"Hm? Their cheat's malfunctioning? Right now?"
Noticing the change, Ryan didn't immediately try to loop around them. He kept widening the distance while putting away the gun and using his now-free right hand to smear tree sap across his clothes. When he'd once used his Instigator ability on the gang members, he'd learned from them that the scarred man had an extraordinarily keen sense of smell — practically like a dog.
In this forest, that particular trait was going to be a problem. As he rubbed on the sap, he also slowed slightly to allow himself to slip back into the shadows, and began gradually adjusting his direction to test whether the three could follow as quickly as before.
"Sharp as a ghost, this one."
The scarred man behind him heard the faint sounds ahead go silent and bit the words back — falling any further behind was worse. The two Assassins similarly slowed a fraction and melted into shadows. With the mirrors now only showing a general direction, they couldn't charge ahead blindly the way they had before.
The relentless three gave chase for a while longer — until they suddenly noticed the interference on the mirrors seemed to have cleared. The mirrors showed the target's position sharply again.
All three felt a surge of relief when they saw the red dot on the surface turn and head left. The two Assassins started cutting across to intercept. The scarred man, unable to suppress his own footsteps, had learned his lesson and didn't immediately adjust direction.
He waited until he'd covered roughly half the distance between his current position and where the dot had changed direction before correcting course — close enough to stay in pursuit without losing the trail entirely.
"It's working again?"
Noticing the movement, Ryan immediately turned roughly forty-five degrees to the right and moved at full speed — to see where the two Assassins who had gone silent were now positioned.
The answer gave him a start. They were much closer than he'd expected. After a quick mental calculation, Ryan felt he already had enough to draw a conclusion about who was behind this.
"Was my thinking read? Or did that insufferable woman plan this from the beginning?"
The answer to that question no longer mattered. Either way, he had to make a choice: advance to Witch, or die.
He didn't doubt for a second that the three behind him intended to kill him. The volley they'd fired as he dove into the forest had made that perfectly clear.
And from the moment he'd left the city until now, twenty to thirty minutes had already passed. Even a Sequence 8 Beyonder was feeling the strain of sustained all-out movement. Featherfall made the movement itself less exhausting — but it wasn't rest. The forest wasn't infinite either. Keep running, and the moment he broke out of the trees, he'd likely have no choice left at all.
"Why do those three still have energy to chase? The two Assassins, fine — but the last one has been running on foot this entire time!"
On the other side, the scarred man was also fuming:
"Why can this bastard keep running without getting tired?"
Even as he said it, he pulled out a small vial and drained it in one go. This was already his second one. Meanwhile, one of the Assassins had a similar restorative, just as effective.
"Should be soon," one of them replied from ahead.
He wasn't concerned about his own stamina. But just as they felt sure of it, the mirrors blurred at the edges of their vision again.
On his end, Ryan had caught the sound beyond the scarred man's curses — the small, particular noise of a vial being opened. He'd already been keeping a knot of anger toward the two Assassins, and now it ignited fully.
"Fine. You want to back me into a corner that badly."
Dragged without explanation into this strange world. Forced to drink a potion he hadn't chosen. Tracked down by a woman he'd never sought out. And now, possibly driven to this point by nothing more than that woman's idea of entertainment.
The disorientation of a foreign world, the helplessness of a foreign era. The rage he'd had no outlet for — buried in the deepest part of himself — was now pulled out in full by the threat of death, blazing fiercely in his chest.
"Fine, you insufferable woman. You want to force a choice out of me? You'd better have what it takes to kill me here. Because if you don't — I will never stop coming for you."
Driven by that fury, Ryan made his final decision almost without hesitation and began looking for his moment.
And the pursuit behind him, just as he'd expected, started to slow. Ryan immediately eased his own speed, slipped back into the shadows — and this time, he had no intention of breaking concealment voluntarily.
A few minutes later, the three pursuers stared at their mirrors, which had grown increasingly blurry with no sign of recovering, and their expressions darkened.
"What's happening? That woman said it would last at least a month."
The scarred man couldn't hold back his complaint.
"You're the one who's good at tracking — can't you find him?" one of the Assassins asked.
"That only works when he's not hidden in a shadow. Once you people enter the shadows, you leave almost no trace beyond your scent. And that bastard knew to guard against it — picking his smell out of all this grass and sap is getting harder and harder."
"Still better than nothing. Even if he's a Sequence above us, he can't have much stamina left. There's no way he's gotten far. Once the mirrors clear up, we resume the chase."
This logic won out with the other two — none of them seemed to have considered abandoning the pursuit as an option.
"I really do owe you one, you bastard."
On his end, Ryan looked at the open book before him — specifically, the eighty milliliters of pure water he'd placed inside it, freshly distilled that very day — and thought this through with clenched teeth.
But his hands showed no hesitation at all.
Eighty milliliters of pure water. Five drops of golden datura juice. Ten drops of narcissus juice. Ryan dripped them one by one onto the small egg — its surface deep red, like carnelian. The moment all three liquids made contact, the egg began dissolving rapidly, releasing a hissing sound and sending up wisps of rose-colored mist — delicate, unreal, beautiful.
After dropping in three scales from a shadow lizard, Ryan poured the entire large bottle of pitch-black, slightly otherworldly-looking blood into the iron box containing the egg.
He was halfway through when he realized the box wasn't going to hold it all. Without pausing, he simply poured everything into the book's ingredient trough instead. He watched the two liquids swirl together and transform into something rose-pink — dreamlike, romantic, almost pretty.
Not bad, actually…
He didn't hesitate. He lifted the book and drank down the Witch potion. Due to the potion's properties, not a single drop was spilled. The formula slipped loose in the motion and fell open beside him, the primary ingredients faintly visible on the page: the complete blood of an abyssal demon fish; an agate peacock's egg.
Burning and freezing — two completely contradictory sensations — struck him simultaneously throughout his entire body, forcing his palms to the ground as his head bowed in pain. Unlike the previous two potions, a tremendous flood of knowledge was now pouring into his mind at once — he felt like his head might burst. The combined knowledge from both of his earlier potions together was nowhere near what was being poured into him now.
Phantom black flames ignited across the surface of his body, yet his clothes showed no sign of scorching. Frost spread rapidly under his hands and across the nearby ground but didn't stop him from bracing himself. His hair began visibly lengthening. His previously well-fitted clothes began to hang loose.
On the other side, the three pursuers — still half-tracking by direction, half-searching for Ryan — found that whatever was wrong with their mirrors was getting worse. What had moments ago still shown a vague general direction was now periodically going completely black, showing nothing, and the dark intervals were growing longer.
"What's happening?"
All three stopped, staring at this development with no idea what to do.