Beowulf, the old hunters.

The Beowulf once were the protectors of the Mountaliya. They were humanity’s prime slayers against the monstrosities, until their disappearance ages ago, and after that they were considered to be extinct.

However, some years ago, a Beowulf was reported to be still alive, the last of his kind.

Viglaf could do nothing but remain a bystander at the scene that had just transpired a few minutes ago. He looked on as Azlan, or rather, Beowulf kneeled and took out some sort of apparatus with a needle on its one end and a glass vial on the other, and stabbed the monstrosity’s bleeding corpse with it.

“W-what are you doing?” that was the only meek response Viglaf could eek out.

“Hm?” Azlan turned his head to look at Viglaf’s direction. It almost seemed as he had forgotten about Viglaf’s existence. “Ah, this is a tool for the extraction of Vile Essence”, he replied, it was apparent from his tone that he was unsure how to explain it to a kid.

“What is that used for?” the kid asked with a dissatisfied tone, fear still lurking somewhere in his voice.

Still as curious as ever though.

“Vile essence is something the wendigo use”, Beowulf tried to summarize. “Ah, the wendigo are a group of monstrosity hun-”.

“I know who you are”, Viglaf cut him off, barely managing to not stammer. “You’re the one they call the murderer”.

Beowulf the Murderer.

Azlan was a well-known Wendigo among the masses of the continent Forsa. Perhaps, it was in part due to that macabre name given to him.

Maybe this Morvest brat wasn’t as clueless as Azlan had chalked up him to be.

“Wasn’t Morvest supposed to be cut off from the world?” Beowulf got up and pocketed the vial plus the apparatus in a small satchel he had on his hip. Seemingly done with the corpse.

“It is”, Viglaf said gazing at the corpse from a few feet’s distance. “It’s just that you’re amazingly famous! Or maybe infamous, I dunno”, his excitement was slowly overwhelming his fear. “We also have your wanted poster on our town’s news board”.

Not anymore, Azlan had ripped off that old thing earlier after all.

“I am expecting you to keep your mouth shut about this”, Azlan flicked his forehead very lightly as he passed by.

“Such a big responsibility”, Viglaf took a jab with his words sarcastically, apparently recovered from the initial shock.

“Bear with it”, Azlan replied with an easy going tone and gestured him to follow. “We’re done here.”

Viglaf gave him an odd look.

“Aren’t you going to eat that monstrosity?” he asked.

Ah, so this is what happens when you let rumors run wild.

Azlan could imagine his oldman saying how much neutrality is important to a wendigo, because it affects them as a whole. But alas, he was never much of a democrat, or a conversationalist for that matter. He assumed that even if he tried to quell the hearsay and rumors, he would only make it worse.

And his assumption was correct.

And so he let them be, no doubt pissing off the other wendigo.

“I don’t eat monstrosities, none of my kind do, as far as I’m aware”, Azlan was eyeing the woods for an easy path down.

“They say your kind eats them and takes their strength. And you’re amazingly greedy, you’ll do anything for a fortune”, he kicked a pebble to the side.

It seemed ‘Amazingly’ was the only extreme word in the kid’s vocabulary.

“The idea isn’t wrong, it’s just skewed”, Azlan pushed some bushes aside. “We don’t eat them. As you saw a few moments ago, we harvest essence from them, it’s a sort of elixir that enhances our abilities”.

“Enhance? How?” Viglaf fired off another barrage of questions.

“Stamina, endurance, strength and mobility, that sort of thing”, Beowulf replied without paying much attention, as he seemed to have trouble finding a safe path leading down to Morvest.

“I can lead you down if you want, I know of a path”, the brat suggested, crossing arms behind his head.

Then why the hell had he been quiet until now?

Unless, of course, there was a catch.

“But?” Beowulf questioned.

“You gotta tell me about yourself”, Viglaf was already walking, ready to guide him.

As Azlan looked at the breaking dawn, he thought perhaps today won’t go as he had intended after all.

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The term ‘Wendigo’ had originated in ages long lost to time. In their folklore, the wendigo was a creature who committed acts of murder indiscriminately, devoured other beings and possessed insatiable greed.

The term was somehow fitting in current times, yet ultimately misleading.

