The skid gave the guards behind Serenity some time to reduce the distance they were behind him, but they weren’t willing to run headlong over the scrap that covered the floor. Even though they yelled for other guards, no other guards had yet appeared and they were less than a quarter of the way to Serenity when he reached his feet again.

Serenity slowed down a little and tried to choose where he put his feet more carefully when he resumed his halted run across the hangar. This time, he managed to reach clear ground with nothing worse than slashed footwear and damaged feet; it would have been a problem for anyone without Serenity’s Pain Resistance and ability to heal, but while he didn’t like the feeling at all it wasn’t going to even slow him down.

He made it to the door into the personnel stairway before the guards were even halfway across the room. He could hear more shouting behind him, but he didn’t take the time to find its origin; it had to mean that he’d drawn more attention, which was only to be expected.

The cuts in Serenity’s feet leaked blood for the first few steps, but after that the only blood in his footprints was from residue. It stopped a handful of steps later, though Serenity knew an expert tracker would be able to follow it quite a bit farther than his quick glance showed obvious traces of blood. That was fine; he didn’t mind being followed for a little bit longer.

Serenity reached the top of the stairwell and shoved the trap door out of the way. It was well camouflaged from above but there was no attempt to hide it from the inside. It was heavy, but Serenity was Tier Eight; too heavy for a baseline human simply meant he had to work a little.

Once he was out of the base, Serenity flipped the trap door closed. It wasn’t going to fool anyone about where he’d gone, but if he was lucky it might slow them down. It certainly didn’t take long for him to close it, while they might need several people or some time to open the door.

Serenity glanced around the clearing; the largest tree was in almost the direction of his camp, so Serenity picked the third-largest tree instead. It was neither directly towards the camp nor directly away from it, and there were several shorter trees partially concealing it from the location of the trap door, so it seemed like a good choice.

Once he reached the tree, Serenity climbed it. It was a good thing he was Tier Eight; Amily was not exactly a well-muscled woman, but the boost from his Tier was still enough to let him leap high enough to catch the lowest branch and pull himself up.

He missed his claws. In his chimera and dragon forms, Serenity could climb a tree without having to hop from branch to branch. It was true that digging his claws into the bark left marks behind, but as long as he didn’t go past the outer bark he wasn’t really hurting the tree.

Serenity was halfway up the tree by the time the trap door flipped open. A dozen guards in runeclam armor spilled out onto the field. Serenity didn’t take the time to watch them; he still needed to climb higher. Specifically, he needed to get high enough that there was no chance they could see him; if he could see them, he was still too close to the ground.

By the time Serenity reached a point where all he could see was the tree’s greenery when he looked down, the view of the trap door was also completely obscured. Serenity worked his way around to the far side of the tree anyway; there was no reason to take risks he could avoid. The entire point of climbing the tree was to mysteriously disappear, after all.

From what he could hear, they were searching for his trail. They didn’t seem confident which way he’d gone after he reached the surface; that was good news, but Serenity knew it wouldn’t last. He’d left too many physical traces.

That was fine.

The next step was the hard one: he needed to quickly shapeshift into his Sovereign form. It could hide in shadows and fly; that made it the perfect way to disappear from the tree. Normally, that just took time, but this wasn’t normally. He’d recently absorbed someone and that made it far more difficult to shift.

He’d managed it before; more than that, he’d had time as he traveled across the base as Amily. Even better, he’d easily conquered Amily then kept very little of her; there should be far less anchoring him to her form than with any other time he’d absorbed someone. It ought to be possible even though this was a bit quicker than he’d managed in the past.

The distraction of being actively hunted didn’t help. They hadn’t found the tree yet, but he knew they would. Serenity focused on shifting and tried to block out the rest of the world, even the awareness of how long it took. He needed let Amily go.

It felt like it took forever, but when Serenity finally shifted, he checked with Aide and found out he’d only been in the tree for about ten minutes. That was by far the fastest he’d ever shifted into one of his own forms after absorbing someone. He’d also had no trouble picking which form he shifted into; somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d worried that he’d be forced into his base draconic form instead of his Sovereign form. It would still let him get away, but it wouldn’t be traceless.

Serenity floated away from the tree several minutes before anyone managed to track “Amily” to the tree.

Serenity couldn’t decide if he was happy or worried that there was no one outside the tent watching for anyone or anything that might find them. Yes, the camp should be fairly secure because of the wards he’d established around it now that they were settled in, but wards didn’t block everything. Serenity’s ability with illusions was terrible, so he had to depend on the ward components blurring things and a general repellence field.

