***Tirnanog, The Old Camp***

***Astra Frost***

Just as I had anticipated, watching the contestants' performances didn't reveal any exceptional partners who would synergize with me.

Despite that, the duel between the two clanners was slightly surprising to watch.

The Thich's camouflage ability was exceptional, allowing him to almost hide in plain sight as long as he didn't move too fast. There was this slight warping effect when he moved, but once he stood still, he was as close to true invisibility as someone could get!

His counterpart, the Hochberg, was a powerful strength-type, but not very fast.

It was a true match of David versus Goliath.

His speed and flexibility were the only things that saved the Thich as he ran circles through the arena while avoiding his opponent's clutches. The impressive thing was that the Thich even managed to hide three or four times in plain sight by dodging at an opportune moment and then holding still. The move actually led the spinning Hochberg astray when he lost sight of his enemy for a second.

Unfortunately for the Thich, the Hochberg wasn't stupid and started throwing dust around once he got outmanoeuvred. Which quickly ended with the two of them running in circles again.

It was impressive that the Hochberg needed to do so and I was tempted to spread my filaments just to test my echolocation on the Thich. But that would have certainly unsettled the watching crowd and interfered with the duel, so I refrained from going through with the idea.

Now that I thought about it, didn’t the Thich have to go commando if he wanted to use his ability? Was it purely skin based? What would happen if it failed? Would the Hochberg be chasing a naked man through the arena?

I didn’t really want to know the answer, but some dirty part of me wished for such a thing to happen. I wasn't a saint and appreciated to see some bare skin now and then.

The crowd on the lower seats wasn't pleased about the direction the fight had taken. They hadn't come here to watch two people playing tag with each other. Their desire was blood and entertainment.

I was of half a mind to chase them out of the arena when some started booing. Likely because the majority of them would lose their bets if this went on.

Thankfully, Gurney put a stop to their shouting before it could get out of hand.

The arena wasn't a place meant for bloodsports.

Tirnanog was a harsh world. It tested a person's power and skills every day. Accidents and lethal fights could and would happen in the arena anyway, but Gurney's primary goal was to show off his charges' skills. That was what the clans paid him for. If someone's abilities weren't meant for trading blows, then that was just as well.

Despite my distaste for the Thich as a group, I had to admit this guy down there had a good ability.

The arena ring was a pit about thirty metres in diameter. There was nothing but flat, packed dirt, which should have made it impossible for a person to go through with a pure evasion strategy.

After ten minutes, Gurney decided to call an end to the match, announcing it as a draw. The Hochberg may not have managed to land a single blow on the Thich, but in turn, the Thich didn't manage to put a single scratch on the Hochberg.

I found it to be a fair decision.

Next was Mark Whetherton who had to fight an anape, a gorilla-like creature with sharp claws. It had probably been caught by a hunting party to use it in the arena.

Mark fought with poisoned arrows and a bow. His sole strategy was to use his poison and rely on distance. It was probably a very valid technique in the wilds, but in the arena, he had trouble pulling it off. The fight lasted less than five minutes until the poison took effect, but during that time Mark actually struggled to survive.

I had been right that his acidic blood wasn't something to be relied upon in actual combat. If Mark wanted to make use of it, he needed someone with an extremely powerful healing ability to choose him.

That wasn't me.

Then it was the new exile's turn. His opponent was another anape.

The man who had actually survived eating the omnieye was a sun-darkened mountain of muscles. Additional eyes had grown on the centre of his forehead and the sides of his temples, giving him almost 360 degrees of vision. Something that looked like armoured plates shifted in a disturbing way beneath his skin and a set of chitinous spikes emerged from his elbows, turning his arms into nasty weapons.

I stopped paying attention to the fight as soon as I saw his mutations. There was no way I was going to deal with that on top of my filaments!

My gaze wandered astray until I happened to notice someone was looking at me.

Or rather, was inspecting my lounge. I didn't believe she could see me behind the shaders.

Ivonne was glaring towards me with an expression of such livid hatred that I was tempted to dodge the death stare. Something had her really riled up.

Was it about my interference with the negotiations yesterday when it was supposed to be Thalia alone? Yes, I had turned the narrative against the Thich, but they had it coming. One clan just couldn't hog all the female exiles Earth sent to us.

It would have been just a question of time until the others were annoyed enough to stand up against it.

This couldn't be solely about us taking the two girls, could it?

