Chapter 43

  Before Dalex went to sleep, he told Seventh to wake him up the moment Arnaut got out of bed. She told him she wasn’t his mother and recommended an automated function of his armor to do the job. And so, he set a {spy golem} to watch Arnaut while he slept and cast {catnap} to inject himself with “wakeup magic” as soon as the hero got up.

  When Arnaut stirred several hours later, Dalex’s armor zapped him awake. He sat bolt upright in bed, fully alert. His mouth tasted like TV static and his brain felt like it was coursing with the caffeine of a hundred cups of coffee, but he was up.

  Dalex used {scry} to see through the eyes of the {spy golem} still watching Arnaut. The man was lying on his back, his eyes droopy as he stared up at the ceiling of his room. He craned his neck toward the window to see the light of the rising sun.

  “I guess it’s time to get up,” Arnaut muttered to himself, and then he closed his eyes. Within a few seconds, he was snoring.

  “Damn,” Dalex said. “I can relate to that. But you snooze you lose.”

  He threw aside his bed sheets and jumped to his feet, bursting with energy. Once he was dressed, he went downstairs to find Balgoth still sitting at one of the common room’s tables, mumbling to herself while she looked at her notebook. She saw him enter the room and closed her notebook to look up at him.

  “An early riser,” she said. “That is rare among human heroes.”

  “Interesting that you should say that. It looks like I won’t have to worry about competition from Arnaut for at least another half-hour. Has Yesui come out yet?”

  A voice behind him said, “I heard you stirring,” and Yesui joined them in the common room. “Where did you go during the night?”

  Dalex raised an eyebrow. “Pardon me?”

  “You vanished for several minutes after retiring to your room,” the fox-eared damekin pressed. “Where did you go?”

  “Do you have some kind of detection spell on me, or are your ears just that good?”

  She gave him a flat stare. He wasn’t sure if she was being obstinate or if she was just offended by the comment about her ears.

  “I had to make a quick visit back to Batulan-bar,” Dalex said. “If you want more than that, you’ll have to figure it out on your own. We’ve got a monster to slay.”

  He turned his back on Yesui and walked out the door. She followed him outside, apparently content to let the matter go. Seventh descended from the skies to meet them. As usual, Yesui was not pleased to see the [android]. She seemed to harbor some special animosity toward Seventh, but she kept her mouth shut about it.

  She and Dalex sketched out a quick plan. Yesui would investigate the forest from the ground and Dalex would continue scanning for the mysterious creature from the skies. Thus far, Seventh had been unsuccessful doing both at the same time. By her own admission, there were things she often missed because she was an [android]. Perhaps beastkin instinct and human intuition would catch something Seventh couldn’t see.

  Balgoth was left in the lurch. She had no interest in participating in the hunt, but demanded that Dalex carry her around in the basket so she could observe his heroic activities. For his part, Dalex had had enough of hauling people around in baskets. He told Balgoth he would come pick her up once he had located the beast, and promised that he would find a good seat for her to watch the show. This did not please the demon, and she insisted she would follow him from the ground.

  “So be it,” Dalex said, but, for good measure he gave her another of his {charms of protection}, not because he thought she needed it but because he wanted to be able to find her if she got lost in the forest.

  He wasn’t sure why he was accommodating her even that far. Everyone who mentioned demon music seemed turned off by the idea of it. Did he even want her following him around anymore? He hadn’t condoned her fixation on him, but he could also make it harder on her.

  Maybe it was just curiosity at this point. What tonal nightmare would spew from her mouth when her first song about Dalex was complete?

  Forgetting about Balgoth for the moment, Dalex took to the skies and soared over the forest, looking down on the endless expanse of broccolini-shaped trees. He had traveled far enough from the point of his arrival on Gaia Eta that he no longer encountered anything resembling pine trees. These were taller, with more growth at the top and shorter branches. They looked familiar to something he had seen on Earth, but Dalex didn’t know enough about trees to put a species name to it.

  Whatever they were, the top of the forest was a solid canopy of impenetrable green. If the monster was shorter than a tree, Dalex might have a Bigfoot situation on his hands, always searching and never finding. But the innkeeper had said the creature’s footprints were as big as a house. That didn’t mean it was tall, but it had to mean it was big.

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  Dalex cast a few different sensory augmentation spells, {detect life}, {detect motion}, {detect invisibility}, and {clairvoyance}. He saw the forest in a dozen different colors with a variety of filters. He heard noises he had never heard before from creatures he couldn’t see. His senses of smell and taste were magnified, and the rich earthiness of the forest flooded his mouth and nose.

  For the most part, these enhancements didn’t help him in the slightest. He didn’t know what the monster smelled, tasted, or sounded like. A few odd noises brought him down closer to the forest to investigate, but they all turned out to be small creatures with big lungs, probably looking for mates.