“So, you’re telling me you can regenerate from any wound?”

“I didn’t say that, I said my regeneration is a bit better than an average human’s”.

“So, you’re not immortal?”

“No”.

This back and forth routine was starting to grate on Azlan’s ears.

“Your senses and abilities are enhanced only after drinking the essence or whatever? How long does the effects last” Viglaf asked with great interest.

“Yes, and they last for a few minutes. Enough to get the job done, I suppose”, Beowulf answered as he endured the endless questions.

“That seems nice”, Viglaf said with a dreamy tone.

However, all was not as it seemed. Each time the vile essence was consumed, something changed in their bodies permanently. Slowly but surely, their abilities and senses deviated from that of an average human being.

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“It really is amazing though, you smashed that thing with one blow!” Viglaf was thoroughly infatuated with the idea of the wendigo.

“That had nothing to do with strength or being a wendigo”, Azlan nonchalantly said. “These things weigh a lot. I only jumped, gravity did most of the work”.

He motioned with his gauntlets.

“How much do they weigh?!” Viglaf was undoubtedly curious.

“I couldn’t even lift them off the ground when I first got them”, Beowulf replied, briefly reminiscing.

“Hmmm”, the boy glanced at the gauntlets and noticed something.

It wasn’t that his pieces of armor were rusty, it was most likely dried blood.

“Say, Beowulf. Why did you take someone like me with you? Don’t you think I’m a nuisance?” the sudden shift in tone didn’t go unnoticed by Azlan.

“Why are you asking that?” Beowulf asked the question this time.

“Somehow you don’t seem the type that is very good with people, at first glance you seem like a selfish person who doesn’t care about others and would do anything as long as they get what they want”, Viglaf tried to explain as best as he could.

How rude.

Yet not completely off the mark.

“I think you’re judging too much by appearances”, Beowulf said.

“...If you say so”, he replied as they walked down the path, not satisfied by the answer.

Such a person once existed, didn’t he?

They could see Morvest down below, in the distance. They were about halfway there.

“Oh right, I hear the Beowulf of the legends could talk to dead people”, Viglaf said as if he had remembered something.

“It’s just a family name”, Azlan quelled the doubts.

“Oh... alright”, he seemed to be in a somber mood since a while ago. “Say, do you think I could become a huntsman or maybe a wendigo?”

“Hm, let’s see”, Azlan said as he took a pseudo analytical look at Viglaf.

Brown hair, hazel eyes, height about 170 cm, stature not muscular, rather more on the skinny side.

“No, it’s impossible for you after all”, Azlan concluded. “I think it would be better if you became a merchant or a worker at a walled city, you’d be surprised how much opportunity there is”.

“So direct”, Viglaf reacted.

Perhaps, Beowulf was being indeed unnecessarily curt.

But anything was better than dying a desolate death in the middle of nowhere. He’d be just another unknown corpse at the side of the road.

“You are so odd, you never scolded me for following you and nearly getting myself killed”, Viglaf sighed. “I thought you didn’t care about what happened to me, but now you reject the idea of me becoming a huntsman”.

“Those are two different things”, Azlan carefully avoided a stone in his path that would have caused him to stumble.

“And you somehow trust me enough to think I won’t tell the townsfolk about what you are”, the boy made a confused expression.

Oh no, Azlan didn’t trust him, not at all.

He believed in the fact that the brat was scared enough of him, that he wouldn’t pull a stupid stunt like that.

The most likely scenario was that the kid would blurt out the beans sooner or later, but Beowulf would be long gone from Morvest by then, the job was done after all.

Moments after these thoughts crossed his mind, he heard a bestial scream in the distance.

An all too familiar scream.

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There shouldn’t have been more than one monstrosity.

They only roamed the misty valleys, one of them creeping onto the mountain was already a rare occurrence.

Azlan had dismissed it as a rarity.

Now, however, it couldn’t be ignored.

His job was done, he could’ve made a run for it, he should have gone to the spokesman; collected his coin, and be on his way out of town.

But he chose to stay.

“Get behind the tree”, Azlan sternly instructed the boy to cover behind a large tree. “And stay there this time”.

Watching him run to cover, Beowulf took out the glass vial from his satchel. He gazed at it briefly, took off the lid, and drank it all in one go.

