A loud clanging outside Kandy’s tent woke him from what—against all expectations given the incredibly hot day—had been an incredible frigid night’s sleep.
Kandy groggily rubbed his eyes and propped himself up on an elbow. “Boom? Mr. Tin? Is that you? Are you here to save me?”
The clanging stopped, and Jabari’s giant form barged through Kandy’s tent flaps.
Kandy screamed, clutching the top of his blanket to his chest.
“For a capable warrior, your voice reaches quite the impressive notes,” Jabari calmly stated. “Get up. We must get going before the sun’s heat renders our journey impossible.”
“Alright, alright.” Kandy deftly packed up his tent and was jogging alongside Jabari mere moments later.
Seeing that Jabari had a large bag strapped to his back, about three feet tall and a foot and a half wide, Kandy asked, “Hey, want me to take your bag? I have this, uh, space thing that I can put stuff in. Makes it really easy to bring stuff around.”
“You know, it was hard to miss your tent disappearing into the air earlier, but I didn’t want to pry. But since you mentioned it… where’d you get such an item? Are you a noble of some sort?” Jabari asked.
“No, just the son of a bandit. I just, uh, made some good friends.”
“Friends.” For once, Jabari seems to be out of sorts. After a few silent moments of jogging, he finally spoke again.
“I appreciate the offer, but I have a similar device of my own. I was just wearing the bag out of habit. It can be dangerous out here in the middle of the desert—a lack of a properly-sized travel bag raises suspicions as to how the traveler is feeding and watering themselves. Makes for a juicy target for unsavory characters and I for one don’t welcome annoyances.”
The pack of his back suddenly disappeared, leaving behind only a puff of purple smoke that disappeared into the wind.
“Now that I’m traveling with you, though, I suppose I might as well put it away. Your clothes and skin color will draw unwanted attention anyways.”
Kandy looked down at his clothes and pale skin, then at Jabari’s. Yeah, the two couldn’t be more different.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m strong, and you seemed to do just fine against Yared. Our safety will not be an issue,” Jabari commented. “How’s your endurance?”
“It’s not bad. Why?”
“How about a race?”
Sensing a friendly competition, especially one that he could win, Kandy grinned. “You sure?”
“I am. As it is not a duel of a combative nature, it will not affect my Crow’s Mark, and I am quite confident in my physical capabilities.”
“Alright then.” Kandy slowed to a halt, then got into his runner’s stance. “You call it.”
Jabari readied himself as well, then began to count down. “Very well. We run at the speed of whomever is quicker, until one of us announces our own defeat, on go. 3, 2, 1… Go!”
Kandy sprinted ahead as fast as he could, pumping his arms and pushing his feet into the sand like his life depended on it.
He looked to his left, only to find that Jabari was, somehow, keeping up with him.
“Dammit!” Kandy wanted to go faster, but this was the pace that he and Beth had maintained during their time traveling through the Holy Kingdom. He wasn’t sure he could go any faster without heavily sacrificing his endurance by directing mana to his legs.
No… this would be the pace. He would simply have to outlast his opponent.
After an hour, the two were still speeding their way through the desert. Jabari’s veins and muscles were visibly stressed, and Kandy’s leg muscles felt like they were filled with burning fuel.
Kandy wheezed. “Just give up, Jabari! I can do this all day!”
Without a word, Jabari slowed to a halt.
Kandy slowed down as well, panting as he shouted his victory. “Finally! I knew I’d wear you down! To be honest, I don’t think I was going to—”
“Be silent, my friend. We are in danger,” Jabari quietly whispered back.
“Huh? What are we in danger from?” Kandy looked all around them, but there was nothing but sand, some rock formations here and there, and a mesa far in the distance.
Actually, as his eyes focused, he saw a small, furry head with giant, cute ears pop up out of the sand just ten or so meters away.
“Is… that a rabbit?” Kandy asked.
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“No, it’s a worm.”
“No, that’s… clearly a rabbit.” Kandy pointed at the rabbit, which cocked its head at the two of them in a manner that was oddly reminiscent.
What does that remind me of…?
Jabari slowly approached the rabbit, then reached down to pet it.
“Aww, see? It’s not so bad. Just a rabbit. Not a worm.” Kandy’s eyes melted at the cute scene of a giant, fearsome warrior softly petting a rabbit’s soft head.
Even as he said those words, though, the rabbit’s mouth suddenly widened, showing rows and rows of tiny little teeth.
“Yo, what the—AHHHHHH!!” Kandy started to scream at the top of his lungs as the rabbit’s mouth continued to widen, unbelievably so.
As the mouth widened, the body of a giant worm burst upwards from under the sand, throwing Jabari and Kandy across the sand.
“See? Worm.” Jabari smugly pointed at the massive sandworm that had burst out of the sand and was diving towards them from up high. The creature was at least a hundred feet long and ten feet wide.
“I see it!” Kandy shrieked as he jumped out of the worm’s way and pulled out his spear. “You better tell me those things travel alone!”
“I’m afraid not,” Jabari responded. “However, despite their size, these worms are…”
He pulled his spear out of his back and stabbed it into the worm’s side. Although the wound was tiny compared to the worm’s giant size, a strangely viscous blue liquid flowed out of the wound. The worm shrieked and dove back into the ground.
“...Quite easy to kill. If we just stab it a few more times, make a few more holes, it will bleed until it dies.”
