Chapter 106: Impostor
Nathan kept dodging.
Another warrior came at him from the front with a horizontal sword arc. Nathan evaded it by ducking. Another resident lunged at his legs. Nathan jumped over him. Another threw a punch. Nathan sidestepped it. And another, and another, and another.
The choreography was becoming unsustainable.
Each dodge cost another pulse of Pale Rider. Each second ate mana. Each minute brought him closer to the moment he would collapse.
And in some corner of his brain still working calmly despite the adrenaline, Nathan began to think.
*Alright.*
*Think.*
*I can’t attack the alpha. I can’t attack the residents. I can’t use area skills.*
*But Liaraen can.*
*She doesn’t have my Class’s mechanism. She can kill the alpha with the sword without activating anything automatic. The sword is technically guiding her. She has the movements.*
*If I switch roles with her.*
*I handle the eight reinforcements she’s fighting. With full lethality that the killing intent from those reinforcements gives me automatically. I kill them in less than a minute. They’re all hostile infected creatures. No moral dilemma.*
*And Liaraen goes for the alpha. With the green sword. With the enchantment guiding her. The residents will probably turn toward her when the alpha redirects the killing intent. But she doesn’t have my Class. The residents charged with killing intent toward her are just twenty people attacking. She can dodge them with the sword. And reach the alpha. And cut it.*
Nathan processed that.
*Alright.*
*It’s a plan.*
*Even if the residents try to attack her, she has the lineage sword helping her. They won’t be any different from the eight reinforcements she’s already fighting successfully.*
*And the alpha is wounded. Both arms practically destroyed. The torso with accumulated damage. One well-placed slash to the neck or torso could finish the job.*
*Yes.*
*That’s the plan.*
Nathan looked at Liaraen across the clearing while dodging another resident.
*I need to shout to her. I need to coordinate the switch.*
*But if I shout and the alpha hears, the alpha will redirect the residents toward Liaraen before we can execute the switch. And she’ll be at a disadvantage.*
*I need the switch to be simultaneous. Without prior communication. Or with a signal the alpha won’t interpret.*
Nathan thought about it while jumping over another resident.
*Alright. I wait for a moment. She’s going to look at me eventually. When she does, I use a signal we established during the journey. One she understands but the alpha doesn’t.*
Nathan kept dodging.
And while he dodged, the other question that had been running in the back of his mind surfaced.
*How did it know?*
*How did the alpha know how my Class works?*
*It said the bodies it uses have collective memory. That the residents have hosted Hunters for decades. That it’s processed explanations.*
*But F-Rank Hunters don’t explain the internal mechanisms of their Classes to rural settlement residents. And even if they did, they wouldn’t explain the dual-mode mechanism because almost no Hunter has a Class with that mechanism. Mine is from the seventeenth. It’s unique. There’s no literature on it. No previous Hunters with the same Class.*
*So the alpha didn’t get the information from collective memory about previous Hunters.*
*It got it from somewhere else.*
*Or directly from me.*
Nathan processed that.
*Hive mind.*
*Vidhraki are a distributed hive mind. Each cell of the organism shares information with the whole.*
*And if at some point during my contact with the colony, my own information leaked.*
*The air.*
*The soup I didn’t eat but smelled.*
*The physical contact with Yorel when I put him behind me to protect him.*
*Any interaction could have been a vector.*
*And no.*
*I don’t think so.*
*None of those contacts would have transmitted information about the internal mechanism of my Class. Vidhraki read magical signatures, not memories. And my signature wouldn’t explain the dual-mode by itself.*
*So it didn’t come from me.*
*It came from somewhere else.*
*Someone else knows how my Class works. And that person shared the information with the colony.*
*Who.*
*Who knows how my Class works.*
Nathan made the mental list while dodging two more residents.
*Selene knows. She deduced it during our conversations.*
*Liaraen knows. She understood it during the journey.*
*Liaraen’s uncles probably know some superficial level. Not the details.*
*Sella and Kalen know. Especially Kalen. He saw things with precognition I never explained to him.*
*Mira knows some superficial level from our conversations before the journey.*
*Brenwick knows some superficial level.*
*Halden and Ilena and Tomen and Renric know some superficial level.*
*No one else.*
*And none of them would have leaked information to a vidhraki colony in a forest five days from Greywall.*
*So.*
*So someone else knows.*
*Someone I didn’t identify. Who’s been watching. Who’s been studying me for a while. And who shared the information with the alpha before I arrived at the settlement.*
*That someone is the other presence in the forest Yorel mentioned last night. The one that appeared two months ago. The one that was empowering the Drakain with the red aura.*
*Halden warned me. Someone with resources is investigating me. And now the investigation reached this colony and gave the alpha the tools to trap me.*
Nathan processed it with the calibrated calm of someone who had assembled several puzzle pieces at once.
