Day 4
Ford post, north road.
Recorded at dawn: one killed, one village robbed at Clearwater, a rogue at Foundation heading north.
Senior Sister has gone to look.
Added below, in a different hand: the ford is calling him the Demon of Clearwater.
Tao sat up first as the sun cleared the trees, gray-crusted, his eyes sharper than they’d been.
“You look terrible, Master,” he croaked.
Hunter glanced at his reflection in a puddle.
He looked as though death had come for him, decided he wasn’t worth the effort, and left him in the discount bin.
“You don’t look great yourself.”
Xuan woke next, then Lex, and in the sense all three had settled: three small, dense knots of qi, Body Refining, first level.
“Did it work, Master?” Lex asked hoarsely, looking at him, and Hunter nodded.
Hunter got to his feet and reached, carefully, for the thing the download had left in him.
The shadow under the nearest tree stretched toward him a few inches.
Holy shit, it actually responded.
He fed it a thread of qi, the way the route in his head said to, and the shadow slid across the grass and wrapped around his ankles like smoke.
He stepped forward and didn’t walk.
He glided, as though someone had taken the friction out of the world.
The second step was faster.
The third was much faster, and it occurred to him, with the camp coming at him and a boulder behind it, that the download had covered going and said nothing whatsoever about stopping.
He tried anyway, overcorrected, and his feet went up and his back came down. The source of this chapter is g.com.
[LUNA] PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Hunter lay there looking at the sky.
“Master,” Xuan said helpfully, “you’re glowing.”
Wisps of shadow were still coming off him, thinning in the sunlight.
“It’s not glowing, it’s shadow qi.”
“It looks like glowing,” said Tao.
“It definitely looks—” Lex began.
“ENOUGH ABOUT THE GLOWING.”
[LUNA] GLOW: 11% AND FADING
[LUNA] DIGNITY: ALREADY FADED
All three shut up.
“Everyone go and wash,” Hunter said, sitting up.
“Now, before the smell becomes self-aware.”
They looked at each other and bolted for the lake.
Tao got three steps and put his fist through a tree trunk by accident.
The tree went over with a crash that emptied the canopy of birds, and Tao stared at his hand.
“I didn’t mean to!”
Xuan hit roughly Mach 2, caught a toe, and plowed a trench across the clearing on his face before vanishing into a bush fifty feet away.
“I’m okay!” came faintly out of the bush.
Lex didn’t move at all. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“Master, what if I break something?”
“You definitely will, so just try not to break yourself.”
Lex took one careful step.
The ground cracked under his heel, and he froze.
“Master, the ground broke,” he said, and then, after some thought, “Should the ground break?”
Hunter pinched the bridge of his nose.
It was his crater all over again, only smaller and funnier: new strength, nobody to show you where the edges were.
“New rule: first one to the lake without breaking anything doesn’t have to gut the fish.”
It took them twenty minutes, and nobody won.
He sat on the shore and watched them scrub, proud and despairing in about equal parts: they’d done it, and they were even more dangerous to the furniture with power than without it.
[LUNA] THEY’RE TRYING THEIR BEST (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ
Their best is terrible.
Tao punched the water, gently, by his standards, and a column of it went ten feet into the air and came down on Lex.
Hunter laughed despite himself, and let the sense drift out across the lake, idly, to the trees on the far shore.
The birds had come back to the fallen tree.
There was a squirrel scolding on a branch, and a deer at the water’s edge a half-mile south.
Past the deer, where the trees came right down to the water, nothing moved at all.
No birds, no small things in the undergrowth, just a patch of silence, very neat, like something had cleared its throat and everything nearby had decided to be elsewhere.
Tao punched the lake again.
Hunter looked away.