“Not just one! We’ve got at least three of them coming up!” Heath shouted as he took a frontal stance, ready to finish the first one before the other two made it to them.
“Quadrupeds! Slim builds! Very fast!” Sonja added to Heath’s warnings as she drew her bow.
The first one barreled into Heath’s great shield, a well-timed side step deflecting the monster’s entire body directly into the path of Sonja's arrow. Heath’s heavy slash followed with a decisive thunk before he whirled back to face the final two.
The second one slammed into his shield head on, while the other flicked up and over it, long tail working to stabilize the abrupt movements. It leapt, clearing Heath completely to get at Michael and the barely conscious boy in the back, but before it could reach them, Eik managed to grasp it by the tail and slam it bodily into the soft forest mulch.
For a moment, the impact left the beast discombobulated, granting Eik an opportunity to plunge the hectona fang into a sinewy thigh. It howled hoarsely as a dose of Profound Toxin invaded its system. It began to thrash and Eik triggered a short burst of Movement Boost to disengage from a potential lunge.
Seeing him retreat, the monster turned its attention to the healer and the Alliance F-ranker, jaws snapping as it began to advance. Eik triggered Movement Boost again and buried the fang in the bony space between the monster’s spine and shoulder blade before it could turn back to face him.
In the same movement, he leapt backwards, getting a hold of the tail as he went and hauling the monster away from Michael’s position. With an exertion of force, he threw it over his head with both hands and ran for Heath and Sonja.
Their opponent was not doing so hot, two arrows protruding from the quadruped’s hindquarters, causing a limp. It lunged at Heath as Eik ran towards them but abruptly broke off its attack in favor of dodging another arrow from Sonja. The beast was agile to say the least, but fragile as made evident by the fact that an F-ranker like Eik had been able to throw one of them around like a dirty dish rag. They were likely somewhere around low F-rank.
Profound Toxin already flowed from the venom duct of the fang as Eik rushed in. With its attention fixed utterly on the woman firing arrows at it, the monster had no time to react when Eik rammed a knee into its rib cage and immediately followed it up with an envenomed stab to the opposite row of ribs.
The amount of toxin injected was minor, but it would do some damage to an already exhausted foe.
With a surge of Movement Boost, Eik leapt back, spinning in the air to face the monster he had thrown just before. The thing was only just getting to its feet as he approached, sick and blackened veins slithering out in all directions from the puncture wounds where his toxin had invaded.
The beast cowered at his advance, long tail tucked between its legs as it whimpered. For a moment, Eik felt a pang of hesitation at what he knew he had to do, but it was short-lived. They had come to this foreign world with purpose, and the monster would without a doubt have slaughtered them ruthlessly had the situation been reversed.
A glance over his shoulder told Eik that Sonja and Heath had dealt with theirs, so instead of hurrying to finish off the fiend in front of him, he simply stood there and watched it squirm. It was really quite a strange feeling, he found, to have the life of another in the palm of his hand. He had certainly been responsible for the recovery of a patient before, but this was like the opposite side of the same coin.
He watched as the blackened veins spread further and further out from the wounds like so many snakes. He watched as the pitiful being grew weaker by the second, its legs betraying it as it attempted to stand. He watched as it collapsed to the ground, unable to keep its eyes open. And finally, he watched as it died, its chest rising and falling feebly one last time before it lay still.
It wasn’t regret, but some kind of feeling swirled in his stomach as he looked at the corpse. The slowness of it all felt… personal, somehow—completely different from the sudden, bloody, and entirely barbaric affair of a death by the blade. The slow descent into silence was haunting.
It was, of course, an utterly absurd notion, Eik realized, to ponder the death of an alien monster as he was, but nonetheless, he found himself unable to shake the thought. A hand on his shoulder pulled him out of the stupor with a jolt of surprise.
“What’s up?” Heath asked as he wiped down his sword with some moss he had pulled off the trunk of a tree. “What’re you thinking about?”
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“Nothing in particular,” Eik said as he turned his back to the corpse, walking with Heath back to the half dead tree against which the boy from the Nidafjeld Alliance was slumped. It had already been hot and humid in this jungle to begin with, but the sweat was running down Michael’s angular face in never-ending thick, heavy beads.
“Are you okay, Mike?” Eik asked, the green glow from the healer's palms never ceasing.
“We need to get the boy back to the clearing so he can get proper treatment at the alliance headquarters,” he gasped and fell back on his ass. “I’m exhausted, and what I can do for him with my shitty abilities isn’t enough. He’s more or less stable, I hope, and I think I’ve managed to extend his life by a bit, but it’s urgent. We need to get him through to them via the next fracture.”
