Chapter 16:

  After practicing his basic tracking and healing it was time to hunt. No spatial magic, no shadow magic. No light or nature magic. With most of his favourites off the table, he did allow himself the use of body magic.

  He needed stealth and he needed speed, so that meant using the wind. He bent the air around himself, reinforcing his body, and pushing himself until his outline blurred beneath the canopy. Each footfall was cushioned by the ground as he pulsed a small amount of earth mana through his legs. Scentless, soundless he leapt into the treetop, finding purchase on a thick branch as he scanned the area around him for signs of passage.

  There were creatures in the border that sensed presences not by scent or sound, but by heat. Now that he wasn’t actively channeling his earth magic, he was able to once more focus on his fire magic. He wasn't yet confident enough to try and take control of his internal temperature, but he could certainly dampen any heat waves that came off of his body and dispersed into the air around him. It was a delicate application of magic that took a lot of his concentration to pull off. More than he was comfortable with, but that was the purpose of training, was it not? He needed to get comfortable with splitting his concentration like this. With this application of magic. Whit these weaves, these patterns, and these tells that, if he wasn’t careful, would give away more than he wanted to reveal.

  Each success, each failure, each area of improvement was marked down in his notes. Reminders about timing, weaving, channeling efficiency, smother casting sequences and release patterns. He recorded ideas about ways to hold an effect longer or dissipate an effect better. More efficiency, more proficiency, more control. In the end it all boiled down to power and he was meticulous about how to make the most of his.

  ~

  It took nearly half an hour for Eli to find prey that would suit his training needs. The squimate was squatting high in the branches of a tree that was only a meter or two away. The bushy-tailed, quadrupedal rodent with hooked teeth and opposable thumbs was not necessarily dangerous alone, but it was quick, it was a true beast, though one of the lowest order, and it could sense mana fluctuations if they weren’t extremely well controlled. It was a perfect baseline test for many of the things he'd been working on that that night.

  Eli gave himself some ground rules before he began. The kill had to be done with magic alone. No physical contact should be made before the initial salvo, he couldn’t be discovered by the beast, and he needed to take down the animal in as few actions as possible. Ideally, one shot per kill only.

  He leapt from his tree, a cushion of tightly controlled wind easing his fall. In front of him was the beast, unassuming as it dashed from branch to branch. The descent was perfect, the angle immaculate, and between one heartbeat and the next Eli struck.

  A lash of water tangled like a noose around the squimate’s neck as he constricted it. With a thought, the water became ice. He knew his control was lacking, and he’d wasted more mana than he wanted to, but the noose allowed for a much larger margin of error. With a small change in the weave the water noose turned became an ice blade. The ice was sharp and thin, and when Eli clenched his fist, it worked to quickly sever the beast’s neck, freezing shut the wounds on both halves of the corpse before a single drop of blood could gush.

  In one breath it was caught. In another, it was ended.

  It had been so simple to accomplish. Life so easy to extinguish. Eli sighed as the body fell from the tree in two pieces. Both disappeared through a portal he’d conjured on their way down. It was embarrassing for him to note that the portal had taken less mana than it had cost him to turn the water to ice, and that he hadn’t even needed a gesture to open and close the portal. His elemental magics were much farther behind his natural affinities than he’d initially believed.

  He also didn’t like collecting the body in his gifted spatial pouch. Unlike with a stasis pouch the items in the spatial pouch were still physically located in the pouch, it was just that the space inside the pouch much was larger then it should have been relative to the size of the pouch. A complicated piece of script work for sure, but it all boiled down to the simple principle of ‘the small pouch is actually a big pouch’.

  A stasis pouch however was not so much an expanded space, and more of a separate dimension with the space inside being anchored to the pouch – more specifically, the entrance of the pouch. This was why there was no true weight limit on stasis storage items, and also what allowed for objects to be arrested in both time and location, within the dimension.

