The two women continued on their way, Scarlet looking for trouble and ways to improve her power. For an hour and a half, they used the sun to keep their direction, adjusting for passing time on the fly. After about an three hours, Scarlet made Keera take over protection again and took the lead in turn, claiming that Keera needed to exercise herself but in truth, Scarlet was feeling a little pressure keeping a monster active and out and the second crystal dormant. She could likely keep Cyca active for another four, maybe five, hours but it would leave her almost as drained as the fight the day before. And she wanted to experiment with Crysna later.

After some time with Keera leading and Badgy ambling along her, Scarlet found a couple of bushes filled with edible berries and decided to have lunch, eating berries directly from the branch. It tasted great and made a good meal, combined with some of the vegetables they had in their packs.

Once they were sated, Scarlet decided to try out her new crystal monster, so she pulled the longish crystal from her pouch and gently tossed it, letting Crysna out for the first time. There was a moment of mental struggle, to determine what of Crysna’s instincts needed to be suppressed and what could be left alone, but after that moment, Scarlet was able to force Crysna to open up and let her fully in.

It was good that Keera had her badger next to her, it allowed Scarlet to instantly recognise the hunger Crysna had for the other monster and suppress it. What was fascinating to Scarlet was how different the sensations flowing back from her new monster were, compared to Cyca. Crysna added a thermal vision, allowing them to get a rough outline of Keera, compared to the colder background. Interestingly, even the crystal badger stood out on the thermal vision, not as much as Keera but still, it was another fascinating aspect of those beings, why would they give off heat, it clearly was not part of any metabolism or anything similar.

In addition to the thermal vision, Crysna had a quite acute sense of smell, tasting the air around them and presenting a riot of information to Scarlet. Some of the scent-traces had an impression linked to them, like a scent-trace of the rat-like crystal monsters, others were just blank, making Scarlet understand that those were some that Crysna didn’t know.

What made Scarlet giggle a little was that Crysna, for some unfathomable reason, presented as male, something she had not expected. Again, Scarlet was not sure why they even felt like they had a sex, it was not as if rocks were sexually dimorphic, as far as she knew, but still, the snake was clearly giving off the information that it was truly he.

Ignoring that strange aspect, she decided to take care of another question she had been curious about. Looking at a nearby rock, she mentally ordered Crysna to use the strange water-attack on the rock while holding back as much as possible. The snake hissed and reared up, causing Keera to frown a little, she had watched Scarlet and Crysna with a mix of interest and jealousy and the hiss sounded dangerous.

As ordered, water shot from the snake’s mouth and onto the rock, splattering around but quite a bit landing in a shallow area of the rock, causing Scarlet to smile and watch what happened next. While watching, she explored the connection to Crysna, putting more hooks into the snake’s mind. Within five minutes, the water was gone and the rock was dry again, as if there had never been water in the first place.

“That can’t really be, can it?” Keera asked confused, after noticing Scarlet’s actions.

“I would have agreed but obviously, it just happened. It’s certainly not hot enough that water would evaporate that fast, certainly not in the shade.” Scarlet was at least as confused as Keera, she just hid it better. But there were only two possibilities, either their eyes were deceiving them or they had accurately perceived reality as it had been but what their premisses were faulty.

Knowing that doubting her own senses and perception was a quick way to insanity or death, Scarlet started to think which premisses could be false. The first was obviously that the snake was not spitting water, it would make some sense, though not a lot. Especially since the amount of water the snake had spat was, by her estimation, more volume than the snake actually occupied which was, according to her knowledge of physics, impossible. Or rather, not impossible in theory but the only way she could think of was some sort of energy-matter conversion and that would mean that the snake was somehow storing enough energy to make even the biggest Federation-bombs look like party-toys, which seemed just as impossible. She could simply not believe that the snake was able to store and convert enough energy to turn the planet into molten slag, and not just once.

Feeling a headache setting in, Scarlet decided to simple accept that the laws of physics seemed to have taken a look at Verdun, gotten together with biology and decided to get falling down drunk, both of them ignoring the tomfoolery that was going on here.

“Let’s gather some extra food and head back.” Scarlet said to Keera after mentally shaking over her confusion.

“But… That can’t be real, can it?!” Keera asked, sounding slightly hysteric.

“Don’t go down that route, you need to trust your senses. It happened, we both saw that. We just need to treat it as real, just like all the other, seemingly impossible, things that happen on this planet. If you start to question your senses, you will either end up mad or dead. I would rather avoid either of those.” Scarlet explained, looking Keera in the eyes.

“Mhm, right. Ignore that the laws of physics seem to be broken.” Keera shook her head a little, rocking back and forth.

“The laws of physics, some of the cornerstones of biology and I’d guess the only reason we haven’t seen the laws of chemistry broken is that we aren’t equipped for experiments.” Scarlet said, forcibly keeping her voice calm, hoping that her calm would keep Keera from mentally checking out.

Thinking that manual labour might help, she pulled Keera up and gently pushed her towards the bushes after handing her a few, wide leaves that would serve as wrapping for the berries. Together, they harvested quite a few berries before Keera called her monster in and took the lead, keeping the sun on their left side, moving roughly west-south-west. They knew, as long as they kept going west, they would run into the river they had followed, the river that would lead them back to town.

On the way back, they stumbled upon one more crystal monster. Scarlet felt it first, taking the lead from Keera as it was during her time of readiness and intensified her efforts to conceal herself. She was quite surprised when Crysna did something very similar, hiding his presence from psionic senses and rolling a little, adding some dust to his back, allowing him to blend with the first.

When they were almost upon the other monster, Scarlet stopped thought for a moment, carefully planning the best attack. The monster was a small bird-type crystal beast, sitting a few meters up a tree, on a branch. Part of her wanted to order an attack with the water-spitting attack but it might be a waste of power, so she ordered Crysna to try a sneak-attack. He continued on, silently slithering through the forest and up the tree, moving in such a way that he was not noticed by the bird. The psionic concealment seemed to do the rest, until he was in a position to strike.

And striking he did, a perfect lunge, fast as a, well, striking snake, he managed to catch the bird by surprise and skewer it on his fangs before pulling it back to the tree. The one attack had been powerful enough to cause the bird to instantly flicker before vanishing in a surge of light only moments later.

Leaping off the tree, Crysna leapt at Scarlet, causing Keera to gasp in fear, the leap looked so very much like the earlier lunge, only that Scarlet felt that it wasn’t that. There was an almost playful feeling coming from Crysna, so she caught him as good as she could taking the crystal from his mouth with one hand and letting him wrap around the other, gently stroking his head while smiling happily.

Scarlet was ecstatic, Crysna was just as powerful as Cyca and worked in a different way, where Cyca was an ambush predator, Crysna was a stealth-predator. Both had a similar approach and maybe, if she became stronger, she would be able to use both at the same time, allowing them to become even stronger.