Chapter 80

A/N: I am currently thinking about making a LOTM fanfic with an original Sequence Pathway, a transmigrator main character (no story knowledge), and a system. If you have any suggestions, what are they?

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It had been three hours, but they had not killed anything yet. Instead, Nastya insisted they sneak around the ruin's edges and outer ring. They tracked prey, followed them around, and tried to escape notice. 

Dane was starting to get a feel for the crumbling infrastructure, veiled in dust and ash, that surrounded him from all directions. The shadows here played tricks on the eyes, shifting at critical moments. 

Often, he found fresh trails of blood and evidence of struggle in his path, and sometimes they would even find corpses, only to find they had vanished upon returning a few minutes later.

A dozen times they did this, and a dozen times they could have killed the creatures.

The Pathfinder, who was incredibly capricious, would talk nonstop about the creatures they tailed. Their weaknesses, their strengths, their habits, and every little thing. Pleasant as her voice was, he had grown bored over the last hour.

Despite his less-than-enthusiastic responses, she did not seem to get the memo, and if she did, she ignored it.

"The Marred Hunker has a one-track mind. If it focuses on something, you'll have to try very hard to get its attention."

"Easy to hunt, then."

"Exactly," she said, licking her lips. "They taste amazing too."

Dane was quick on the uptake.

"Who's bait?"

Nastya nodded toward another street, her lips curling playfully.

They were at an intersection between streets, lined with buildings so it seemed like a cross, hiding in the rubble of an abandoned home at the edge of a road. Coming down the road far ahead was a Carapace Scavenger, sporting a hungry menace in its eyes. Now, on the street to the right was the Marred Hunker.

It was a green-scaled lizard the size of a dining table with a rough patch of golden scales running down the side. It had a comically large head that bobbed with every step as if its neck was too weak to keep it stable. It shuffled down cramped crevices and clung to dark corners, and was nigh impossible to see. The only reason they didn't lose it was thanks to the short intervals during which the sunlight reflected off the golden scales.

Now, he saw that light flash as it advanced toward the street, about to cross paths with the scavenger.

Nastya put a finger on her lips. "Don't move. Don't make a sound."

Suddenly, her eyes glowed, and it was gone as soon as it came.

Out of nowhere, there was another Nastya. Only, she was battered and beaten, oozing blood and stumbling down the middle of the street, very close to the lizard. Dane looked at Nastya and the other Nastya, perplexed. 

The Hunker caught sight of her too…he could tell by how the light froze.

The new Nastya suddenly turned, looked right at the lizard, screamed at the top of her lungs, and scampered toward the intersection.

Dane watched with acute horror as the Scavenger scrambled to the scene of the scream, which it could not yet see. Its segmented legs fell and rose rhythmically, and only grew faster when the other Nastya appeared from the street. She froze like a deer in headlights, trembling…and then the lizard pounced on her. Nastya fell to the floor, screaming and crying as it ripped at her flesh with jagged teeth…and then the Carapace Scavenger joined the bloodbath. With a powerful thrust of its pincers, it caught the Hunker. It squeezed, and when it seemed like the lizard was about to be split in two, Nastya (the one next to him) pushed her arms out of her cloak.

She pointed her crossbow at them, closed an eye, and pulled the trigger. TWANG! The bolt buried into the Scavenger's eyes, and before it could drop the Hunker, she undid the hatch, pulled a bolt out of the quiver at her waist, drew it along the string with frightening ease, and pulled the trigger. The second bolt went right through the lizard's brain.

He hadn't noticed it before, but the second Nastya was gone.

"Well, that's dinner!" Nastya chuckled, hanging the crossbow on a little hook within her cloak, and pulling her hands beneath the wool like before. Dane could've sworn he saw a sword and a dagger hidden beneath as well.

Dane looked around. "We need to go."

Nastya shook her head. "We don't. Nothing heard the screams, so we should have a few minutes to get the corpse and leave."

When they reached the corpses, aside from the nightmare creatures' blood, there was no blood or torn skin…as if it had never been there. "Illusion," he muttered. Terrifying.

They picked the lizard up, hauled it over their shoulders, and snuck away to the Bright Castle.