Naru felt a shift in the air. She felt her ears flickering under her hat. Her ears which were more sensitive than a humans were able to pick up sounds that they wouldn’t normally be able to hear.
She smirked. Delta was moving again.
Still, it wasn’t like she knew for sure that Delta was moving. She was currently blindfolded after all. It was the next stage of her training.
Naru had gotten much better at following Delta in crowds. She realized that her entire plan from the start was flawed. The whole idea was that she had to “follow” Delta. Rather, it was more like “shadowing” her.
In other words, Naru began to get better at predicting her movements. She was even close enough to barely missing grabbing at Delta’s skirt at one point.
She still remembered the moment deeply. As she crashed against the ground in a desperate bid to try and restrain the women she was instantly greeted with a back-hand slap on the face. It was rude to try and touch a women’s clothing without permission too.
Now that Naru had gotten better at predicting her movements Delta began to work in more mysterious ways. Backtracking on herself and taking side paths that were harder to follow her in. It took a few weeks before eventually Naru also got the hang of this too.
This came to a head, where she met Delta at the public fountain again to have a bandana shoved in her hand.
“You shouldn’t look at a lady without her expressed permission” Delta had told her.
While Naru was sure that this was some sort of made-up etiquette rule. The gently smiling Delta gave her no quarter to deny the request. Which now leads her to this situation.
Naru was now blindfolded in the middle of a city and expected to try and find another woman. She also wanted to burst laughing at the impossibility of the task. Still, she didn’t think it was possible that Delta was doing this to simply punish her rudeness.
Mostly sure.
Naru felt air being displaced in front of her and instantly put up her arms to block the approaching object, she felt something clap against her forearms and then quickly withdraw.
Naru breathed a sigh of relief, having avoided another one of Delta’s attacks.
The first few days Naru spent blindfolded were mostly spent with her being slapped and tripped by Delta at every stage.
Eventually, Naru smarted up to this treatment thought. She was getting better at sensing when she was about to be attacked and also keeping her guard up. Since she was blindfolded, she wasn’t sure what the other townsfolk thought of this display but based on the way Delta and Naru dressed they probably thought it was a harsh mistress punishing a servant.
Naru sniffed the air. Much like her ears, she also had a more sensitive nose than humans. While it was as strong as something like a bloodhound it was enough that she could tell when it was about to rain and able to follow particularly fresh scent trails.
In truth, this was something she would be happy to do without. Her first few days in the lower city where the commoners lived were days where she resisted the urge to throw up.
There was no such thing as sanitation and proper sewage/plumbing in the lower cities which meant that waste, for the most part… was left on the streets for a lack of better words.
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Naru had gotten used to the scent and was beginning to be able to ignore it, but she still made a small shudder every time she had to take a deep breath to follow Delta’s scent.
The woman, used a particular floral perfume that was very uncommon among commoners which meant it was a relatively easy scent to follow.
Still, Naru couldn’t drop her guard since she had been fooled too often by Delta intentionally dripping perfume in different directions to throw Naru off.
Instead of walking in crowds, Naru spent most of her time on the rooftops, jumping around like some sort of manic frog. Since she spent so much time in the lower cities, she had more or less memorized their layout and she was sure she would land on the correct rooftop.
She did accidentally miss a rooftop once, but since the buildings in the lower city were not that high, and since she was a magical deer with a strong constitution than humans she only sprained an ankle.
It was an odd sight, but people rarely looked up anyway and it was more efficient than navigating a crowd while blind.
To this day, Naru was still not quite sure how Delta managed to do it. It was like magic, the way she was able to dip in and out of crowds like she was simply walking along an empty hallway.
[The scent is weaker here.]
She jumped to a nearby building.
[Mhmm, here is closer]
This was one of the downsides with using buildings, since she was farther away from the ground it was harder to follow Delta’s scent.
She assumed this was also why Delta didn’t mind that she used to buildings to navigate. At the end of the day, she was only handicapping her ability to follow Delta for more ease of movement.
Naru heard a rustling below her.
Another thing she had managed to pick up from being blindfolded was the fact that most people had a different gait, something that could be heard and distinguished.
Delta had clipped and measured footsteps, they were refined, vastly different from commoners who had never been forced to walk in large halls that echoed.
She pinpointed her target based on sound.
And then lept.