With his father carrying his two siblings, and his mother carrying him, Dei realized just how much his parents were holding back their magical physique. They went in a straight line through the forest, ignoring all paths, to the section where the previous group was supposed to explore.
‘Holy Fucking SHIT!’ Dei thought as his mother leapt from branch to branch, the world blurring under him. There were a few tree animals that they passed by on the way, and when one would react aggressively, it would usually explode in a puff of fur or feathers depending on what creature it was. Eventually Dei realized that his mother was drawing her bow back faster than he could perceive and hitting the animals so hard they exploded. He couldn't even spot her drawing an arrow, just the afterimage of an animal before it was gone.
Dei had also started figuring out the new language his family spoke, not enough to get the sentence structure down, just enough to learn a few words, and he kept hearing the word he associated with “monster” spoken by his parents.
When the trees began to clear up again, Dei noticed that other groups had joined them far to their left and right.
As they finally reached a clearing that led to the mouth of a cave, four other groups were present. Words were rapidly spoken, each one sounding like some sort of shorthand version of a sentence that he was finding difficult to parse.
“Late. ******. Attack. Monster.****** Now.******. Overnight.”
After a few seconds, the five groups turned to the red forest and took off in a sprint. Dei and his group were near the back, with a duo of heavily scarred men behind them. Ahead of them were two parents with what looked like their teenage daughter between them. On his left was a group of three men and a woman, while on his right was the final group, one man and one woman.
‘They’re putting the young in the middle.’
The one person in each leading group had someone watching the ground without looking up, while their partners guided them with a hand on their shoulder. If he had to guess, Dei would say they were looking for the tracks left by the missing people.
The woman on the right front called out
“Tracks. Monster. ******”
He didn’t catch the third word, but most of the adults in the group mumbled expletives at it.
With a trail found, they turned towards a new direction and slowed down, moving onto the ground rather than through the trees.
They still moved at the speed of a fast jog, but everyone was crouched as low as they could go to the ground and spread out to cover a larger area.
‘Holy hell, I do not want to meet the thing that has everyone here tense. They look like elite trained soldiers’ thinking for a moment, he added on ‘but I’m going to’ and shivered
The stealth of it was what impressed him so much. They still moved through the grass while making either the same amount of noise or less than the leaves swaying in the wind.
The groups moved deeper into the forest, and Dei noticed with a fright that the canopy was becoming thicker the further they went in. Not only were the trees growing taller and thicker, but they grew closer together too. It started to dim slightly, but Dei’s vision was unhindered. To others it most likely seemed dark, but there was still a small amount of light filtering through, so lights were not needed.
The trackers continued to dutifully follow something Dei couldn’t see, and they slowed down the further they got into the forest.
From their original jog, the adults were now at a sort of power-walking speed, and were no longer crouched.
The dense trees quieted the forest more, and soon even the breeze stopped flowing around them, their light footsteps the only thing that broke the silence.
It had been around twenty minutes since they started moving together as a group when a blood curdling scream rang out from their left. Rather than immediately moving to help, there was a quick and brief series of signs from one of the groups at the head, before they all moved directly towards the noise at the same previous pace.
As they moved, Dei noticed something flitter by quickly in the corner of his vision and snapped his head towards it, barely catching the shine of something, not with his eyes, but with his soul sight.
His mother had turned at the same time to look at what he saw, but quickly turned back ahead ‘she doesn’t see it. She can’t. Not even I could see it with my regular sight, despite the upgrade to my eyes.’
It moved again, this time to their left, and he got a better look at it, just barely catching a squishy tentacle-shaped leg with a hard blade at the end of it.
He wanted to point, to bring attention to it, but both his arms were swaddled in the harness under his mothers armor. The only part of his body that was free was his head, his mouth. But he knew that if he just started screaming, his mom would shut him up
‘Damn it, I either have to speak my first word or people are going to die’ yea, no pressure.
He already knew which one he was going to speak, so he began to form the words in his mind, practicing moving his tongue in the right way. He had to time it correctly too, or it wouldn’t make sense, and he would still be shut up.
They approached the location where the scream had originated, but the closer they got, the more Dei saw the creature in flashes, a blade here, a tooth there, some slithering tail, but he never got the full picture, and it was too quick to track for any length of time. He always followed it with his head, and his mother was starting to pick up on it that something was wrong, but she still hadn’t called anything out yet.
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A clearing opened up ahead of them, but the group leader called for a stop and narrowed her eyes as she started looking around. Her eyes glowed as she turned her head on a swivel to look around the forest they had already come. ‘She spotted a glimpse of it too!’
But he couldn't find it anymore. It didn’t appear in his vision, the shallow flashes that haunted him the entire walk now eerie in their absence. He searched the forest but saw nothing, looking back to the woman leading the group, he was barely able to distinguish a blurry soul shape of something above her, dropping down from the trees. ‘It can hide from my sight too!’
“MONSTER!” He screamed out as it was halfway down the trunk, he saw small chips flying as it clung to the bark and pulled itself down faster than gravity would take it ‘I’m too late!’ he thought in horror.
