NOVEL NEXT Chapter 192
“The monster’s found you! Flee before it devours you whole!”
Trai’s screams echoed across the watching members of my elites as I stomped exaggeratedly towards her with my eyes shut tight. The little one couldn’t quiet herself as she stumbled and rushed to the other side of the circle to avoid my approach. Unfortunately for her, Trai’s laughing screams betrayed her location and guided me just as surely as the quiet patter of her feet did. With three of my steps quickly outpacing her uncertain and hurried run, I bent down and swept the giggling child off her feet before teasingly threatening her with my jaws. She rolled and dodged each of my obviously telegraphed bites before I opened my eyes and smiled broadly at the child.
“Cheat! You cheat!” Her squeaking voice accused.
“I would never.” I replied, my voice reflexively serious at the accusation, even though it had come from a literal child. I lovingly scratched her back in the way she’d let everyone know she liked before passing the tired child back to her father, where she resumed her complaints of unfairness and disbelief at how I could have possibly been able to find her with my eyes closed.
Little Trai was finally but quickly growing out of being a hatchling. No longer did the six week-old child sport the narrow shoulders and skinny legs of a baby, but instead, she was filling out to look more and more like her mother. Treel had been a rather dull mix of browns and deep greens, in which Trai resembled her late mother, but for her lighter face and head, which was much like her father’s. Trai’s shoulders were broadening day by day, and I suspected that she would continue to grow this way until she fully represented the image of a khatif.
Since she had learned how to walk, Trai had been made to walk for hours a day, which she had initially loved. Then, she’d needed to try to make her way through the shallowest parts of the marsh by herself, and by the second time she’d had a foot stuck in the mud and the fourteenth time she’d been made to stay in the middle of the swarm to stay safe, the novelty of self-propelled travel had worn off. Though her speech remained stilted and infantile, it was obvious to me and the others of my brood, as well as every other reasonably intelligent keelish, that Trai was much more intelligent than we had been as hatchlings. She was maturing much more slowly, but her body and mind were growing more thoroughly and comprehensively than a keelish’s. Trai was obviously a khatif, not a keelish.
The thought and the difference intrigued me, though there were no other khatif hatchlings to compare her to. Instead, I spent the days leading the swarm, and the nights training my [Skills] with this child. I made sure to start every morning humming to Trai while [Nurturing Enunciation] quickly emptied my sonilphon’s reserves. At every stop we made, I made sure to redouble the influence from my [Skill], and at night I would sing the child to sleep with [Nurturing Enunciation] once more… after our little game of hide and hunt to train my newest [Skill].
[Skill: Tremorsense; passive Skill that grants the holder heightened sensitivity to the waves that pass through solid and liquid substances. Use of this Skill allows the holder to sense movement through the vibrations transmitted through contact with whatever substance the holder currently is enveloped within or standing upon. This Skill cannot evolve.]
As I had initially learned by finding the sleeping Trai, I could detect even very small movement through contact with the ground, and I supposed I would be able to do the same while in water. I had continued to experiment with the new [Skill], and learned that, frustratingly, I couldn’t walk at a normal pace while only navigating through [Tremorsense]. If I slowed myself to a creeping walk and didn’t lift my feet, I could walk without running into any obstacles, but it was slow enough that the barely-walking Trai could nearly outpace me. The new [Skill] was interesting, and I could see the potential uses for it, but for now, it was only a poor substitute for my other manners of perception. Even so, I made sure to spend time every day practicing with this new sense, especially at night when my eyes couldn’t help me.
Thus, my hide and hunt game with Trai. I would stand with my eyes closed in the center of a circle made by my elites, then they would all make some sort of noise by hitting the ground while Trai attempted to hide somewhere still within the bounds of the established circle. Initially, I was mostly stumbling blind, the urgency and inspiration from the night I had gained my [Skill] absent, but as the days passed, I became more and more adept. What had begun as a pure guessing game quickly required the addition of fakes and feints, a longer time to hide, and the occasional passing of Trai from adult to adult before being gently placed in a final hiding spot in the hopes I wouldn’t feel her there. Eventually, even that couldn’t stop me.
Beyond little Trai, the swarm as a whole began to grow and evolve more and more into khatif as the days passed, one or two a day. Most of those were of the same caste that I suspected Brutus was in, brawny and more intelligent than keelish, but not by much. Some grew to join the ranks of the magical khatif like Percral, Ytte, and Solia, and they worked together to develop their magical capabilities at night and in hunts together. None developed sonic magic like I had, some joining Percral with lightning or Solia with fire, but most of the newly magical quickly found themselves joining Ytte in her manipulation of stone and earth. Interestingly, no khatif had developed the same power as the Wave Wolfstags.
Two more days had passed before we’d finally left the marshes, and even the Wave Wolfstags seemed grateful to leave the swamps, though that may have been due to Arwa’s obvious hatred of the water and her new position as Alpha over all the wolfstags under our control. As we left the waters and once again began traveling over consistently firm ground, our pace once again soared as the swarm ran over the softly grassed plains. Before long, though, I began to see the hint of a possible roadblock in the distance. I wondered what the gray smudges across the horizon were as I sat to eat with my elites one night, before I was interrupted by Wisterl’s approach.
I hadn’t paid her much mind as the days had passed into weeks. After all, I didn’t feel the need to ask her for further instruction now that I had ascended to the peak of the swarm, and I felt a slight pang of guilt at how easily this disregard of my combat instructor had settled into my being. I hadn’t even realized that she had evolved to become a khatif, much less when such an evolution had taken place. Before I could ask or begin to rekindle a comradeship, Wisterl’s hard, unforgiving voice cut through my thoughts.
“I’m bored, Alpha. Fight me.”
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