Leonidas, now armed with the advantage of his [Psionic Focus], put distance between himself and the Hive Tyrant. The creature had become more wary of him, it seemed, following its failed ambushes—and for all that it was definitely still stalking him, it appeared to be biding its time.

Why, he didn’t know.

But he wasn’t going to fail to take advantage.

His Psi was steadily declining with his [Psionic Focus] locked on the Hive Tyrant, and he did notice that it seemed to bleed away faster based on how far away he traveled from the submerged monster. Tarnys had said that the ability was like ‘active radar’ at higher levels, which meant that at his current state of strength, the Skill was more like a targeted tracking beacon.

He equated the Psi-drain, through that context, as battery life.

The further away the Tyrant was, the more battery his tracker drained.

With a mix of wariness and curiosity, Leonidas pushed his Intent toward the ability and tried to mentally configure it less like an active tracker, and more of a passive ping system. Instead of constantly marking the position of the Hive Tyrant, it could instead refresh the creature’s position every ten seconds, or each time that it moved closer to him by more than ten feet.

When he did so, he opened his map ‘widget’—he smirked at his own joke—in his HUD, and noted with pleasure that the Tyrant did appear on the ‘mini-map’, and that each time his [Psionic Focus] pinged, it caused the Tyrant’s labeled red icon to flash back into existence with a small range-reading under it which he understood without needing to actively read.

“Neat,” he said to himself while continuing his steady jog away from the creature. He hadn’t heard the announcer the entire match, he realized as he moved. The Arena Master had been silent ever since the initial confirmation of the bout—and he suddenly wondered at why. It wasn’t a thought that he had time to investigate, of course, but it certainly was curious.

His [Psionic Focus] warned him, and Leonidas changed direction.

Every time the Tyrant changed direction, Leonidas adjusted his own to maintain and grow distance, and each time he did it seemed to frustrate the Tyrant to some extent. The pings showed the occasional surge of motion where the arachnid, which was only separated from him by about eight feet of sand at any given moment, surged to catch up and then subsided once more.

Again, Leonidas couldn’t quite understand why, but there were only three possibilities: either the Tyrant was waiting for its claw to regenerate, which he thought was unlikely for several reasons, or it was waiting for him to grow too exhausted to run, which was also unlikely. The third possibility, and the one he most hated, was that it was waiting for backup.

And that, of course, was why Leonidas was opening the [Aetherium Store].

Other than the [Psi Potion] he needed, he’d also seen accessories on offer during his more frantic flight from the Tyrant earlier, and he needed to assess what it was about them that the store believed was so useful to him.