Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 14: Progress

Toren Daen

I left Fiachra that very day, venturing back into the forest with nothing but my meager supplies and a gut roiling with determination. I could survive on the bare necessities: Toren had been for years. Shelter, food, and water were all present in the forest. But the danger was ever-present; always looming and ready to swallow me whole.

Six weeks had passed since then. All I had done was train and train, running myself ragged in a desperate scramble for power. Learning to navigate this forest with the grace of a cat, fighting day in and day out with beasts across the forest, and struggling for food and water had granted me immeasurable improvement.

And if I had tried what I was doing now when I first began, I would be dead in a millisecond.

I stood silently on a tree branch, hyper-aware that I was surrounded. This deep into the Clarwood Forest the sun was rarely visible. The oldest and tallest of the trees grew in solid stature here, blocking out the sky with their canopies and casting the world in perpetual darkness. The forest floor was rife with fauna and mana beasts, making the tall boughs of the mighty clarwoods ironically safer than the ground.

At least, that was usually the case. Right now, I was being hunted. My senses tingled as I waited for the monsters to close around me.

Because there was rarely any light in the forest, most of the mana beasts around had evolved exceptional night vision. Even with my eyesight strengthened by mana, my own senses weren't quite as good as those naturally occurring. I learned this the hard way when a mana beast–some sort of cat-like creature black as a panther but twice the size–had nearly killed me in a faceoff on the forest floor. I was extremely lucky my wounds healed quickly, or else I would have fallen then.

Now I relied heavily on another sense. The scrabble of claws against trees reached my mana-enhanced ears. I suspected my affinity for sound mana made this detection task easier and made my sense of hearing more receptive to strengthening, which was a godsend.

Five beasts. I tilted my head, skittering from a bit further rebounding off my eardrums. No, six. Maybe more farther away, but out of my range.

I shifted into a low stance on the thick branch, my knuckleduster dagger held in a reverse grip. As I heard a low hiss of breath, I launched myself from my perch with a timed combination of a telekinetic push at my feet and strengthened legs. I rocketed through the air with a slight whistle and a crack of wood, but my attention was on my target. As I soared past a tall tree, I pushed off it slightly with a burst of glowing white telekinesis, shifting my angle just enough.

The mana beast had no time to react as I rocketed past, swinging my dagger as I went. The steel, imbued with mana to strengthen the material and sharpen its cut, scored a furrow across the unwitting monster's neck.

It spurted blood, an artery clearly severed as it toppled off its perch to the ground below. Using a telekinetic pull, I yanked myself towards another bough of a tree. Catching it with one arm, I nimbly pulled myself to stand once more on a perch. Growls and hoots of anger echoed across the boughs of the tree, but I didn't move.

These mana beasts were one of the top predators of this part of the forest. They looked almost like apes, but with far thicker hindlegs and flaps of skin connecting their arms to their hips, kind of like a twisted flying squirrel. After all, a fall from these trees was almost always fatal. These monsters couldn't fly, but they could glide.

They were also intelligent. They hunted in small packs, herding their prey towards the others with organized hoots and howls. I learned that the hard way a few weeks ago when I fell for their gambit. I barely escaped with my life, and only because of a sound grenade scaring them off.