The silver light of the moon shone down upon the sleeping forest—the sound of Octavius’s pounding boots intermingled with the gentle lapping of the water on the riverbank. A gust of wind blew through the trees, rustling the canopy that arched gracefully overhead.

The stream that he ran parallel to was much smaller than the large stream that ran along the southern and western borders of the Sanctuary. It was, in fact, the third tributary that flowed into that stream that Octavius found as he followed it north.

He had been running at his top speed for over a dozen minutes. If he had to guess, he would say that he’d traveled seven or eight miles along the original stream before he came to the tributary that he now followed. Throughout the entire length of his rushed journey, he had not caught hide nor hair of the escaped thrall.

While he did not know its specific physical stats, he knew that it was a mage. In his encounter with it, his strength had easily allowed him to overpower it in physical combat. Since then, his stats had only grown.

With the difference in their stats, Octavius doubted that the thrall could move over long distances so quickly. Either the thrall had escaped much earlier than he had been assuming, or it did not come this way at all. The odds of the second of the two choices being correct was quickly becoming more and more exaggerated to him as he ran on.

Still, he thought to himself as his boots pounded on the packed ground next to the tributary, I’ll continue this way until I get to within five miles of their base. The thrall said that I would find a cliff in this direction and that the thralls’ main base was ten miles along that cliff. So, if I still can’t find it after I’ve run along the cliff for five miles, I’ll turn around. If I take a few precautions, the chances of me being detected by any border guards will decrease to nearly zero.

Nodding slightly to himself, he continued to run along the riverbank. Now that the Emergence had ended, the forest seemed much more peaceful and welcoming. Before the Emergence, he had always thought that the forest was hostile ground, somewhere to tread lightly and always be on alert. He hadn’t noticed it during the Emergence, but that feeling had intensified to the point in which now that it was back to its normal levels, he could hardly feel it.

The irregular movement of a shadow caught his attention, and he focused on it. He brought his spear around and leveled it as he slowed. Approaching the shape cautiously, he peered into the darkness of the shadow that it hid within. It moved jerkily, and Octavius prepared to attack. The moment that it exited the shadow, the moon’s gentle glow illuminated it. The shape wasn’t a thrall; it was a raccoon.

Still, his first instinct was to kill it. The Emergence, short as it had been, had conditioned him to treat any and all animals he encountered as hostile threats. As he watched the raccoon scamper into the treeline that was beside the flowing water of the stream, he reconsidered that.

While many of the beasts were still hostile to him, and pretty much every other human as well, many others would no longer attack him on sight. In his mind, he reclassified beasts from all being hostile to being something to decide on a case by case basis. It was true that he’d still probably kill most of the beasts he encountered, if as much for the experience points as for anything else, but precisely intel was always valuable.

The tributary continued for another five miles, and he was truly beginning to discount the possibility that the thrall had come this way. His breath caught as the world seemed to open up around him. The upward slope that he had followed began to level out as the tributary curved to his left.

He continued straight for another short while, and the trees gave way to a sharp drop off. The cliff stretched down from where he stood to a great plain that continued to the horizon in the distance. To his left, the hill that he had started up continued until it became more of a small mountain than anything else.

The sound of crashing water was audible to him over the gusting wind. Squinting as he followed the line of the mountain, he was able to catch sight of a pair of tumbling waterfalls as they roared down the stone of the cliff. The churning water of where they impacted a stream below caught the silver light of the stars and moon and drew Octavius’s attention.

Looking to his right, the great grass-filled plains continued into the distance. Above the horizon, he was just able to make out the peaks of mountains and hills in the clear night. That must be where the dwarvish catacombs were, he decided.

All in all, the topography of the region was surreal. A sharp cliff, likely a wooded plateau now that he thought about it, held a solitary mountain on it. Off the edge of the cliff, there were grasslands as far as the eye could see. The cliff and the abrupt shift from forest to grasslands seemed almost unnatural to Octavius.

That’s not important at the moment, he decided as he turned to his right. He didn’t need to check his compass to know which direction of the two was more easterly; the mountains in the distance, along with his internal sense of direction, made that clear enough.

He moved further away from the edge of the cliff until he was just inside of the treeline. If he was a thrall, the edges of the cliff would be where he placed the most guards and sentries.

His mana reserves could power his illusion ring for slightly over ten minutes. At his top running speed, he could likely nearly go the five miles there and five miles back during that time. However, the irregularity of the ground, his need to remain as quiet as possible, the various obstacles that were strewn in his path, and his footwear would all reduce his top speed. He decided to play it safe and move two miles along the cliff. If he still had not encountered the thrall by then, he would activate his illusion ring.

