Chapter 100
After catching her breath and organizing her thoughts, Lea stood up once again. She couldn’t afford to sit and wallow in weakness anymore. There were people she now had to take responsibility for.
“Kaang…”
To do that, she first had to avoid Calix. Leaving the palace at this point wouldn’t be a problem. After all, the only thing she had been holding onto here… was Calix.
A strange sense of relief washed over her. It felt like she could finally let go of the lingering attachment that had dragged on for so long.
There was something she had learned after wandering the hunting grounds for years. If she followed the mountain path connected to the hunting grounds northward, she would reach Grayson territory.
If she entrusted herself there, wouldn’t Zion eventually come find her?
He was one of the few people she could still trust. Though she was slightly wary of Ilion, she judged it would be okay.
So Lea set her direction north and began to run. Her small body darted forward nimbly, each step strong and purposeful.
Letting go of all that stubborn longing made her feel as though her body had grown lighter. With her tiny paws working hard toward the north, she suddenly felt her fur stand on end.
Instinctively, she ducked under a dense patch of leaves as she ran. There was no presence nearby, yet the constant sensation of being watched made her nervous.
She panted, picking up her pace… Until suddenly, a voice rang out.
“You’re not thinking of heading to Grayson territory, are you?”
“Ka-aang!”
Startled out of her mind, she cried out before she could stop herself, then came to a halt and looked around. But she saw nothing. Not only that, she couldn’t hear anything approaching either.
When in animal form, a werebeast’s five senses are sharper than in human form. The fact that she couldn’t detect anything only made it more likely that the other party was deliberately concealing their presence.
She’d never thought she could easily escape someone as skilled as Calix, but she hadn’t expected him to catch up this quickly either.
Lea held her breath and stayed perfectly still. She had to figure out where he was before she could plan her next move.
“Oho. So you’ve got more brains than I thought. Then why did you act as if you were so stupid all this time?”
Even though her legs trembled at his mocking tone, Lea forced herself to feign composure. She had nothing to say to him, even with ten mouths, but she had no desire to explain herself anyway.
Just then, a small sound reached her from far away. The moment she locked onto the direction, Lea shot off in the opposite direction at full speed. She heard a muttered curse and the sound of someone clicking their tongue behind her.
A powerful gust of wind swept past. Lea instantly recognized it It wasn’t natural wind but Calix’s ability.
She remembered clearly what techniques he had once used with wind. And she realized that this wind now served the function of an invisible rope.
She also knew how to counter it. Lea swiftly dug a hole in the ground to hide herself. When the wind passed, she would crawl out and move bit by bit, hiding in gaps between rocks she found along the way, watching for movement.
She erased her own tracks as she went, advancing little by little.
* * *
Meanwhile, Calix found himself slightly flustered. He had assumed that catching Lea, who had simply turned into a little fox, would be easy. But her presence kept vanishing and reappearing repeatedly.
After nearly an hour of tracking, even he was starting to feel confused.
“She’s a fox, sure… but can she actually befriend real foxes or something?”
Otherwise, there was no reason her presence would keep appearing in such random places. How was she hiding her presence in between?
Of course, he had no intention of letting her go. After all she’d done to stir him up, she was trying to run away without explaining a thing?
The moment he realized she was heading north, an uncontrollable rage surged within him. More precisely, jealousy.
Just how kind had that man been to her? Did she really trust someone who had once been the Empress’s closest aide that much?
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