it shares territory with. If there’s one gopher, then there are twenty more you don’t see, and where there are families of gophers, there are dust jackals.”

His words conjured up a mental image of lanky, long-limbed dogs the same color as the gopher, but I had a sneaking suspicion that they wouldn’t be normal animals. At the very least, they’d be magic-using animals. Possibly, they’d be monsters instead.

The primary difference between an animal and a monster was its relationship with mana. Specifically, the defining characteristic was whether the creature’s physiology could function without mana to keep it going. An animal might use mana, often in instinctive and unstructured ways, but a monster needed mana the way people needed food and water. I’d made a study of monsters at one point, and I’d found that often the simplest way to contain or control a monster specimen was to put it in an environment where I controlled its access to the mana it needed.

Undead were a prime example of a monster that couldn’t survive without access to mana. Take away the ambient mana, and the average zombie would collapse within hours unless it could find another source to feed on. One second, they’d be vicious flesh-eating abominations. The next, they were nothing but a moldering corpse on the ground.

Plenty of seemingly-animal creatures were actually monsters in disguise. False hares looked just like their mundane counterparts, except that when a predator tried to catch and eat one, they found themselves being eaten instead as the animal in their mouth suddenly morphed into a blob of grasping tendrils and razor-sharp teeth.

But crippling their cores would cause them to destabilize into a mound of writhing flesh and teeth with no way to pull themselves back together. If they stayed that way for a few hours, they would literally fall to pieces. Not once had I ever had a sample last more than three hours once they lost access to mana. Without it, their physiology just broke apart.

“And what exactly is a dust jackal?” I asked.

“Pack hunters that manipulate the ground and air to blind prey in clouds of dust. They don’t seem to have a problem seeing in it, and they love to hunt in areas arbor gophers inhabit. All the burrows the gophers dig provide them with plenty of loose dirt to use.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “Are they smart enough to leave the gophers alone? Or perhaps the gophers just know how to avoid them?”

Father watched the gopher, rather larger than I’d initially given it credit for, trundled out from behind its rock and farther away from us. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just know if you find arbor gophers, beware of dust jackals.”

That was an interesting, but hopefully pointless bit of information. It still wasn’t entirely clear where dust jackals fell on the animal to monster spectrum, but I was leaning more toward animal with magical abilities. If it did come down to combat with a pack of them, mana draining would not be my go-to opener.

As anemic as everything that relied on mana in these parts was, it probably wouldn’t be worth it anyway. Mana drain was fine as an offensive spell when the goal was to take mana from the target, but not when I needed to shore up my own mana reserves, not unless the target was my sister who’d just accidentally absorbed a full core’s worth of the mana I desperately needed.

There were other options that were more mana-efficient, but really the best strategy was to start walking again and hopefully avoid the fight altogether. Father must have agreed, because he overruled Senica’s whining protests and got the whole group moving again. I noticed Mother and Father both keeping much more of a lookout than they previously had, and after some whispered instructions, even Nermet started watching around us.

Something I hadn’t considered before beginning my plans to reincarnate into a new life was that it was much harder to see things that were far away as a toddler. Up close, my vision wasn’t bad, but the farther away something got, the harder it was to focus on it. I’d done my best to compensate with magic, but it always came back to resource management. In some situations, like this trip, it was worth it to use a sharpened senses invocation periodically to look around for trouble.

I was relying on the adults around me to give me advanced warning between uses of the spell, which I only had active for a few seconds every minute or two. I might spot an ambush, or something watching us like that arbor gopher, but anything fast enough could very well get in range in that gap time between spells.

I just kept telling myself that we’d be fine, that it was only a three hour walk that had turned into something closer to five hours. The wastes weren’t thick with monsters like the villagers seemed to think. We’d barely seen a handful for all the days and nights we’d been camping out here, and only then because the mana sniffers were attracted to Father’s ignition.

But knowing my luck, I fully expected to deplete a portion of my mana crystal’s reserves on the journey. If it wasn’t the dust jackals finding us, it’d be something else, be it monster or emergency. Someone would fall and break a leg, requiring expensive and difficult healing spells to get them moving again. Or we’d stumble upon some natural phenomena like an illusory maze and become trapped in it.

Once I thought about it, that last one might actually be a blessing in disguise. It would be well worth the time to harvest the mana powering something like that. Of course, that all but guaranteed we wouldn’t ever encounter one, not that it made much sense to find a pocket of natural mana in a desert like this anyway.

Or it could just be the damned dust jackals after all. I grabbed Father’s shirt and pointed down at a set of paw prints clearly visible in the dusty ground. His jaw tightened and he nodded, then scanned the area for more paw prints, touched Mother’s shoulder, and pointed off towards a dry gully not a quarter mile away from us.

“Probably holed up in there,” he said when she shot him a questioning glance. “No big deal as long as we keep walking.”

But he didn’t sound like he believed it, and now that I had a target to focus on, my sharpened senses spell revealed to me that Father’s guess at their location had been perfectly accurate. His optimistic suggestion that we’d be able to walk right on past them was less so.

“They’re coming,” I said. “Six of them.”

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