Twenty hours of continuous jogging. Ajax was very much surprised at how long it took for him to finally see something else on the horizon besides the rocky dead landscape that stretched out behind him. He knew that he wasn’t pushing himself to his fullest with [Mana Syphon] but the distance was still a lot larger than he had imagined it would be. Getting that area filled with life once again was going to be a pain once the kingdom expanded, Ajax didn’t envy the Duke that would gain this section of the kingdom.

Thirty minutes later Ajax was finally able to step on a field of grass. A patchy strip fifty feet is all that stretched out from the forest that hid the horizon. This made it easy for all to see that the desolate land behind him was created and not natural.

As he entered the forest Ajax pushed his senses to the limit, he knew he was no longer safe. These first few minutes were going to be tense for him but if any of the Ascended races were keeping an eye on him and looking to kill him they would now be within their rights to do so as he was no longer inside humanoid lands.

“Well if nothing’s killed me yet I doubt anyone will just do it out of the blue.” Ajax mumbled before letting out a sigh of relief. One of the worries Ajax had was that his evolution to join the ranks of the Ascended had somehow been felt and that had put a target on his back from the other races. He knew there was a very low chance of that happening but it wasn’t something he could dismiss outright given the little he knew about the Reaper from the dragon.

Ajax's first step after that was finding shelter and resting. He wasn’t yet tired enough that he needed sleep but he was well aware that sleep was a luxury he could no longer afford so easily. The first dungeon should be about ten days' travel from him and he was planning on getting his first night’s sleep in there on the lower floors. Until then he would frequently stop and use [Meditation] to make up for the lack of sleep.

The first thing Ajax noticed as he started making his way through the forest was actually marks left by other humanoids. The tracks were clearly coming from the dead wasteland behind him or heading towards it, this close to the edge it made sense that humanoids would be the only ones actually moving through but it wasn’t something he had realized before.

Waiting to have an idea of where he was going Ajax covered himself in Shadow Mana before he leapt up into the sky as high as he could. Using his new high vantage point Ajax saw a small hill in the direction of the dungeon and decided that getting to the top of it would be his first move forward.

It didn’t take more than ten minutes running through the forest before Ajax first encountered another living being. He couldn’t say he was surprised to find birds living out here but with how dense the branches in the canopy were and their thickness he did find it odd that they survived without a predator establishing this as their territory and feeding on them.

The birds were beyond low level, all of them under level ten, nothing Ajax would even care about, more than that he even recognised two out of the four species it would be a while before he would find something that couldn’t also be found in Gryndor.

As he ran deeper and deeper into the forest Ajax started finding more and more animals, deer, wolves, bears. He had even seen a few monster variants that had managed to infuse some Mana into themselves and pushed past level twenty but it wasn’t anything all that different from the forests of Gryndor.

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One thing Ajax did notice was that the animals here were somehow a lot more sensitive to his presence. During the few experiments he made where he dropped his Shadow Mana cocoon and approached both the deer and the wolves he had found something interesting. Both animals detected his presence with their regular senses, hearing for the deer and smell for the wolves.

The change in behavior came from their reaction to his presence. Unlike normal evaluation reactions the moment a wolf got so much as a whiff of him he yelped and the entire pack ran off. The deer on the other hand had a much different reaction, the moment it locked on to him due to a branch he stepped on and snapped intentionally it lifted its head and looked straight in his direction. There was no direct line of sight due to the trees but even more shocking was that the deer didn’t run away, instead it froze, quite literally like a deer in the headlights.

“Are they somehow able to tell how strong I am?” Ajax couldn’t help but wonder. He knew they weren’t able to use an inspection Skill on him [Enigma] would have blocked anything they were capable off.

It would be a long time until Ajax would realize that it wasn’t the animals that had been able to pick something up about him but that he had changed since the last time he had been on a regular hunt. More to the point that he had gained an Aura, one that when not suppressed by his use of Shadow Mana was all any animal needed to know once they felt it that they lived or died by Ajax’s whim.

It took another three hours before Ajax made it to the top of the hill, his speed had significantly slowed down now that he wasn’t just running in a straight line, once there he climbed in the tallest tree he could find but the view from the top didn’t tell him anything new he didn’t already know. There was nothing he could see far into the horizon besides the forest.

That in itself however was something that put Ajax very much on edge. This specific piece of land and the dungeon he was heading towards was about the same distance away from Sylvanthal. Since it all seemed to be forest there was no reason why the elves wouldn’t have chosen to put in the work and extend the borders to include another dungeon. This meant that there was something else that had made it not worth it for them to do so, more than that it was something that he wasn’t able to pick up on at first glance, most likely the apex predator of the entire area.

As curious as he was, it had been more than twenty four hours since Ajax woke up so he was determined to rest for a little while. His first step was using his Earth and Life affinity to create a small empty pocket beneath the roots of one of the larger trees in the area and covering up the whole once he was inside leaving only a few channels for air to get in and out.

Once he got settled in his little hidey hole Ajax got comfortable before he let his body relax and enter a deep [Meditation]. Despite [Meditation] not being as restful as real sleep there was another benefit to using it to replace sleep besides the increased awareness of his surroundings.

Ajax now had time to focus properly on anything he wanted for a few hours until his body rested. Right now there were two lead topics he had in mind. The first was to analyze the ambush and see if there was anything he could pick up or improve upon there. Seeing how smoothly it had gone from his point of view he doubted there was much there.

The other topic however was his focus on Shadow Mana, more specifically learning how to shadow travel and maybe one day even shadow jump. He had seen plenty of examples, a number of scouts that had access to the Mana affinity had learned how to at least enter a shadow. The best among them had even learnt how to move across them without exposing themselves, the smoothest example of this had been the Republic’s champion who seemed to enter and leave the Shadows at will.

His focus however was not on any of the humanoids he had seen using the ability but rather of Fluffy. His brother’s bond was not only proficient with the Skill, able to use Shadow jump, something very rare in humanoids as it required jumping from one shadow to another without a connection between the two. The most important factor why Ajax was focusing on what he had seen Fluffy do however was that Fluffy’s casting matched his own. He knew the others achieved their result through chants or runic spells, something he couldn’t use properly.

“If anything it might be easier for me to lean shadow jump, the big issue with the spell is getting it to target the correct shadow and establish the jump, but since I am not using something so rigid as a chant or rune once I get the hang of it it shouldn’t be that much harder than regular shadow travel.” With that Ajax felt the rest of the world fall deep into the background of his thoughts as he focused on remembering everything he could from the last time he had seen Fluffy shadow travel.