Rivers of the Night - Chapter 242

Chapter 242: Medicine [450 GT Bonus]
“Role call!” General Pennel barked.

Finally, their voices seemed to be directed from the right places. As the hounds slipped away, rushing away with their tails tucked between their legs, the group began to come together once more.

To maybe all of their shocks… no one had died. Everyone seemed to be here.

At the very least, no one except Theron, who seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Theron had reacted quickly, quickly enough that while many of them were heavily injured, they had still managed to stave off death. If he had taken any longer, though, their Mana would have likely been depleted to the greatest extent.

These few obviously couldn’t sense their blood moving as easily as Theron could. As such, they had to rely on other methods to sense and feel the shifts in the world around them.

Back when Theron was a Bronze Mancer, one of his favored sensory techniques to make up for a lack of Third Eye was dispersing his Water Mana around him—ironically into a mist—and feeling the movement of those that pushed through it.

Of course, this wasn’t true Mist Mana, but instead a bastardized version. But even so, that method wasted a ton of Mana because while Theron could disperse his Mana to that point, he couldn’t pull it back because it was no longer in a form he could easily control.

In this case, these geniuses had managed to form their own similar methods. But that likewise wasted a great deal of Mana.

Luckily for them, they had more Mana now than a Bronze Mancer Theron. But they were still barely able to hold on to this point.

“Where is Theron?” General Pennel asked.

The group looked to one another, but it was clear that no one had an answer.

General Pennel fell into silence. He felt that there was something wrong, but the first answer didn’t seem to make any sense.

That answer was that Theron had cleared their challenge away for this, causing this Mist to slowly dissipate and allowing them to see through it and hear one another again.

But the other answer… that Theron was the target all along, and once he was dead, there was no need for them to attack anymore…

That somehow felt less ridiculous.

Why would Theron be the target? He had caused a great deal of upheaval in the Nightingale Empire by this point, but had it reached a level of reaching the ears of the other Empires?

But the first problem seemed even more ridiculous than that, because even if Theron was the one that got them out of this… where was he? What reason would he have to suddenly escape?

If escaping was something Theron wanted to do, couldn’t he have done so any number of other ways already?

General Pennel could have never guessed that the real answer was a combination of the two. But what he did know was that they were suddenly out of their target depth, and something had to be done, or else Theron might not be the only one to die.

Taking a breath, General Pennel settled down.

The smart thing to do was retreat, but there was a very good reason he had brought these kids along with him. If they couldn’t display their talent now, there would never be a chance for them to do so in the future.

The Nightingale Empire was closer to collapse than any of them knew.

General Pennel had never wanted kids of his own because he knew that they would have to carry this burden. These kids, though…

Weren’t his children.

They were the warriors of the Empire, and they would have to start acting like it.

“Find your horses. We move forward. Aliza, you will take the vanguard with the other academic stream students once again.”

**

Theron dashed to the other side of the stagnant river, his thoughts not on General Pennel at all. All he cared about was taking advantage of the Mist while it was still here.

Without the direction of the Mist Mancer, the density of the fog had already begun to flag, but by then Theron had long made it to the other side of the wide river and to the location he was aiming for.

The blockage.

‘Earth Mancer. A powerful one, at that.’

Theron looked out toward where the river began to slope upward, headed out of the basin they were in. There, at a critical point, a tall line of thick, jagged rocks had appeared. It was definitely not a natural formation; they were too uniform, and too perfectly designed not to entirely stop the water, but to instead slow it down considerably.

Building a dam to stop a river this large would be a tall task given a short period of time. But if it was a Gold Mancer, and they took an intelligent approach like this one that forced the water to take a maze through to get to the other side—not to mention using gravity to their advantage…

It could be done.

Theron nodded to himself. ‘Interesting.’

He stood, crossing over to the other side of the river where the bacteria and various other pathogens had already been filtered out. Here, he could finally sense pure Water Mana again.

Bending over once more, he dipped his forearms in and took a deep breath. His hair flickered with familiar colors again, but he didn’t dip completely into his Echo.

[Aqua Resonance].

A light blue glow crawled up his arms and his wounds began to heal at a visible speed. Theron had put a lot of effort into learning healing spells these days, and unsurprisingly, his progress was shocking.

Even though [Aqua Resonance] was just a Bronze Resonance Technique, when amplified by his Immortal Jellyfish Echo, its power was more than 10x what it should be.

Not only were his wounds healing, but his blood was being replenished at an astonishing pace.

After a while, Theron slowly opened his eyes.

‘The alpha won’t like that so many of its kin are dead.’

Theron pulled out the severed head of a familiar Mist Mancer.

‘Using the hounds to target me is interesting. I wonder if you’ll like a taste of your own medicine.’

Theron tossed the head into the river, watching it bob up the flow.

A head like that wouldn’t necessarily naturally float, but Theron had made sure it would.

For so many of those hounds to make it here, the pack’s core must be nearby. They had likely migrated away from the stale water. In which case… they’d stumble onto this head very soon.

Theron’s figure flashed and he vanished into the line of trees. Hopping up, he shrouded himself in stealth, his breathing becoming incredibly shallow, his Mana slowing to a crawl, and his steps echoing not even the faintest of sounds.

Minutes later, he spotted his first hound. His pores practically closed up, the scent of his blood and life suffocated into silence as well.

He continued forward, and he began to stumble into more and more hounds until he spotted it from a distance.

A hound trotted forward almost nervously, a head in its open maw. It stopped before a wolf the size of a horse, letting the head drop to the ground.

The alpha looked at the head, its nose twitching for just a few moments before it raised its head up and unleashed a howl that made the trees sway.

It stood so fast the ground cracked, its long, shimmering, and arched claws splitting the hard soil like scythes.

Then it dashed off.

Theron watched all of this calmly.

The Mist Mancer was obviously already dead. However, he had saturated himself with poison formed from the rotting corpses of countless hounds.

The reason these wolves were called hounds instead of wolves was precisely because of just how sensitive their noses were. It was because of this it was so peculiar that they had ignored the Blood Weeds when they definitely should have sensed them.

And that sensitive nose would allow the alpha to decipher between hundreds of different scents…

Including those of the people the Mist Mancer had spent the most time with in the last few days.

Theron lightly tapped the branch as the pack began to surge. He followed after in the shadows, his movements impossible to track.