I hunkered down low, crouched in the undergrowth, my eyes trained on the deer in front of me. Deer, of course, was the term Ren and I had given the species, but the thing in front of me was no Earthen deer. It was the predatory kind, the first animal Ren and I had ever eaten on Argonis. They weren’t terribly strong, and posed almost no threat to me at the moment, but they were meaty, certainly big enough to match what most of the other nobles would present as their catches.
But I wasn’t competing with them. No, I was in competition with Zayr, and while I hadn't quite gotten a good grasp of how strong the boy was, I knew for a fact he was powerful. And if I wanted to win, a little deer was far from enough. But the deer was my ticket to its natural predator: the earthen bear.
The earthen bear was one of the strongest animals present in the Border Forest – at least, of the side I’d traveled. I learned that the Border Forest was actually far larger than I’d known, stretching along the length of the continent as far as the Hellinous mountain range, even. Ren and I had only seen a slice of the forest, and only dealt with the tropical variety of wildlife that inhabited the massive stretch of forest. And the tropical variety, I learned, was not the strongest of the varieties, and there were apparently beasts hidden within the depths of the forest that even the Imperial Army of the kingdom wouldn’t dare mess with.
The moment I’d heard that, I’d made it a life goal to go and do exactly that one day, once I had the strength. I was already burning with curiosity, wanting to know what those animals would be like. Given what I’d seen in the world already, my imagination knew no limits, and my current favourite idea was some kind of dragon. Preferably some kind of fire-wielding one.
A rustle in front of me brought me out of my thoughts, as the deer lifted its head up to sniff the air, its muzzle coated in scarlet, dripping with the blood of the poor, still-alive rabbit it had been tearing into. The deers, I’d learned, were vicious creatures, nothing like the docile animals of Earth.
This one seemed to have felt my gaze on it, or at least felt the feeling of danger that I posed to it, and was already getting ready to fight, even though it hadn't quite zeroed in on my position yet.
A grin spread over my face as I focused myself on the hunt, letting all other thoughts fall from my mind like rain off an umbrella. I had forgone my pole, since I wasn’t aiming for blunt damage this time, and chose to go instead with my scarlet flame claws. Those had quickly become a favorite of mine, second only to the pole.
I still hadn’t figured out exactly why the flames of my claws had such a distinct, blood-red color to them, nor been able to reproduce the effect with any of my other flames, but I was sure the color change indicated a difference in the quality of the flame. The claws burned hotter and were more solid than anything else I’d been able to create.
The deer turned its head then, just a little to the left, far enough away for my position to be out of its vision. Immediately, I sparked a little pearl bomb and shot it out, aiming it for the joint on its hind leg.
The thing exploded the moment it made contact, the force immediately snapping the joint as the heat burnt the flesh and skin over it. Disabled, the faster animal could no longer run away from me when it realized it couldn’t fight me.
With that dealt with, I leapt out of the underbrush like a panther pouncing, my claws outstretched as I caught the side of the deer’s belly, scarlet flame tearing through the thick pelt and biting into the scarlet blood behind as I ducked and rolled under the deer, making it to the other side of the deer just as it had finished turning its head to the side I had jumped out of.
Before it could react, I was at its throat, my fingers drawing a quick line across the white fur of its neck. A hard blow to the side of the head followed, knocking the thing to its side and almost unconscious, bleeding out the last of its life. I breathed out as I stood above the animal, staring into its blank dark eyes as the life drained out of them. As merciless as the deer was, I’d given it a quick death, though bleeding out of the throat would never be a very pleasant way to go.
Still, it was over quick, and before long, the thing lay as a corpse over the now-dead rabbit it had just been eating, a puddle of its bright blood pooling at my feet. With a sigh, I left everything as it was and backed up, further than I had been for the deer, and hid myself once again. The scent of the blood would waft into the air for quite some time, and I knew from experience that if there was a bear nearby, it’d come running at the smell of a dead animal – or, a free meal, from its perspective. And there would be a bear close enough to catch the scent, I was sure of it. It was the Border Forest, after all.
