Chapter 3460: Sabotage
He had already ruled out teleporting underwater or to the skies as a strategy. He had also ruled out creating fake paths of entropy with invisible sources. He had also ruled out numerous other techniques and tactics, such as blinding the entropic surveillance flies, or killing them for that matter.
He needed something categorically functional.
’Think, what is the precise goal that I’m looking to accomplish?’
The goal was to avoid being pursued while they traveled to the Gajanan Clan, obviously.
In order not to be pursued, they needed to prevent being detected or make it so that those pursuing them were unable to travel or gain access to the information of Rui’s location.
His glowing red eyes lit up with an idea. ’What if I disable the communication systems of the flies around me?’
This way, even if they could detect him, they would not be able to transmit that information to them. He quickly processed that information and possibility in the Forge of Creation before creating a technique designed to do just that.
A simple electromagnetic pulse was all it took.
Creating one of the right frequency and intensity was extremely difficult, but Rui’s handle on high principles was too high for him to possibly fail. He flashed singular pulses at all the flies in the vicinity, disabling what he identified as their communication transmitters thanks to the Tree of Life enlightenment.
Soon enough, they detected him, but failed to actually transmit the information to their pursuers.
BZZZT
The three-dimensional holographic projector in each of their hands buzzed, indicating the end of the trail of the anomaly. In their eyes, the anomaly just disappeared all of a sudden.
"Damn, it’s gone!"
"Do you think that the anomaly disappeared and appeared elsewhere again?"
The pursuing parties froze as they lost the trail of the anomaly that they were pursuing. They were stunned that even the only sensory system that was capable of pursuing this anomaly had completely failed, leaving them entirely stunned as to what they ought to do when they had no idea what they were dealing with.
"It might not actually be a living entity... it might be some strange cosmological phenomenon with some of the highest principles of this universe..."
They couldn’t be blamed for suspecting that they were dealing with some strange esoteric phenomenon to do with the more unknown parts of their reality. After all, how else could one explain their security surveillance apparatus being bypassed so effortlessly?
"Wait...!" The captain of the team of pursuers of the Dthrivoraustrat Clan widened his insectile eyes. "The flies have stopped sending messages altogether, including basic systems check-up updates and GPS positioning data! This is no esoteric cosmological phenomenon! That damn entity is wiping out their communication systems!"
"Update the status from suspected hostile entity to confirmed hostile entity!"
"Follow the path of broken communication systems, we will definitely be able to pursue it in this matter eventually!"
WHOOSH!
The giant flies and the pythons in the marshy, mangrove-like area pursued the path of sabotaged entropic surveillance flies, allowing them to track Rui and Amare’s path; even if their precision and certainty of their positions had reduced a lot, they hadn’t lost them entirely.
Rui, further ahead in the distance, huffed with a hint of annoyance. "They’re still on us, even if further back. They must be following the sabotage instead, but that increases the margin of error of their certainty of our position. Not bad, but not good enough. I will have to come up with a better solution. But this does buy us some more time and more leeway."
"How far are we from the Gajanan Clan’s territory?"
"Quite," Rui remarked. "It will be another half a day of travel at this pace."
He turned towards her. "How are you holding up?"
"Manageable," she replied. "Work on that technique and then teach it to me so that we can take turns and maximize the amount of time that we are able to remain active."
Rui nodded as he honed in on the only other way that he could think of to throw off their pursuers as they skywalked through the mangrove area.
"Disguising our entropic trail instead of trying to hide it is probably the only solution left for this."
It wasn’t the entropy itself that was anomalous. After all, everything had entropy, so it wasn’t as though the fly was constantly flashing an anomalous signal to everything around it. The anomaly came from the fact that the entropy that they left behind seemed to come out of nowhere because of Rui’s powerful stealth technique.
"I need to trick the entropic surveillance flies into thinking that there is a legitimate source of the entropy."
If he could do that, then, in theory, he would have completely fooled the entropic surveillance systems of the flies and get away with infiltrating Kiriket without any issues in their pursuits.
All he needed to do was manipulate the environment to trick their other senses into thinking that there was a creature that was releasing the entropy, and it would stop sending anomalous signals to their pursuers.
This was where his nature manipulation could come. Using the backdoor into the flora technology that the therianthropes used, he could gain complete control over the trees and use them to help trick the flies that there truly was a source of the anomalous entropy that the flies were sensing. He used the nature in the environment to release sound, light, and chemicals that would normally be released and detected by the flies in the environment to try and fool them.
A partial success.
One of the flies didn’t release a signal about the entropy, while the others did.
"I’m going to have to figure out the exact configuration."
What ensued was a race.
One where the pursuers began growing in numbers as they crossed many more territories across South-East Kiriket, trying to catch the anomaly while Rui rushed to develop the perfect technique to fool the annoying little flies who kept ratting out on him.