One leg, from the shoulder all the way down to a hoof made of white wood, was all that remained. Qi leached out into the ground in a vicious tear superimposed onto the world the colour of fresh blood. The Ceridaunt couldn’t do anything like this. Not even to itself. A small amount of wind Qi blew through the statue’s clearing away from the mass of violence, but it was so weak and pathetic that it had to be from something on its last legs.
“Shit.” Noem hissed and slowly retracted his bow’s draw. He gently put the arrow back into the quiver the wrong-side up so as not to trigger the skill that buzzed inside of it, then sent his bow back to his inventory. He traded it for a knife half the length of his forearm with a slightly curved blade that looked like it had been chipped out of translucent green gemstone, inscribed with jagged red patterns that evoked a sense of bloody gashes and horrible violence. A black metal spine covered the non-bladed side of the knife, transitioning into a handle that was stylized to look like a hooded snake had coiled itself around a core of black metal.
The handle nipped at his Qi, but Noem stopped it before it could do any damage. The little bastard was especially bloodthirsty for some reason–that was never a good sign. He ran his finger down the spine and activated the stasis field he’d worked into the metal, which ate away at his already dwindling power supply. But it was better than losing the extremely fragile blade.
Noem carefully stepped into the clearing and made his way to the last remaining piece of the Ceridaunt. He glanced up at the gargantuan statue legs with a twisting sense of unease, but forced himself to focus on the Ceridaunt with a shudder. He pressed his hand to the leg and felt its flow of rapidly dwindling Qi draining into the surroundings, then flipped it over to see just how bad the damage was.
Torn vines and splintered wood greeted him. Nothing had been cleanly cut; every single thing within the leg had either been pulled or sheared apart. That most likely ruled out other hunters, since anything that could do that kind of damage could just as easily destroy the bond anchor. But the ground around the leg was pristine– absolutely no signs of a struggle. Which meant the attack was most likely a violent ambush, but one that also didn’t damage the surrounding terrain in the slightest.
It didn’t add up.
As he was about to give up and look for new prey, something else caught Noem’s eye. A fingertip-sized dark grey intrusion among the green and white. He leaned in further and poked around until he revealed the source of the anomaly; his arrow. Snapped off just below where the head would’ve been.
“That’s a terrible sign.” He muttered to himself. Those arrows were strong enough that he’d once caught himself from falling off a cliff by jabbing it into the stone. Anything strong enough to destroy an arrow so cleanly was not something to be trifled with.
Qi flared. Noem shivered. He turned and slashed at the lump of horribly destructive Qi that had been launched at his back, and found himself staring down something strange. The blob of Qi slammed to the ground a few meters away and launched into a flurry of immense violence that sounded and felt like a clash between two apex predators. It cleared a second later, revealing a pristine piece of ground right where the violence had been.
The thing’s silhouette looked almost like a human. Two arms and legs with all the joints in the right places, with a torso that was just a little too thin at the waist. But the head was all wrong. A simple white wooden mask hovered where it would’ve covered a face, except there was absolutely nothing behind it. Twin globes of brilliant green Qi burned inside of hollow eyes, and vines crept up the thing’s back to connect with the mask and give a laughable facade of being a human.
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All of it was made of the same vines and white wood as the Ceridaunt, but with far more cohesion. Vines of all sizes acted as muscle, wood took the place of bones, and bark so thin it was translucent in place of skin. The thing held up the Ceridaunt’s bond anchor, as if to make sure Noem could see that it was the one who’d killed the creature, and pressed it to the center of its mask.
For a lack of a better word, the wood unfurled around the anchor to make room. It assimilated perfectly into the blank wooden slate, then gave birth to a mask with swirling lines of brilliant green Qi that felt like nature unbound. Wind kicked up around the thing in a vicious whirl, adding the second of the Ceridaunt’s strengths to the monster’s arsenal.
“Identify.” Noem said calmly while he closely watched the thing’s every move.
{Error: no matches found in existing databases. Data will be based solely on observations and the sensations picked up by the interface’s outside sensors.}
Noem clicked his tongue and ignored the popup that followed. It was just a rehash of everything he’d already seen from the Ceridaunt, combined with the attack and appearance of the monster before him. The system was terrible against anything that people hadn’t registered to its databases, but that itself was something Noem could use.
The thing that stood before him was a brand new entity. It was strong enough to brutalize a threat level two monster and an arrow. It had easily integrated a bond anchor into itself, which no longer felt like a bond anchor. The chance that this thing was already bonded to someone was great, since that was the most common source of system errors, so Noem had to fight as if the thing could get backup at any moment.
The question was; who would make the first move? Noem held his three skills and bent his knees to be ready to move in any direction, but the thing didn’t move at all. Not like how people breathed and made unconscious little motions no matter what; the thing was unnaturally stone-still. A stare-down of fairly minor proportions ensued, with Noem’s Qi-induced calm and the monster’s unnatural stillness at odds with each other.
Just as Noem began to wonder if the monster was trying to run his Qi dry, it took a step forward and let its hands fall to its sides, palms facing towards Noem as skills began inside each of them.
“What’s wrong? Getting impatient?” Noem goaded the monster, though it was all for his sake. His words didn’t leave his hood. “Can’t one-tap me like you did the Ceridaunt, can you? Does that piss you off, little masked-thing?”
Obviously that didn’t garner a reaction. But the masked thing burst into motion nevertheless. It slammed one foot into the ground with an echoing thump that shook the clearing, then clawed one hand full of skill through the air. The exact same sensation as the skill Noem had knocked away burst into being, but now that he was face-to-face with it, he could fully understand it.
Savage and primal violence. The kind that left broken and shattered boundless spirits in puddles of Qi as their very essence blew away on the wind. That explained why the Ceridaunt’s spirit hadn’t left any traces.
There wasn't any trace left to leave.
Noem rolled out of the way and sprung out of it in a sprint. He twisted his knife around in his right hand so the blade was pointing away from his body, then threw his entire body weight into a slash intended to take one of the masked thing’s arms off.
His knife bit into and through wood and vine as strong and durable as stone. No sound escaped the masked thing’s face, and it simply turned its upper body in an absolutely unnatural motion to plant its other palm on Noem’s exposed back.
Pain and wetness spread as one. Noem bit back a scream as his flesh was torn away in scraps, like the claws of a predator stripping their victim away to nothing. He lashed out with a kick he empowered with Heavy Blow at the last second, which sent the masked thing skidding away.
He reached up and felt at the back of his shoulder. His hand came back soaked in blood and little flecks of flesh that could’ve been skin or muscle. Noem rolled his shoulder to confirm he hadn’t lost the use of it, which resulted in more than a little pain, but full mobility. With any luck, the masked thing had used most of its Qi for those two brutal attacks.
Two more palmfuls of savage Qi killed Noem’s hope. He grit his teeth and shifted into as small a stance as possible to survive the masked thing’s onslaught.