Chapter 127. Return
They took the long way back, taking their time to let Rhys sip his potion and recover, and tracing a long route away from their hideout to mislead anyone who tried to come after them before finally winding their way back to the hideout. Rhys wasn’t completely sure how mages tracked one another, or if there were tracking skills at all, but nonetheless, it was worth the effort to avoid getting followed home.
He felt a little uncomfortable about setting the re-cored mages free, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t know these mages; he didn’t know them at all. Not their personalities, their allegiances, their pasts and futures, what had happened within the farm, nothing. Inviting them back to the hideout would be an immense risk, when he didn’t know if he was inviting an Empire-favored narc directly into the heart of the operation. He pinched his chin, then sighed. He needed branch offices, or something. All kinds of things that got easier, once his junk food stores got off the ground, and he had money, access, inventory, all the things he needed to actually oppose the Empire. Right now… He sighed, putting his head in his hands. The flying sword glided on beneath him, supporting the weight he couldn’t support himself.
“Something troubling you?” Lira asked.
“Everything.”
She harrumphed, the sound almost like a laugh, and said nothing. They both had their own troubles to ponder, and neither could dismiss the other’s.
The biggest problem that bothered him was the classic serial killer’s problem—in other words, triangulation. Almost every armchair sleuth would tell you that one of the easiest ways to lock down a serial killer’s location was to track where they killed. They’d head out in all directions, sure, but they usually wouldn’t go further than a certain radius from their home, which made it possible to triangulate their general location. Not the most helpful for a serial killer, who might live in a major population center, but for a squad of insurgents living in the woods? A real problem.
Should we move bases? Or maybe… Maybe it was time to take the trucker approach. Returning to serial killers, it was postulated that the most successful, hardest to track serial killers were long-haul truckers, who could travel thousands of miles between each kill, and who spent all their time moving around on the road. It was impossible to triangulate a trucker-killer’s home base, because their true home base was their truck, and their truck was always on the move. An isolated kill a thousand miles from another isolated kill would almost never get connected, especially if the trucker-killer targeted those at the fringe of society, whom the police wouldn’t bother looking too hard into: poor people, homeless people, addicts and runaways. He couldn’t learn anything from ‘targeting those at the fringe of society,’ not that he wanted to—after all, his targets might be completely disregarded by the Empire, but the camps themselves were symbolic, political statements: herein lies the fate of anyone who opposes the Empire. Upending the camps meant opposing the Empress directly, and the Empire knew that as much as he did. He’d placed a giant target on his back just by acting against the camps at all, let alone overthrowing two of them.
No, he couldn’t learn that part, but he could learn the other part—wandering around, hundreds and thousands of piles at a time, and attacking randomly on the go. He nodded to himself, resolved. His next attack would be hundreds of miles away, on a camp further away from this one, not in another direction, but in the same direction; then, just when the Empire decided they had him dead to rights and reinforced another camp in that direction, he’d shoot off in the opposite direction, and start taking that line down.
He thumped his hand into his fist, enlightened. If that was his course of action, then he had a clear route ahead of him. He needed a movement technique, and not one like Trash Step, which activated in particular circumstances and gave him surefootedness and a stronger stance in trashy terrains, but one that allowed him to cross great distances at speed. He needed a movement technique that trivialized distances, one that ate up the miles like they were feet.
The problem was, that sounded like a profoundly un-trashy movement technique. And not only that, but he valued it, which made it even harder for him to learn. Rhys sighed again, exhausted. His path could be incredibly troublesome at times. Sure, it was nice to be able to take garbage techniques and refine them into something worthwhile, but it was frustrating to know that as soon as he set a goal, if he couldn’t see a trashy path there, then his goal was almost certainly cut off from him forever.