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((The Father's Day Special -- page 14 of 24))
He annihilated his right gauntlet and knelt down to feel the ground with his hand. Honestly, though, he wasn't entirely sure what he was doing. Man, it sure would've been nice if he could sense forms through the earth like he could through the air.

The vibrations in the ground were definitely fluctuating, though. And not in any kind of pattern that he could determine. What could be causing that, he wondered? The tremors should've abated by now, surely. And if the monsters were somehow tunneling their way toward them, then the vibrations should've been growing steadily stronger, right? Not fluctuating like this?

Unless, maybe, they were tunneling somewhere else? If they were trying to escape, then the shaking should've been getting steadily weaker, but that wasn't the case, either.

So what else could it be, then? If they weren't attacking, and they weren't running, then...?

They were preparing.

That thought made Hector stand back up and turn to Voreese, who was still talking to Mevox. He had to interject. "Can you sense the monsters' locations at all?"

'Uh. Not really. It's all kind of foggy down there. Like a soul-empowered haze.'

"...Or an aura," said Hector.

'Whatever term you like,' she said.

Hector concentrated harder on what the Scarf was telling him. Specifically, he tried to pay attention to how the air was flowing over the ground. It was pretty hard to discern specifics with all the foliage around, and the collapsed cave was far enough away that he couldn't really sense in between the cracks in the rubble, but maybe he was thinking about it in the wrong way.

Maybe he needed to look at the bigger picture that the Scarf was describing to him. Was the flow of the air affected by the shaking in the ground? Even just a little?

...Yes, he realized. It was extremely faint, but it was there. A slight shiver here or there in the air currents.