In a matter of minutes the intersection was filled with blood. Xavier and Leyla found a rhythm to work together and began eliminating the short but lethal monsters with great teamwork. While Xavier used his speed and blades to stab and pierce those near him, Leyla didn’t miss a single target when she set her eyes on it.
Xavier was fighting five of these green monsters at one point and did not notice a sixth raise its stubby little hand holding a rusty axe. But before it could bring the axe down, the sound of an arrow slicing through the air reached Xavier’s ears.
He sliced through one of the Goblins in front of him and turned around to see a skewered Goblin slump down to the ground with a thud.
“Thanks,” he muttered and gritted his teeth, taking down two at once with a clean sweep of his katana.
“No problem,” Leyla muttered, more Goblins falling victim to her deadly precision. They were trying their best to make as little noise as possible to not attract other Goblins. Yet, they still seemed to pop up like cockroaches, annoying Xavier, who was already drenched in blood and bits of their intestines sticking to his clothes.
Hunting down the Goblins hadn’t been much of a problem. They sneaked up to the Goblins and took them by surprise, sandwiching the little green monsters with the Infected’s help from the other side. Xavier and Leyla focused on killing the Goblins rather than ending the lives of the Infected.
Xavier’s Air Bullet was much stronger against the living, either way. His Air Bullets burst through the Goblin’s hide, inflicting serious injuries no matter where they impacted.
This provided Xavier some leeway to learn how to use Air Bullets while entering close combat with the ruby katana. Fighting with Dash and Air Bullet utilized at all times was draining, especially mentally, but the results were great. He and Leyla were able to deal with the Goblins long before the Infected could reach the duo.
“More are coming!” Leyla warned Xavier, pointing up at the hill. Xavier readied the ruby katana, expecting a group of Goblins to charge at them. Fortunately, there were only more Infected coming down the hill. Leyla readied her bow and nocked an arrow on the bowstring, but Xavier only reached for her shoulder to signal her to do otherwise. He shook his head as she looked at him and then pulled her aside.
“Let them be. I want the Infected to devour the blazing boar,” He said without going into further detail. All Xavier wanted was to prevent the Goblins from the Goblin community from taking the blazing boar corpse with them once they found it. Allowing the Infected to feast on the boar’s corpse was the easiest way to achieve that.
Leyla frowned but she didn’t say anything. The determination in Xavier’s eyes was enough to understand that he must have his reasoning.
“You can come with me if you want. If not…well, I don’t really know what you plan to do from now on, but I, or rather, the village needs you.”
Xavier realized too late that Leyla could misunderstand his words. He hurriedly manifested the Hidden Mission’s information in front of him and willed the notification to appear in front of Leyla as well.
Leyla was surprised, but she recalled Xavier talking about a mission earlier. Leyla quickly deduced what was going on and what they had to do in the next 24 hours.
“I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I believe that we have to work together to increase our odds of survival. Mankind will have to work together, otherwise, we might as well become a nameless corpse soon,” Xavier murmured. His thoughts were dark, but they weren’t far from reality. Leyla could understand where he was coming from.
“I have no place to stay for now, so I might as well come with you. Where are we going? Your parents’ house, or your grandmother’s?”
Xavier chuckled lightly. He was glad that he ran into Leyla while following the Goblins. If not for talking to her, Xavier didn’t know how he would have reacted to the Hidden Mission, the hordes of Goblins, and the fact that a Monster Gate anchored in their village.
It was really good to have someone to talk to by his side.
“A bunch of boars charged through our house, so we will have to go to my grandmother.”
**
The trip back home was short. They didn’t encounter many Infected. All they found were some corpses and a bunch of squirming Goblins buried underneath the dead Infected. The Goblins were not yet dead, but Xavier solved that problem quickly.
“Watch me” He said as Leyla raised an eyebrow. Standing in front of his prey, Xavier extended his right hand, fingers forming the shape of a pistol, and pointed his index finger at them. Then jerking his arm back after each shot to mimic a recoil, he fired Air Bullets at them, blasting their heads off like watermelons.
“Show off” Leyla muttered under her breath as he chuckled and they began walking again.
Xavier climbed up the small flight of stairs, leading up to the entrance and spoke to Leyla excitedly.
“You will be safe here. It is just me and my…”
He began but trailed off when he stepped inside through the door, Leyla in tow. He stopped abruptly when his eyes landed on the huge crowd of people inside his grandmother’s house. There was a group of more than a dozen survivors, carrying heavy backpacks in both hands that were filled to the brim, and several more bags flung around their arms and shoulders. All of them wore expressions of worry and anxiety as he saw his grandmother talking to some other elderly people, trying to calm them down to the best of her ability.
