This was starting to feel depressingly familiar. Still, eight wasn't too bad. I noted there was two less than the group standard of ten or below, presumably those two Jessie were following were scouts or something. What an annoying bunch. Still, it was surprising they'd stayed hidden from Callie. Granted they were far enough away to make hiding easier, but still, the idea that all of these people had higher Perception than my girlfriends one hundred fifty plus was intimidating.

I didn't want to jump to conclusions though. I didn't know the particulars of higher level stealth or how there being more of them affected things, so I just decided to move on. I stared at the calm man, not letting my eyes wander to the new figures. "So, eight to two, less favorable odds sure, but then again, based on your vibe I'd say you're all stealth geared. We're not a great match up for you, and you gain nothing from fighting us."

He gave me that same humorless smile. "There are a limited number of G rank Ascendants in this little hunt. Two less is nothing to sneeze at. We can just disable you and trigger your beacons." I didn't actually know that was an option, but I'd keep it in mind for later. It seemed like a great way to get rid of enemies. "But we aren't exactly eager for a head on confrontation. The lady noticed us early, meaning she's got an impressive Perception stat and that will make this fight...messy."

Callie sighed. "Which means this is a stalemate. You don't want a losing fight any more than we do, but if you let us go we might hold a grudge and come after you. Not to mention neither of us wants to give up the blossoms assuming they're on your list too. So, what do you want to do?" She was looking around subtly, and I was betting she expected the other two members back soon, and if so expected Jessie to find us. Worst case we would fight them head on, but it might not be necessary.

The fact remained however that we needed to do SOMETHING. Which meant this would probably break into a fight. Hell, they were probably planning something as we spoke. I reached out for Callie's hand, wrapping my fingers in hers. Our little smoke trick would work well here. Combined with Seek Hidden it would let me identify where they were, but it was Callie's call, and I'd at least wait for her go ahead. She might have a better idea for getting us out of here than just vanishing into black smoke and attacking them all. I could admit that tended to be my go-to response to stress.

Callie was cool as a cucumber. "How about we do this? There are a few blossoms. Maybe enough for us to split them and hit the quota. Why don't we just do that and go our separate ways?" She sounded calm and reasonable, but I remembered that the hunters got to keep their findings. This wasn't just about the quota. Giving us any of the flowers meant money they would be giving up.

Which I realized was the trap in this whole thing. Letting us keep the treasure meant that this wasn't just some school scavenger hunt. This was building a fortune, they put us in a position where giving up even a single thing would impact us personally. It made any sort of alliance outside of a team pretty unlikely. The damn academy had effectively put us on opposite sides of a war for resources, and thinking about it logically there was no real reason to expect anyone you allied with outside of your team (whose performance impacted yours) to honor a deal.

That was obviously apparent to Callie too, because she clearly noticed them starting to move off to one side when I did. She squeezed my hand, a signal to get ready to use mistwalking. "If not that isn't a problem, we can always just leave. There will be other Hummingbird Blossoms, no need to get mixed up in anything so early- shit NOW!" Her head snapped to one side, clearly picking up on some kind of imminent attack, and I pulled up my mistwalking as she spread the shadows around us, merging the two together.

As we did that though it gave me another idea. I'd practiced flexing my skills a bit, and I'd accidentally managed to merge skills with Callie and then repeated it plenty of times. I wasn't sure if the way we were doing it was really the same as synergizing skills myself, but if I could interact with her skills at all, then maybe she could do the same. I dropped and then called up Seek Hidden again, aimed at the hooded assholes around us.

Instead of letting it settle as normal though, I reached down just like before and strained it. Instead of layering another version of the skill on top, I did something more like what I'd done in the siege with the poison, I stretched Seek Hidden out, pushing it through my hand and into Callie, trying my best to give her access to the same vision that I had. She stiffened when the energy slipped between us, but then, slowly, relaxed as the skill took hold and suddenly she could see.

Just like me, she had the red outlines of the hooded figures in her view. If anything she could see them easier because of her Perception. Luckily the cloud skill actually fucked with their stealth. Since the Stealth Skill worked by erasing the traces a person left, making them unable to see where they were going degraded it's effectiveness. Not completely since they still had Perception and other senses, but still, it definitely helped us and hurt them.

