Chapter 121: Desperate Plan
At the top floor of one of NY’s skyscrapers, beside a shattered window, a girl stood looking out over the city below with a complicated expression.
She looked disheveled, small cuts here and there, clothes torn in several places, not enough to make them useless, but enough to make them wholly inadequate under normal conditions.
It was cold outside. Very cold. And given her current state, she couldn’t afford the luxury of finding something better to wear.
That, however, was not her primary concern at the moment.
She had her ways of keeping warm, but the problem was that all of them involved using mana, which would have been perfectly fine under normal circumstances, except that fate had decided these were anything but.
She was in an unknown place, surrounded by unknown creatures that apparently had an extraordinary nose for mana.
She hadn’t realized this immediately, not when they first attacked her. It was only later, during her escape, as she desperately tried to put distance between herself and the things pursuing her, that she managed to find cover.
But the moment she used her mana, those creatures materialized from everywhere at once, from the ceiling, from the ground, from the shadows, from every direction, as though they had caught the scent of their prey and locked onto her position with absolute precision.
’I can’t keep going like this,’ she thought, her mind cold and clear, running at full capacity in search of a solution.
She didn’t know where she was, let alone how to get out. All she had was the small amount of information she had managed to piece together over the last few hours of running.
And everything she had learned told her that her situation was far more precarious than it appeared.
She had no food. Which meant she would have to rely on mana to sustain her body for as long as possible. It was something awakened at her level could do, even if only within certain limits, their bodies were still too rooted in the physical world to rely on mana alone indefinitely.
But that option, too, was now effectively off the table, given that the consequences were something she simply could not afford.
She had considered several alternatives, fleeing the strange city entirely, searching for food somewhere nearby, but none of them held up. The city appeared to have been dead for an unknowable amount of time. Finding food was nearly out of the question. As for the plants, the few she had spotted didn’t seem to bear anything edible, and beyond that, they felt wrong, wrong in a way she couldn’t articulate, but that her instincts told her clearly was not something she should touch.
Her mind drifted back to the two incidents that had brought these creatures to her.
The first was when she had used a significant amount of mana to stop herself from falling from the tree branch. That had triggered the appearance of multiple creatures, many of them, some appearing to be around her level, others clearly stronger.
The second was when she had taken cover and used only a small amount. The creatures had still appeared, but in far smaller numbers, four or five at most, and none that felt stronger than her.
Her eyes widened slightly as she focused on that detail.
The second time she had been more careful, more deliberate, actively trying to use as little mana as possible. That quantity, under normal circumstances, would barely register to other awakened, it was too controlled, too contained, nothing like the explosive burst she had released when saving herself from the fall.
The creatures had found her anyway.
But the number had been drastically lower.
And none of the stronger ones had shown up.
She hadn’t thought much of it at the time, too focused on running to analyze it properly. But now, standing here with a clear head, she couldn’t afford to ignore it.
Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t simply a matter of whether she used mana. Maybe it was a matter of how much.
Mana was something she would have to use eventually. There was no avoiding it. And if she had to use it regardless, better to do it now, while she still had energy to spare and could afford to experiment.
"Ha..." she exhaled quietly. "Let’s just hope I’m not wrong about this."
She began carefully.
Normally, using mana meant mobilizing the refined particles stored within one’s mana core and guiding them through the body’s channels, the amount and method of flow determining the application and effect.
She didn’t take a large quantity.
She took the smallest amount she could manage.
A single particle, moving through her channels, so minuscule it would have been nearly imperceptible even to the awakened drawing it out herself. She guided it gently, directing it toward the parts of her body hit hardest by the cold.
The particle traveled and reached its destination, settling into place and immediately offering a faint, almost imperceptible sense of relief.
It wasn’t much. But it was something.
That, however, was not the point. Not yet.
The creatures were.
Having already learned from her earlier experiences that she couldn’t detect them with her mana sense, couldn’t even perceive their presence when they were nearby, she didn’t stay still waiting to pick up any change. Instead, she kept her eyes moving constantly, scanning for the slightest sign that those things were beginning to appear.
Several seconds passed without anything happening, and she began to doubt herself.
Then her survival instincts detonated all at once, and she threw herself sideways from her position before she had consciously processed why.
She looked back immediately, and where she had been standing a second ago, a clawed hand was emerging from the floor, followed slowly by the rest of a body rising behind it.
She scanned the area quickly, searching for any other sign of those creatures, but after several more seconds, nothing else appeared. Just this one, in front of her.
She still couldn’t judge its strength through mana.
But unlike the previous creatures, this one didn’t trigger the same overwhelming sense of danger within her.
’Let’s just hope I wasn’t wrong,’ she told herself, as her determined eyes settled on the creature standing before her.