480 True Blindness and The Essence of the First Stage
Crysta’s hunch turned out correct… and the delta cursed as she felt the temperature change. It wasn’t enough that she was finding difficulty in tracking down her item, let alone moving about, now she felt the scents about her stir and get impossible to distinguish.
This was just the beginning, however…
A powerful updraft of wind shook the trees and raised dust from the forest floor of the man-made forest that was the playing field of the first stage in the Royal Gas. The audience could only watch as the trees strained in protest against the strange force of nature that was the wind.
One of the active caras kept an eye on a grey wolf leaning against the trunk of a young oak and staying close to the ground hoping to outlive the sudden change in weather while another showed a royal casually walking through the woods in search of an item.
Cole didn’t look bothered by the sudden change in weather. In fact, he looked at peace with the chaos that had just invaded the forest. After a few minutes, the wind ca to a stop… only to change direction.
This ti, the wind blew in a perfect circle, bending the trees counterclockwise in the shape of a great giant twister. The wind kept a threateningly steady velocity almost like it was being controlled by so lever in a control room.
As Cole made his way through the forest, he ca across a timid blind delta bracing herself against a young oak for dear life. It was only after noticing her frightened presence that the wind stopped howling, “I see you chose to compete this year. Who would have thought I would face you at ‘The’ Royal Gas!”
“Cole… Is this your doing?” Crysta barked.
“What on earth could have given you that idea?” the king feigned ignorance.
.....
“I’ve heard the stories. The day she vanished, the wind blew so hard, lightning split the skies every few seconds and the thunder… was so loud I thought my ears would bleed.
When we heard the story of her disappearance, we didn’t doubt it was true. You are the goddess’s chosen after all. Anything is possible for the two of you,” Crysta explained.
“An interesting story. I’ve never heard it told quite like that before… and I’ve grown bored of this conversation. For your convenience and for the sake of your team, I do hope you find your item. Good luck,” Cole said before starting to walk away.
“Wait, Cole…” the wolf yelled through the mind link, bringing the king to a halt, “I… I’m sorry… about everything. I know we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but… for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about everything,” Crysta still rembered everything she’d done to gain the prince’s attention in the path.
What made her cringe the most was her thought process at the ti. The lies she’d weaved into her own mind and believed to be reality. It only took Cole’s mate nearly killing her to realise that, “I also forgot to thank you for saving that day,” she sighed.
Cole’s irritation towards the delta eased up and he turned back to face her. She was nothing like Bree had been a few monts ago. Crysta, while more experienced and a wolf of higher rank, was actually blind and oblivious to her surroundings.
The grey wolf wasn’t even staring at Cole as she spoke through the mind link and every step she took forward felt extrely calculated. ‘At this rate, she won’t be able to do much,’ Cole sighed.
“I just did what any sane person would have done. You didn’t know who you were dealing with at the ti. So, I’m glad you learnt sothing. After seeing what Bree pulled, I assud you would all be the sa.
It seems I was wrong, so I must apologize for making this too hard for you. But it doesn’t change much really. My team will be winning the Royal Gas… again. It’s the only way,” the prince said before walking away from Crysta.
Crysta could tell from the sound of his footsteps that he was having no trouble navigating the forest without his sight. Unlike her, Cole was traversing the woods with no trouble.
“Bree, how were you able to move so accurately?” Crysta asked through the mind link. There was no rule against them communicating with their teammates outside the forest. Since this was a competition that depended heavily on one’s senses, speaking through the mind link was a bad idea as it was bound to severely break one’s concentration.
Crysta’s situation was hopeless. She had to call out for help and Bree was ready to help, “A voice spoke to through the wind, giving instructions on how to move without my sight.”
“I’ll skip over the red flags scattered throughout that explanation and ask you what the voice said,” the delta sighed.
“Well, if I recall the exact words, they went:
Clear your mind…
Relax your shoulders…
Don’t fight your senses… Embrace them, Bree, I an, Crysta.
You’re a werewolf, not a human.
Allow your senses to take over you.
And let them be your eyes…” Bree recited the words exactly as she heard them.
Crysta was stunned for a mont before replying, “They certainly don’t sound like sothing you could cook up. Thanks, Bree.”
“Hmph… What if I’d given you my idea? Would you have taken it?” Bree raised her voice over the mind link.
“You’re my friend, Bree. Of course, I would consider your idea,” Crysta chuckled before blocking her friend out of the mind link. She had to try…
...........
Crysta started her walk again, allowing her werewolf senses to flood her mind with information, ‘If Bree could do it, then so can I!’ she convinced herself.
