Chapter 758: Where He Would Land

Chapter 758 — Where He Would Land

The spear came out of the mist at Leon’s ribs.

He had covered barely two hundred paces along the southern wall. A thin wind carried his scent behind him, and his aura lay close against his skin, but neither precaution stopped the weapon finding him.

He turned with the first swirl of disturbed mist and caught the shaft’s blade on his sword.

The impact ran up his shoulder. Behind the narrow spearhead curved a long hook, its inner edge sharpened. As the weapon withdrew, that hook tried to catch his sword and pull it out of line.

Leon twisted free and cut toward the wielder.

A tall shape slipped behind a pine. He sent fire around the trunk, but the shape was already dropping off the shelf beyond it. Flame lit empty mist.

Leon listened with his sword raised.

The stream covered the smaller sounds. Whoever had attacked him knew exactly how much noise it could make beneath that rushing water.

You’ve had more practice here than I have.

He looked uphill. A broad shelf offered room to move and fewer trees for the hunter to hide behind. He examined the stone at its edge, prepared a short spatial step, and crossed.

The hooked spear met him as he arrived.

Leon got his blade across his chest. The spearhead slid away, but the hook swept back along his guard and grazed his left forearm.

Pain flashed. He answered with lightning, driving the hunter off the neighboring shelf. Its retreat passed behind a pine an instant before the trunk split.

Leon stood with blood running toward his wrist.

The wound was shallow. He cleaned and bound it, pressing the bleeding closed while he replayed the attack. The hunter had not crossed the entire distance after seeing him appear. It had been concealed one shelf over, already close enough to strike.

During his deliberate preparation, qi had gathered around the intended crossing. Mist had drawn toward the opening at its far end.

He had advertised a landing place to someone waiting beside it.

"All right," Leon murmured. "What else can you read?"

He kept the bloodied strip when he replaced it with a clean binding. By then the cut had stopped bleeding. It stung when he turned his arm, an irritating reminder that a clear patch of ground was not necessarily an unobserved one.

He spent much of the next hour testing it. From cover, he sent an illusion of himself running toward the stream.

It reached the water untouched.

Leon improved the image’s shadow and repeated it along a different route. Still nothing.

The hunter either recognized what was missing or preferred to wait for better evidence. He was not going to learn which by sending the same trick past it all afternoon.

His image could look solid without weighing anything. It left the pine needles undisturbed and sent no ripples through the shallow water. Leon had given it a convincing face when the creature might never have looked at his face at all. He let the illusion dissolve and shifted his attention to the ground around its route.

Next he disturbed a stand of pines with wind, stirring the mist beneath them. A gray figure moved along the ledge above. It paused under cover, watched, and withdrew without striking.

It investigates. It doesn’t just chase whatever moves.

Leon began combining his tests. A foot scuffed stone beneath an image. Mist parted around it. A little qi marked an apparent movement. The hunter came closer, though it still held back when the signs failed to agree.

Once, returning toward the shelf where he had been cut, Leon glimpsed it crouching near a spot of blood.

Ground traces mattered too.

That did not prove it lacked other senses. He had already learned what assuming too much about it cost. For now, he knew it compared several signs and disliked committing to an uncertain target.

He caught it on its next approach.

The spear came down from above. Leon met it, turned the shaft, and drove fire along it before the hunter could retreat. Flame struck its shoulder. It hissed and released one hand, twisting away behind the rock.

Leon’s follow-up cut sheared stone from the ledge. The hunter dropped through the gap and vanished below.

He could tear apart half this slope to flush it out. That would cost energy, spoil his view, and possibly give it more broken ground to use. A better reward might also depend on how well he handled the trial, though he had no intention of trusting his life to that guess.

He looked toward the exit, then at the stepped shelves ascending the northern wall.

The hunter wanted a target whose next movement it knew.

Leon could give it one.

He crossed the stream and began climbing in a deliberately consistent way. At the end of each shelf, he prepared a short spatial step to the next, choosing the inner edge near the cliff. He left ordinary signs of passage: a scrape underfoot, displaced mist, and once a little blood carried from the stained cloth.

He made no effort to disguise the preparation of those crossings. Instead, he watched the approaches to each landing point.

At the fourth shelf, the hunter tried to intercept him again.

This time Leon was ready. His sword knocked the spear outward as he arrived; fire drove the hunter back before it could hook his arm. It withdrew along a narrow side ledge, favoring its burned shoulder.

Leon let it go.

That exchange told him more than another untouched illusion would have. It had begun waiting where he habitually landed.

Above him lay a narrow shelf beneath a projecting lip of rock. An eastern ledge gave covered access to it. A leap across the open drop was possible, but would leave the hunter visible and unable to change direction so easily. The ledge suited the careful approaches it had used throughout the fight.

Leon studied the rock above that shelf. Water spilled from a crack behind the overhang, hiding a broken climb on its far side.

He did not step through space to his hiding place.

Instead, he circled behind the waterfall on foot, climbing with small holds shaped in the rock. Water battered his shoulder and concealed his passage. He used the fall’s existing spray to cover the brief disturbances of his work, keeping both himself and his qi screened by stone.

At the lip, he lay flat and listened.

No attack came. That did not mean he was invisible; it meant the hunter had not yet found a reason to abandon the expected route.

Leon worked toward the false landing point below him. A small spatial opening made the familiar inward pull without carrying his body through. Wind and water guided mist around the shape he was preparing there. A few drops drawn from his bloodied cloth reached the stone.

The cues came from one place, in the order the hunter had already observed.

He held the illusion ready. Below, the shelf appeared to await another careless landing close against the cliff.

For several breaths, nothing happened.

Then stone scraped faintly along the eastern ledge. A gray hand appeared against the rock, followed by the dark shaft of the hooked spear.

The hunter paused to look.

Leon waited with it, sword held close beneath his body. He needed more than its arrival. He needed it to choose the attack.