While he could have made it actively unpleasant, Serenity was all too familiar with that kind of ward. It worked well as an active defense but it was terrible at hiding. You might not be able to get in, but you knew something was there that didn’t want you to enter.

For this, Serenity went with the opposite sort of mental effect. The area covered by the ward was dull, drab, and completely uninteresting. It was just like everything around it and completely unremarkable. Someone could walk into the camp, completely miss the tent and the ritual circle because they were no more interesting than another tree, then walk back out.

It reminded Serenity of a Somebody Else’s Problem field, more than anything else. It should be enough against most of the people from the base, but there were probably people who could notice it or simply notice that something wasn’t right. Tier had some effect, but there were low-Tier people who would notice oddities and higher-Tier people who were very suggestible, so there was no way to know in advance.

Someone walking around the camp would be hidden by the wards, just like the rest of the camp, but because the searchers were actively looking for a person the wards would be less effective. On the other hand, without someone watching the area it was harder to know when there were potentially enemies nearby; after all, there wasn’t anyone in the group with a good scrying spell. Rissa could see what might happen, but that was extremely unreliable in a situation like this.

When Serenity stepped into the tent and saw what was happening inside, he realized that he should have added “except Ita” to the thought about the lack of scrying spells. She had one running, focused on a white sheet of cloth hung from the tent’s top into the large central area. Unlike a normal scrying spell, it seemed to switch viewpoints periodically.

Serenity watched for a moment while no one had noticed him and realized that Ita was manually switching while she watched. Was she getting a field of view from broken tokens the same way she could make a broken token act as the anchor for a portal? That would explain why she never offered to scout using clairvoyance; someone had to go there first and leave a token. It fit well with her particular odd Affinity.

Serenity added “a lot of security cameras” to the list of items he needed to pick up the next time he was on Earth. They could do the same thing Ita was doing for camp security and while they would give off electromagnetic signals, they wouldn’t emit the magical signals Ita’s did, so they should be even easier to hide on a low-tech world.

“It’s good to see you’re keeping an eye on things outside,” Serenity complimented Ita. He couldn’t really blame her for not mentioning it earlier; they’d had someone outside watching and that was generally better. Her images didn’t give sound, after all, and sound (or its lack) was often the first thing a guard would notice changing around such a small camp.

Ita turned towards him and gave him the open-mouthed Sterath grin; she didn’t seem at all surprised by his presence. She’d probably seen him as he walked through the camp. She bobbed her head at him politely. “Thank you, my Lord.”

Serenity shook his head with a grin of his own. He was never going to completely break that habit of hers, was he?

“Lord?” Ita’s answer seemed to have drawn Zanzital’s attention. “You’re a Lord?”

Serenity lost his grin and nodded at the Guildmaster. “Yeah. It’s not something I talk about much.”

Zanzital tilted his head. “You don’t act like a Lord.”

Serenity shrugged. “You’ve probably only met the kind that inherited it or planned to get there. That’s most Lords, in my experience. Still, this shouldn’t be a surprise; didn’t Ita tell you all about the trip to Lyka last night? I’m sure she mentioned we were rescuing my people.”

Zanzital stopped for a moment and blinked. “Huh. I thought you meant people like you, from the city you were from.”

“Most of them are human,” Serenity responded. He managed to not correct the idea that they were all from the same city. Zanzital would probably eventually realize that his assumption didn’t make sense, but Serenity would prefer not to admit that he owned an entire world. Yet. He wasn’t sure how Zanzital had missed the insignia that Serenity, Rissa, and Ita all wore; it wasn’t exactly subtle.

Serenity turned back to Ita. There were more important things to worry about right now. “Do you know how far they’ve gotten? I don’t have a way to track them above ground without altering the ritual I was using or watching them in person.”

Ita nodded. “I managed to drop some tokens in convenient places around the field. I don’t have the whole area covered and there are some open spots between here and there, but I can at least show you what’s happening in the clearing.”

The scene on the sheet changed from a view of trees with a corner of the tent visible to a view that was partially blocked by a tree on the right but showed a clearing on the left. There were a number of people, probably around a dozen, gathered around a tree in the distance, while a few other people walked around the clearing and looked at the ground. Most wore runeclam armor; Serenity didn’t see the Viper anywhere in the scene.

Lillene

This isn't how they planned to draw people out of the base ... but Serenity doesn't really mind the deviation. Still Plan A!