Nobody's Memories
Chapter 16 - Being Stalked

I'll be honest, I didn't have it in me to move after the horse kicked me off of it and just stood there, lost in some sort of smug horse-based self satisfaction. One might even say I lacked the heart to. Regardless, I was just fine laying there on the dirt road either way, tampering with my mind, figuring how far I could tighten that feeling in the back of my mind before everything hurt again, or I risked breaking it.

The answer was not very far. Time barely slowed before I needed to stop slowing things down, and I could only hold it for 10 minutes – 10 minutes to myself that was. But again, it was much better than being powerless. I wasn't anywhere near my full strength, being only roughly human and far less impressive than Geralt, and while I was still stupidly durable – I had forced Geralt to test exactly how much force it took to hurt me without any time dilation to make things hurt less, and the answer was "A lot of force falling from a great height, a very heavy rock, and a crapton of magic".

That had been an interesting morning.

I also didn't remove myself from the ground because pondering didn't require me to exert any physical effort and I was a procrastinator.

For the past 10 days, I had been trying to figure out why my Time Dilation had been broken so spectacularly. I had tested it before, after all, and broken it by simply overexerting it. The effects then had just been disturbingly similar to if I was a boss who had been stunned, so that the player would stand a fair chance against him. The Symptoms had been the same, too - muscle fatigue, a loss of feeling in my limbs, disorientation, ringing in my ears, black spots... the fact I knew my breaking point was why I had known to push that far in the first place. Had it been how I disengaged it? The time I spent pushing myself that far? Because several hours spent slowing down time to the point where I couldn't tell if it had stopped or not while constantly moving had probably put a hellish amount of strain on my body.

But regardless, I was just retreading old ground now aaaaaaand bored. I couldn't shuffle through my cart, I had put it back into the loot cave... no cats to abuse me... well then. I finally sit up, ignoring the horse still silently gloating next to me, and instead look towards the village. It looks oddly... Victorian, especially considering what these places were normally like. Might be a town, now that I think about it. Whichever one was bigger, that's what this place was - wooden shacks, log cabins, even a few brick buildings, a wooden wall with a gate thatched roofs of course, but also tiled roofs. Vines crawled up and down the walls and the roofs of almost all the buildings, and all of this was built partially hidden by the woods, which grew thicker and thicker the further back they went. It was also, unfortunately, quite foggy. It provided a creepy, chilling atmosphere, the kind one would expect from any horror movie building suspense. Ordinarily, such connections and observations might be ignored, especially since I could no longer be bothered by such things.

But this was the kind of world where that atmosphere meant "Super-Murder-Monster is HERE", and was a direct result of it trying to eat your face off. So... y'know. Sure, it could just be a foggy day - it was, the entire field was fogged up for miles, and there was a river close by - but was I willing to take that chance? Nope.

It just meant I had to be incredibly vigilante, therefore staving off my boredom. For example, I can see Geralt a few minutes ride ahead of me now, almost at the village's entrance. He was mostly a big, black blob, but...

...he was moving awfully slow compared to Roach's normal canter. And the mist... it was oddly runny, wispy, advancing much more slowly than it had been earlier. My horse... no, I just couldn't tell, she was standing there with the dumbest, goofiest face imaginable on a horse. Regardless, it appeared my passive Time Dilation was working again. The question here was why; what danger had it judged me to be in? Lets see here...

... nothing hiding in the village to ambush Geralt, at least not blatantly; nothing behind or above and about to pounce; no vibrations beneath my feet... The woods? Right to left, let's see here...

...Aaaaand that's a big blurry vaguely human shape watching me from the woods. It looks at me, as though it somehow noticed it had caught by attention, and its gone in a moment, so fast I can't even see it move, or even where it went. Whatever it was, it was very, very fast... and very dangerous. I take note that the fog is moving normally again and looks towards Geralt, who has ridden into town by now, hopping off of roach and guiding him towards what is probably an Inn. I look back at where whatever had been watching us had been, and measure waiting for Geralt to return against following whatever it had been now.

I'm at the edge of the woods where it was a minute later.

This was so, so very stupid and I knew it. But I wouldn't engage whatever this thing was, not yet. I just wanted to pick up its trail before it went cold. I could at least point Geralt in the right direction with his Witcher Sense later, because god knew that it was infinitely more effective at tracking people than I was. Magic Gene Therapy bullshit, it was.

Lets start with obvious things. First off, footprints, or at least some sign of bushes and other plants being crushed under foot or shoved aside. Whatever I had seen, it was large, and had to leave behind some sign it had been here. Second off, torn branches that indicate where whatever it might've been broke limbs off trees by sheer virtue of size; third off, realize that I don't know what I'm doing and that neither of those things were here. No imprints of any degree in the fresh dirt, no brambles crushed or depressed, no signs in the trees that whatever it had been was ever here.

Clearly a good sign. A large, intelligent, humanoid creature that moved fast enough I couldn't follow it with my currently meager time dilation, so stealthy I couldn't find any sign that it had been standing here, and dangerous enough that it set off my passive time dilation simply by watching me.

A leaf chose this moment to very delicately, and much more slowly than it should have, fall into my path of vision. I did not know why, nor did I care why it had fallen. A very gentle breach, lighter than it should have been and lasting longer as well, kicked up. It felt as though something was breathing down my neck. There are Crows, sitting in the trees, suddenly cawing, the noise prolonged and drawn out.

And the mist was once more wispy, advancing at a rate just slow enough to let me know something was wrong once more.

I looked, and found nothing.

I ran.