And sure enough, I caught sight of a great brown bolder-like figure moving through the green underbrush not long after, led by a nose raised high up in the air. I grinned to myself from up on my perch halfway up a giant tree. Zayr was dreaming if he thought he could hunt better than I could. Hunting had easily taken up about a quarter of the total time I’d spent in the forest; if I couldn’t beat a pampered prince after as much practice as I’d had, I would be better off giving up the life of an adventurer.
I waited with a patience honed by months of hunting for the bear to make its way to where I lay in wait, ready to pounce on it when the moment presented itself. The bear was nothing like the deer, and even with the experience I had, it wouldn’t be a matter of a few moments to deal with the animal. And that meant the first strike was all the more important. I had the advantage at the moment, and I wouldn’t let it slip by without getting in some real damage.
The scarlet glow of my claws lit up my face as I waited, the ominous red highlighting the bloodlust in my eyes as I waited for the thing to come closer and closer, until it was just a step away from being directly below me. And then, just as I tensed myself to drop onto the animal, a piercing sound rang through the woods, bouncing off the tall trunks of the trees and echoing into the distance. The source of the sound was far, but I recognized it immediately. In an instant, I hopped off the branch I’d been on and landed on the branch of a tree nearby, not caring that the noisiness of my movements had alerted my would-be prey to my presence. Not caring because the hunt no longer mattered, since the pitch of Ren’s whistle was enough for me to guess that something was very wrong. The highest level of wrong, in fact. Of all the whistles we’d designated with meaning, the one I’d just heard signaled the most urgent of danger, the drop-everything-and-come level of danger.
And so I did, leaping from branch to branch with as much speed as I could possibly manage, headed only in the vague direction I’d heard the sound in.
Exactly a minute after the first, a minute spent crashing through canopy leaves and small branches, another whistle sounded, and by then, I was close enough to pinpoint the direction of the sound with enough clarity to know where I needed to go.
Almost half a minute after that, I found Ren. It took only a second to understand the cause for the whistle, though more of that time was spent in shock than in processing the sight.
Ren stood as part of a circle of motley adventurers, each with their weapon of choice unsheathed and being waved threateningly at the massive, scaled wolves that had faced them. Crouched cowering in the center of the adventurer's protective circle were the nobles, no longer caring for appearances as they cried silently or shook with fear, each saucer-eyed as they took in the appearance of their captors.
The hired adventurers, for their part, didn’t look much better off than the people they were protecting. Fear practically wafted off of them, despite their defiant stances, and the wolves had certainly caught the scent.
They had yet to attack, though, I guessed, based on the lack of dead bodies lying around, but I could tell that they considered the meat in front of them as nothing more than a prepared, defenseless buffet. I could see the arrogance in their eyes, even from atop a nearby tree.
Ren, who stood front and center in the circle, seemed unperturbed by the danger, even though I was sure he knew that we’d never faced the animals before, and more than that, that he could feel the threat they presented. I didn’t know what they were, but they were dangerous, more than most everything else I’d fought in the forest.
There were twelve of the beasts, a pack of scarlet-scaled monsters in the shape of wolves. They stood easily at three feet tall, their eyes glowing with a deep orange like the embers of an inferno. Dense muscle rippled beneath their scarlet armor with every step they took, beautiful in a fatal sense, like a living painting drawn of blood.
The standoff between the groups was dangerous, filled with uncertainty and fear – at least, on the human’s side. The wolves were playing with them, they all knew, and the deathly silence of the woods weighed on the minds of the adventurers, heavier each second it stretched on.
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I huffed out a sigh, taking stock of the human side. The nobles would definitely not be of any help, that much was clear from the crippling fear that so obviously gripped them. And I didn't place much hope in the hired hands, none of whom struck me as particularly powerful mages. D-ranked at best. They would be distractions at most, facing the wolves, and even that for only a few minutes.
Oh well, I thought to myself, a grin creeping its way up my face. Guess it’s just me and Ren again.
I fired up a pearl bomb as I waited, the golden white orb floating over my palm as I packed it with as much Flux as I could, using every bit of the concentration and control I’d built up over the months to create the strongest bomb I was currently able to make.
