Slime Evolution

Chapter 413 - Advantage

The night wind howled intensely through the canopies of Mythlorien’s giant trees as Lisa shot forward like a fast white blur through the elven forest’s dense vegetation.

Lohan was firmly anchored to her back, his gelatin fully flattened against the fox’s silky fur to minimize friction against the cold night air as much as possible.

Despite the sleep they’d both been building up, with Lohan by this point going over 2 days without sleep, neither of them seemed genuinely tired, still able to wield their full power with ease.

Behind them, the forest’s silence was almost absolute, as Alice and Dylan had been left behind within seconds due to the insane speed of their travel.

They knew perfectly well that, in a situation of extreme urgency and severity like this one, it would have been ideal for the whole group to move together in a coordinated way to avoid any kind of ambush or surprise on the trails.

But time was their most relentless and dangerous enemy in that crucial moment. Nearly thirty minutes had already passed since the moment Lohan’s clone had monitored the officers’ secret meeting at the Broken Suns mansion, and the risk of arriving too late at the leak site and losing their one shot to act was high, which could ruin the entire plan they’d carefully put together.

"Hold on tight, Halon," Lisa transmitted over their private mental link, her voice coming out in a quick mental whisper that matched perfectly with the frenzied, elegant rhythm of her strides over the damp earth. "I’m going to push my spirit agility to its absolute limit to cross this section of the forest, I hope we get there before his officers manage to organize themselves and start the clandestine repair. Alice and Dylan know the general path to the rift and will meet us at the entrance of the gorge as soon as their stamina allows. They’re strong for physical combat, but they can’t keep up with the raw speed my mystical evolution gives me now."

Lohan spread his blue gelatin extremely smoothly over her back, ensuring a perfect grip that completely ignored the sharp turns and acrobatic leaps the fox pulled off between the enormous colossal roots of the centuries old trees. "Don’t worry about my weight or my body’s stability, Bella. Just focus on keeping up this fast pace. We only have tonight to rip the mask off the Broken Suns in front of Thalendor’s Council. Ahh, I’m so excited to finally get my gelatin back into combat again, I was dying of boredom not doing anything these past few days."

Thanks to the frightening speed Lisa’s legendary evolution granted her, the trip that would normally have taken a long stretch of fast walking was completed in just five minutes of fast running through the dark trails of the deep forest, more than twice as fast as when Lohan had made that same trip alone.

As they approached the north side of Thalendor, leaving the guild’s safe boundaries behind, the air around them began to change pattern drastically.

Lohan felt a heavy, thermal vibration begin radiating through his perception channels, a dense, oppressive energy that seemed to burn his gelatin skin with tiny, invisible needles of stagnant mana coming from deep within the ground.

If that chaotic energy were spreading through an ordinary human region, where magical affinity was in fact low, the magical fluctuation would probably go entirely unnoticed by most novice adventurers exploring the surrounding area, or by the population living nearby.

But Thalendor was an elven capital, a natural sanctuary where practically every resident possessed decent, pure, and extremely refined magical sensitivity from birth.

The continuous leak of that corrupted mana had been severely bothering the citizens living near the northern rift, generating a wave of formal complaints and protests that had been taken directly to Thalendor’s Council, which ended up sparking the local authorities’ immediate suspicion about the quality and truthfulness of the suppression seal the Broken Suns claimed to have installed flawlessly at the site.

If just getting close to the site already left Lohan feeling uncomfortable from that energy in the air, imagine for those who lived close enough to the place to feel it all day long?

Fortunately the exact spot where the seal had been placed, according to the directions Yrneha had provided when they accepted the mission, was quite far from the city, so only a few elves had felt and been bothered by it so far.

Lisa slowed her fast pace as they reached the slippery edge of the dark stone gorge, where the purple mist of the mana leak floated like dense, harmful smoke over the ground.

She lowered herself gently to let Lohan slide off her back, catching her breath with light gasps that made her chest rise and fall quickly under the cold, silvery light of Elysium’s moonlight.

Lohan rolled slowly onto the stone ground and extended his membrane to map out the surroundings with his thermographic perception.

He let out a long, relieved mental sigh upon realizing the site was completely deserted, with no sign of anyone else, or of Broken Suns Players watching the rift.

"No one from the Broken Suns has arrived at this gorge yet," Lohan said, his voice showing the satisfaction of having won that first race against the clock. "They’re probably still tied up back at their headquarters, arguing over their gold coin accounting or trying to secure the level twenty rune seals they plan to use to hold the mana temporarily."

"That gives us an excellent window of opportunity..." Lisa replied, her golden eyes gleaming in the dimness of the night as she watched the magical mist rising from the bottom of the gorge. "Let’s take advantage of being completely alone here to carefully scout the terrain. If we can find the exact source of the leak before they get here, we’ll have full control of the situation and we’ll be able to handle this in a way that’s a lot more pleasant for us than it will be for them!"