Just then, Ludwig grabbed her by the back of her collar and pulled her back. The grip was firm and quick, then released the instant she halted, as if the touch itself were distasteful to him and only the result mattered.
She was about to let out a sting of curses at being ’handled’ The breath for it lifted into her throat, hot and ready.
"Watch your steps," he said. His tone did not rise. It flattened to carry only instruction. He tipped his chin toward her feet.
Looking down, there was a fine wire where she was about to step, and then he pointed up, a log of spikes was hidden inside the trees, if the wire was triggered, she would have gotten impaled right there and then. The wire had been rubbed with ash to kill its shine and threaded through a pair of fungus shelves to hide its line. Above, the deadfall rested in a cradle of vine, points dark with old sap. The trap slled of old sweat and iron, the scent of human hands that had worked in haste and then waited.
"Seems like they’ve been huddled up here for a while. For them to plant traps and all. I’ll go first, recover your breath." His eyes ran the ground in a widening fan, counting where the wire ran next, where scuffs broke the moss, where a circle of leaves had been disturbed and laid back wrong.
"I don’t need your help!" she said. The words ca sharp. Her hand dropped from the place his fingers had been as if his touch burned.
"Then at least be calm yourself down, your heartrate is too high and your heart is beating like a war drum." Ludwig said. The observation landed as gently as he could make it. He did not look at her when he said it, granting her the grace of privacy inside her own body.
Only then did she realize it, the strain from sprinting so much and so far couldn’t be simply hidden by holding her breath and regulating it, her heart was struggling to regulate itself and it was echoing in her own eardrums. The pulse knocked at her throat and the inside of her ears in heavy knocks. She swallowed against it and steadied her stance, letting the forest’s cool seep through her boots.
"I’ll go first," Ludwig said as he took a step forward. He lowered his weight, placed his foot where the ground showed the faintest give rather than the brittle crust that hides a slip. His shoulders shed tension without going loose. He let the quiet he carried spread out around his steps until even the insects near the wire resud their hum.
Only then did she realize, Ludwig’s steps made no sound when he walked, not a single sound, so when she thought she had left him in the dust earlier, he was always sprinting behind her. His stamina and endurance were off the charts. This wasn’t human what so ever. The realization steadied her in a different way. Pride re-ordered itself into respect without asking her permission. She breathed once, deep and honest, and when she let it go her next step was cleaner.
Ludwig simply walked over the wire, his eyes gazing around the area, looking everywhere and anywhere for any sort of traps, trip wires, pits or any sort of way the sand dwellers could have used to inform themselves of a sudden raid. He found the pattern beneath the ss. A shallow pit to the left disguised with a mat of twigs. A string of bone chis tucked inside a bush that would sing at a brush. A sar of grease on a low branch where a sentry liked to rest his hand. Each small note aligned to a larger intention and pointed.
And he noticed plenty. Though they were mostly spread all around the area, they seem to be spread in a circular way, toward what looked like the mouth of a cave. The circle was too neat to be accidental, a ring of teeth around a throat. The forest dipped forward there, stones leaning like tired shoulders around a black mouth half veiled by brush that had been cut and then pushed back to appear uncut.
There were no guards at the cave entrance, but a couple of torches lighting the entrance. The flas burned steady in a wind that had picked up, their color a shade too rich, their tips not bending with the breeze. The heat from them sat oddly in the air, not radiating, but standing in columns like pillars.
"Seems like their security is very lax," the guard said. Her voice had regained a thin slice of disdain, a knife sharpened to hide the nick in its edge.
"No, they have two powerful Djinns guarding the entrance, we can’t simply walk in." His eyes did not leave the flas as he spoke. Instead his hand tightened on his ring where his weapons were hidden. He watched the way saplings near the fire did not crisp at their edges, the way moths curved too wide around the light.
"Are your eyes okay? There is no one there," she said. She squinted into the heat shimr and saw only fire and stone. Her hand drifted toward her bow and then stopped, uncertain which target to choose when none presented itself.
"Ah, you must not have realized it..." Ludwig said, "Those torches, those aren’t fires, those are Djinns, they camouflaged themselves as flas, the mont soone tries to enter the cave they’ll attack. Not to ntion," Ludwig said as he drew his sword from his ring. Steel slid free with the quiet of a tool that belonged in the hand that took it. He let the point drop a fraction toward the ground, an angle that could lift to guard or cut in the ti it takes to blink.
"Why are you drawing your sword are you planning on fighting ghosts?" Her whisper had tightened without her permission. She had ant to keep it dry and failed.
"Ghosts? Of course," he smiled, "Not to ntion, Djinns are very preceptive of heat, and we’ve been spotted long before we spotted their entrance. He felt the attention before the words confird it, a prickle at the skin where his neck t shoulder, the sense of eyes without pupils watching the shape of his warmth through leaf and bark.
"Impressive, that soone knows so much about us," they heard, the voice ca from behind them, eerily so, enough that not even Ludwig noticed it. The air cooled with the sound, as if the voice had drawn heat from their backs to make the syllables. It was too close for comfort and too far to strike, sliding in at ear height with a smoothness that suggested soone practiced at making people flinch.
[You’re in a hostile Environnt]
The notification ca a tad bit too late. But Ludwig was ready.
"We’re surrounded," Ludwig said as he looked at the darkness between the trees, his eyes saw what hers couldn’t.
She imdiately nocked her arrow and pointed it at the assailant. A man drapped in full black cloth, the only thing visible was the blackness of his eyes from behind a scarf covering almost all of his face.
Two daggers reflected the moonlight as they slid from underneath his cloak, reverse gripped each, "We don’t like intruders, we even put a lot of effort into stopping them, but finally one with good eyes arrived, still yours weren’t good enough to tell you not to step where you’re not supposed to," the man said
"If you think that," Ludwig said, "Then I can say the sa, your eyes are terrible for judging your opponent," Ludwig replied as he pointed his weapon forward.
For a flicker of a mont, the man’s eyes seed to look at sothing right next to Ludwig then back at him.
As if it was a signal, and Ludwig didn’t miss it.
Without even turning his head, with his other free hand, Ludwig pointed down, [Frenzied Spirits] he uttered, the was one of the first spells he learned back in the Black Tower academy.
And it was the most potent spell to use against spirits and ghosts. And Djinns are also sothing like that.
Almost imdiately, a conflagration of heat and flas surged from Ludwig’s left side, raging like a torrent, a Djinn affected by the spell imdiately turned raging and frenzied, unable to recognize friend from foe as it rampaged with its flas through the forest.
The two flas at the entrance of the cave surged out high and wide, churning their flas at first then blowing them out like the torch of a titan.
"Fuck! You’re a caster!" the man said as he rushed forward with his daggers.
The Djinns being rendered useless was a surprise to the assassin like intruder, but he was still a killer from another country, and if he was sent this far, it ant his skills were the real deal. And that was on Ludwig to test.
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