Affinity: Chaos

Chapter 2225: Unknown Threat?

Reynolds flew over to Grey and hovered beside him, eyes fixed on the smoking wreckage left by the final blow. Fragments of stone and scorched earth still drifted in the air. The corpse of the Space Elementalist lay half-buried beneath a collapsed ridge, the last traces of spatial energy slowly bleeding away into nothing.

"What was that light?" Reynolds asked, voice low with curiosity.

Grey turned from the body and met his friend’s gaze. "Remember I told you Necromancers can mark a person? Every Necromancer and Gnome can sense the mark if they come within a certain distance."

Reynolds frowned, thinking back. "The mark you got when you first arrived on the Aurora Continent?"

"Correct." Grey nodded once. "At the time I knew nothing about it. I had no way to remove or resist it. It took years of research and more than a few dangerous experiments before I finally understood how the thing worked."

Reynolds still looked unconvinced. "That doesn’t explain how you grabbed it. Shouldn’t a mark like that be intangible?"

"For most people, yes. For me it’s simple." Grey lifted his hand and studied his own fingers for a moment, as though still feeling the residual energy. "The mark is woven from life force and darkness element in a very specific pattern, almost impossible to unravel unless you already know the structure. When it was on my body I studied every thread of it. Once I understood the pattern, stopping it became possible. Of course, that doesn’t mean anyone else could copy what I did." He paused, then added quietly, "To seize it physically I also had to use a measure of life force and darkness element of my own."

Originally he could only draw on the life force of Gnomes to deal with such marks. After years of careful research he had learned to use his own. It was not something he intended to do often. Each use carried a cost that would eventually catch up with him.

Reynolds listened in silence, then gave a slow nod even though most of the technical details had clearly gone over his head. Void and the bunny leader showed even less interest. The cat merely flicked an ear while the bunny leader’s nose twitched once before both returned their attention to the surrounding trees. Grey’s explanations rarely held their focus for long when they could not sense the energies involved themselves.

Grey gave the Space Elementalist’s corpse one final glance, then turned away. "We should leave. I don’t think they’ll bother us for a while."

With two experts at the absolute peak of the Sovereign Plane dead, the Gnomes and Necromancers would want to reevaluate the situation. The loss of such powerful figures should make them more cautious about sending anyone else after him in the near future unless they were certain of success.

The four of them rose into the air together. Below, the ruined clearing shrank until it was only a dark scar on the forest floor. The dense canopy of the Magical Beasts’ Forest closed over them like a green tide, swallowing the last traces of the battlefield. They did not linger near the forest’s edge. An hour of steady flight brought them to Lapis City.

They stayed only a single day. In the markets and inns the talk was the same everywhere. Gnome raids had grown fewer, and several trade routes that had been too dangerous to travel for months were open again. Merchants spoke with cautious relief. Soldiers drank a little more freely. A group of caravan guards at one tavern claimed they had crossed three regions without seeing a single Gnome patrol, something that would have been unthinkable only a month earlier. The group listened without comment, paid for their rooms, and left the next morning.

When they departed the city, Grey chose a different path from the one they had taken on the way here. He wanted to pass through the regions they had bypassed earlier, in case any Gnome activity remained.

Days blurred into one another. The landscape changed beneath them. Rolling hills gave way to sparse woodland, then to open plains still scarred by old battle lines. In one stretch they flew over the blackened remains of a village that had been abandoned months ago. New grass was already pushing through the ash. Further on they passed a once-busy crossroads where the road markers had been left untouched for so long that vines had begun to climb them. They crossed five separate regions in a little more than two weeks.

Along the way they encountered only small Gnome or Necromancer camps, never more than a handful of fighters, none of them strong enough to pose a real threat. Most of the camps looked recently abandoned rather than destroyed. Storage crates stood open and empty. Watchtowers had been deliberately collapsed. It was as if the enemy had withdrawn completely from large parts of the map.

