Swish, swish, swish!
Lan Jin casually swings his newfound blade in front of him as he walks, each swing cutting down small amounts of grass. He doesn’t do it because it makes it easier for him to walk through the tall grass or because he wants to have greater vision, but because he’s bored and just wants to play with his new toy. All the while, his attention is focused on walking forward without tripping and restarting the jade whenever it stops playing so he has more fire to play with later.
At this point, his Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame was already fairly sizable and he was sure he could burn a pear to get another strand of purple mist, but he wants to wait until he gets to the forest so he can burn something he doesn’t plan on sustaining his life with.
Having already walked for several hours, it was starting to get more than a little warm out but he hopes that he had made good enough time that he might still arrive in the forest before the worst of the heat comes out to bake him. Unfortunately, with the grass still towering over him, all he knew was that he had walked for several miles. He only hopes that he had walked several miles in a generally straight line and that he hadn’t managed to turn himself around at some point.
Bored, tired, sweaty, and more than a little warm, Lan Jin continues on his journey while leaving an indistinct path of poorly cut grass behind him. He continues on in this way for another half an hour, his blade constantly swishing through the air, and his feet aching until he starts feeling a strange sense of discomfort.
Lan Jin doesn’t know where the feeling comes from, or even when it started, but one moment he felt bored out of his mind, and before he knew it a cold chill started going down his spine. It’s a strange sensation to him and he ignores it at first, but when his discomfort begins to build he starts getting anxious.
“What the fuck is wrong with me?” He wonders while shaking his shoulders up and down, hoping that the small movements will settle his nerves. It doesn’t though, and his anxiety sits heavily in his heart until he starts looking around, paranoid.
He inadvertently begins to pay more attention to his surroundings, his head slowly turning left and right as he occasionally lifts his arm and wipes sweat off of his forehead every few minutes. He never sees anything, but for some reason, he finds that to be extremely unsettling. After several minutes, he decides to stop playing the jade in the Omega Browser’s Space until his discomfort fades.
When a few more minutes pass, he starts breathing more heavily and begins reacting to every sound he hears. Whether it is the wind blowing through the grass or small insects buzzing in the air, Lan Jin suddenly finds everything to be terrifying and he can’t help but wonder why he is so inexplicably afraid. Even the smell around him cause his nerves to spike, but why that is he can’t explain.
Eventually, Lan Jin begins picking up his pace. It’s slow at first, and he doesn’t notice that he’s doing it until his breathing starts getting more labored, but once he realizes he’s walking faster, he chooses to run instead.
It is then that Lan Jin knew something is wrong other than his nerves acting up because he finally hears something shift behind him and he can’t help but increase his speed even further. He had never felt this way before, but he now knew that something was stalking him from behind. What he didn’t know was what caused him to feel so afraid in the first place. He definitely hadn’t realized anything until he heard the shift of something behind him, so he shouldn’t have had any reason to be responding the way he did. He was even pretty sure it wasn’t his instincts helping him out because he was a city boy through and through and the worst thing he’d ever had to endure was being messed with for being average height. And though he’d spent a few hundred hours playing popular survival games, and his dad had taught him a few emergency wilderness survival techniques, he was pretty sure his instincts were about as useful as sunglasses at midnight.
Regardless of what it was that spurred him to run, Lan Jin couldn’t be bothered to figure it out because something audibly begins chasing after him. He has no clue what it is, but the heavy shuffling sound of its feet and the grunting, sniffing sounds it makes as it moves causes Lan Jin to go pale in the face and he begins moving at a dead sprint as he charges through the grass.
All the while, Lan Jin repeats a mantra inside his head as his feet pound the ground. “Don’t trip, don’t trip, don’t trip!”
Without being able to see where he is going, he places all of his hope on just moving a little further, on staying ahead just long enough that whatever is following him gives up. He’s even too afraid to turn his head to see what it is that is following him. He thinks that the second he does, that will be the instant when his feet find a gopher hole or a large rock that causes him to face plant for the second time today.
So he moves forward, his breathing labored, sweat pouring down his face, and his heart pounding in his chest as he covers more distance in just a few minutes than he covered in the last hour combined. At the same time, the handle of the blade in his hand grows slick with his sweat and he dreads the thought of dropping it right now despite having no intention of turning to fight whatever it is that is behind him.
