Chapter 83 I Take It Back.

  Isaac and Lenna ran across the nearly untouched pure white snow. The tracks that they were following were steadily getting deeper as they had been made while the snow was still falling. They had followed the tracks until their first end point. Said first end point was another higher end row home, that was noticeably smaller than the Guard Captain’s, which they had come from. It was unreasonably normal for someone like the woman who lived there. There wasn’t even a live-in servant.

  The Store Manager of the local CSC branch only had one wardrobe, a closet, a dressing station, and a large but not over the top bed in her bedroom. The drawers were all thrown open and the closet was left exposed to the rest of the room. It looked like she had taken all of her favorite clothes and stuffed them into a bag and then left. The rest of the utterly normal house was entirely untouched. After a few choice curses, the pair had moved on to continue following where the tracks lead after they left the Store Manager’s home.

  “Damn it.” Isaac swore under his breath as they ran. The only reason that they weren’t using Shamesh to help them follow the tracks faster was so that the skeletal wizard could save his mana for when it was truly needed. “We are too far behind.”

  “Yes.” Lenna agreed while they maintained their breakneck pace via liberal use of Isaac’s death flames. “There is no way that they will not feel us coming. Everyone within a block radius probably feels us.”

  “There isn’t much else we can do.” Isaac scowled. She was right, but unless they wanted Shamesh’s fighting ability to be compromised, they were forced to maintain their current means of travel.

  “Can’t you pull us with your shadows?” Lenna wondered.

  Isaac thought about the idea for a moment as they continued their sprint. Technically, he could definitely do that. He often used his shadows to yank his own figurative marionette strings to pull himself out of danger. He even used it on other people from time to time. There were only really two problems with that idea. The first was that it took quite a lot of concentrated effort and mana to make something as intangible as shadows physically move something. The second was that in the bright snow his mana use had dramatically spiked. He was literally out of his element. The pure white snow that reflected all of the ambient, filtered and refracted, light from the sun was already actively cooking off his shadows. He could easily maintain a shadow-cloak on himself, or Shamesh, but doing so for Lenna would be quite the stretch. That was just how harshly the surface treated someone that was supposed to be in the dark bowels of Primatia.

  “Not for long.” Isaac replied to Lenna’s inquiry. “A minute at a time at best.”

  “What will give out first?” Lenna asked him. She already knew everything that had gone through Isaac’s head.

  “Probably my focus, if I’m being honest.” Isaac told her. “If I just ordered the shadows to do it, it would save my focus but take even more mana and be less responsive. What is in this direction?”

  “The merchant district, I believe.” Lenna informed him.

  Isaac was only ever decent at directions. He could follow a map and get from one point to another but his natural sense of direction wasn’t actually that sharp. Lenna’s on the other hand was at least as sharp as a compass from a general store. It could be off slightly but never by more than a few degrees, even then, it was probably because of how far they had moved from where she had first centered herself, Contantis.

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  “Damn it.” Isaac swore. “Lock up, I need firm purchase.” He told her and then reached out with his mana and mind to the surrounding area, specifically the shadows that existed inside of Lenna’s and his own armor. A black void stretched from one of them to the other as Isaac needed a constant connection in order to truly control the shadows. He raised his hand and they both lifted off of the ground. Isaac reached his hand out away from himself in the direction that they needed to go and they began to speed up. Snow began to kick up behind them as their boots skimmed the top of the freshly fallen snow. “Direct me!” He ordered Lenna as it was taking all of his focus and control to move them both. He felt like he was commanding them forwards with nothing more than his iron will and a refusal to fail.

  Lenna could see the tracks clearly because they were the only part of the snow that wasn’t perfectly flat and shining back at them. Even through her incredibly dark lenses, she could make out the darker streak of the tracks as well as the blocky shapes of the buildings. “Up ahead, turn left.” She told him and glanced over at her husband. Both of them were locked mid step and just being forced forwards like a pair of children’s dolls being made to run side by side, the main difference being the black void that connected them at roughly core height.