The sound of the birds, the rustling of the trees. The variety of scents filled her nostrils with each deep breath she took. The scent of bark, the scent of the soft loam that covered the forest floor… and the scent of rain.
The wolf stared blindly at the sky above. During the twister that had torn through the arena earlier, the girl had co to the conclusion that it would rain as well. The scent of rain had been thick then, but now… it seed to be receding.
‘So he really can control the weather,’ she confird.
Wiping the thoughts out of her mind, the werewolf searched through the scents she could pick up, looking for one in particular. The scent of the item she was ant to be looking for.
Crysta had already wasted enough ti as it was and she didn’t feel like wasting any more of it for her team. So she studied the different scents, isolating the different strands of scents in her mind, searching for that one in particular.
After what felt like an eternity of walking aimlessly through the woods, she caught a faint whiff of the scent she was looking for. Crysta turned in the direction she knew it to be coming from and switched from a slow walk to a trot.
Unfortunately for her, she didn’t get the clear ntal image her friend had received when travelling blind. It felt like creating one was next to impossible.
And because of that, the delta tripped over rocks, roots and several other obstacles that she couldn’t identify before eventually crushing snout first into a tree. The grey wolf took a step back and shook her head in dizziness. It was getting worse…
Ever since she’d caught the faint scent that marked her team’s items, her focus on her surroundings had deteriorated even more. It was frustrating. ‘I can do this. Lina and all the others are counting on ,’ this is all she could say to keep herself from breaking down.
She was about to take another step forward and weave around the tree when she noticed sothing odd. The scent was now going in three different directions. For so reason, she was now picking up on the scents of three different items.
The delta stayed stationary for a mont, wondering what she was supposed to do now that she had three options. ‘Sothing is not right here. The items can’t be this close to one another,’ the girl thought to herself before taking one step to the right.
Two of the three scents vanished, including the one she had been following earlier.
‘The wind… It ssed up everything in the forest,’ she cursed, ‘That idiot probably walked away from knowing I wasn’t going to succeed.’
This revelation was terrifying.
The strong wind summoned by the king had blown the perfud items’ scents in all directions, making them extrely hard to track. If he had let it rain, it would have been next to impossible as the perfus would be completely wiped from existence.
It seed the king had only intended to make this competition a little bit more challenging, but not impossible. But sothing didn’t add up in this whole sche. Raising a twister of that magnitude was bound to make tracking down an item infinitely harder for both of them…
‘Tracking…’ the girl gasped, ‘Damn it! He got good. I should have seen this sooner. Cole knows he has a stronger sense of sll than I do.’
In a situation like this, only the best trackers were capable of finding the item they were looking for… which required a great amount of concentration.
The girl got low to the ground and began forging forward once again. Her perception of the gas changed, ‘I’m not against the sa person Bree was facing… which makes my situation infinitely different.
Jason wanted to overpower Bree and take her item from her but Cole has a completely different approach. If I can’t track down the item with my nose, I won’t even be able to leave the forest until the gas end.”
It wasn’t that Bree was a terrible instructor. Using her senses was bound to help her if there hadn’t been that one problem of a twister scattering the scents in the forest.
This ti, when the delta drew on her senses to create a ntal picture of her surroundings, she understood what was wrong with it.
Instead of getting a clear picture of the grand man-made forest towering all around her, she got random distorted images of nature with mismatched signals and images coursing through her mind.
The confusion was even worse when her brain tried to interpret the chaos that ca through her senses. Her ears tried to correct the picture, but with her sense of sll picking up all the wrong ssages, it was impossible for her to co up with sothing exact.
And yet, she was ant to use that very sense of sll to get herself out of this situation.
Crysta had heard of it before. On her search for power that would help her rise through the ranks among the pack warriors, she’d heard a few tips from the trackers.
‘When tracking, the best ability a tracker must acquire is not an extrely sensitive nose, but the ability to isolate a single scent out of the myriad of scents they had to sort through.’
Crysta’s victory in this round was completely hinged on her figuring out this technique, finding the item and returning it to the Waiting Room. And all this was supposed to be done in ti to allow Lina a chance to get their team points as well.
She had to figure out how to track down her item... and this was the True Essence of the First Stage of the Royal Gas.
..........
“I think she’s got it, Bill,” Stan suddenly spoke up over the speakers.
“Got what, Stan?”
“What she must do to make it through her turn? The only question is whether she can make it in ti,” Stan sighed, keeping his inside knowledge on tracking all to himself.
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