Now that he was relatively hidden by the trees, he ran. The little sound that he made with his passing was obscured by the howling of the wind. Long gusts blew unobstructed over the flat plains below, only to be interrupted by the massive wall of rock that made up the cliff.

After two miles, he still hadn’t caught sight of the thrall. After traveling such a distance, he guessed that the thrall would’ve had to have escaped the Sanctuary hours earlier to have made it this far.

Even then, he closed his eyes and activated the illusion ring on his finger. Mana flowed from his core into the ring with an ease he had yet to experience. It did not surprise him if he could now activate and deactivate the ring in a fraction of the time it had taken before his mana manipulation skill had leveled up.

Looking down, he watched light distort slightly around his body before he disappeared. The slight shimmer in the air that denoted his presence was essentially invisible in the deep shadows of the night. Damn, he smiled slightly, I’m glad that the thrall doesn’t have an illusion ring right now. I bet I’d run right past it in the darkness.

Before he resumed his sprint, he double-checked the position of his mana potions in a pouch on his belt. He would have to use one later after he began to run back. Even if he had the mana to power the illusion ring for ten minutes, the symptoms of mana exhaustion would kick in well before that. With the use of one mana potion, he guessed that he would be able to return to his current position with enough mana left to spare to deal with any surprises that might arise without becoming exhausted.

Cinching the pouch tightly closed, he broke out into a quiet run once more. It was difficult for him to focus both on the placement of his feet, pay attention to where he was going, and keep an eye on the cliff to spot the thrall if he encountered it. The task would likely have been entirely impossible for him to do before the tutorial, and he once more thanked whatever the system was for his improved stats.

His rush through the trees was quick and measured as he grew closer and closer to the point where he would turn around. The mana counter in the corner of his vision ticked down steadily as time wore on. He had just reached what he estimated to be the point four-ish miles from where he reached the cliff when something caught his attention.

A loud, wheezing series of gasps were just audible above the howling of wind and swaying of branches. His speed slowed to a crawl as he peered past the treeline to the area just next to the cliff. A shadowed, humanoid form was moving with a hunched-over jog along the edge of the cliff. It was a thrall.

Octavius listened to its wheezing breaths and smiled. This was almost definitely the very same thrall that had escaped the Sanctuary. After all, what other thrall would be so out of breath this late at night near their base of operations? Still, just to be sure, he used Identify on it.

Zreks - Thrall (F) (Lvl 21) (Mage)

It had the same name, but it had somehow leveled up. Octavius blinked uncertainly, Did it kill the guards that were watching it? Or maybe it killed something else during its flight from the Sanctuary?

He didn’t like unknowns, and the thrall increasing a level was a significant unknown. After a moment's thought, he realized that it most likely leveled up from the ten thousand EXP that every survivor was awarded for surviving the tutorial.

With that mystery solved, he moved to end the threat that it posed to every human within the tutorial. While he likely could overpower and subdue it once more, the amount of noise it would make wouldn’t be worth the risk. He was on a kill mission; his priority was stopping it from reporting back to its superiors, not recapturing it.

He took care with every step as he circled to its front. The clear strip of ground between the treeline and the edge of the cliff was only five or so feet across. Octavius positioned himself behind the trunk of a tree just to the side of the thrall’s path. While he knew that the illusion ring made him all but invisible, extra precautions wouldn’t hurt.

He was surprised that there weren’t any thrall sentries positioned along the cliff’s edge thus far but guessed that they couldn’t be too far away. If there weren’t any sentries within shouting distance from his location, he’d have to downgrade his opinion of the thralls’ capabilities from amateur to entirely inept.

Straining his ears, he listened to the wheezing sound of the thrall’s breathing grow in volume over the roaring wind. As the thrall stumbled past his tree and into his line of sight, he took a single moment to line up his spear with the thrall’s neck. Then, he thrust forward.

His spear caught the thrall in the side of its neck and its raspy breathing silence, replaced by a wet gurgling. The sound of the thrall’s body hitting the ground was nearly inaudible over the wind to Octavius’s advanced perception. The thrall twitched a few times, then laid still.

You have slain Zreks - Thrall (F) (Lvl 21) and gained 1313 EXP (1/2)(21)(1)(1)(1.25)(100)

Before more blood could pour from the thrall’s opened neck, Octavius quickly moved forward. Crouching, he rolled the corpse of the thrall over the edge of the cliff. The wind blew his hair back, and he peered over the cliff’s edge. The scene of the thrall limply slamming into the cliff multiple times was illuminated by the moon’s gentle glow.