I waited and waited, watching closely until the biggest of the wolves, the one staring down Ren’s calm face, finally made its move. Ren, still using his sheathed sword as a cane, showed no sign that he was aware of my presence. I knew he had no way of knowing whether I’d heard his whistle or found him, so I knew fully the risk of the plan I put into action when the wolf moved. And yet, not a thought of the plan possibly failing even crossed my mind at the moment, my trust fully in Ren’s ability to react on the turn of a dime.
And so, as the lunging wolf closed the distance between itself and Ren, its jaws less than a foot away from chomping on the boy’s head, I launched my supercharged bomb not at the wolf, but at Ren’s face.
The golden pearl traveled faster than a bullet, entering Ren’s three-meter bubble of perception within a fraction of a second. And Ren, just as I’d hoped, had the presence of mind to notice the little disruption in the Flux around him and realize exactly what was happening, and what he needed to do.
A small smile curving his lips, the boy calmly – but incredibly swiftly – unsheathed his sword and used the blade to reflect the speeding bullet I’d shot at his face. The Flux coating his blade allowed him to deflect the bomb without setting it off – something we’d found out when I’d lost a battle of wits one day – and we’d used that fact to our advantage many times already.
And it worked as beautifully with the wolves as it ever had. The pearl bounced off the dark blade and shot back, straight into the throat of the pouncing wolf. There was no Flux inside the wolf’s mouth to deflect the bomb, so the pearl detonated the instant it made contact with the soft, fleshy pink of its throat.
A muffled boom sounded as the wolf’s head simply disintegrated into a bloody mist, leaving behind a headless beast that fell to the ground a few seconds later.
There was a silence that enveloped the clearing again, but it was different this time. This time, the wolves weren't in control, and the only one having a good time was Ren, whose face bore a great big grin.
Deciding it was time to start the party, I pushed off the branch I’d been hiding on and flipped gracefully through the air, landing lightly on my feet atop the headless wolf. I mirrored Ren’s grin as he turned his face up at me. “Tundra Dungeon?” I asked, to which the boy nodded in response.
Before he could speak, though, I felt the wolf behind me finally move, that strange niggling in the back of my head warning me, a feeling I’d come to learn meant that my brain had felt a disturbance in the Flux around me. I ducked and rolled to the side just a moment before the wolf’s jaws came sailing through the space I’d been in.
Ren, with no bomb to help him this time, also chose not to face the hundreds of pounds of lethal meat rushing at him. Instead, he rolled underneath the animal and popped up on the other side.
“Alright then,” Ren said as he faced the one wolf that was now within the circle of adventurers. “First target acquired.”
I smiled and turned around, yelling over my shoulder as I did. “The rest of you, help Ren deal with the beast!” I commanded. Realistically, they would be more useful if they helped with my job, since mine was objectively harder, but I didn’t want the deaths of random adventurers on my hands, and it would be easier for me to focus if I didn’t have to worry about protecting them during the fight.
With that command made, I left that mess for Ren to deal with and turned my focus entirely on the objective before me. An objective that meant keeping the ten hungry jaws of massive wolves off of me and also distracted for as long as it took for Ren and his crew to deal with them one by one.
Easy peasy, I thought to myself as I burst forward, excitement heating my blood as I ignited the air around me, swirling flames leaping off of my swinging pole and hitting the wolves around me as a tidal wave of heat. I landed in the center of the group, my mind racing as I cobbled together a plan. The wolves were intelligent, more so than the wolves of the Tundra Dungeon from back then, and that meant I would have to work much harder to keep the ten of them on me.
Thankfully, we were in the woods, so the terrain was somewhat advantageous for me. And once the constant heat had dried the space around me, it would be entirely advantageous for me.
With that in mind, I called upon the largest mass of Flux I could handle from the air around me, forcing it to spin around me like a converging tornado before igniting it all. Flames burst out of the air around me just as the first of the wolves finally pounced. The descending fire tornado caught the wolf halfway through its jump, the force of the flame smashing the beast into the ground as it burned its scaly skin.
