The bird was fast, incredibly so, and the only reason I managed to evade its grasping talons was because I moved the second I heard the sound, not wasting a second to see what it was.

Ren did the same, so the foot-long talons were left holding a chunk of dirt and grass instead. The bird shot back up immediately, breaking past the canopy again and vanishing.

My eyes searched the leaves overhead with sharp focus as the rough winds buffeted me, every fiber of muscle in my body steeled and ready to fight. Flux flooded my veins, filling me with power. The shift from relaxed to primed for a fight had been so smooth it was almost instantaneous, and a small, hidden-away corner of my mind glowed with pride at the fact.

Ren and I didn’t have to wait long for the bird to return, and when it did, we were ready. It crashed through the leaves above at incredible speeds, moving so fast that all I could make out was a black-and-white blur. What I knew for a certainty, however, was that it was headed straight at me, and I reacted before I even registered the thought. Flux welled in my palms and burst outward, igniting into brilliant marigold flames as it did.

The stream of fire was powerful and hot, enough that the violent winds only served to fuel its strength instead of suppress it, but strangely, as they engulfed the blurred form of the bird, a sudden gust of wind burst outward from the bird and snuffed out the flames immediately. The wind also hit me with a powerful shove, knocking me off balance and onto the ground.

My mind raced as I fueled the flames on my palms with as much Flux as I could gather, the disorientation of the wind and my fall making it hard to focus on what I had to do. So, instead, I stopped thinking and let my body work as instinct dictated, knowing that I would be dead before I could consciously decide what to do.

My body moved seemingly on its own as I punched outwards the second the bird’s beak entered the sphere of Flux that I could sense. The timing was perfect. My flaming fist contacted the side of the bird’s face a second before the animal’s beak pierced my chest, knocking the thing to the side enough for me to roll in the other direction and out of the way.

The bird’s momentum drove it into the ground in a massive cloud of dirt, the shock of my punch likely knocking the bird off guard enough that it couldn’t change its direction fast enough.

I wasn’t about to let the bird have a break, though, and neither was Ren. Before the dust even settled enough for either of us to make out the bird’s form, both of us began to attack. I put my hands together and let out two streams of flame that met right where the cloud of dirt was centered, and Ren fired off one of his Flux blades into the mess.

Both attacks found their marks, if the spray of blood and pained squawking was any indication. The violent wind around us began to pick up as I cooked the bird, whipping my hair into my face as it raced around the clearing. Soon, it got hard to stay on my feet, and even harder to keep the stream of fire going long enough to reach the bird.

Eventually, I had to stop since my Flux was just being wasted. The winds rapidly died down as I stopped, and the cloud of dust was finally allowed to settle, revealing the scorched, wounded, furious bird in the middle. There were no human features on its face for me to read, but I could still see the utter rage in the animal’s eyes.

Unfortunately for it, Ren’s blade had bit deep into one of its wings, which would have greatly hindered its ability to fly on its own, but my flames had sealed the deal. The bird was now as land-bound as the rest of us, which meant its greatest weapon – its incredible speed – was now useless.

Still, that didn’t mean that it was entirely helpless now. I sensed more than saw the wind blade that it sent out at me, rolling to the side just as the blade entered my Flux sense’s range.

The wind blade passed by me with a whoosh, traveling into the jungle behind me and severing a few taller plants before dissipating.

Once again, I felt a rush of gratitude at my new sense, knowing that there was no way I’d have been able to dodge the blade without it. It had traveled silently and with only the slightest visible distortion in the air it moved through, which made it almost impossible to discern with normal senses alone.

I didn’t take the attack passively, however, and fired my own attack as I rolled to the side. What I sent was the product of a sudden flash of inspiration: a kind of elongated bullet of compressed flame, about the length of my finger and tapered to a sharp point on one end. The purpose was to speed up the process of creating projectiles, as the arrow idea I’d had took too much time.

And the product fulfilled its purpose well enough for me. The orange-red bullet sped off toward the bird in response to its wind blade, and although it certainly had the reflexes to dodge my attack, the scorched half of the animal rendered it nearly immobile. So the bullet found its mark, biting deep into the soft underbelly of the animal, sizzling as it did.

The bird threw up its head as it screeched in pain, exposing its neck as it did. I didn’t notice that at first – I didn’t have an assassin’s instincts, after all – but Ren certainly did, and he capitalized on it mercilessly. Moving faster than I could possibly hope to, he burst forward with one forceful step and sped past the pained animal, landing on the soft dirt a meter on the other side of it within the second.

The bird, who’d only raised its face to the heavens for the briefest of moments, never got to look back down to the earth as it fell on its back, a bloody line drawn across its neck. Half of its feathers were scorched black, and the down under its neck was drenched in the scarlet of its lifeblood, leaving the once-graceful animal only a sad echo of itself.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Fortunately for it, it didn’t live long enough to see its own fall from grace, and before long, the small clearing returned to the quiet peace that Ren and I had been enjoying not a minute earlier.

I looked at Ren as the two of us let loose a breath, our muscles relaxing at the same time. “I’m gonna go grab my pole before we get ambushed by another animal,” I said tiredly, knowing that it was unlikely that we were done fighting for the day. I had a growing suspicion that the denizens of the forest weren’t going to be very gracious hosts during our stay. It would be best if I kept my weapon close, and my guard up at all times. Daily life in the forest didn’t seem like it would be very accommodating to slips in focus.