They were currently heading toward a place where travelers in the last city had reported lingering Gnome activity. The rumors were vague, but they were the first solid lead in days, so the group pushed forward at full speed.

A few hours later the terrain changed again. They arrived at a region that still carried the constraints of war. Craters and broken earthworks marked the ground below. Yet it was obvious that no serious fighting had broken out here for some time. The damage looked old. Grass had begun to reclaim the edges of the trenches, and the residual elemental energy in the air was faint and scattered.

An hour passed in near silence as they flew deeper into the region.

Then, as they crossed a wide valley, Grey’s heart clenched.

A strange, familiar aura brushed across his senses. Goosebumps rose along his arms. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. The sensation lasted longer than a split second this time, long enough for it to settle into his bones before it vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. No matter how hard he focused, he could not pin down its source.

Void’s ears perked up. His pitch-black eyes swept the surroundings with sudden vigilance. The bunny leader’s fur rose along his spine. Both of them scanned the empty sky and the valley walls with sharp, wary attention. Reynolds, still flying a short distance ahead, glanced back with a puzzled expression that quickly hardened into alertness.

"What’s wrong?" he asked, already turning in a slow circle, ready to strike at the first sign of movement.

Grey did not answer immediately. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to locate the aura that had already disappeared, then shook his head in defeat.

"This sensation... it’s the same one we felt near the Thunderbird Clan when we first arrived."

Void and the bunny leader both nodded. The bunny leader spoke in a low voice. "Yes. What’s happening to the space here?"

"We didn’t find anything wrong in the Thunderbird Clan even after investigating." Grey shook his head to indicate he still did not know.

"Could it be someone?" Void asked.

Grey’s eyes narrowed. A thin thread of worry tightened behind them. Even Void and the bunny leader, whose senses were sharper than his own, could not locate the threat. That alone was unsettling. Worse was the exact match to the aura they had encountered in Thunderbird Clan territory.

Reynolds frowned. "Does this have something to do with the space element?" He had not sensed anything himself, yet Grey, Void, and the bunny leader had all reacted at the same instant. The only common factor he could see was their connection to space.

Grey considered for a moment, then nodded. "You could say that. The abnormality in space comes first, but beneath it there’s a dangerous aura hidden."

"How dangerous?" Reynolds asked.

"I don’t know." Grey’s voice was flat. "From the way it felt like... it could kill me without any real effort."

Reynolds’s expression tightened.

Grey continued in a quieter tone, almost to himself. "What I still don’t understand is why it feels identical to the one near the Thunderbird Clan. Does this have something to do with the Gnomes?"

"What do we do now?" Reynolds asked.

"We can’t locate the aura. It disappeared almost instantly. But I’m certain it has something to do with the space element." Grey replied. After a short pause he shook his head with a shrug. "Let’s locate the Gnome camp and deal with it. Since whatever the aura is isn’t targeting us, we shouldn’t bother with it. If it is targeting us, there’s barely anything we can really do."

"You know you don’t have to say it like that," Reynolds complained. "You could’ve just said nothing and we move on. How do I deal with the thought of something that might be able to kill us easily being nearby?"

The bunny leader spoke calmly. "I don’t think we have anything to worry about."

"That’s encouraging," Reynolds replied sarcastically, face straight.

Grey chuckled and tried to ease the tension. He wrapped an arm around his friend’s shoulder. "There’s nothing to worry about. Have you forgotten the treaty?" He continued as they flew. "Peak Sovereigns can’t freely harm us with the bunny army present. Even if we can’t fight them head-on, we can escape. So unless a Half-God Plane expert makes a move, we have nothing to worry about."

Reynolds’s eyes brightened when he recalled the agreement between the races. Half-God Plane experts were not allowed to act freely. Grey, Void, and the bunny leader were all skilled with the space element. Even if they were surrounded by Peak Sovereigns, their chances of escaping remained high.

"Now that I think about it, you’re right. There is nothing to worry about." He said it with a more relaxed smile.

The group continued forward, flying straight toward the reported location of the Gnomes’ camp.