  It meant that while the meat in his current pouch would eventually thaw and contaminate everything else within, he would have no such time limit or restrictions with a stasis pouch. In fact, Eli would rather not have had to transport the beast at all because now he was on even more of a time limit. Keeping the beast from making a mess in his bag was taking a continual effort of will and was a small but constant draw on his mana. He would much have preferred to just leave the dead squimate in the wild. However, this wasn’t the same situation as with the boar. The squimate wasn’t a simple animal, and he couldn’t leave the carcass for nature to dispose of. Besides, it would have been such a waste to leave the body behind, and it reaffirmed his need to get stasis.

  He bumped up ‘make stasis pouch’ on his to do list as he drained, skinned and butchered the squimate. Luckily the beast was only the size of a housecat.

  Now he had to decide what to do with it. Considering it was a low-level beast, it wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary for a hunter to have caught it in the woods, so discreetly depositing it at one of their regular delivery spots wouldn’t be too odd. Though that would definitely come with some scrutiny he wasn’t interested in instigating, even if he knew it wouldn’t be aimed at him.

  Perhaps he would butcher it and leave the chunks at the orphanage. He thought of adding the high-quality meat to one of Aria’s shipments. He could try and pass them off as a donation. Then he remembered that there was no way anyone would believe the butcher would spontaneously donate to charity.

  Eli’s internal clock told him he didn’t have much time to get back to the keep if he wanted to clean up at all before morning training.

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  As he made his way back to the clearing, he worked to eliminate all signs of his passage. Scorch marks were erased, gouges smoothed out, blood dissolved into churned soil, and nature magic was used to help the vegetation grow over the patches of ground that had been too disturbed to easily brush over. By the time he was done, only faint traces of mana lingered around they area, and even they were already fading and merging into the surrounding mana. It was a dispersal technique that had saved him more than once his first time around.

  It would take a particularly strong mage or a beast with unnatural perception to even know that magic had been done here, and while there were certain artifacts that could trace lingering remnants of mana, and help identify specific personal signatures they often had trouble in the high density of the ambient mana of the Wilds versus the much thinner mana found in places with higher densities of people, like cities and towns.

  Despite his best efforts, the sun was rising by the time Eli made it back to town. He had correctly timed the hunt and the practice, but he hadn’t accounted for the butchering or the cleanup. Both of the clearing, and of himself. He hadn’t realized that the hunting lodge his father kept would be so heavily warded against intruders, and that he would be considered an intruder. Though he should have. It would be a few years still before his father first took him him hunting.

  Lesson learned. Future knowledge, like all information, should be verified before being acted upon. It was one of those things that was obvious in retrospect, but most mistakes were. He was glad this mistake had relatively harmless consequences, if he played things off right.

  Well, he thought. If I’m going to be in trouble anyway, I might as well make it worth it. Now, the keep or the butchers…

  ~

  The butcher’s yard was quiet apart from the faint sound of wood grinding against wood. Aria bent over the handcart, both hands gripping the handles, pushing with all her strength. The wheel shrieked in protest, bent as it was along the axel. She pulled it back, tried again, shoved until her arms shook. The cart barely budged.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered, straining against it. She had risen early, as always, determined to be ready when Eli arrived. She never wanted him to wait on her. Not once. She didn’t have any deliveries today, and had planned to spend her morning in the yard, tending to the small garden her mother used to tend. It was the only real patch of life left about the building and she was determined that it would not die. That’s when she had spotted the handcart.

  Nothing looked obviously wrong, but there was just something about it. It wasn’t until she had tried pushing it that she heard an awful grinding screech. Something was seriously wrong. She’ pushed once more, but the cart that had been gliding effortlessly along only the day before was suddenly still and unmoving. She pushed harder, eyes blurring with frustration, the sound of the straining wood growing louder in her ears.

  From the doorway, her father’s voice drifted. He had followed her? Of course he had followed her. He always seemed to be there for her moments of despair and humiliation. It was as though he had some artifact that only worked to tell him when she was sad, and where she would be so that he was just in time to kick her while she was down. Today was no different. His tone was sharp and mocking. “Not so fancy now, are you?” Another mutter followed, something low and cutting, meant to sting more than anything. He leaned on the frame, glaring, making no move to help.

