Published at 27th of July 2026 12:10 pm

Chapter 4349: Rising Uncertainty

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Each of the pathwalkers held their breath. They remained frozen where they stood, not daring to move even a little within the stealth canopy that Siliscia had generated to protect them. Their hearts pounded hard as the macrobes briefly entered their cave, scanning it for several moments.

Ria’s expression tightened a little as they approached the canopy, stopping just half a meter away from it, turning midair as they seemed to scan the entire cave. Ria’s expression grew a little tenser as she detected that they weren’t simply staring at the cave, but were actually absorbing the air within the cave and scanning it to analyze its composition and try to deduce the presences within the cave.

Of course, human civilization was an extremely advanced civilization. Over the past thirteen years, the advancements made in stealth technology have been great. The technology needed to completely cover scent trails had not only been invented but also mass-produced and implemented into many high-end stealth systems, including the premium high-quality exosuits that they were wearing.

The Spyioneer that she was wearing explicitly not only completely sealed any of her scents but also ensured that they didn’t leak into the environment. All of the gear they carried was also crafted with those features in mind.

And sure enough, after a few tense moments, the macrobes departed, leaving the cave and going away.

Runark heaved a deep sigh of relief, relaxing his tense body that was prepared to leap into action and completely butcher the macrobes into ribbons at the first moment if he had to. "Man, I thought we were totally going to get caught."

He turned towards Siliscia with a grateful expression. "Thanks, you have some nice gear on you."

Siliscia beamed at the praise as her long ears wiggled a bit at the praise. One of the things that she had agonized over the past three months as they developed EsoQuest Solutions was the value proposition she provided to the team that would justify her being a part of it.

Of course, Ria had never demanded that each of them prove their value. She took them as they were and valued them simply because they had managed, she trusted them, something that was in very short change, especially for what she had in mind.

Siliscia, of course, was eager to be on the team for reasons beyond simply being trusted. It wasn’t a secret that she was the weakest out of all of them in combat. Elves were only as strong as their environment, even if they had made great progress in mitigating that shortcoming in the past thirteen years.

But compared to a monster like Ria, and highly gifted superhumans like Sternon and Misha, and even someone who trained as hard as Runark, she was definitely much weaker. Thus, she had decided to focus all of her efforts on being able to provide for virtually every other spontaneous need that they would have in the middle of a mission. Elves had mastered oxygen sequestering to an extraordinary level, since the plant kingdom was naturally equipped with the ability to sequester oxygen from the environment.

But she had also stocked up on numerous vegetative technologies, including the stealth canopy that could rapidly create a cage of leaves that could create highly insulated systems that made detection that much harder.

"Keep the canopy up for a while," Ria told her with a cautious tone. "They’re still out there and... they’re combing through the mountain very thoroughly."

Her extraordinary senses allowed her to detect them despite the impressive insulation of the stealth canopy. She didn’t explicitly say it, but her serious tone made clear what they were all thinking.

"Have they actually managed to detect us?" Sternon couldn’t help but ask with disbelief. He had been quite certain that they were dealing with a relatively limited civilization that would have no way to detect them, even if they hadn’t gone all out with stealth. But it didn’t seem like a coincidence that the macrobes seemed to be searching for something intensely in the same area that they were in.

"...I don’t think we can know for sure," Misha remarked with a tinge of concern. "Because our operation entails a limited threat assessment prior to its commencement, we weren’t able to completely analyze the risk of getting caught."

Of course, such was the nature of jobs in the frontier and out of human civilization. It was not possible to have comprehensive risk analyses compared to operations within human civilization, where information was more abundant and easier to acquire. If they had conducted the kind of comprehensive assessment that would have warned them of the threats that they were facing, then it would have taken more than a month for them to have more accurate estimates on exactly what the macrobes were capable of.

Of course, even if the macrobes were searching for them, that didn’t mean that they were in imminent danger. From a civilization that wasn’t even anywhere near type-one, the pathwalkers were confident that they could overwhelm them. However, just because they were confident didn’t mean that there was absolute certainty. It was possible that collectively, or perhaps even individually, the macrobes were capable of felling the aliens.

And if that was the case, then confrontation was the worst thing that they could have possibly done.

"...We’ll need to be more careful than before, maybe even start using stealth techniques on top of our stealth gear," Ria remarked with a concerned tone.

The only problem with that was that it was much harder to use stealth against in an exoplanet while they were forced to wear exosuits. While the exo-Martial suits were equipped with air manipulation systems that could allow them to use breathing techniques even on an exoplanet, they came with the downsides of reduced precision and accuracy. Stealth techniques usually required just those, so Ria wasn’t entirely confident that it would be enough to hide from the native macrobes.

Regardless, it didn’t change what they had to do. They just had to be more careful with the matter.

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