We crept out of the way of the attack, stopping a bit away to look over the battlefield for their locations to plan out our next move. The cloaked figures were all on the ground now, even the original two having dropped down to avoid presenting obvious targets on the branches. I turned to Callie, and the slight muffling of the mist made whispers viable if we were right next to each other, and we were, so I pulled Callie close. "You see them right?" She nodded silently. "Good. Then we need a plan. What's our method of attack?" I kept the noise from my speaking as muffled as possible, trying to be so silent that I didn't even move my lips, basically exhaling the words.

She scanned the battlefield, clearly not sure she could get away with the same trick without a mask to muffle the sound. She pointed out one specific hooded figure and I nodded. Before she could move I swept her up into my arms and triggered Leaf in the Wind, once again covering us both. It was a strain to push both of the skills at once, but covering a second person I was touching wasn't nearly the imposition trying to force a skill to work double time had been. I pushed off in a leap, carrying us both across the clearing through the smoke.

Given the Perception based skill set at work I felt that coming in from the air gave us a better chance of getting close without notice, I didn't however, just spring an attack on her out of nowhere, I caught a branch as we sailed up and pulled us both onto it. While still within the smoke, we could also still see because of Seek Hidden, and I figured the high ground would give us an advantage against our opponents. I'd seen that on a movie somewhere, and the guy who said it seemed really sure it was a game changer.

At the very least though it was useful for battlefield control, Callie was looking down at the enemy, who were all surrounded by her shadows, and she was grinning. This close I could see her face, and when she closed her eyes I knew to look down and watch the show. It was actually really weird trying to watch it from up in the branches. My Seek Hidden let me see through the shadows, literally, but I didn't see the shadows themselves, so despite them theoretically moving I got no hint as to what was coming.

To me it just looked like they started tripping and slamming into things. Callie was playing this smart. Ankle grabs, rope trips, and based on the pinwheeling I saw from at least one of them, I was pretty sure she managed to create a slick of frictionless shadow under the feet of some of them. It wasn't just making them fall though, she manipulated the battlefield perfectly, tripping them into each others range of perception so they would hear their companions and think they were being attacked.

Unlike the last batch of enemies we fought, despite being fairly well trained in working together, these guys weren't all being puppeted by a seamless puppet master. They had no innate sense of what was what, and apparently Callie's frustration at dealing with the Heartrippers had made a group of even well trained opponents seem like a cake walk. The spots where their cooperation wore thin were easily visible when you compared them to the kind of perfect symchronization our last group of enemies were capable of.

Leaving Callie to her controlling, I slipped off the branch, drifting down to the ground using Leaf on the Wind. Once I hit the ground I oriented in on the closest cloaked figure. It was the blandly smiling man I'd originally been talking to. He was nursing a head wound, presumably from one of the other attacking him when Callie tripped them up. I leaped forward, sailing through the air and bringing my tonfa down on his head.

His Perception let him pick up the sound before I managed to hit him, but his dodge was slow and jerky because he couldn't actually see me coming. My blow landed on his shoulder, and the force flooded from my tonfa and was surprisingly absorbed by the cloak he was wearing. It didn't take all of it because he staggered, and I was on him in seconds, beating him heavily about the head and body. I didn't use the poison fire because there were classmates not evil cultists, but I also didn't hold back. This one was G rank so he could take the hits.

It took about two minutes to put him down, and ended up stripping off his own cloak and tying him up with it before leaving him there to hit the next one. Ten minutes later we'd properly taken down all of them, and we banished the smoke as Callie dropped from the tree on a rope of shadows. She came racing over and tackled me. "That was amazing! That trick is so much more fun when we can both see! We kicked their asses!" She was grinning like a maniac as I held her up and I couldn't help but laugh at the enthusiasm as I leaned up for a quick kiss.

As I put her down her grin turned sly. "I also grabbed this while I was up there." She held up a multicolored flower that I immediately recognized as the hummingbird blossom. "Three down, twenty two to go. Now, what's say we search these guys and find out if they have any of the rest of the stuff we need, or any other materials we can sell before we trigger their beacons." She turned and happily raced off to pat down the cloaked figures.

As I watched my excited girlfriend search our most recent conquests I felt a grin of my own spread over my face. I felt amazing. This was what I was out here for. None of the hard moral choices or the evil assassin cults, I just wanted to fight, to get stronger, to help my friends and spend time with my loved ones. With a crack of my neck I headed for the nearest limp figure. I was pretty sure Callie could use some help.