Almost instantly, he could feel his body temperature rising.

Slowly, he exhaled. He could see the breath coming out of his mouth.

His preparations complete, he closed his eyes.

He could hear two, no perhaps three of them heading towards his direction. And fast.

And soon enough, they were in sight.

Bearing the same grotesque form as the last one Beowulf had slayed.

One of them stayed behind the thicket and the other two carefully approached him.

Viglaf carefully peeked from behind the tree.

The two monstrosities were trying to circle around Azlan, ready to pounce at any moment.

Seemingly tired of just stalking, one of them screamed and rushed him.

These things were as mindless as ever.

Beowulf took a deep breath and waited for it to come closer.

And closer.

He waited till the monstrosity swung its mangled claw, formed out of bone fragments.

Beowulf dodged by spinning to his side, and punched the monstrosity using the momentum of his rotation.

To Viglaf, it seemed less like a punch and more like he just threw himself towards the monstrosity, fist first.

Beowulf’s fist sunk into the abomination’s face, if it could even be called that, and it staggered.

However, it was not enough.

“Damn...” Beowulf realized too late, as the backhand of the abomination hit him, he tried to block the impact by crossing his hands in front of him, but the sheer force of the impact sent him crashing into a tree behind him, breaking a few branches.

As Beowulf lay there dazed, the mass of horror didn’t waste a moment and lunged towards him.

“Mistake”, Beowulf thought as he grabbed a large broken branch lying beside him and jammed it into the mouth of the wretched thing and got up.

Without letting it retreat, he inhaled and struck one end of the branch with all force he could muster.

The branch pierced through its flesh, tearing it apart from the inside.

The monstrosity ghastly gargled for a few moments and then collapsed.

It was then, when he realized that the other one had already crept behind him.

Instinctively, he threw himself on his back, to avoid its attack, but the claw grazed his leg as he fell.

The abomination pounced on him, trying to bite his head off with its horrid, jagged teeth.

Laying on his back, Beowulf held out his arm to prevent it from reaching his face.

However, it was overpowering Beowulf rapidly, and he had no way to retaliate, it took him his all to muster up a defense.

It was all or nothing at this point, he held out both arms and tried to undo the straps of his right arm gauntlet, all while avoiding the monstrosity’s teeth.

He cursed while gritting his teeth, barely managing to undo the straps, and shoved the gauntlet vertically between its jaws, stopping it from biting his face off.

The abomination, caught off guard by his action, retreated a few steps back, desperately trying to remove the object between its jaws.

Beowulf couldn’t let this opportunity he created go to waste, he instantly got up and dashed up to it, grimacing due to the slight pain in his leg. The mass of death noticed him and swung its arm at him.

Predictable.

Beowulf strafed to the right, managing to avoid it. As soon as its arm hit the ground, he used it to climb on its body. He stepped on its shoulder and jumped upwards.

While falling down, he grabbed the upper jaw of the monstrosity with his left gauntlet, the sheer weight of the gauntlet and his falling momentum pulled the abomination’s head down and slammed it against the ground.

Doing that caused its jaws to forcefully close, forcing the gauntlet that was inside its mouth to come bursting out of its skull.

The abominations whole body underwent a spasm and after a few seconds, stopped moving.

But Beowulf had no moment to rest, he quickly took out the now bloody gauntlet out of its skull and put it back on in a hurry.

There was a third one, after all.

“Beowulf!” he heard Viglaf’s scream.

The monstrosity had found the kid and was right upon him.

“Damn it!” Beowulf couldn’t reach him.

But before he could even move, they heard growling.

It was somehow so foreboding, that it felt like the whole world had fell silent.

And before they could make sense of what was happening, the monstrosity that was near Viglaf screamed in pain as its body was sliced in two.

Beowulf watched in disbelief as the abomination fell into a pool of its own viscera.

“W-what is happening?” Viglaf ran up to him.

Beowulf grabbed his arm and moved Viglaf behind him, while the growling continued to get louder and louder.

Someone or something was here, hunting them.

Was it more monstrosities?

No, this was different.

This was not mindless behavior.

Ah.

Come to think of it, they were indeed intruding on someone’s mountain.

The Ghosts of Everness.

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