We returned to Yenn and followed the road that branched off to the east, having only spent a few minutes on our impromptu hunt. All signs of the path disappeared soon after we left town, and it was only by the grace of our Detection that we could continue along in the right direction. Apart from the absence of the road, our traveling conditions were beautiful, with clear blue skies and radiant sunshine that sparkled in the pristine snow while keeping us comfortably warm. The clear conditions also helped to illuminate the end goal of our journey: two gigantic snow-capped mountains standing side by side in the far distance. Somewhere in the shadows of the twin peaks laid the entrance to Shadowmine, and hopefully, a final end to the invading beasts.
Over the course of our day of travel, we encountered three more abandoned towns along the road. Whereas Yenn had seemingly been given plenty of time to evacuate, the towns closer to Shadowmine had not been as lucky; each painted a sadder picture than the last, with half-packed homes and scenes of bloody destruction in a majority of the structures. Alongside the ruined homesteads, we also found the monsters that had caused the ruination. They had all created nests only a few miles away from the towns, hidden amongst thickets of trees or natural rock outcroppings, most likely in an effort to monitor their hunting grounds for more prey. Each was handily dispatched with the same simple gambit, and our confidence against them increased along with our knowledge of their tactics.
We stopped to make camp an hour after sunset when the night air became too cold for Lia to comfortably continue traveling. Without any nearby structures to provide us with shelter, we created a campsite on the main road itself; I suffused the path ahead of us in a wide circle and invoked the Fire rune within my ring, creating an intense burst of crimson flame that instantly sublimated the snow and created a patch of warm, dry dirt. Lia quickly buried herself within the folds of my cloak, sending a shiver up my spine as her cold body pressed against mine.
“What do you think we’ll find tomorrow?” she asked, nodding her head towards the looming pair of mountains that blocked the sky ahead of us.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s some sort of nest that we can destroy and put an end to this once and for all, but I get the feeling there’s more to it than that.” I stared off into the darkness, trying to gauge how far Shadowmine was from our camp. “Maybe I can get an idea of it from here. I’m sure most of the mine will be blocked by that damn static, but I might be able to get a rough count of how many we’ll be facing.”
Lia hummed in thought. “You’ll probably have to wait until we leave tomorrow for that. We’re still a good forty miles from the mountains at this point.”
“Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Do you think that’s a problem?”
She let out a sharp laugh. “There’s no way you can reach that far.”
“You doubt my abilities?” I asked with mock offense.
“I do,” she grinned. “But please, by all means, prove me wrong.”
“Maybe I will,” I replied as I settled into a more comfortable meditative stance. My deep reserves of mana activated as I took a centering breath and began the ritual of circulating the energy through my body. After another moment of meditation, the energy streaked out across the ground like neon lightning, racing along the road we would travel at daybreak. I felt a sweet ache in my mind as the mana sped away, similar to the relief of stretching a well-worked muscle. The stream of energy was so narrow that it hardly relayed any information as it traveled, allowing me to push the mana farther without worrying about accelerating my mind to keep up. Lia watched with quiet amusement as mile after mile passed without any sign of the mana slowing down.
A strange series of indentations in the road suddenly flashed through my mind, and I halted my advance to expand a small Detection radius at the end of my extended mana. Wagon ruts. Footprints. Fire pits. The playful nature of my experiment faded away as I made a more concerted effort to study the area. There’s a lot of them. A map of neon lights continued to expand within my head as the seconds passed in total silence, revealing a mess of overlapping wagon tracks and dense patches of footprints. A LOT of them.
The first foreign mana signal appeared at the edge of my Detection after another minute of slow expansion. The faint red light belonged to a young man dressed in chainmail and unadorned leather armor. He stood in the center of the road, staring straight ahead with his hand placed calmly on the hilt of a shortsword belted on his hip. More lights appeared as I pushed ahead, all similarly dim and undeveloped within the men and women who gathered on the road. None of their various outfits matched one another; some wore military-grade steel armor, while others stood completely unarmored, opting instead for heavy winter coats. The only unifying detail of the crowd was the direction they faced: straight forward, training their eyes on a shared target.
I felt