Before too long, Lan Jin begins to feel sick to his stomach and he starts slowing down. He had run long distances in high school, but that had always been at a moderate pace. He didn’t even know he was capable of running so fast for longer than a few seconds. Thankfully, after moving at such a hard pace, he saw a light at the end of the tunnel. The grass around him begins to grow more sparsely on the ground and it’s no longer nearly as tall as it had been, so he can finally see stalks of bamboo a hundred, maybe two hundred meters away.
The distance intimidates him, but despite wanting to stop and throw up, Lan Jin forces himself to continue running as he hopes desperately that he can hide from the thing chasing him if he can just get to the bamboo forest. He knows he isn’t far ahead of whatever it is chasing him because he can still hear its grunts and sniffing from close behind him. But the thing sounds large, and Lan Jin hopes that running so far had tired it out as much as it had tired him out.
He wants to shout at it, to scare it and send it running away, but he holds that feeling inside himself as he forces one foot in front of the other, keeping up a quick pace through sheer willpower and desperation as the distance between him and the forest ahead shrinks rapidly.
Seconds that feel like hours fly by and Lan Jin feels more and more nauseous, but he finally arrives at the bamboo forest and charges right into it without a second’s thought. He hears the thing behind him crashing through the stalks of bamboo and nearly flinches at the sound of cracking bamboo. The sound of cracking bamboo makes him think it is much larger than he had originally thought, so he looks around and runs through bamboo that is growing more closely together in hopes that it slows the thing down.
Moments later, Lan Jin feels as though he made the right choice as he can once more hear the crashing and cracking of bamboo behind him. Wanting to have a better idea of what he’s going up against, he quickly turns his head back and glimpses at the thing following him before turning back and continuing to run.
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Though he only looked at the thing for a second, Lan Jin really wishes he hadn’t. The thing is about the size of a small bear or a large dog, has brown fur with quills growing out of it, feet with long claws, and soulless beady black eyes. It looked somewhat similar to a large echidna, but only if said echidna had the head of a beaver with a mouth full of pointy teeth.
The only thing that makes him feel slightly better is the fact that the thing has two large and very obvious wounds on its body. Both of the wounds are on the creature’s right side with one being on its face and the other being around the shoulder of its front right leg. The wound on its face seems to be swollen and infected and might even be impacting the creature’s vision whereas the wound around its right shoulder is completely matted with blood and dirt and looks to be around eight inches to a foot long. It’s also clearly very deep since the creature seems to be favoring its front right leg, but it also terrifies Lan Jin that this thing can run so fast and crash through bamboo so easily when it is already heavily injured.
In his mind, the thing had no business being as large or as fast as it was. He even began to curse it silently as he shoved his way through more and more narrow stalks of bamboo. Though, even as he is thankful for managing to put a little bit of distance between himself and the monster echidna, he feels that it isn’t enough because it is very audibly still close behind him, and every time it breaks through the stalks of bamboo separating them, a trill of fear pierces Lan Jin’s heart.
Eventually, Lan Jin realizes that doing what he had been doing wasn’t going to cut it. He had to try to figure something else out.
It doesn’t take him too long to come up with a basic idea, but it isn’t until he looks back at the monster echidna a couple more times and decides that he will probably tire out before it does that he finally chooses to enact his plan. He starts looking for large amounts of bamboo growing closely together and, when he finds some, he runs through it, sliding between the stalks to the right whenever he has the opportunity as he hopes to make the monster echidna behind him use its bad leg more and more.
His first impression of his plan is that it doesn’t seem to not be working, but he isn’t sure about how effective it is. The absolute unit of a beast behind him just shoves its way through the bamboo, splitting apart multiple stalks at a time as it goes, and Lan Jin can’t really tell if he is making any progress toward tiring the thing out. Nevertheless, he continues moving further into the bamboo.
Minutes pass and Lan Jin’s exhaustion begins to peak its head out more and more. All he has had to eat over the last two days was pears and, unless he counted the stuff he drank in the River of Fate, the only water he had taken in was from those pears. Thankfully, the echidna didn’t seem too much better off at this point because it had to forcefully break through all of the bamboo in front of it to continue chasing after him.
The thought that he might have a chance at surviving this situation spurs Lan Jin to dig up the last dregs of energy he has in his body as he continues moving.
Moments later, Lan Jin finally notices an opportunity as the echidna seems to struggle to break through any more bamboo. It still manages to move forward, but it is much slower and the cracking of the bamboo is more obvious when it finally happens.
Noticing this, Lan Jin begins to shift further to the right and slows down slightly as he tries to put the thickest growth in between himself and the echidna. Gradually, Lan Jin is able to lead the echidna into a difficult situation where Lan Jin is able to move further to the side than the echidna is capable of adjusting for.