Kandy looked up at the wailing worm. “What if I just make one big hole?”
“Hm?” Jabari looked at Kandy with questioning eyes and a furrowed brow. “That would work, yes. Why?”
“Give me a second.”
Kandy closed his eyes, then concentrated—mana flowed from his hand and down the shaft of his spear, accumulating near its tip.
The sand beneath him shifted—Kandy dove to the side and turned around, thrusting his spear at the side of the worm that had just erupted through the ground again.
Where his spear pierced the worm, the mana ravaged and burst through, instantly blowing a massive, gaping hole through the worm’s body. The front end of the worm flew into the distance and fell onto the top of a sand hill a dozen yards away, while the bottom half fell back into the hole the sand had come out of.
Jabari’s eyes narrowed. “You can use the power of the spirits. Very well, too, for one so young. How?”
Kandy shrugged. “Like I said, I have a good teacher. And back where I’m from, we call it mana.”
“Mana? Hm,” Jabari slowly sounded out the word. “I do not like this name. It feels underwhelming for the power it bestows.”
“I guess. Anyway, can you use mana? Or uh, power of the spirits or whatever?”
Jabari squared his shoulders and proudly stated, “I indeed have the ability to utilize the power of the spirits, as I am blessed through my Crow’s Mark.”
“Woah, that thing can make it so that you can use mana? Man, it took me forever to learn. I had to grab a stick and learn to feel the mana moving through it. Took forever.” Kandy set his gaze upon Jabari’s animated Crow’s Mark with some envy.
“It indeed sounds like an arduous process.” Jabari nodded in agreement. “Now prepare yourself, its allies have arrived.”
True to Jabari’s words, Kandy could see—and feel—the sands around them shift. One by one, cute little rabbits popped out of the sand and stared at the duo. This time, though, Kandy looked at their fluffy forms only with disgust and hatred.
“Seems to be an even dozen. How many can you handle?” Jabari asked.
Kandy shrugged. “I think I can take them all.”
“Oh? What a coincidence. I was thinking the same. Since you handled the earlier one, let me take care of these.”
Jabari grinned. “Without a proper display of my abilities, you might start to think that I’m weak.”
Kandy pressed the button on the side of his spear to shrink it back down to a dagger and stepped back. “All yours, then.”
Jabari raised his spear over his head and roared. As if through a signal, all the cute rabbits retreated beneath the sand. Then, a flurry of rumblings could be felt under the two travelers.
Surrounding his spear with mana, Jabari stabbed it into the ground. The sands parted and the ground beneath broke apart, revealing several of the giant worms.
He swung his spear, and with the power of the spirits, manifested an arc of mana that trailed the head of his spear and flew toward the worms.
They tried to snake away, but to no avail. Each was cleanly split in half.
Kandy had jumped out of the way earlier to escape the reach of Jabari’s first attack, but while he was in the air a worm burst through the sand under him. Kandy barely dodged the worm’s mouth in time, but its body hit him as he fell.
He ended up tumbling along its long body as it quickly slithered past, but was able to right himself and ended up running along the length of its body until he was able to jump down from its back end.
With a glance, Kandy saw Jabari dispatch another five worms with quick, efficient thrusts of his spear.
Kandy raised his hands as he ran away from the worm, which had turned to chase him. “Let’s see. He killed, uh, six with the slash. And now he’s killed one, two, three, four, five. That makes…”
He stared at his fingers, which were all raised. “Fingers, plus one. A dozen means fingers plus two, so… hm. This worm should be the last one.
“Hey, Jabari! Come get this worm before it eats me! It’s the last one!”
“I am sorry to have inconvenienced you with my desire to show my strength, Kandy,” Jabari softly murmured as the two crossed paths.
A split second after, a wave of mana pierced through the worm, spearing it from head to tail.
Seeing that all threats had been handled, Kandy slowed to a halt and wiped his brow. “Whew! They’re not strong, but their size is really quite scary.”
“Indeed.” Jabari pulled a jar out of his dimensional storage. “Now come. I will teach you how to harvest its fluids.”
“Harvest?”
“Aye. We must do so quickly, lest we be caught without shade when the sun reaches its peak.”
Kandy looked up at the sky—the sun was already starting to beat down on the desert sands.
“Sounds good.”
Apparently, what Jabari called harvesting was just squeezing the worm’s blood into a jar, an easy, if disgusting, process. When Kandy questioned why Jabari was spending precious time on doing such a thing, the latter gave a long-winded answer.
As far as Kandy could tell, the worm’s blood was a good ingredient for making potions and could fetch a pretty penny.
Thankfully, the process didn’t take long, and soon they were back on the figurative road. It didn’t take them long to find an outcrop to hide under, one with just enough room for the two of them to sprawl out in the shade.
Jabari quickly pulled his traveling pack out of his dimensional storage and set up a sleeping area. “I’m going to sleep while the sun passes. You should get some rest while you can as well.”
“Shouldn’t I keep guard?”
“Nobody will bother at this time of day. It’s during the night that we’ll have to worry.”
Kandy looked out at the sands. Under the intense heat, the sand almost looked as if it were on fire—it felt like it too. He couldn’t believe he’d traversed that hellscape the day prior…let alone survived it.
Yeah, they’d be safe until the sun set.
“Mm. Fair enough.” Kandy pulled out his tent and quickly fell asleep.