  Aria’s throat tightened. She wiped her palms on her tunic and bent again, trying once more to shove the cart forward. It screeched, stopped, and she bit her lip until she tasted blood. She tuned out the sound of the grinding axle, her father’s mocking laughter, her own panting breaths. Her arms strained, her muscles trembling with exertion, stones bit into her feet through the thin covering of her shoes. Her world narrowed down to only one thing. Move, move. She thought. Move, you stupid, useless-

  “Aria!” An excited, affectionate voice came from the back gate, snapping her out of her thoughts and pulling her into the crisp predawn air. It sounded like Eli, like her new… friend. Even thinking the word felt surreal, but then she heard it again.

  “Aria?” Came the same voice. Her- Eli’s voice.

  Her head snapped up. Eli stood there, but it was too early. He looked like nothing more than an illusion as he peered at her through the open yard door. His gaze flicked from her hands to the cart, then to the butcher. The man’s scowl faltered, and he turned back into the shop, the door still open behind him.

  Eli stepped in, expression steady. “What’s going on?”

  Aria startled, hastily swiping at her eyes, sidling away from the cart as if to hide it. She shook her head, unable to answer.

  “Aria.” His tone was quiet but certain. “You don’t have to hide it from me. Let me take a look.”

  She said nothing, only shifted further aside. Eli gave a short tut, then shook his head as he inspected the cart.

  “I’ll have it taken to Mr. Carpenter. Get it fixed. He’d be very unhappy to know that one of his products gave way so soon after purchase. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen.” Though his words were for Aria, as he spoke that last part, his expression cooled and his eyes trained on the open doorway where the butcher was still visible. Then he turned back to Aria, his expression warming once more. “An attendant will come collect it later.” Eli made a dismissive gesture as though the problem had been solved, and Aria supposed it had. A word and a wave and the issue was put to rest.

  The girl just stared at him, her expression too complicated for such a young face. It made Eli want to squish her cheeks, so he did. Slowly, he placed his hands on either side of her face and gently pressed in until her lips puckered like a fish. With her confusion drawing her brows together, the overall picture had Eli bursting into laughter and pulling the startled and overwhelmed girl into his arms. She just kind of limply went along.

  “Hey, Ari, I know I’m early, but do you want to come to training with me?”

  “What?” It was the first word she had spoken since Eli had arrived. It seemed fitting, as the entire situation spun out of her hands and floated off into the winds. Ari? Who was that? Was that her? Did she mind? No, she found she quite liked it. Ari. It was nice, and Eli was nice. Nothing like the nobles the townsfolk had warned her about. And he was strong, and warm, and when he was around all her problems just went away and-

  “Training! Come, with me.” Eli repeated. Flopped as she was in his embrace, her mind running exceedingly fast and yet not settling on any thoughts at all, she figured she’d simply do as she was bid.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Great. That’s really great, because I’m going to be in so much trouble again,” he laughed.

  “What? Why?” She asked, pulling back from him, and finally regaining some of her composure.

  “Oh, I snuck out early,” he said. Seeing no reason to hide that particular clandestine activity.

  “You, what?”

  “You say what a lot.” He responded without answering her implied question. “Now come on. We’ve got to go fast or I’ll get in even more trouble.” He crouched, back turned, his head peering at her form over his shoulder.

  He was glad he’d detoured to the empty hunting lodge because it gave him a chance to change and wash up. He was about to carry precious cargo, and it would have been embarrassing if he was all sweaty and disheveled with neither an explanation nor an excuse. Sure, it put him past the time he would have been able to sneak out, but it did let him head to Aria’s way earlier than initially planned. An alibi and an accomplice. One his parents would be much less likely to scold. Yes. This was a great plan.

  Aria hesitated, just staring at his open, eager face until he raised one brow in both question and challenge. Aria pressed her lips together, smoothed her clammy hands down the sides of her shirt, then climbed onto his back. She pressed her face into his neck, trying to will away the warmth in her cheeks as he jogged them both toward the keep.