Satisfied, Octavius stepped back from the edge. Any thrall finding another of its kind with a sliced throat just outside their base would be instantly alert. On the other hand, if they found the broken body of a thrall at the bottom of a cliff, they might not be.

While the puncture to the neck would be a giveaway, it was not impossible that the thrall impaled itself on a stick or piece of rock during its fall. Octavius hoped that the thralls’ apparent lack of appreciation of the threat the humans presented them would cause them to not look too far into the thrall’s death. Not to mention that the thrall’s gray skin acted as camouflage, hiding it among the rocks at the base of the cliff.

Returning to the blood-stained dirt that the thrall left when it fell, he used the butt of his spear to disturb it. Quickly, he packed it back down with his boots. It still looked noticeably different than the surrounding ground, but not in the same way that a pool of blood would. Nodded to himself, he turned to face away from the thrall’s main base and broke into a run.

At least one good thing came out of this ordeal, he allowed, Now I can be almost certain that the thrall’s base is actually located where the thrall said that it was.

He returned to his spot in the trees and began to move back the way he had come. Now that he was no longer in a race with the escaped thrall, he moved much slower. With his objective complete, he needed to get back to the Sanctuary without being discovered. Whereas before, his movements were quiet, now they were entirely silent.

He continued at that pace for five minutes before drinking a mana potion. The core of energy in his body seemed to swell as a mist of energy coalesced around it before being absorbed into it. As he walked forward, it was only the lack of sound that he was making that allowed him to hear the sharp crack of a twig behind him during a lull in the gusting wind.

He spun to face the source of the sound and found nothing. Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he scanned the trees for the faintest glimmer that would indicate the presence of an illusioned thrall. A blur out of the corner of his vision caught his attention.

Whirling, he faced it with superhuman speed. He flinched at the sharp pain on his chin. Without taking his eyes off the forest around him, he reached up and plucked the object from his chin and held it to his eye. It was a small dart of some sort. Its trajectory would have carried it directly into his neck if he hadn’t turned.

He blinked slowly and found that the effort required to lift his eyelids was extraordinary. His jaw clenched, and he pulled up his status effects.

Sedated - You have been dosed with a strong sedative. -30% Strength and Dexterity. -300 Stamina.

His eyes drooped, but he forced them open. The only explanation was that there were thralls in the area. How the hell did they know where to aim? He wondered, I’m illusioned right now. Not to mention, I’ve been focusing on stealth! Can they see through their own illusions?!

He didn’t know, and he didn’t see the pulsing light that shone dimly within one of the white jewels of his ring behind the illusion. At the moment, though, it didn’t matter how the thralls had found him; what mattered was his escape.

I can take a few mages, even with my physical stats debuffed, he decided, but it would be better to escape.

He was entirely sure that he could outrun pretty much all of the thrall mages. The only chance one of them had to keep up with him was if it was at a much higher level than him. If that were true, though, he’d have even larger problems.

Spinning away from where he assumed the thralls were waiting for him to collapse, he broke into a sprint. His boots pounded into the ground. Even as he ran, his thoughts raced a mile a minute.

Everything depends on whether they were here soon enough to see me kill the other thrall and if they find its body within the next few days, he decided, If they were there and do find it, there is a good chance that they’ll attack the Sanctuary right away, just in case. If not, the fact that I’m alone might go a great deal toward convincing them that I am a solo adventurer.

He planned routes in his mind. There definitely hadn’t been sentries along the cliff’s edge on his way here. If there were, they would’ve helped the thrall. That meant that they had some way to track Octavius, at least while he was within the vicinity of their base. The only thing that he could think of was either his illusion ring or his dagger.

Either way, speed would be his greatest advantage during his escape, rather than stealth. He moved back and forth slightly as he ran but barely made it two dozen strides before a needle-sharp point entered the back of his neck.

He stumbled slightly, forcing himself to keep going. I will not fall! He screamed to himself as he pushed himself another three steps forward. After that, he fell forward onto his chest. He wasn’t even able to brace himself with his hands as they hung sluggishly at his sides.

His Soulsilver spear thumped into the dirt with a deafening finality, and his left hand, still clenched around the first dart, opened, letting it roll gently to a rest in front of his face. The smell it gave off was annoyingly familiar.

I guess I know why I haven’t been able to find any more Valerian, he thought. And with that, he was out cold.