He felt a soft breeze touch his cheek as his body was rapidly but gently shifted to the right, and the same wail they heard as before rang out to their ears. This cry felt stilted though, wrong, and any hope of it being from the lost group fled from his mind.
When he regained his bearings, a golden glowing arrow as long as his father was tall pinned the monster to the tree. Nobody froze, even the woman under the monster reacting quickly, and they formed a perimeter around it.
With its skin pierced, Dei saw as the cloak dropped momentarily and almost threw up from the sight.
The main body was shaped like a lamprey eel, if the mouth extended all the way to the tail, with four tentacle-like limbs that ended in three sharp claws in a triangular pattern on the end each. It had no eyes or ears, just armor across its entire back and down its arms. The underside of the tentacles was completely unprotected, but there were coarse brown plates on the overside of it that matched its back
He watched as multiple arrows shot towards the creature but, even pinned, it bent its body in impossible ways to dodge most of them. There were a few glancing blows, but nothing substantial. It wrapped two tentacles around the arrow pinning it and snapped it before anyone could jump in, making the arrow explode into glowing sparks that blinded him for a second.
When he could see again, the monster was gone, camouflage again. He saw the direction the entire group was looking, and barely caught the haze of what was previously a clear soul shape. ‘I'm an idiot! Of course it would notice me looking at it. It took so long to strike because it was testing different ways to hide itself, and when I finally stopped reacting, it knew it had me.’
He had made a dire mistake, he should have waited. That could have turned out worse if his mother wasn't already vigilant and suspected he saw something she couldn’t. But it didn't turn out worse, everyone was still alive, and he needed to keep it that way.
With the monster escaped, the group congregated into a circle. Nobody stopped watching the skies either, as they knew it could come from the treetops.
His mother also said something he couldn't make out “Dei ****** monster ***** attacked.” but when she finished her sentence, a few of the people around them gave him a quick glance before focusing back outward. "She told them that I was the one to spot it.’
He focused more, but was careful this time. It hadn’t perfected its camouflage, otherwise the woman would have already been dead by now, and he couldn't let it. He looked straight forward, watching as it moved through trees in his periphery, but he didn’t look at it.
He didn’t need to though, as a few of the more veteran people in the party were whispering out words, which he thought were locational, as they only came when the monster gave a glimpse.
The words became less frequent as time went on, and Dei realized it was adapting to their perceptions too ‘shit shit shit!’
He wasn't sure if they realized and stopped calling it abruptly or if the monster succeeded, but the group waited in silence for several beats of his pounding heart. He barely caught it in the corner of his eye as it nimbly and silently leapt off a branch towards them, the tree limb not even swaying.
He immediately snapped his head towards it, and before he even had the word out, a rain of arrows shot at it. Mid air it twisted between each of them, only a single one grazing its upper carapace, letting out a spark as the others did nothing at all
‘Oh’ he thought belatedly as the monster landed on the man standing two people to his right. As its teeth closed around him, he was simply gone from Dei’s vision and blurred to his soul sight.
The monster launched itself backwards with its catch, and started to run, rather than stalk. “Dren!” his partner cried and launched herself after it. The entire group exploded into action as they started to chase it.
The mans partner was at the forefront of the group, stalking it with uncanny certainty that not even Dei could match. While the creature was stealthy, it wasn't faster than his group, and they rapidly gained on it, occasionally hitting it and letting sparks fly out or, rarely, blood. The blood still blended to the creature though, never giving them a clear shot.
As they chased, he was filled with dread as the woman became less sure over time, the creature becoming adept at hiding even the tracking of her partner.
‘I can’t let this happen!’ he screamed in his mind
‘I will do whatever it takes to save him’ he faintly heard the echo of some distant bell across his soul. A warning from the System rang in his head, but he ignored it.
‘I will see through any shroud it puts up’ The tolling growing louder at the second ring.
‘It threatened my family.’ A third, tangible toll rang out across his soul. It reverberated through his body, and he felt as all the energy stored in both his body and his [Pandora’s Box (Sealed)] were sucked away, firing through his eyes and towards the creature.
When the wave hit, it started spasming mid air and dropped its cloak. The man it held in its mouth also went flying some other direction, limp but hopefully alive. It squirmed on the ground like it was on fire, whipping out in every direction and bouncing between trees.
Its camouflage didn't merely drop though, he saw as static formed across its body, multiple colors of the rainbow shining in a kaleidoscopic display. After spasming for several seconds, it let out another wail, this one sounding more like sobbing than a scream of horror.
He saw multiple melee attackers move in and, now that they could genuinely see its limbs, began to butcher it. He watched as the cloak slowly began to transform back into more mundane colors, but far too late. In only three seconds, hundreds of cuts ran across its body and multiple wounds stabbed all the way through. Two limbs were not working, and it still wasn't thinking clearly from whatever Dei had done, as it wasn't even trying to fight back, merely run.
Dei suddenly felt incredibly tired. It had cost him something to do that, and now he was paying the price. Watching as a blackness slowly encompassed his vision, and he slumped forward.
‘I hope I did enough.’