His gaze swept through the lot and he recognized a few of them who used to live two blocks away from his home.. The survivors of the events from the day before had deep bags underneath their eyes. Silvia walked into the hall shortly, carrying a tray of cups filled with tea and a dish with some cookies, and offered them to each of the newcomers.
Their hands shook and their voices came out as whispers as one of the elderly women cupped Silvia’s face, mumbling something along the lines of ‘Bless you’. It looked like they hadn’t slept at all. Some shivered, pulling their threadbare coats closer to their bodies, cupping their hands around the warm tea cup while others stared blankly at the open door in front of them.
“...my family in the house…” Xavier finished his earlier line as the two of them watched the survivors with a mixture of relief and curiosity.
Most of them were quite aged so it was a wonder how they managed to survive, but Xavier would be the last one to complain to find more human beings around him. All he had seen were Goblins and boars around him for the past two and a half days or so. He was glad that they had found a safe shelter, and that it was Zora Vador, his grandmother, who took the responsibility to do it.
Hearing his voice, a few of them looked in their direction. And Xavier saw their eyes go wide as one of them got up from the chair and reached for an iron rod he had placed by the corner.
Xavier and Leyla shot their hands forward to clear his confusion but a few elders screamed and one of them even hurled a teacup in his direction.
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“Ow” He winced when the hot tea sloshed upon his arm.
Chaos ensued as everybody began screaming before Silvia realized who it was.
“Xavier!!” She shrieked and ran towards him and pulled him a tight hug, almost choking him in her embrace.
“Yeah mom, I am fine…” He tried to speak as she looked up at him and ran a hand through his face and hair to check for injuries and damage. He was covered in blood and muck and probably stank like a sewer but that did not stop his mother from inspecting him thoroughly.
“Mom!! Stop!!” He groaned again and grabbed her by the shoulders, putting some space between them. Leyla chuckled again but stayed quiet, happily watching the mother-son reunion. A fleeting image of her grandmother hugging her tightly flashed in front of her eyes but she quickly shook her head to discard it.
Xavier didn’t expect their home to transform into a refugee camp for the survivors from the other side of the hill. Now that some of them had joined their little hideout, bringing as many rations of food and other essential supplies as they could find in their collapsed houses, all food was stored in the basement cellar. It would be distributed fairly. The only downside was that everyone would have to starve a little bit since nobody could tell what the future awaited them.
That was a bummer, but it was not something they could change just because they wanted to.
I hope we can eat monster meat without bursting apart. Digesting it should be possible, I guess? With higher stats it should probably be safe to try.
In all honesty, Xavier had no idea whether the meat of a blazing boar could be consumed. Would they mutate as well, or was it necessary to have higher stats to digest the meat of mutated animals? Xavier was not sure, but he knew that someone would have to test it out, otherwise, they would all starve to death sooner or later.
And starving was what Xavier hated the most. He loved eating way too much to consider starving to death a feasible option.
Maybe I should secretly try some grilled monster meat when nobody’s looking.
The Glutton in Xavier’s head spoke to him, and he couldn’t agree more. This idea sounded much better than starving because of their low food rations!!
But before he turned himself into a guinea pig to experiment with the meat of monsters, Xavier would have to hunt a monster with lots of meat. A blazing boar would be the best. Unfortunately, Xavier was not yet confident of hunting such a monstrosity. Other than that, Xavier had to deal with the Monster Gate as well. He had to exterminate the Goblins in the village and destroy the Monster Gate – by hook or crook.
Silvia finally stepped away from him and only now did her eyes fall on Leyla.
“Oh my God, Leyla, it is so good to see you,” She screamed again and walked towards a hesitant Leyla who was also squeezed in a deathly grip.
Xavier merely shrugged at Leyla who looked at him for help and left her with his mother while reaching for a cookie.
At first, he thought they found the shelter on their own but it looked like his parents and his grandmother worked a lot harder on gathering survivors than expected. That was great and all, but it also resulted in a cacophony of voices, a tense atmosphere, and little to no space in the house.
The otherwise spacious room was now jam-packed with people and their stuff scattered all around the place
“You can take my room. It’s a little bit small since I’ve been sleeping there when I was a child, but waking up due to loud noises will be the least of your worries. You look like you didn’t sleep for days. It’s time for you to rest up a little,” Xavier told Leyla, taking her a bit further into the house.