Then Ivonne looked away and steeled her expression.

I promised myself to make sure I would always have my back to a wall when Ivonne was nearby. That expression had promised a long-lasting grudge.

The sun reached its zenith in the sky when Gurney finally decided to call it a day and announced that the arena would close for today.

I had kept an eye on Ivonne's lounge, wondering whether she had just looked in my direction by accident. Maybe she had been livid about something else.

But no, that didn't sound right to me. I had been coming to the Old Camp ever since I was old enough to do so. Everyone knew exactly where my lounge was, meaning that glare wasn't an accident.

At the very least, Ivonne had thought about something related to my clan when she looked at my lounge.

I stayed in my seat until I was sure I wouldn't run across any Thich upon leaving the arena. Then I departed, heading for the market to spend the rest of the day perusing for goods.

The Old Camp wasn't the wealthiest of places, but I had found one or two treasures over the years. Sometimes, an exile got lucky and stumbled over a discarded piece of technology from Earth that was still working.

Like the old music player I had found two years ago. It was compatible with the solar panels at the Aerie compound. So I had immediately snatched it up and transported it with enough care to make my parents think I had found something which increased a person's evolutionary potential.

I wistfully remembered the music, but I never dared to transport the music player since then. It was safe in my quarters back home and it would stay that way.

My search of the market stalls didn't bring up anything of interest today.

There was this one case of a vendor trying to sell me an old battery. But it was in such a bad state that I didn't believe it to be salvageable. The price was also ruinous, even to someone like me.

I left him sitting on the thing, not believing he would get it sold if he didn't lower his expectations.

Working devices from Earth were almost priceless ever since the colonization efforts had been stopped. Tirnanog just didn't have the chance to build the necessary infrastructure before the supply chain was cut.

Once I had read up on the matter, it was of no surprise to me. Modern technologies just relied on too many different resources, like metals, salts and other elements. Unless you hit the jackpot and found a location that provided everything in abundance, it was impossible to start the necessary industry to become self-sufficient.

The reality was that humanity would have had to colonize a sizeable part of Tirnanog to gain access to these resources. That meant an enormous investment of resources before the colonists' tech base would become self-sustainable. Because just like on Earth, not every metal deposit was conveniently located in the same place.

And Tirnanog's fauna and flora did a pretty good job at preventing the early settlers from doing so. There was just no other way for humans to survive than to dig a deep hole and bunker down. And against certain predators not even that worked.

Once the sun threatened to settle beneath the mountains, people began to pack up their things and retreat to whatever hidey-hole they had made for themselves.

I also returned to the bunker and settled down for the night.

This time, I had a blessedly uninterrupted sleep until someone knocked on my door.

I cracked an eye open and saw some rays of sunlight filtering through the very small and heavily reinforced window that my room came with. Normally, it wouldn't have been enough to light up the room, but Tirnanog's bright sun created just the right lighting conditions for an unenhanced human. Hence, the bunker's architects saw no reason for bigger windows.

Thanks to the uninterrupted sleep it felt like I had just lied down a moment ago.

“Mh...” I didn't get up, but I used one of my filaments to open the door just a crack. If this wasn't something important, then I would have no bad conscience about sleeping in.

Thalia used the chance to barge into my room!

“Wakey! Wakey!”

“No!” I turned around and covered my head with my pillow.

Thanks to my echolocation, I knew exactly what Thalia was doing when she spread her wings and used them to fan cold air all over me. Since she had thrown the door wide open, it was coming into the room from outside. She knew exactly what got me going in the morning.

“What!?” I turned around and threw the pillow right into her face.

Which she took stoically.

“You have to get up.” She bent down with a grin and took the pillow, then threw it back at me. “Guess what. I heard Roderick came back during the night. After he didn't return the night before I seriously thought he became firehorn poop.”

“What do I care about Roderick?” I asked grumpily.

Even if I was properly awake now, it didn't mean I was happy about being woken up in this manner for nothing. “I mean, he could have gotten eaten for all I care, but I won’t deliberately go out of my way to kill him. He betrayed my trust, but being chased by a firehorn for two nights should be enough of a punishment.”

“Oh, no. It's not about that.” Thalia patted a device she had hanging next to her hip, a camera. It was her most prized possession.

“We have to go and record this moment in history because rumours say the firehorn got in a lick or two.”

“What?” I frowned, understanding nothing. Maybe I wasn’t as awake as I thought.

