We weaved through the woods, the twisted ashen branches unable to impede our movements. We were too well trained, too adept, too powerful in our collective position as the scouts for Titan City. It was three days since the meeting with Amalarys, the Mistress and the others, and we were out yet again searching for signs of activity from Malagost’s forces.

Given my electroreception was a fairly unique sensory skill, and one of the hardest ones to avoid being detected by, it was obvious that I was relegated to those who were dedicated scouts. We also had a mixture of fighters, in case of combat. Ostensibly everyone would be a sufficiently capable fighter to fend off the enemy, but that wasn’t always true in the heat of the moment, let alone against human combatants. Most of them lacked sufficient practice against non-spike feeder threats.

Betty was the leader of my squad. Ethel and Veronica had their own scouting squads, and we had cycled the territories around the road leading to Titan City. This night we were hugging the high ground, my mind fixated on tracking the sensory information, looking for any activity that seemed like it could be other people, while the others around me did the same. The mission was clear: ensure that Titan City was not caught unawares.

Our way was led by those with proper night vision, the rest of us trailing thereafter. I wasn’t sure where Alain, Mia or Vera were, but I trusted they were in good hands. They were all capable fighters. They would survive. They had to survive.

Off in the distance, some activity spiked on the periphery of my electroreception. I peeled ahead, closing the distance to Betty.

“I sensed something in that direction,” I said, pointing of deeper into the woods. “I presume it’s a few spike feeders, given how few of them are present, but I think we should check this out. Just in case.”

She nodded, and whistled a brief tone, the rest of the group focusing on her defining note of clarity. “Let’s move,” she demanded.

She headed off in the direction I had indicated, with the closer she got to the targets, the more sure she was in her path. At this point, her senses were more than sufficient to confirm the location of the beasts, who seemed mostly subdued, evidently resting in-between movements.

In a heartbeat Betty leapt through the area the monsters slumbered within, their signatures fading into nothingness, leaving the area bereft of activity barring the people around me. It was nothing like my first time out in the woods. Even there there were brief signs of life, although they were mostly hiding from the beast tracking me down. Even that pond I had jumped into was teeming with activity, just of small and insignificant beings.

But this part of the woods was deathly still, nothing as far as I could tell going. Perhaps…. Perhaps something was wrong with our assumptions.

Betty was cleaning herself off to the side, wiping excess filth against one of the ashen trees. I sauntered over to her position, trying to keep my heart from beating too rapidly. “I don’t want to alarm you,” I started, “ but I think something is off.”

“Well, things certainly are ‘off’, Perry, but I take it you have more conclusive proof than your feelings. So, spit it out then.”

“What I’m wondering is if the forest is too quiet. Shouldn’t there be more signs of life other than the beasts you just eviscerated?”

She paused, silently mouthing words— I could only tell by merit of the activity coming from her mouth. My time within the belly of the beast had rendered me more sensitive with my electroreception, if I focused enough, and this was a moment requiring focus.

“That is unusual,” she started. “The more I think about it, the more this unnatural silence sticks out. Perhaps the few critters there are fled from contact with other people. Maybe… maybe they already had a contingent of forces closer to Titan City. I don’t know how we could have failed to notice them all this time, but we may simply not have searched far enough for fear of getting lost in the woods. Perhaps they have a means of mitigating that risk. I don’t know. We can’t just sit here pontificating endlessly. Alright, I’ll make a decision then. Perry, you and my boys will check a bit deeper into the forest. I’ll send another one as a runner back to the city, just in case, and we’ll otherwise lurk around here and continue our search. We won’t go too far, but I do want you all to return within the next thirty minutes, alright? So be quick and cautious.”

We nodded, and I left with Betty’s squad of Reggie and Archie. I didn’t know much about them other than their names, but she had the utmost faith in them, and while we had barely interacted in our time scouting together, I had no reason to doubt their competency.

I knew that the runner we were sending back was specifically meant for that purpose. If she got back fast enough, perhaps we could up our defenses in case of a surprise attack. We wouldn’t want to be caught unaware when we had an option of knowing otherwise, and one night of extra heightened activity wouldn’t differ too much from the other preparations that had been put in place.

Archie kept us fixed in place perpendicular to the road, never going any closer towards either of the cities— we just wandered in deeper and deeper into the heart of the woods, silently moving, only our senses ensuring our safe passage through the area.

Even though we went deeper and deeper, the area seemed still bereft of any life. It was odd, but perhaps it was just a mistaken assumption that life even deigned to be present in this area in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t a reflection of Malagost’s army, but just our lack of understanding of the ecosystem around us. There was insufficient time and resources to do a sufficient study of the neighboring woods. Their vastness was uncertain, and the possibility for a spike feeder to be present always loomed, as evidenced with Betty’s swift execution not long ago.

If it was a mistake in assumptions, then Betty was prepared to pay the price, but she also agreed with my suspicion. We couldn’t just stop based on nothing.

“How much longer do we have?” I whispered.

Reggie whispered back, “Fifteen minutes. We need to hurry up or else we’ll spend all the time on our return trip.”

“Alright, just a bit longer then until we give up. Then we go back empty handed and let Betty know. She can blame me freely if she wants. I’m sure I’ve already done enough things over the course of my life in my time in the city guard to get on Amalarys’s bad side.”

Reggie rolled his eyes and punched me lightly on the shoulder, before moving on ahead, our party continuing to scour the area for any suggestions of life in the area.

