“The bigger they come, the more they can hurt you,” the lizardman said. “No, wait, that’s not it at all!” He held up the bag he’d stolen. “Still after this, yes? Want to beat me up for hurting your friends? Well, come on then.” He held his arms wide.
Anger simmered in my stomach, but I forced my mind to let the emotion pass. I didn’t go in fighting without thinking, like my friends had done, because I wanted to study our opponent. He didn’t seem as if he wanted to actually harm us; he just wanted to show off his skills.
If I was going to catch this guy then I needed to take away his advantage, maybe even beat him at his own game. Instead of charging straight at him, I took a moment to call forth the power of ash inside me. An Ash Cloud billowed from my skin to fill the space around us. With my movements concealed by the mist, I rushed at the lizardman.
“Nicely done,” said a voice over to my left. “But you think I can’t sense you coming just because I can’t see you? Tut tut tut, boy, I’m not some guardsman on his first watch.”
I dispersed the mist and looked around. The lizardman stood in front of the shrine again, the bag still in his hand. He tossed another apple ring into the air and caught it in his mouth.
“You didn’t need these, did you?” he asked.
This time, I summoned another Ash Cloud, but this one was much thicker, more acrid, and focused around the lizardman’s head. When I heard him rasp and wheeze, I charged, but the ground beneath him shifted. Before I could grab him, he vanished into the sand, leaving the ash hanging uselessly in the air.
“Over here!” he shouted from the doorway of a half-buried house.
I ran at him and used Stinging Palm to shoot thorns into the ground at his feet. I was hoping the thorns would make the sand beneath him too dangerous to disappear into. In response, he changed up his own tactics. Sand swirled around him again, but instead of vanishing into it, he sent it blasting out from his body. I hardened my forearm with Compress Ash and raised it just in time to avoid having my face sandblasted. The sand attack had eaten away at the ash covering my arm, and the exposed skin was left raw and stinging.
“So close,” the lizardman said, again from a totally different direction. “Should I give you more of a head-start?”
He was standing in the darkness at the edge of the village, where the flames of the fire barely illuminated him. He rummaged in the bag again and pulled out a flatbread.
If he was merely a thief, as his poaching of our food seemed to imply, then he was going about it in a strange way. He could have vanished into the night at that point and none of us would have been able to find him, but instead, he was lingering, toying with me.
He could have been sent to kill us—after all, we had new enemies here and old ones back home, all eager to make us pay, and there had to be people who would hunt down a potential Swordslinger just on principle. But again, he wasn’t acting like a killer. Though he had a leaf-bladed spear strapped to his back, he hadn’t even tried to use it once, and when he gained a decisive advantage, he stepped away rather than following up.
That only left one option: for some reason, he was testing us.
It was time for me to do some testing of my own. If I threw some potentially deadly magic at him, then his reactions would tell me a lot about what was going on. If he escalated, then this was clearly all buildup to a kill. If he backed off, then maybe there was a more positive agenda here.
I cupped my hands together and summoned fire between them. The flames became a sphere that I launched an Untamed Torch in the lizardman’s direction, targeted not to hit him but to go a couple of inches past his head.
The first thing I learned was that this guy had nerves of steel. He stayed stock-still as the fire flew toward him and past his face. He didn’t even blink as the burst of light blazed by, and his cloudy eyes remained completely still.
Our mysterious attacker was blind.
He must be using another sense to find us in the fight. I’d learned in school about how snakes used vibration to identify where their prey was; could that be what this guy was doing? It would explain how he could so easily and precisely follow and counter our movements without having to even look in the right direction.
Knowing that gave me something to work with. I couldn’t make myself invisible, but maybe I could create vibrations to hide behind, just like I would use terrain to shelter me in a normal fight.
I called on my Vigor again and sent magical energy flowing down the wood channels that created Plank Pillar. The magic ran through my feet and down through the ground, heading in several directions at once. As each burst of magic neared the surface, the ground around it shook, then bulged, before a pillar of wood burst out of the ground.
I watched the lizardman’s face as the first pillar burst out. Only a little twitch betrayed how much the sudden vibration had drawn his attention, but that twitch was the most advantage
