The Sixth School Ch. 016

After the armor and weapons were out of the way, Olivia had Greg buy several potions. Some were healing potions of different potencies. Others were potions that would dispel some possible negative effects like being paralyzed, being drunk, being confounded, and so on. Others among the potions were weapons like, alchemical bombs, potions that could eat through armor like wet tissue, to say nothing of human flesh, potions that were capable of causing some to feel excruciating, almost debilitating pain on any part of one's body that it came in contact with. Olivia also had him buy many different poisons that Greg could dip the flying daggers in. The final class of potions that Greg bought were utility potions. Potions that served supportive roles, like allowing him to go invisible for a short while, potions that could completely erase his scent, making him invisible to any beasts that used scent to track their prey, and so on.

In fact, one of these utility potions was the reason that Greg was currently walking with his gaze fixed on the sky. Heightened sense potion. That's what the system had called it. It was supposed to sharpen his senses and make him able to pick up sights, sounds, and smells that he otherwise would have been unable to detect. Given that it was a tier-one item, Greg hadn't thought much of it. When he got close to the three tusk boar's territory, he had taken a vial of the stuff. The closest approximation of the effect was that, Greg felt like a camera that had zoomed out to cover a wider area. Before he took it, his senses could only monitor what was going on immediately around him. After taking it, everything within five hundred meters of him was within the range of his senses. And 'everything' here wasn't just a figure of speech. From each individual bird chirping in the trees, to the bugs creeping on the ground. The smell of every particular flower, to the smell of each boar in the group of three tusk boars three hundred meters away to the northeast, to the smell of the bark of the trees in the area around. A gap of an inch between two trees a hundred meters away would have been impossible to see before Greg took the potion. After he'd taken it, Greg could spot a dragonfly through such a gap. The color of everything seemed to have intensified and the clarity turned up to eleven.

As amazing as the feeling had been, it was less than a minute before Greg began to feel a migraine coming on due to sensory overload. As it turns out, he just wasn't built to handle such a volume of sensory input. At this point, Olivia had advised him to look up at the sky. Greg wasn't sure why this would help, but having no better ideas, he had chosen to follow her advice. Much to Greg's surprise, looking up at the clear blue sky had helped a lot. A second before, Greg had felt like he was drowning in sensory information, in the next, that overload was slashed by almost three-quarters. Greg couldn't help but ask the familiar why this was. "Unlike beasts, you humans don't have as sharp a sense of smell or hearing," She had replied. "Your over-reliance on sight means that it is the one that affects you most when you take that potion," She explained. "Your hearing and sense of smell might have gotten a lot sharper, but your brain doesn't recognize ninety percent of what you are hearing or smelling, as such, it's just noise to it. With your sight, that would be different. Your brain would be working overtime trying to make sense of everything you are seeing, that's the main reason why the potion can be a bit overwhelming for first-time takers," She relayed.

Greg didn't need further explanation to understand. Looking up at the sky reduced the amount of input from everything in the forest to just the blue color of the clear sky and the occasional bird that flew by or the clouds that drifted by. Although he could see both in much greater detail now, it wasn't in any way overwhelming to his brain. But while Greg wasn't looking around, there wasn't anything in his surroundings that he wasn't aware of. It had taken a while to get the hang of it, but as things stood, so long as something made the slightest sound, or had even the vaguest of scents, if it came within half a kilometer of him, Greg would become aware of it. His uncle would literally have to become a ghost if he hoped to have even the slightest chance of ambushing him. This was why Greg looked so relaxed, almost to the point of being oblivious to what was going on around him. He had chosen to capitalize on his heightened senses to pretend that he didn't have his guard up. Anyone that looked at him as he casually moved through the forest would have no way of knowing that he was closely monitoring everything within a half-kilometer radius of himself looking for any traces of his uncle.

***

Unbeknownst to Greg, however, despite his best efforts, he had already come into the sights of his foe.

In a hidden cave a mile away from where Greg was moving, a man with deep lines on his face, and a mouth that seemed permanently set in a scowl was standing before a basin of water. Rather than the clear surface of the water, the basin was filled with an image of Greg as he moved through the forest. In a forest full of beasts, there was no reason the boy would pay particular attention to a small bird perched on a tree a few meters away from him. It was this bird's vision that was being projected to the basin of water before the man Greg would have recognized as his uncle.

The scowl on the older man's face was reflected in the young man standing beside him. With how much the two looked alike, one wouldn't even have to know them to figure out the fact that they were father and son. They had been quietly watching Greg in the scrying pool for half an hour before the younger man let out a snort. "It seems that he's forgotten even how to hunt," The younger man spoke. "Let me go after him," He requested.

The older man turned his gaze towards his son. Although there was no overt threat in the man's gaze, his son couldn't help but shrink a bit in the face of his father's stare. Anyone with any insight into psychology would see that this wasn't a momentary fear, but one that had been cultivated from years of abuse. "What's the first lesson that I taught you about hunting?" the father quietly asked his son.

Despite his fear, the boy knew better than to delay in answering his father. "Respect your prey, no matter how strong or weak!" the young man answered with a glance at his father. The boy's gaze shifted to the staff in the man's hand, the light of greed burning in his eyes for a second before he turned back to the scrying pool.

His father had found this cave and that mysterious staff on one of his hunts. He had brought the staff home as he thought that given the ornate carvings throughout the staff, not to mention the large jewel at its head, it had to be worth a lot. When the next morning, he had woken up saying that he had communed with some hidden deity, the young man had been sure that his father had lost his mind. Years of abuse, however, made it so that the young man wasn't willing to garner his father's ire, as such, he hadn't said anything. When a few weeks later his father brought him to this cave and showed him all the abilities that the entity had granted him, he was left with no choice but to believe his father. The young man had, of course, also noticed the gradual deterioration of his father's health. The lines on his father's face had grown deeper, his hair had started greying with some of it falling off. The robust frame of his father had started to wither away and morph into the thin one he now had. The failed ritual that killed his father's brother and almost did the same to the son of his father's brother had only made things far worse for his father, giving him the haggard look he now had. The young man, however, didn't care in the least. The man might have been his father, but all love for the man had long since been beaten out of him. The only thing that had been on the young man's mind was this new power that his father seemed to have gained access to. Whatever it took, the young man planned to gain the same for himself as well.

The older man hadn't missed the greed in his son's eyes when he looked at the staff in his hands. He, however, said nothing. The boy was weak, he'd always been weak. He would pose no threat to him, and as such, the man didn't care what designs his son had. The same, however, was not true when it came to the one in the scrying pool. The man was not sure what it was that had changed with the boy, but a very real sense of lethal danger filled him whenever he thought of making a move on him. Looking at him, the man couldn't blame his son for thinking that his brother's son had forgotten how to hunt. The boy was moving through the forest like he didn't have a care in the world. When the man looked at his late brother's son inside the pool, however, he couldn't help but feel like he was looking at a predator slowly stalking its prey. There was something about the calm way that the boy was moving that left him feeling like he was a coiled viper that could strike at any time. It left his back feeling cold.

"Patience," The older man declared. "For now, we watch and prepare. When we strike, he won't be able to escape our grasp..."

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