A few more minutes and we were at the threshold of our range, needing the rest to return lest Betty panic at our absence when Archie stopped us.

“Don’t step any further. Look at the ground, Reggie.”

Reggie grunted, squatting down to the earth below. “That does kind of look like some sort of footstep.”

“That’s what I thought. Let’s keep moving in that direction. Perry, be prepared to let us know.”

We continued in deeper, my electroreception still failing to note anything other than an absence of presences outside of our own. Reggie and Archie’s tracking, however, bore fruit, as more and more tracks appeared in front of us. Whatever force they had squirreled away into the woods was showing signs of their presence.

We followed with reckless abandon, our pace unerring due to my constant confirmation of an absence of activity, meaning that when we ran into the open clearing it took effort to refrain from crashing into the discarded cloth on the ground.

It was a wide area, remnants of trees swept to the sides, trunks broken as relics of the brute force employed to clear the vicinity. On the ground was a contingent of makeshift tents all discarded, campfires long extinguished. There was no care for covering for this camp. If someone stumbled onto the clearing, there was no way to satisfactorily hide evidence of the presence of human life going through the area, unless the group meticulously destroyed every traced and buried it. That obviously wasn’t conducted in the vicinity, far too arduous a task to do when one could just continue away, leaving the disguised encampment in the middle of nowhere where no one would ever find it under normal circumstances. It was only our paranoia that led us to this area, but that wasn’t sufficient. We had to know where they were going from there.

“Quiet, I need to focus,” Reggie demanded. He walked around the perimeter of the camp, studying the trail left behind, going slower and slower with each passing second.

“Well shit,” he groaned. “I don’t know why it wasn’t obvious in the first place. They’re headed towards the city.”

“That was more obvious than I expected. I don’t know why I thought otherwise,” Archie added. “Do we know how long they’ve left?”

“Kind of hard to be sure in the dark. But I’d hazard that any amount of time is too soon. They might have camped somewhere else on the perimeter, or already gone to attack. I don’t think it matters, Archie. Time to reconvene with Betty, I’d say.”

We unanimously agreed, and ran back, our urgency outweighing everything else. We had certainly been gone for over thirty minutes now. Hopefully, Betty had taken our absence as a sign for our party to return towards the city, as opposed to heading out in our direction. We didn’t need additional resources to get trapped in the woods.

By the time we got back, only Betty was present, her body resting up against a tree, arms crossed over her chest. “That was longer than thirty minutes.”

“Well yeah, we found something,” Archie said.

“I guessed as much. Do you care to explain what?”

“It was a camp. An abandoned camp. Bodies headed towards the city. Unsure of how many it was precisely, but it far outstripped our scouting party,” Reggie replied.

“Well shit. Guess we’ll see if my runner paid off. It was maybe a few hours prior to our projected return time, so we won’t be likely to rendezvous with Ethel or Veronica. Guess it’s time to see what we’re missing out back on the city. Hopefully none of the others got noticed in our surveillance attempts… I just hope they’re using the proper amount of caution in the return to the city. Fuck, I should have gone with them and left someone else behind, but I didn’t want to think that they could be in danger. Fuck.”

“I’m sure they’ve learned proper procedure under your guidance these last few days, Betty. Let’s catch up with them and see what we can do. No use worrying over this further. Just plan for the next steps,” I replied.

She groaned and nodded. “Hate it when the babes tell me things I should already know.”

We ran off, the city a few hours away from our prior location, wondering with each step what we would find on the other end. Would Titan City be razed? Would there be an enemy camping at our door? Was there already blood spilled? Did we get ahead of the enemy and give proper guidance for a defense? The possibilities were innumerable and our uncertainty endless.

We couldn’t bother spending our breath to speculate. Our lungs were dedicated to our return home, Javier’s favorite means of practice and discipline proving to be prudent as always. I constantly set my electroreception to its maximum range, looking for any signs of activity outside of our own, whether it was an ally or enemy the proximity would help discern how far we’d gone. The wait was unbearable, just lingering with one’s own thoughts against the pounding of the feet on the treacherous ground, dancing on the cliffside as to avoid the roots peaking out of the ground. We had advanced slowly to our designated area, giving time to avoid the hazardous terrain, but this was a race against time. This was a necessary melding of agility and grace.

I couldn’t say how long it had been in our travel, but the very edge of my senses picked up activity, a cluster of bodies waiting patiently. “Something’s ahead,” I warned our little platoon.

We slowed down, Betty taking point and sniffing the air, her own nose able to discern the file details my electroreception couldn’t make out. “That’s our men, but it’s worrying that they stopped there,” she noted.

We pulled in, sighs of relief emanating from the other scouts. “Thank goodness you’re back, Betty,” one stated. “We don’t know what to do. They’re at the front door. That’s all of them and we’re just… us.”

We were not too far from Titan City, the edges of the cliffs nearly receding into the road, and my mind’s eye blazing with activity as I counted the activity in the distance. It seemed like the worst had come to fruition. Titan City was already under attack, and perhaps worryingly for us, there was no means of breaking through the enemy encampment to make it back into the city. They had surrounded the perimeter, and none of us knew any of the secret paths into Old Titan City.

“There’s nothing we can do but plan for what action next. Set up camp and prepare for little sleep,” Betty declared. “War’s at our front door. Sleep as well as you can this last night, because you won’t know respite once blood is on your hands.”