“He had a little bath in its flames,” Thalia clarified. “It scorched off all his hair, including the eyebrows.” She wiggled hers. “And then he took a dive into firehorn poop to get rid of his scent trail!”

I pulled a face at the thought. Firehorn excrements were like a chemical weapon. They stank so much, that most beasts immediately vacated the area. Not to mention getting any of it onto your skin. The stuff was corrosive and the smell lingered days after.

There was this unpleasant memory of my dad taking me out as a child. And then I stepped…

Yeah.

I didn’t need to be reminded of that.

“Come on!” Thalia gestured for me to get up. “Roderick is an extremely powerful regenerator. There is no telling when his hair will decide to grow back!”

I got to my feet with a sigh and untangled my filaments. Then I quickly changed my underwear and formed my filaments into the same set of clothes I had gone with yesterday.

“That just makes me so envious, you know that,” Thalia commented while she led the way through the bunker.

“It’s my woe and my bane,” I replied with a smirk.

“And it’s a waste on you because you have no imagination,” Thalia continued. “You have literally three, maybe four different styles and that’s it. And why always a cloak?”

I stopped smiling. “Okay. That’s enough. There are only so many ways to use up my filaments if I don’t want to disturb people with questing tentacles.”

Thankfully, Thalia let it go and we quickly grabbed a bite to eat. This time together with the rest of the clan.

Liam, our doctor, was still taking care of the two kids we had ended up with. They looked a little better than yesterday, but I knew better than to pry for what was obvious.

Thalia and I continued and left the bunker.

She spread her wings and took off into the air as soon as we were in the open. I was forced to follow with my awkward sea star technique.

My friend took the lead and had no trouble guiding us directly to Roderick thanks to her tracking skill.

Less than ten minutes later, we landed on the rooftop of a house next to the market.

Roderick was sitting at an open food store and looking pissed. His high-quality clothes were gone, but he still had that crate he got from Earth. Instead, he was wearing the simplest of robes.

Normally, I wouldn't have been interested in seeing someone with his mutations naked, but Thalia had been right. The fact that all of his hair was gone made him look ridiculous. Like a chicken without feathers.

Add to that the little issue of his smell and I couldn't hold back from smirking while Thalia took the first photo.

People who were unlucky enough to walk downwind from Roderick actually pulled faces and changed the side of the street they were walking on. The store owner was looking very pissed and was trying to kill Roderick with his glares.

It was no surprise because Roderick chased away any other customers with his smell.

Sadly, the owner didn’t dare to chase the huge man away.

A commotion distracted me and I looked towards the wall where the guards were hollering and cheering.

“What’s that?” Thalia asked.

I pointed towards the wall. “It’s the guards. Something is up.”

“Let’s take a look.” Thalia secured her camera. “I have obtained all the remembrance I need.”

“Just what did Roderick do to you?” I asked. “Usually, you aren’t hounding others like that.”

Thalia didn’t reply and took off into the air, heading for one of the guard towers.

All I could do was follow her.

Less than a minute later, we landed on the roof of the guard tower to watch what had the guards so riled up.

An exile was running over the intentionally cleared area between the Old Camp and the forest border. He still had about 500 metres to go, but he was being chased by a group of gutters. They had earned their name because they really liked to gut their prey, eat the innards, and leave the rest for carrion eaters to take care of.

The creatures looked adorable from afar. Like little white Persian cats that had enough hair to make them look round.

In reality, the beasts were two to three metres in height and had one large retractable claw on each paw. Their long snouts with several rows of teeth also made them look more similar to hounds. And I knew from experience the damned fur was extremely tough to get through. Crafters really liked to use it as armour padding for additional protection.

“Wow! Run Forrest! Run!” Thalia exclaimed, cheering with the guards. “I have never seen someone run so fast. Could be one of the new exiles. If so, then he took one night longer than necessary.”

I snorted. “Yeah, though it's impressive. I doubt many can keep up with a gutter on foot. The things are faster than they have any right to be. But I am worried about his sanity. Why is he laughing? Maybe he broke out there. Some just can’t deal with this world.”

“Who cares!” Thalia kept cheering. “Forrest!”

“What’s this about a forest?” I asked, confused about what a running man had to do with a forest. Or did she want him to turn around? That would be just mean!

“An old movie,” came the reply.

I shrugged and joined the cheers.

After all, the guy was fast.