“Stay well clear and keep hidden,” Jason said. “I don’t want to be running off to rescue you when you catch a dose of poison breath, no matter how heroic it would make me look. Well, maybe if you can set me up with good backlighting.”
“You seem very relaxed for someone about to fight what sounds suspiciously like a kaiju.”
“I’m a man’s man,” Jason said. “The only thing I fear is a frank discussion about my feelings.”
Jason warned Kylie to get ready and dropped lightly to the ground as the beetles turned into clouds of darkness that returned to Jason’s shadow. Kylie stumbled but was prepared for the drop and managed to remain upright.
“Don’t put yourself in danger trying to get good footage,” Jason warned, the jokiness now absent from his voice. Without waiting for a reply, he walked into the jungle.
Kylie wasn’t getting great footage. She had some impressive shots of reptilian heads larger than she was snaking through the jungle, but little else. Between the dense jungle and the obscuring clouds of poison gas, visibility was poor.
Knowing she would need another approach, she reached into a small bag at her belt, took out a headband stitched with magical symbols and slipped it on. A cable dangled from the headband, and she plugged it into the camera, which she returned to the belt bag. The camera now recorded her perceptions directly.
Her senses were much more capable of seeing what was happening than the camera itself. The racial gift she obtained when awakening her vision confluence essence gave her the unusual capability of awakening a perception power from each essence, where other essence users only had the one. There was a lot of overlap, with so many powers enhancing her magical and aura senses, but the effects grew with each one to be far more powerful than her rank suggested.
This allowed her to gain a real sense of just how powerful Asano’s aura was. Auras had a quality to them that was separate from their strength, that clearly indicated an essence user’s rank. Asano’s aura bore the unmistakable feel of category two, while easily reaching category three in strength.
All auras with a power, she had discovered, had a flavour to them that reflected their magical effects. Asano’s was no exception. His aura had an overwhelming feel of domineering judgement, as if Asano himself was the arbiter of objective right and wrong. It was the most arrogant aura she had ever encountered. She felt it react to her senses, which flinched from the aura like fingers from a hot stove.
Kylie’s superior senses had helped her to hone the control of her own aura, which was a key part of her formidable stealth abilities. Compared to Asano, she was a second-rater and he was the first person whose emotions she was completely unable to read. Even category three agents allowed her to snatch glimpses of what was happening behind their eyes, but Asano’s aura felt like a solid wall around something mysterious, dark, and dangerous.
Like most of the Network members in the incursion space, she had no idea who this strange essence user was that the higher-ups seemed to consider so important. He wandered around like he was in charge, with his strange robes and eerie cloak. Rumour was that he was from another branch that Sydney was trying to recruit. She hadn’t really cared until she encountered his bizarre aura and sensed the incredible magic of the equipment he wore.
The items weren’t just powerful but incredibly well-refined. It made it hard for anyone with lesser senses to even realise how potent the magic on them was. The man was a walking treasure trove, and she wasn’t sure that anyone but her realised.
She returned her concentration to the fight, which she was tracking through her senses, eyes closed. She could sense the bulk of the dimensional entity’s main body and its necks that were incredibly long and flexible. The seven heads crashed through the jungle trying to chase down Asano, who repeatedly vanished from one spot to appear in another. As for the hydra’s poison breath, Asano was not just ignoring it but absorbing it, and transforming it into some kind of health and mana recovery effect.
Asano was lashing out at the creature repeatedly with a weapon in each hand. One was a dagger and the other was a strange whip that, ironically, took the form of a hydra. Both weapons easily landed against the monster’s bulk. She could also sense some kind of swarm creature crawling all over the hydra. She sensed echoes of Asano’s aura from it, meaning it was likely a familiar and not just a summon.
Summons and familiars were both rare. Very few people had the knowledge to perform the rituals involved, which influenced which essence users could awaken such powers. Asano, strangely, had three: the swarm, the shadow that could turn into beetle mounts, and the nebula monster that guarded them on their journey through the jungle. It was another reason to be curious about the odd man.
Asano’s weapons seemed to have little effect on the hydra, although they certainly agitated it, sending it thrashing through the jungle in pursuit of Asano. He dodged the creature well but there were seven heads snaking through the trees in pursuit. He took a few hits as he dodged a toothy mouth, but a giant head crashed into him, sending him flying like he’d been hit by a truck. He seemed to have some kind of shield that, with each hit, transformed into a healing effect.
After one such hit, one of the heads clamped down on his leg, huge teeth sinking into him. It lifted Asano up through the canopy and into the air. Asano’s nebula familiar launched all four of the orbs floating around it at the creature, which collided in pairs to trigger two explosions with potent magical force. The hydra dropped Asano, who did not fall but slowly drifted. She could sense that it was the magic of his cloak holding him aloft as he chanted a spell.
She felt the life force drained out of the hydra. It flowed out of the monster and into Asano, completely restoring his leg. He then dropped out of the air and back through the canopy.
The hydra’s body was lumbering and Jason easily sprayed Colin all over it. The heads, by contrast, were as quick as the body was slow. Jason took multiple hits in the course of locking in his afflictions. The creature was powerful enough that even with the shields his amulet was creating with each affliction, the monster punched through those shields in short order.
The hit that breached the armour left him dizzy and the monster clamped on to his leg, rearing its head to haul him up and over the treetops. If not for Gordon’s orb explosions freeing him, the leg would have been torn right off.