The first bare needle of fear wound through Hirrus as soon as the attacker vanished over the wrought-iron fence and into the forest. A foe like that was more frightening when you didn’t know their location. She’d proved to have access to some form of stealth that would defeat his eyes easily even at close range, and that she had the statistics to be a threat to him if she had a reasonable advantage in a fight.

The sort of an advantage an ambush would give her.

However, calling what he was feeling “fear” felt like a monstrous overstatement, in the face of Alric’s reaction.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Alric said over and over again. He kept whirling around as if expecting an attacker to be immediately behind him. “Fuck fuck fuck!”

“Calm down,” Hirrus said. He wanted to bark it as an order, but he knew that wouldn’t work, and so instead he said it firmly but slowly. If Alric behaved like anything, it was an excitable dog. If he started yelling, it was just going to add to the man’s anxiety rather than reduce it.

“Of course I’m fucking calm!” Alric snapped, turning on Hirrus. “I almost just got assassinated, and now she’s bolted into the fucking woods!”

“She only approached you because you were alone,” Hirrus said, keeping his voice even. “I suspect in an attempt to take you hostage, not to kill you.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s way fucking better,” Alric said. Despite his words and tone, he did seem incrementally calmer. He turned to Hirrus with wide eyes. “I’m gonna be a prisoner to a masked lunatic?”

Hirrus shook his head. “Not if you stay close.” He moved for the exit to the cemetery and gestured for Alric to follow. “She won’t attack you if you’re within reach of me.”

“Why not?” Alric said, in a disrespectfully defiant tone, though he still fell in behind Hirrus. “Are you three spoopy five her?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Hirrus said.

“It means you think you’re so scary she’s going to ignore me.”

Hirrus bit back the desire to feed the adventurer to the mystery woman. “No, that’s not it.” Instead of heading back down the trail to the Hari Path, he circled around, following the fence. “She can’t afford to attack you if she wants a fight with me. Any effort wasted on you is enough of a disadvantage that I will win the fight.”

“Oh, that’s a small comfort,” Alric grumbled, picking his way over a fallen branch as Hirrus moved to the spot where the attacker had jumped the fence. “My death will give you a fleeting tactical advantage.”

“I apologize if you misunderstood,” Hirrus said, kneeling down and examining the dirt. Her boots had a distinctive shape, thanks to the plates on the heels, and so it was easy to find the depressions in the soft soil that she had left. “You being near at hand isn’t for your protection; it’s for mine.”

Alric flapped his mouth open and closed a few times, clearly caught somewhere between thinking what Hirrus had just said was hilarious or horrifying.

It almost made Hirrus want to laugh.

Instead, he focused on calmly explaining his comment. “It’s not a complicated matter. Practicality. She will not attack if she has no chance of winning. If she meant to fight to the death against an obvious disadvantage, she wouldn’t have run. It’s something your kind could learn.”

“Okay, fine,” Alric said at length, finally either understanding Hirrus’ point, or giving up on the poor brain cells that had given their lives for the matter already. “So then what are we doing now?”

“We’re following her,” Hirrus said, pointing at the tracks that vanished into the woods.

“You just said you don’t want to fight her,” Alric said, scooting closer to Hirrus. “Why do you want to find her?”

Hirrus stood, hands firmly on his hips. “She seemed to be a scout.” He started following the tracks. “If there are more of them, they might be waiting for her word before closing in.”

“So you want to go towards them?” Alric hissed. “Are you crazy?” Despite the objection, he followed anyway.

“I need to know what’s coming. The worst thing that could happen is being caught by surprise. If I know what we’re up against, I can make a plan.”

“Not sure I like the sound of Plan B against a whole bunch of you freaks when your Plan A against just one is where I die first,” Alric grumbled.

Hirrus ignored him. The distinctive footprints weren’t hard to follow through the soft soil of the forest. But a slow and methodical pace seemed the most reasonable course for following the trail.

Carelessness could be his undoing. If one of Rumi’s attack dogs had an Arcana to turn invisible, it was possible he’d set up some way to train several in the ability. He could be walking face-first into an ambush.

He had only one good tool to deal with that. And so he kept his inward attention firmly fixed on the Reflected Echo Arcana, cursing himself that he had never experimented with it before to test its function and efficacy, even as he kept himself firmly focused on his surroundings to avoid a potential ambush.

About a hundred yards into the forest, the footprints stopped. Hirrus took a long moment carefully approaching the prints, before sweeping his blade through the space above them. He struck nothing, and so he stepped forward, searching the air with the hook-tipped sword.

Nothing.

The footprints vanished, leaving no sign of the would-be attacker.

“Oh yeah, that’s perfectly fucking normal,” Alric muttered, kicking a nearby tree. “I almost got assassinated by a fucking ghost.”

“I’m sorry,” Hirrus admitted as he turned to head back towards the cemetery - and the trail back to the Hari path. “This was a waste of time.”

“Maybe if she knows we tried to chase her, she’ll think we’re more threatening than we are,” Alric offered with a shrug. “Like a mongoose screaming and lunging at lions.”

Hirrus nodded halfheartedly. He didn’t believe that kind of tactic would work for more than a few minutes, but he didn’t want to waste more time arguing the point. If Rumi’s forces were tightening the noose around them, they needed to move fast.

Sometimes the best way to escape a trap was to outrun it.

They got back to the cemetery without incident, and then picked their way back to the villa, and eventually got to the Hari Path. Hirrus set as fast a pace as he could reasonably expect Alric to keep up with. His first and foremost hope was to never see that woman again. He would face down any number of foes like the attacker he defeated in the ruined town, as long as he didn’t have to learn the full extent of the would-be assassin’s power.

The area around the Hari Path was growing wilder as they went. Open fields between the road and the forest went from patchy farmland and pasture to untended plains. And then patchier badlands that would resemble subarctic tundra in a few months, when winter came. The treeline grew closer as well. Before they reached Shemil, they would be in the foothills of the northern mountain range, which was now no more than gray and white triangles stabbing out of the horizon and into the sky.

The next stop along the path was Umbrak, a small town known for the logging that fed high-quality lumber sought after by carpenters even as far as Yenon. Even before the town came into view, Hirrus could see the ice-cold river that ran down out of the mountains, carrying the logs that would feed the mill.

He could tell it was the right river because the logs were backed up as far as the eye could see.

As the lumber mill came into view, it looked like an enormous dead bug, seized-up and unmoving on its back. The water wheel was still. A barrier that blocked the logs from speeding off downstream to the ocean was groaning and threatening to break under the weight of all the wood that was building up, going unprocessed.

Whatever happened here - whatever Rumi did here - it had happened in the middle of the work day, with tasks visibly half-finished. The saw at the top of the ramp off of the river was halfway through a log. Two logs were on the ramp, waiting their turn for processing that seemed like it might never happen.

The mill was at least intact, however.

Beyond it, the town of Umbrak seemed to still be on fire. Smoke rose from the ruins. The outer buildings looked like lumber warehouses, belching smoke as months of stock burned within.

“We’re getting closer,” Hirrus said, slowing his pace slightly so that Alric could stay close. “Rumi must have hit this place more recently, for it to still be in flames.”

“Maybe not,” Alric warned, voice shaking slightly with fear. “I think this destruction might be unrelated to that bullshit.”

“Why do you think that?”

The answer came not from Alric, but from the city itself.

A deep, bassy roar ripped through the air from the town, followed by the sound of something large and wooden being smashed to splinters.

“I think that fucker who escaped you back on the road didn’t just pack up his ball and go home,” Alric said, pointing towards the dust cloud that suddenly joined the smoke filling the sky. “I think he came back with more balls.”