–

I had no idea how right I’d turn out to be. Three weeks and countless slain beasts later, the real effects of the dangers of the forest had begun weighing on me in full force. The exhaustion of three weeks of constantly being on guard burned in my limbs, but I forced my body to move, dodging to the side as a rock crashed into the dirt at my feet. I fired another fire bullet as I did, the action almost muscle memory at that point. My aim was true, and the fifth monkey fell from the branches and thumped on the dirt floor, a hole still sizzling right in the center of its throat.

Ren moved in the second that the three remaining monkeys wasted watching their fallen comrade. A swift swipe ended one monkey immediately, but the second managed to jump just a second before Ren could reach its throat. Still, he nicked it on the shoulder hard, enough to knock it off balance in the air and make it miss the branch it had been aiming for.

Two fire bullets lodged themselves into its head and chest before it could hit the ground, leaving it dead as a rock as it crashed into the dirt under it. The last monkey, true to the cowardly manner I’d come to expect from its kind, didn’t spare its fallen comrades a glance before vanishing into the leaves with a screech.

Ren sighed and fell off the branch he’d been on, landing with his customary grace. Neither of us cared to hunt down the animal. One more dead monkey would hardly make a dent in their immense population. The jungle had a serious monkey infestation, I’d come to find.

I walked up to the seven monkey corpses on the ground and toed one, wrinkling my nose at their smell. “Looks like monkey meat is on the menu for tonight,” I said, feeling neither apprehension nor anticipation at the prospect. Monkey meat was a little gamey, tough to chew, but it tasted fine if we cooked it right. Which, admittedly, was a big if. We’d had three weeks of practice, but it was far from enough to turn either of us into a proper cook. Thankfully, there was usually an abundant amount of meat ready for us by evening, more than we could ever finish in a day, so a few burnt cuts weren’t the end of the world.

Ren chuckled in response, handing me his dagger without a word. I sighed and got down to work, trying to remember everything Ren taught me while keeping my stomach from emptying itself. The work was revolting, and the daily practice had done little to help. And the monkey’s smell certainly didn’t make matters easier either, not to mention the fact that their anatomy was a little too similar to humans’ for my liking.

Still, survival was more important than my tastes, and I did the work without complaint. Well, with minimal complaint, if I was being honest, but I didn’t see the need to disguise my disgust around Ren; it wasn’t like I needed to keep up appearances around him. We’d spent so much time together by that point that we hardly needed words to understand each other – which, I’d come to find, was an unexpectedly helpful skill in the jungle – so we’d all but abandoned the veil of politeness that friendships normally demanded.

I made quick work of the first dead monkey – quick, but decidedly not skillful – and I’d salvaged enough meat for the day. And that was about all we needed, mainly because more than that would be too much to carry, but there was also the fact that finding more meat tomorrow was almost guaranteed. Not a day had passed since we’d entered the forest that at least three different species hadn’t assaulted us, and I saw no reason for that pattern to change.

And indeed, it didn't. Life continued in much the same manner as the first three weeks, although I got noticeably better at handling it. Having to be on edge constantly was incredibly taxing, but I eventually got the hang of balancing relaxing and being on guard. It was a matter of always being ready for an attack, but never expecting one. It was a slight change, but it made all the difference.

In practice, it meant walking through the forest without fearing an attack from every hidden spot that could potentially hold an enemy; there were too many of those spots, after all, and being on guard against each of them was too much for any mind. Instead, I learnt to stamp on the fear I felt at the sight of every hidden nook, but always be ready in case those fears came true.

Sleeping, on the other hand, was much harder to get the hang of. Ren adapted very easily, which saved my life multiple times as it still took me almost five seconds to shift from sleeping to ready to fight. Five seconds wasn’t a long time, but when a python was inches away from your face in the dead of night, five seconds was the difference between life and death.

We’d taken to sleeping on thick, high branches, which mitigated the danger of most of the animals in the night, but there was one particular nocturnal snake whose favourite hunting grounds happened to be exactly the kinds of places we slept, and more than once I’d awoken to Ren’s dagger poking through the head of a python mere seconds away from biting my face off.

But beyond the dangers, life was good. I relished the freedom, the knowledge that no one had any control over my life. And the forest, when we weren’t being attacked by it, was a beautiful place. The constant nature was an amazing change of pace after having spent my entire life in a corporate, concrete jungle. And not having to experience all of it on my own made everything so much better; it made the bad parts tolerable, and the good parts all the more enjoyable.

Life settled into a comfortable rhythm, one of constant improvement, constant movement, and a prevailing sense of peace that I’d so sorely lacked in my life it almost tasted sweet on my tongue; like the sweetness of water in a parched mouth.

The peaceful routine remained relatively unbroken for a while, and before I knew it, three months had passed us by. Then, early one day, as we continued our seemingly endless journey of trailing the sun, we came upon a sight that we hadn’t seen since the first day we entered the forest: a village. But this wasn’t the simple goblin’s village that we had razed to the ground. No, this was a step above in construction and sophistication. And, most importantly, this village wasn’t inhabited by those simple little green creatures; it was inhabited by humans.