Eik knelt and put another two healing spheres in the boy’s mouth. Hopefully they could get a new batch when they handed him over to Atla.
Heath, who had managed to avoid taking a single hit throughout the skirmish with the aggressive animal, picked up the boy as if he was a sack of feathers. Careful of the wound, he held him gently to his chest as they began the long trek back to the clearing. Without the markers they had scratched into the trees on the way, they would have been completely lost.
They trudged on in silence, the four of them on high alert now that Heath was carrying the wounded boy and unable to have his shield out and ready to tackle ambushes. Instead, Eik, given his Movement Boost, took the lead.
If they were attacked again, he and Sonja would have to keep whatever appeared at bay for the moment it would take Heath to place down the boy and throw on the tower shield strapped to his back.
It was when they were reaching the edge of the decaying area of the forest that Eik signaled for a stop, fist raised as he looked around, sniffing the air intensely.
“What in the world are you doing?” Heath asked, coming up on his side, the boy mumbling something incoherent in his sleep.
Eik didn’t answer for a moment as he continued to flare his nostrils. “Don’t you smell that?”
“Now that you mention it;” Michael concurred, putting his nose close to a nearby blooming flower but quickly dismissing it. “It’s sweet. Really sweet, actually. What is that?”
“Forget smelling, don’t you hear that?” Sonja said, her fingers caressing the handle of her bow as she fished out an arrow.
Eik strained his ears and immediately heard what she was talking about. Continuous distant booms echoed from the direction they had come. The sound was dull and deep, like the hollow impact of a large rock falling into a still lake. With each boom, it grew closer and clearer.
“That doesn’t sound so good,” Michael said and began to back away from the sound.
“Look, the mushrooms!” Half meter tall mushrooms grew against almost all of the unhealthy trees. They were vibrating, growing in intensity as they released a shroud of pinkish spores into the air.
“Get back, and don’t inhale that!” Eik shouted as he waved for them to hurry. “Run! I don’t think we saw those mushrooms in the healthy forest! Just a little more!”
About sixty meters back, a forceful blast rocked nearby trees, branches swinging as if in a hurricane while leaves and dried bark were ripped violently from the limbs. In a chain reaction, the closest mushroom too erupted shortly after the first in an expanding pink sphere of spores, followed immediately by the next in line and then the next.
“Run, run!” Even with their F-rank speed, the booms were catching up to them faster than they could flee. Eik looked back over his shoulder and saw that the distance between their team and the destruction had already shrunk by a third.
Heels digging deeply into the soft earth, Eik slid unsteadily and dashed for the nearest mushroom, the spore cap releasing thick, sweet clouds into the air relentlessly.
“What are you doing?” Sonja shouted, looking ready to come back to get him.
“I think I’ll be fine,” he answered, drawing the simple knife he had received from C-ranker Andrew Brooks during the second monster wave. The weapon didn’t compliment his Profound Toxin ability that well, but it was exactly what he needed now. “I have a resistance! Just keep running!”
With a swift movement, he severed the spore cap close to the ground, the eruption of spores ceasing instantly. He grasped it tightly and hurled the severed mushroom toward the swiftly approaching chaos of explosions. The spongy projectile drew a pink trail like a bizarre comet as it sailed under the canopies.
Eik dove for the next mushroom and repeated the process, sending it flying into the eruptions. He severed seven more as he ran back toward his friends.
After the eighth, he threw himself to the ground where he curled up and covered his head protectively. When the explosions reached the first of the severed plants, there was a brief lull where only distant echoes still rung dully.
The explosive spore bursts must have contained some kind of reactive material, because when the residue floated into contact with the closest intact cap, it erupted at full strength, renewing the deadly chain in full.
He half expected even the severed stems to react, but nothing blew his limbs apart as he lay on the ground, the eruptions continuing on each side, forming a neat oval of safety around him. Hopefully the delay had been enough to allow his team to get out of the mushroom territory.
He got to his feet slowly, dust and leaves still settling around him. No missing arms or legs, luckily. He looked back the way they’d come. Had the chain of explosions followed the path they had trodden? It almost felt targeted. Or maybe it was an unfortunate result of some manner of evolutionary sensory trait of the mushrooms.
He ran after his friends with a sense of dread weighing in his stomach. The booms had died down, but if they hadn’t made it out in time, they might well be dead already.
Shortly after crossing over to a mushroom-free area of the forest, Eik’s sense of dread turned into desperation when the sound of a person moaning in agony reached his ears from up ahead. Fearing the worst, he sped up to break through the first layer of vegetation.