*Alright.*
*When I get out of this alive, I need to report this to Selene with maximum urgency.*
*When.*
*If.*
Nathan kept dodging.
And while he dodged, the fatigue began to set in.
---
The cuts on his left arm, ribs, and right thigh hadn’t stopped bleeding. The accumulated loss over the last twenty minutes was beginning to manifest. His peripheral vision was narrowing slightly. His movements with Pale Rider were becoming less precise. Each dodge had less margin.
And Soul Sense began to fluctuate.
Not to shut off.
To fluctuate.
Like when mana dropped below twenty percent and passive skills became less reliable.
Nathan checked mentally.
```
Remaining mana: 220/3,500.
Pale Rider consumption/min: 30.
Time remaining: 7 minutes.
```
*Seven.*
*After seven, I can’t maintain Pale Rider.*
*After that, they catch me.*
*I need the switch with Liaraen now.*
Nathan turned his head while dodging a child lunging at him from the front. He searched for Liaraen with his gaze across the clearing.
And he didn’t see her.
Nathan processed that with the fraction of a second his fluctuating Soul Sense gave him.
*Wait.*
*Where is she?*
He pushed Soul Sense.
He detected her signature.
She was at the clearing’s northeast corner. Approximately thirty meters away. Still fighting. With the sword. With only four reinforcements remaining from the original eight. She was also wounded. Nathan detected damage signatures on her left side and right calf. But she kept fighting.
*Good.*
*She’s still alive.*
*She still has the sword.*
*Follow the plan.*
Nathan tried to position himself to catch her attention visually.
He pushed through two residents coming at him from the front. One fell to the ground from the push. The other scratched his right shoulder with its nails before Nathan dodged it.
Nathan turned.
He ran with Pale Rider toward the angle from which Liaraen could see him.
And at that same moment, the alpha creature—which had been motionless, watching—moved for the first time since the killing intent redirection.
Not toward Nathan.
Toward Liaraen.
With both arms destroyed but with legs still functional. And with its five-jawed mouth open.
Nathan processed it.
*It’s going after Sprout.*
*It realized the plan before we could execute it.*
*It’s trying to eliminate the switch option.*
Nathan changed direction with Pale Rider.
He began moving toward the alpha.
With the intention of intercepting it before it reached Liaraen.
But the residents moved with him.
Coordinated. All at once. The distributed consciousness repositioned them in less than a second to block Nathan’s direct route to the alpha.
Nathan had to dodge three at once.
And one of them—a warrior—swung a slash from behind that Nathan didn’t see coming because Soul Sense was fluctuating.
The short sword entered his right flank.
Approximately five centimeters.
Nathan felt the metal pierce skin, muscle, and stop at the rib.
*Shit.*
Nathan turned.
He applied a physical shoulder push to the warrior. The warrior fell backward to the ground. The short sword remained embedded in Nathan’s flank when the warrior released the hilt during the fall.
Nathan continued with the sword embedded.
With the pain concentrated on his right flank.
With fresh blood adding to the rest of his wounds.
With Pale Rider still active but mana dropping to 180.
He searched for Liaraen again.
She had seen the alpha move. She had abandoned the remaining four reinforcements that had been attacking her. She was running toward the alpha with the green sword in both hands. With the intention of intercepting the alpha’s attack before it reached her. But one of the reinforcements took advantage of the opening to lunge at her back.
Nathan shouted by reflex.
"SPROUT! BEHIND!"
Liaraen turned just in time to block the attack with her sword. The green sword absorbed the impact and spun in the air with the enchantment’s fluidity. It cut the reinforcement’s neck. The reinforcement fell.
But the moment cost Liaraen her interception trajectory.
The alpha kept advancing toward her.
And Nathan kept trying to reach it first.
With the residents coordinating to block him with precision.
With the sword embedded in his flank.
With mana at 160.
With his vision narrowing.
With the single thought that if the alpha reached Liaraen before he did, Liaraen was going to die with the creature’s two deformed arms closing around her with enough force to split her in two.
Nathan accelerated Pale Rider to absolute maximum.
Even if it cost him the rest of his mana.
Even if he collapsed afterward.
It didn’t matter.