The wolf opened its mouth to roar with agony, but before it could make a sound, my pole came crashing down on its snout, snapping its jaws shut as flames engulfed the thing’s head.
Knowing I was running out of time if I wanted to keep the rest of the wolves off Ren’s back, I didn’t take the time to continue wailing on the first wolf. Instead, with a hard stomp on the thing’s nose, I launched myself up and out of the flaming tornado. The spinning mass of flames was an awesome sight, a raring beast of heat and destruction, and it was completely under my control. It represented the entirety of what I was capable of after the months of training I’d been through, using every bit of the mental capacity I’d built up, and it was a gratifying sight to behold, even in the middle of such a dangerous fight.
As I jumped out of the tornado, I called on the beast of flame with a thought, and suddenly, the spinning tower fell to the ground, rushing out against the ground like water from a dam broken. I controlled the flow as best I could to ensure the flames only rushed at the group of wolves, sparing Ren’s group from being roasted alive.
The wolves fared much better than the humans would have, of course, but they certainly didn’t have a good time. The great blaze swept past them as a wave of heat and pain, eliciting a chorus of yelps and barks from the pack.
Knowing I didn’t have much time left with the amount of flames I’d summoned, I leapt into action, dashing into the pack as my pole flashed a blur of orange all around me, slashing and jabbing and whacking at the wolves as I danced between them, feeling the blissful warmth of my own flames washing over me.
But I underestimated the beasts. In the thrill of my success, I danced a little too close to one and suffered claws raking across my gut for it. The dagger-like claws tore through cloth and skin like they were paper, severing muscle and tendon as blood poured off me.
I stumbled over my own feet, the pain immediate and intense. The sight of my own blood splashing scarlet against the earthen brown of the soil was sharp in my blurring vision.
The wolves were not so merciful as to let me reel from the pain too long, though. Before I’d taken two steps from where I’d taken the strike, I felt the powerful jaws of a wolf close over my shoulder, the serrated fangs biting into my skin from bicep to collar bone. I grit my teeth against the pain, snapping my head around to find the glowing orange eyes of the wolf. They dripped with what I could have sworn was a mocking mirth, and the sight sparked in me an anger I’d never before felt towards an animal.
The rage hit me like a tidal wave, sweeping away the pain and all other coherent thought in its way.
With the sub-two seconds I had remaining to control the mass of fire that currently blanketed all the wolves, I pulled it all in, forcing it to converge at my position like water in a tub with an open drain.
Within a fraction of a second, the flame had wrapped around my bloody figure and the wolf who still held me in its jaws. The temperature shot up in our cocoon, reaching so high the leaves under my feet instantly crumbled into dust, the soil beneath burnt crispy and hard.
The wolf, for its part, didn’t fare much better than the leaves, despite its hardened scale armor and natural fire resistance. The heat instantly fried its skin to a crisp, desiccating the meat beneath not long after, leaving the wolf a withered sack of jerky meat by the time the fire burned out, almost exactly two seconds after it had converged on me.
A grin of utter satisfaction split my face as I saw the dried, blackened corpse of the animal, a feeling like a particularly bothersome itch being scratched filling me.
I broke myself out of my revelry not a second later, but it was a second too late. The wolf furthest from me took the opportunity to jump to the other side of the battle, leaping over the half-dead wolf fighting Ren and landing less than a meter from the cowering group of nobles who sat all the way on the other side – the group who, stupidly, hadn’t yet thought to run away.
Cursing to myself, I pushed myself forward as fast as I could, but I knew there was no way I’d make it to the group in time to save all of them, and the cold hand of fear snaked its fingers over my heart for the first time in a long time at the thought.
Before I had even taken a step, though, the massive form of a wolf blocked the way. Dread reared its head fully as I was forced to stop, the realization setting in that I was about to be responsible – partly, anyway – for the death of over a dozen people. Idiotic people, but people nonetheless. And the thought terrified me.
Then, just as a gruesome massacre of the nobles seemed all but certain, a bolt of lightning shot out from between the trees, a violet and white flash of incredible power that struck the wolf on the head with lethal precision.