Chapter 58: Predator’s Veil
Chapter 58: Predator’s Veil
Nobody cheered. Forty people just stood there.
The accounting happened at the carcass and, to their credit, it was quick. Vaelora had done nine tenths of the damage; I’d made the shot that ended it and run the firing line. Neve said so out loud in front of everyone, Halloran wrote it down, and the hunter who’d needled me looked like he’d bitten something.
Vaelora put her entire claim on me without being asked.
"I cannot carry a dead cat into a war," she said, pulling the glaive free with one boot on its skull. "Take it. All of it."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:02:40]
I got her back into the hazel and tried, one final time, to explain properly—the class, the roll, the two stages, why I couldn’t choose.
She listened to about eleven words of it.
"You will summon me again."
"I can’t promise that. The Call rolls a grade first and then picks somebody inside it, and I don’t get a say in either. It might reach you. It probably won’t. And even if it does, I can’t promise what you’ll be fighting."
"Then hear me." She set the glaive against her shoulder. "Your plan was adequate. Your shot was better than adequate—you saw what it was about to do before it did it, which most of my officers cannot manage." A pause. "Next time, summon me for prey worthy of my glaive."
"I just told you. It’s random. I can’t aim it."
Vaelora looked at me.
Then she looked at me properly, slowly, from my boots to my face and back again, and whatever was behind those gold slit eyes was amused and entirely unhurried and made the skin crawl down the whole length of my spine.
"Then you had better be fortunate."
Her gaze stayed exactly where it was.
"I reward those who please me. Those who disappoint me may require punishment."
Why did that sound exactly like something that perverted goddess would say?
I was still assembling a response—I had the beginning of one, and it was not good—when she vanished, mid-word, back into a stride she had never finished.
[Manifestation duration complete.]
[Vaelora returned to origin dimension.]
[Return Point: Exact origin place and instant.]
[Origin-Time Elapsed: 00:00:00.]
[Injuries, healing, poison, exhaustion, spent energy, and technique backlash retained.]
[Natural charge recovery initiated: 72:00:00.]
They found the core an hour later, cutting the Panther open by lamplight, and the noise the man doing it made brought everyone over.
It wasn’t the size. It was the colour. Ordinary cores are dull, and this one had a moving darkness inside it, a slow curl like ink in water.
I put my attention on it deliberately.
[Nightfang Core—Rare Skill-Bearing Core]
[Contains a complete skill essence formed from the Nightfang Panther’s evolved predatory trait.]
[Absorption may grant one compatible skill.]
[Warning: Skill-bearing monster cores are exceptionally rare.]
Halloran read it off my face before I said anything, because he’d got somebody else to look at it too.
"Skill-bearing," he said to the group. "I’ve heard of two. Two, in eighteen months, across everyone who’s ever come through here." He looked at the thing in the man’s hands. "You could kill nine hundred of these animals and never see another. It’s not the species. It’s this one—it lived long enough and killed enough that the trait set solid."
"And it goes to him," somebody said.
"By the rule we all agreed to this morning. Yes."
There was a silence with a lot of arithmetic in it.
Nobody argued out loud. Two of them didn’t need to.
I did not absorb it in front of them. I took it back to the print shop, sat on the floor with my back against the door and the window open onto the flat roof, and did it alone at three in the morning.
The core dissolved into a darkness that entered through my palms. It went into me cold and quiet, with none of the agony the cultivation art had cost.
[Core Absorption Complete.]
[Compatible Skill Essence Identified.]
[B-Rank Passive Skill Acquired: Predator’s Veil.]
[Skill Absorption Successful.]
[New Skill Registered.]
B-rank.
Feline Grace was the only other B-rank skill I possessed, and I had received it from a Resonance milestone with Liora. This one had come from a monster so rare that Halloran had heard of only two skill-bearing cores in eighteen months.
The registered skill opened beneath the acquisition messages.
[Predator’s Veil]
[Rank: B]
[Type: Passive Skill]
[Effect: Suppresses the user’s sound, scent, and detectable presence while moving carefully.]
[Break Conditions: Sprinting, attacking, or suffering a forceful impact immediately ends concealment.]
[Limitation: Does not conceal the user from direct sight.]
I tested it on the roof for twenty minutes.
It was not invisibility, and I wanted to be precise about that, because for about four seconds I let myself think it was. Anybody looking at me could still see me. What it took away was everything else—the scuff, the breath, the smell, whatever it was that made an animal’s head come round when nothing had actually happened.
My reflection remained perfectly visible in the dark print-shop window. So did my shadow when I crossed the lantern glow. Predator’s Veil concealed presence, not light, and anyone who happened to look directly at me would still see an underfed man creeping across a roof.
The instant I accelerated, the concealment fell apart. My boot scraped felt, my coat moved against my side, and all the small evidence of a living body returned at once. I activated it again, drew the military knife, and made one careful cut through the air. The Veil broke before the blade completed the motion.
No attacking from concealment. No sprinting while hidden. No surviving a hit and pretending I was still absent.
Move slowly and you are furniture. Run, swing at something, or get hit, and you are a man in a field again.
Layered under Feline Grace, it was the most useful thing I owned.
I came back down off the roof at dawn and went out to the yard for water, and the conversation at the fire stopped.
Not paused. Stopped, completely, and stayed stopped while I filled two bottles and walked back past them, and one of the hunters who’d been on the west barrier took an entirely unnecessary step out of my way.
The trader was waiting outside his shed. He looked at me, looked toward the second-floor window of the print shop, and very carefully did not ask whether the horned woman was still inside. When I requested two boxes of rifle ammunition on credit against my share of the Panther hide, he agreed without haggling.
That worried me more than an argument would have.
Fear was useful until people decided the frightening thing needed to be watched, recruited, robbed, or removed. Fenwick Junction had shifted overnight from tolerating a strange solitary hunter to building stories around him, and every version of the story gave me more allies and more confidence than I actually possessed.
Eleven days ago, I had paid four nights in advance so nobody would think about me.
I had the ground back, a B-rank skill worth more than everything else I owned combined, and a room with an escape route in a settlement where every single person now believed I had friends who wore imperial armour.
And they’re going to start asking who she was.