Chapter 15

The forest floor felt unusually hard as Kyle leaned his back against the rough bark of an oak tree. He closed his eyes, letting the silence of the woods wash over him, but the silence was a lie. Even with his eyes shut, his Perception Aura continued to feed him a constant stream of data—the rustle of a squirrel thirty feet up, the rhythmic swaying of branches, the crunch of dry leaves under a beetle's weight. It was exhausting. Maintaining the aura in its active state felt like holding...