Chapter 1056: Chapter 1056 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 2
Both of them looked ahead long enough for the situation to settle...
Ren’s body in contact with Liora’s in a warm and soft hug that wasn’t accidental, it was established now as the default position of the two of them on the Mantis’s back.
"Better?" Ren asked, after a while.
"Yes," Liora said.
The difference between that "yes" and the earlier "no" was smaller than it appeared.
Ren was in opportunistic mode and pulled her closer. Not with the awkwardness of the first months, nor with the excessive deliberation of someone calculating whether the gesture was appropriate.
This was done with the naturalness of someone who had spent enough time doing this kind of thing with the 3 people ’beside them’ that some things were simply what they were.
Liora had spent about a third of that cumulative time, so she was less accustomed and went a little red.
The purplish fire she was generating increased one degree of temperature beyond what the warmth situation actually required and was turning pinkish at the edges.
Shizu and Umi were watching the horizon with the feigned monotonous attention of two people who had decided the horizon was the most interesting thing available at this particular moment.
"If the three of us were here," Liora said, without elaborating.
"Yeah... I’d be quieter," Ren said.
"This is cheating then..."
"It’s not cheating." A pause. "It’s just still easier for me this way..."
Liora considered that.
"Isn’t easier the same as cheating?"
"No," Ren said. "Easier is easier... And would only be temporary so brace yourselves." He pulled her close and bit her cheek.
Liora didn’t respond verbally. But her whole body trembled, a vibration that ran along her spine, and the spirit fire heat went up one degree.
Ren counted that as a victory in the category of victories that were not mentioned out loud.
♢♢♢♢
The transition into the Gold ring arrived through the mana senses before anything became visible.
The Silver beasts that had maintained a respectful distance from them for the last several hours, reading the group’s combined signature and deciding that big a power margin didn’t favor them, fell behind.
The Gold beasts that began appearing at the edges of the territory as the group moved forward operated on different logic. A Gold beast didn’t process the presence of another beast at comparable rank as an automatic reason to retreat; it processed it as information that required further evaluation.
Evaluation that took longer than retreat.
And during that time, harassment was the natural behavior.
The formation tightened without anyone ordering it to, the coordination of a group that had done this before and knew exactly what the response was. Nobody needed to be told what the closing formation meant.
But Gold 1 was still very manageable to pass flying...
Gold 2 was a different conversation.
The flying beasts descended into the tree line, because holding the airspace in the Gold 2 ring cost more in warmth and sustained attention than the advantage of the elevation was worth.
Too high, too cold...
The ground offered its own complications, but it was the right trade.
The trees of the Gold 2 ring were in the category of things that made the word "tree" feel insufficient. They had the scale of something that had grown for long enough without the limitations that environments normally imposed, roots that modified the topography of the ground around them, canopy that didn’t let light through so much as filter it into something different by the time it arrived at the base.
The root system was actually huge feet and created a second movable topography at ground level; a landscape of ridges and gaps where something that wasn’t paying attention could end up somewhere it didn’t intend to be.
"Stay at the top of the base of the trunks," Ren said, from his position, with the brevity of someone giving instructions the group already knew but that the group needed to hear so that following them was conscious rather than by inertia. "Don’t touch the ground between the roots, you can be stomped on or pulled from below..."
The soil between the roots responded to vibration with sprouts that had their own opinions about what walking above them deserved, and those opinions were not neutral. But one would have to make the conscious choice to jump down from the base of the trees, dropping ten to twenty meters from the top of the roots to reach that soil.
It wouldn’t happen by accident to a group like this.
The group’s combined mana continued doing what it needed to do. Not aggressively; the presence of several Gold-rank signatures in proximity, sufficiently notable, gave the beasts approaching out of curiosity the information they needed to arrive at the conclusion that looking with curiosity and taking action were two different things and that in this case the second wasn’t worth the cost.
The advance was steady.
♢♢♢♢
The Gold 3 ring was different in scale from everything before it.
The trees here made the Gold 2 trees retroactively seem reasonable....
Some of the group’s mana creatures moved with the heightened attention of a beast that had registered it was in territory where other participants operated at comparable level, not just nearby but throughout the space, present in the way the mana in the air was present.
The beasts watching from the distance hadn’t launched yet. They were the same kind that had once pursued Zhao with that annoying feline interest, but not stupid. They carried the instinct of something that had survived long enough to reach the rank they had reached, and that instinct included the capacity to evaluate when a target was worth the risk and when it wasn’t.
The advancing group had the signature of something that didn’t fit the profitable calculation: enough members at comparable level, moving with the coordination of something that had operated together before, without the particular kind of distraction that made vulnerable groups vulnerable.
The beasts followed at distance with the patience of something that had time and yet also the intelligence not to spend it on poor odds.
The group advanced with the attention of something that couldn’t waste time but didn’t need to run either. That balance was the correct pace.
But what Ren had been registering throughout the journey wasn’t the beasts.
From the air, the rings had looked the way they always looked. Vegetation density, color patterns, the distribution of beasts across the territory: everything within the ranges the records documented as normal. Nothing much that would have drawn attention from altitude.
But from the ground, even the soil was different.
Not visibly. Perceptibly, for someone with the mana sensitivity Ren had and who had been using it for enough years that variations had become readable the way changes in air pressure were readable before weather shifted. That something present below the surface that wasn’t supposed to be there, distributed through the substrate in a way that grew more pronounced the further they went from the city.
The corruption was in the subsoil even here, this far out.
And further.
It was distributed, filtered through the root systems of the beast that were acting as ’vegetation’, present in that ominous way of things that gradually settled into a system without the system detecting it as an invasion because the process is slow and not painful enough.
Looking at it now...
The beasts that stalked from a distance had that different texture if you knew where to look. Not corrupted in the sense of the mutants on the wall. But indeed, still affected...
The instinct that made them curious had an edge that the instinct of any other pure Gold 3 wouldn’t have had if not slowly affected by it.
Ren noted it down on the mental map he’d carried since they’d entered the first ring... Much worse than initially expected.
From above: normal.
From below: very different.
Numbers should be on another level too.
The other problem was the information that didn’t appear in any official report because official reports were made mostly by scouts from above, and from above things remained as they had always been.
He told Lin and Liora what he had noticed during the brief exchange between sectors that the advance allowed.
Lin listened with the attention she paid to tactical information that changed the assessment of a territory.
"How much?" Liora asked.
"I don’t know if it’s enough to change what we’re going to find in the ruins," Ren said. "But it is enough so that we don’t arrive assuming the problem will be the same as always."
Lin and Liora processed that.
"Good," Lin said. And she said it with the tone he had when "good" meant that the information had arrived and had changed something about how she was going to proceed.
The group continued advancing.
The trees remained the huge trees but now Ren was sad for them.
Since beneath them, in the underground and in the roots that reacted to the vibration, something that had been settling in for some time remained taking them on its claws little by little.