  “How far?” He asked her.

  From his question, she immediately knew that even though his eyes were open, Isaac’s mind was anywhere but on where they were going. “Forty feet.” Lenna informed him. He started drifting towards the left. “Not yet, wait.” Lenna told him before he could turn them into the corner of the next building. Isaac maintained his direction which would lead them into the corner of the building on the far side of the street that they were going to be turning onto.

  “Continue giving me inside corner distances.” Isaac spoke. The pair began to slow down as his eyes came back into focus. He stretched out his other hand towards the corner of the building that served as the corner post of the street they were on and the one that they were going to be turning onto. A hand of shadows reached out from Lenna, who was on the left, and grabbed onto the corner of the building. With concentrated effort, Isaac maintained the length of the shadow-arm and used it as a pivot point to maintain most of their momentum as they rounded the corner. As they straightened back out in the middle of the street, Isaac called out again: “Where?”

  “Keep going. I’ll let you know when to turn again. Just keep it up.” Lenna assured him.

  “How much faster are we actually going?” He questioned her with obvious strain in his voice.

  “About half again as fast as we were going.” Lenna estimated. “Thirty miles per hour, maybe a bit faster.”

  “That’s it?” Isaac questioned. He felt like he was pushing hard enough to reach the sound barrier but hadn’t even left suburb sp- “Ah!” Isaac cried out as a headache lanced through his focus like an arrow into water. His grasp on their shadows slipped and all of a sudden they weren’t being held aloft anymore.

  Snow flew everywhere as the sounds of steel and dragon scales meeting ice resounded. The snow as well as Lenna’s wool cloak and Isaac’s shadow-wolf one helped to muffle the sounds of the pair’s spectacular crash.

  Lenna’s boots caught the snow and suddenly didn’t want to go forwards anymore. She went down on her knees and elbows at almost the same time. She tucked her head in and rolled onto her shoulder with her forwards momentum in order to reorient herself. She had hoped to end up with her feet facing the direction that they were going but her cloak had a different idea. As she transitioned onto her back, her cloak had gotten stuck on one of the sharp pieces of her knee guard. Instead of her cloak trailing behind her as she went, she was turned into a horizontal sail with her knee and shoulders as the sail’s anchor points. Lenna was almost immediately yanked to a halt as her cloak filled up with snow before it suddenly tore free of her knee guard and she was sent tumbling in a tangled mess of tattered cloak and indestructible armor. Isaac hadn’t fared much better.

  Isaac’s mind had been anywhere but where his body was as he had lost control. Between the headache and his control over his shadows, his physical body was hardly in his mind at all. If anything, his body was just the object that his shadows were being willed to move along. When his concentration had broken, Isaac’s knees had momentarily also gone limp. All of these factors culminated in Isaac rolling head over heels five full times before he came to a stop face down in the freezing snow, thoroughly dizzy, and maybe mildly concussed from at least one heavy impact with the icy ground.

  “Isaac?” Lenna asked and began struggling to get herself untangled from her cloak. Isaac let out a groan in response. “I take it back. That was a horrible idea.”

  “Yeah.” Isaac groaned and ran death flames through his entire body as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “Maybe by myself, but never with another person.”

  “We made good progress, but we will have wasted it all if we do not-” Lenna cut herself off as she yanked on her cloak hard enough to tear it free of whatever it had gotten caught on. Her belt shifted ninety degrees but her cloak was still stuck. “Ugh, damnit.” She swore and grabbed her belt with one hand and her cloak with the other. With one hard yank she forcefully untethered them from each other. “-continue quickly.” She finished in a huff. She yanked her belt back into place and then walked over to help Isaac to his feet.

  Isaac was already on his knees but was still wobbling slightly as his body had to regain its equilibrium. “Yes.” He agreed and took her offered hand. He shook his head to clear it and then coated their boots in shadows again so they could once more run on top of the snow. “Quickly.” He said with a nod and the pair shot off after the tracks in a run once again.

  Amaranth Serentia V'Nova Wexler