  As for his enhanced vision, it only told him that the creature wasn’t hiding in any other spectrum of light. Motion detection was useless. The forest was teeming with movement. Some of it was produced by large creatures, but only herbivores that Yesui had informed him beforehand were native to the area.

  After a couple of hours, Dalex finally came across his first sign that the creature really existed, an enormous set of four footprints. They were at the center of a flattened section of forest with tree debris all around them. Each foot was several yards wide at the middle and even longer from heel to toe. It had three toes to a foot, the tips of which seemed thick and clawed, perhaps mammalian or reptilian. Dalex could stand at the center of the imprint and just barely see over the top of the crater left behind by the massive creature.

  The prints gave Dalex a good idea of how big the creature was, but, unfortunately, the prints were the only trace. There wasn’t a trail to follow. It was as if the creature had set down in the middle of the forest to plant its mark and then ascended to the skies without taking a step.

  Yesui had said she was confident this wasn’t a dragon, but that didn’t exclude other flying creatures. A number of possibilities jumped to mind, but most of the flying fantasy creatures Dalex was familiar with weren’t this large or at least didn’t have big feet like a dragon’s. Still, when he went airborne again, he spent as much time scanning the skies as he did the ground.

  A little later, he found another flattened clearing, but this one didn’t have any prints. It seemed like the kind of damage the creature would do if it bellyflopped on the ground or maybe rolled around on its back, if indeed it had been caused by the creature at all.

  A bright red light like a flare shot into the sky nearby, catching Dalex’s attention. He flew over it to find Yesui waiting for him. He set down next to her.

  “Have you found anything?” she asked.

  “Footprints,” Dalex said. “And maybe some more damage from the monster’s passing, but it’s hard to tell. Are you sure this thing isn’t a dragon?”

  She shook her head. “I came across some footprints as well. They look like a dragon’s but they’re too small.”

  Dalex’s eyes widened. Too small? Those had been some chunky prints.

  “It doesn’t seem intelligent,” Yesui went on. “And there’s nothing out here that would interest a dragon. I think—” she paused, visibly thinking through whether she wanted to say the next part, and then decided to go through with it. “I’m not sure, but it might be a hydra.”

  Dalex clapped his hands and made a delighted little “Ooooh” sound. “Now you’re speaking my language.” But then he paused, a frown creasing his lips. “But can hydras fly?”

  “No,” Yesui said. “At least, not that I’ve heard. And they’re almost exclusively amphibious creatures. The closest body of water large enough to provide for one is a couple hundred miles away. That’s why I hesitate to make such a guess.”

  Suddenly, the ground shook. Dalex and Yesui each braced, looking wildly around for the source of the tremor. For a moment, Dalex thought an enormous many-headed beast would appear on the horizon, looking for its next meal. The image sent a shiver down his back.

  But no creature appeared. Dalex took to the skies again. “Seventh, did you feel that?”

  “Feel what?” she spoke in his head. “I have not encountered any abnormal phenomenon.”

  Dalex rose a hundred yards off the ground and saw a cloud of dust in the distance. Something had just smashed into the ground a few miles away. He floated over to the cloud, looking for some sign of the creature. But, as the dust cleared, all that was left was an empty patch of destroyed forest. He saw no creature, and he heard no monster’s cry.

  “Where are you?” Dalex sent to Seventh. “You didn’t see that impact? The cloud?”

  “I am not sure what you are talking about. I am on my way to you.”

  A minute later, she joined him in the sky. She could not have been very far away. How could she have missed such a loud and visible occurrence?

  He pointed at the remnants of the cloud. “There. You didn’t see that?”

  “See what?” she asked.

  Dalex stared at her. The aftermath of the impact was faint, but it was clear something had happened in that part of the forest recently. Surely Seventh would be able to detect the signs. He pointed down at the leveled patch of forest beneath them. “That wasn’t like that a few minutes ago.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Yes, the recent [satellite] images of this area show intact forest beneath us. Perhaps I am experiencing sensor malfunctions.”

  The only time that had happened before was in fighting the enemy {far realmers} and the mutts.

  “Don’t tell me, are there mutts around? Are they interfering with your sight?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she said, “Negative. This distortion is not indicative of the unknown faction. However, I believe I have an explanation for our difficulty locating the target creature. One of the signs of a nearby deposit of benefine is distortion of light. Depending on the size of the deposit, it may be enough to render an area of significant size invisible.”

  “Hold on, does that mean—”

  Before Dalex could finish his thought, something big and heavy slammed into him, batting him across the sky like a gnat hit by a fly swatter. He didn’t lose altitude, but by the time he recovered control of his movement, he was a thousand yards from where he had been floating with Seventh. Seventh herself was nowhere to be seen.

  Neither could Dalex see whatever had hit him. The only thing in his field of view was clear, tranquil forest.

  “Great,” he muttered to himself. “An invisible hydra. This should be fun.”

  He summoned {Skull Anchor} into his hands and his mouth split into a wide smile. “Who am I kidding. This is going to be an absolute blast.”

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