His room at his grandmother’s was not huge but nice and cozy. Xavier hadn’t used this room for ages, so he realized only now that he should have tidied up his room a little before showing it to her. His walls were adorned with old posters of his favorite anime characters and random stickers of quotes he found interesting. One such quote read ‘I’m on a seafood diet – I see food and I eat it’.
Paw prints were running up from the window throughout the wall and disappearing behind the pale gray curtains. The sheets on his bed were crumpled and two of the antique action figurines from his favorite comic were lying on the sheets, both face down. But the most embarrassing part was an old, slightly grainy photo that was on one of the shelves beside the computer table, staring at him.
It was a photo of him holding a bouquet of roses, hair neatly parted by the side, and a big smile on his face for his first day of school. He used to be a chubby kid so there was baby fat on his face that he found not so appealing but his mother adored.
He hoped Leyla would ignore it as she walked in and looked around for a place to sit before deciding to head towards the chair. Xavier had opened his mouth to speak but she lifted the lone, crumpled sock and held it in front of his face.
“I think your room is trying to break free of your grasp and achieve world domination. One sock at a time.”
Xavier tried to ignore Leyla’s teasing and turned around to leave. “I am not sure when we would run out of water to shower. So if you want to take a shower, do it now before it's too late. There should be some spare clothes somewhere. They should fit you since I was a bit bigger in the past.”
Once he told Leyla everything she had to know, Xavier left her alone in his room. He stepped out into the living room and searched for his parents again. Xavier was subjected to weird stares for his blood-soaked appearance, but he ignored that entirely. It was of far more importance to tell his parents about the Hidden Mission and the threat of the Goblin Community.
Xavier found his parents soon after he left Leyla. He approached them hurriedly, which earned various scared faces from refugees and his parents alike. “What happened to you? Are you fine? How badly are you injured? What happened? I got distracted by Leyla’s arrival so tell me everything right NOW.” Silvia Vador asked countless questions and was about to interrogate him for hours. Luckily, Mark approached his son to inspect him thoroughly and passed a quick judgment.
“Not injured. It’s not his blood.” He said. Xavier nodded with a thin smile. He then began to summarize what happened after he left the house earlier in the morning.
“...Then I met Leyla, who told me what happened to her grandmother….”
Once Xavier was done with the summary, Silvia and Mark looked at each other.
“Poor girl!” Silvia sighed and would have asked more questions but Mark intervened, “How many Goblins were there exactly, and what is this about the Monster Gate? Tell me more in detail!”
Xavier manifested the Hidden Mission for his parents to see and turned to his mother, “Leyla is taking a shower right now. I told her to sleep in my room. It looked like she hadn’t slept for…a while. I am not good at consoling but…if you could help her a little bit that would be great.”
The adrenaline surging through Leyla must have subsided by now. Either she was too shocked by the happenings of the last 12 hours, or she was crying in the shower.
Xavier was not sure, but he could tell that his mother would be the best candidate to console Leyla. Silvia’s instincts were to feed people and care for them.
“I will leave in the early afternoon again to hunt. The Monster Gate has to be destroyed before it’s too late,” Xavier said and Mark agreed with a nod.
They had just gathered some survivors from the hill and it didn’t look like any of them was willing to fight, not for now, at least. Only Zora’s sparrows, Mark and Silvia, could fight, to a certain degree. Maybe Leyla as well if her mental state was good enough to let her step out of the house. They didn’t want to let out a suicidal archer, after all. They had no idea for how long Leyla had been fighting for her life all alone. She needed some time to rest and heal.
Xavier spent some time discussing the next steps with his parents before he retrieved a bunch of Common Card Shards. Since the special privilege [Goblin Hunter] provided him an increase in his drop-rate when hunting Goblins, Xavier had been rewarded with just enough Common Card Shards to create a new Common Card. That was exactly what he needed if he wanted to go out to exterminate the Goblin Community in the next 20 hours.
He combined the Card Shards and received a Common Card, called [Power Shot]. Xavier didn’t have to read through all the pieces of information provided by the Common Card to know that it was perfect for Leyla. Thus, Xavier put the Common Card down on the bed in his room where Leyla would see it once she was done showering, repaying the favor he owed her in the form of the Elemental Spell Card she’d given him before.
Xavier then stepped out again.
So, how am I going to replenish my energy quickly now?
****
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