But rather than trying to move away from the echidna, Lan Jin slows down further as he allows the echidna to close the distance between them.
It takes all of Lan Jin’s willpower to not try running away again, but what keeps him steady is the knowledge that he doesn’t believe he could run much further in the first place, so if he tried to run, the stubborn animal would probably end up catching up to him before he could find safety.
So as the echidna draws closer to him, he continues moving to the right through the thick bamboo, forcing the echidna to work harder and harder to continue facing him. Eventually, they are only a few feet away from one another, but with the thick bamboo separating them, Lan Jin feels a strange sense of safety, like standing behind a guardrail on top of a skyscraper— just a thin barrier kept him from being in danger, and it was only because that barrier existed that he had the guts to put his life in such a precarious situation.
His guts win out, though, as he holds out one hand and draws the other, the one carrying his new blade, back. He swallows stiffly, his dry mouth not making the action easy, and he tries not to shake as the echidna tries to push the bamboo separating them. Then he acts, and with a single thought, he makes a purple flame with red and gold streaks running through it appear in his forward hand for one quick second.
The sudden appearance of fire causes the echidna to reel back, but the bamboo surrounding it makes the action impossible and Lan Jin takes advantage of that fact to lunge forward and thrust his blade like a spear into the echidna’s face. His blade lands above the creature’s jaw, just in front of its left eye, and pierces into its flesh before getting stopped by something hard. Noticing that he had missed, Lan Jin grits his teeth and steps forward once, pushing the blade with the weight of his body as it shoves through the echidna’s flesh leaving a bloody trail behind it until the tip of the blade puncture’s its beady black eye.
The series of actions only takes a couple of seconds, but when Lan Jin finally pulls back the creature lets out a horrifying squeal of rage and pain. To Lan Jin, it sounds like a dying pig, and it scares him so much that he nearly drops his blade, but he manages to hold himself together and begins to back away from the echidna while watching it struggle.
At this point, Lan Jin thinks it is mostly blinded. It might still be able to see out of its right eye, but if it can, it can’t see much so Lan Jin takes advantage of the moment to catch his breath and decide what he’s going to do next. His first thought is to run. But that thought comes and goes in the blink of an eye as he doubts that the creature relies solely on its eyes to hunt him. After all, it managed to find him in the tall grass despite it being nearly impossible to see more than a few feet.
Realizing this, Lan Jin quickly moves further to the right, trying to remain as quiet as he possibly can as the creature lets out pained noises. Eventually, he arrives at the creature’s side and stabs forward again, this time aiming for the old wound around its shoulder.
His blade lands true as he cuts into the echidna’s already mangled flesh and he jerks his arm back and jumps away as the echidna tries to throw its body into him. Blinded, hobbled, and impaired by bamboo, it fails to do so. But even still, Lan Jin nearly loses control over his bladder at the thought of so many sharp quills stabbing into his body.
Lan Jin begins to slowly sneak up on the creature again, relying on the loud noises it is making to hide his footsteps as he stabs his blade into it once more, this time making a deep cut into its back leg before he once again jumps away from the creature.
This process continues for several minutes until, due to loss of blood and its injured right side, the creature finally topples to the ground. It’s then that Lan Jin runs into a predicament, though, as he doesn’t know if he should finish the job.
It’s not that Lan Jin doesn’t want to kill the thing that had been hunting him, but that he doesn’t know how to approach it. Its back is completely covered in sharp quills nearly as long as his blade, and its front is protected by its two working legs that are even now flailing in the air as the creature tries in vain to attack him. Circling around it, Lan Jin eventually finds that the only place that might be safe for him to attack is its face, so he does just that.
Over and over, Lan Jin stabs his blade into the echidna’s face. Each stab leaves a long, deep trail through its fur and flesh and causes more and more blood to splash and spill onto his blade and the ground. Finally, after torturing it and cutting its face to ribbons, it finally gives up the ghost and dies.
Lan Jin continues stabbing it for several minutes, not realizing that the echidna is already dead. When he does realize it, he stumbles back, exhausted, and tries to lean against a thick stalk of bamboo only to hiss in pain as something digs into his collar. He turns his head slowly, too tired to put in much effort after experiencing so much stress, and realizes that his hoodie is still hanging off of him.
He blinks, surprised that it would still be with him after running so far and through so much bamboo. But, despite being happy that he still has his supply of pears, he can’t help but wonder if it would have been easier to run away if he had had the presence of mind to leave it behind him.