I finally lifted my eyes to the path ahead just in time for them to lock onto a set of claws scraping across the ground without noise. ‘Fairy dust…’
I quickly turned several times, scanning my surroundings. ‘You're telling me Dire wolves walk quieter than Mo breathes! How is that possible? Magic? Is it good enough to remove all sound?’ I pulled my daggers and lowered my stance. ‘And I was cocky enough to get mad at my teacher for teaching us about monsters that didn’t show up in this region…’ “Well… come on then… Let’s see what you got…”
The pack had no alpha, at least not one strong enough to distinguish itself. That was in my favor… But… They were still dire wolves. Then again, I wasn’t the same scared little girl I was the last time I fought them, on top of that, there was no one around me for miles, and so there was no reason for me to not go all out.
I coated my daggers in dark magic, extending their effective range, at the same time I enhanced my body with manna, and sensing an immediate threat, my dragon's blood activated as well, turning my eyes orange and heightening all of my senses further, including my sense of balance and self-awareness.
Without turning around I could tell one of the pack was lunging at me from behind from the movement in the air, and using my ability to control my body from the third person it was all too easy to track. I leaped in the air flipping backward and sliced its neck twice with each dagger, cross-cutting it, and rolling its head before its feet hit the ground.
The others suddenly became more cautious, their hair standing up like needles, but they didn’t run away, instead, the four remaining ones all charged at once.
Stomping the ground, ice erupted from my foot, traveling across the forest floor and spiking up through a wolf's stomach as I stepped into throwing one of my knives with enough strength to send it into another skull down to the hilt. Then I lunged forward, leveraging my small size to get underneath one as it jumped, grabbing its throat with one hand and quickly stabbing the other three times as I ran past its side. As the last wolf tried to claw at me with its front legs I threw it away before sending more ice and freezing its feet to the ground. After that… I don’t know what came over me…
A part of me was just curious about whether what the professor said was true or not… Admittedly another part of me felt that it was a shame to poke bloody holes through such nice pelts… And of course, the more vicious a wound the harder it was to clean, and the lower the quality of the meat… Regardless of the reason though, or lack thereof, I wiped the blood from my blade and sheathed it, climbing onto the wolf's back and breaking its neck with my bare hands…
Feeling the familiar crack under my fingertips sent a shudder through my whole body as the wolf fell limp underneath me and my eyes instantly went white again, my whole body going numb. Although it was just for a few seconds in total, I had enhanced myself far beyond my natural limit, and aside from my reinforcement not fully keeping up with my movements, my manna was once again almost completely drained, and without my dragon's blood giving my blood lust… I felt sick at the stench of blood… Much less myself for being the cause.
Even after I killed them I still felt out of it. With nothing else to do, I gutted the monsters and separated out their pelts and meat. Judging from what my eyes had seen, they actually used magic to silence their steps, which explained why I didn’t hear them, but it also meant that manna lingered in their body even after they were killed… Which after eating some, I found to be true.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
As I sat next to a little fire I had made I stared at what all was left of them and somehow still felt nothing. ‘It seems like the longer I cook it the more manna leaks out… I was hoping I could seep the manna into the meat, but it has the opposite effect…’ I glanced over at the raw steaks I had cut. ‘If I… no… I don’t think I’m ready for something like that just yet…’
I used recovery magic to fully finish healing my throat from when I breathed fire, as well as help heal my muscles and joints from how far I pushed them in the fight, then I ate more to sustain using that magic, and then I ate more again to help recover my manna. The wolves were big for sure, but they were wirey, so they didn’t actually weigh that much, almost more like cats, so by the time I was done I ended up eating two of them over the course of another hour or so. With only three wolves' worth of meat left, I tied the pelts together to make almost a giant blanket and put the meat inside, starting on my way back to Rothet. After about two hours it all finally started to set in. The thing that made me the most nauseous though was probably the fact I turned their skin into a bag to carry their meat… Still… Compared to even just what I saw in the dungeon, it wasn’t all that bad when I put it in perspective. Although… It was worrying that I was starting to like the scent of blood as it thinned with time.
There was no real way of preserving the meat, and I didn’t want to waste it, so after I made it back I gathered my guild mates and we all sat outside roasting barbecue as we watched the sunrise. There was still a lot of meat though, so we invited our teacher as well, mostly so I rub it in his face that dire wolves still had weak necks… After that, we just gave whatever was left over to Bear, who ominously disappeared again without telling us where. Although to be fair, we didn’t ask, at least not that time.
“So…” Mo muttered, staring at me nervously.
“He never caught on, so this should work… He said he’s coming back in three days to take you home. That’s when things get serious.”
She slowly looked down. “I thought you had to hunt demons… Do you really have time to be doing all of this?”
“Wel… Demons feed on most negative emotions, fear, sorrow, rage… So it stands to reason that if I’m really looking for demons I’ll find plenty following him around…” ‘And once again the lines intersect… Really… I don’t get why Rafi and Agis can’t get along… If I work toward one goal I’m basically doing both…’
“Hm…”
“What?”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say now… I want to say something… But nothing feels right...”
I leaned back and looked up at the sky. “How about… Good luck! I could always use more of that… Saved my life plenty of times so far…”
Her smile was always so dim you could barely tell her face moved at all but seeing it somehow made me feel warmer than the fire. “Thinking you might need it is just going to make me worry more though…”
“Yeah… That’s fair… Still. I am a noble, so it’s not like he will just kill me if he finds out.”
She sighed. “You’re betting on an assassin not killing someone?”
I suddenly felt a jolt rush through me. “I-I was… Do you really think he would?”
She grabbed a knife from my sheath and leaned her chin onto one of her hands, flipping the knife in the air and catching the tip of the blade. “He actually doesn’t like killing people that aren’t targets… So I guess maybe not… Although, he would probably get pissed you were wearing my armor, strip you naked, and then torture you until you told him everything.”
I got another chill, starting to feel even more uncomfortable in the armor. “I’d rather he just kill me… But if that did happen I’d just lie a whole bunch and get him to leave on some goose chase, answering right away to avoid the torture part.”
“You really are… Something…”
“Arn’t I?” I smiled brightly handing her the last skewer we had.
She smiled back, this time not so much dim as… Inginuine, clearly not wanting to eat but taking it anyway.
To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure she meant it as a compliment… But if a smile was all it took to make a worried little girl feel better, it was worth doing… Besides… If my plan actually worked, she’d end up being my little sister, not that I didn’t already see her like that.