When the fist came down Eik could do nothing to avoid it. It was too fast and too heavy. Life should have flashed before his eyes, but what he saw instead was Heath’s wide back obscuring the attack.

The metallic crash of a truck hitting a wall tore through the forest and a deep boom like that of a powerful bass pulsed through Eik’s body. In the next moment he was carried off his feet by Heath’s massive body.

While all air was purged from Eik’s lungs and he slid through the grass, Heath continued through the air only to hit a tree and fall to the ground, deathly still.

“Heathy!” Sonja screamed as she ran to her brother, followed by Michael, whose hands were already glowing with Heal.

Eik gasped for air as he propped himself up on his elbows. “H… H-Hea… eath. Heath!”

Rock Fist Bart approached with a steady stride, loosening his shoulders with a remorseless smile. “Accidents can really happen at anytime, as they say. That was truly unfortunate, but I’ll make sure to rectify my mistake now.”

“Don’t come any… any closer, you uppity sack of cat shit!” Eik rasped while Sonja cried mournfully on Heath’s chest.

The sound of her voice breaking tore at his heart with every sob. It was too painful to look at Michael and Sonja hunched over Heath’s broken body, so Eik aimed his gaze at Bart, hate a white-hot, blazing flame in his stomach, threatening to rip his body apart.

“Do you think you’re going to get away with this? You won’t. Everybody saw what you did,” Eik snarled.

Bart laughed, villainous staccato and the whole program. He gestured around the clearing with a grandiose sweep of his arm. “Do you see anybody watching? They’re all too busy fighting for their own lives to watch yours be snuffed out. Maybe you should follow their example.” —He glanced back at the others with a contemplative expression. A few eyes were glancing furtively in their direction—“And even if they had seen… something, they would keep quiet about it if they know what’s best for them. Not that anything would come of it if they did.” The man looked supremely confident.

Eik felt like he was about to explode. “I'll kill you.” Eik’s voice was cold and steady.

Duck Piss Bart guffawed derisively, hands on his hips in a parody of every bad guy in every movie. “And how, exactly, do you intend to kill me? You’re worthless compared to me, pharmacist.”

"I have met people stronger than any Awakened on Earth. If I call for them, they will come,” he lied.

Bart chewed on that for a moment, looking suspicious. Again a grin split his face. “But that’s only going to be an issue if you can call them, no?”

“What?”

“If you never come home, then there’s no problem,” Duck Piss Bart explained, nodding toward Heath, where Sonja had stood up, her face hidden by long hair as she nocked an arrow on the string of her bow. “And as we’ve realized, accidents can happen anytime out here, and to anyone,” he said.

An arrow grazed his ear, drawing a thin, red line across his skin. With a finger he touched the lobe and looked at Sonja. Her face was madness incarnate as she prepared another arrow, walking briskly toward Bart. “M-My bro—, brother,” she sobbed, tears running thickly. “You killed my brother, y-you fucking piece of shit! You asshole! You filthy vermin! You ugly, disgusting, bald bastard!”

Another two arrows flew, but Bart batted them away with hardly a glance. Judging by his face, he was neither wary nor particularly interested in her. “Your brother was caught up in a fight between myself and a powerful monster. It’s a very unfortunate and saddening consequence, indeed, but these things simply happen sometimes. None of us could have predicted it or prevented it.”

“You’re completely insane…” Eik hissed. Knowing the futility of it, he still found himself reaching for Viper Fang in the grass and preparing to leap at Duck Piss Bart.

Bart’s palm glowed with an eerie light as he prepared to meet them both, grin never leaving his face. Just as they were about to clash Michael bellowed at full lung, his voice urgent and hopeful. “Stop, stop! Heath’s got a pulse. He’s got a pulse! He’s alive, Sonja! Heath is alive! Hurry, we have to—”

An explosion that rocked the entire forest drowned out whatever Michael had been trying to say. An eruption of dust, earth, and wood splinters surged up and took the young healer in the back, the shock wave rocketing him toward Sonja and Eik, where he rolled and tumbled past them, screaming.

Heath’s prone body was lost as the opaque wave of debris swept over him. Sonja called his name, but the buffeting sand and soil caught in her throat and elicited a fit of coughing. Bart stood against the force without much trouble, but Eik and Sonja both had to relinquish a few paces in the face of the raging blast.

Like a cloud, the dust rose into the air as it roiled like ocean waves.

Eik and Sonja made for the tree where they had last seen Heath, fumbling through a dust cloud so dense it almost felt like a fluid. “Did you find him?” Eik heard Sonja yell. Her voice sounded far more distant than he knew her to be.

The explosion had long since settled, but something was still causing a hell of a racket close by, the rumble of cracking trees and grinding rock echoing incessantly through the forest.

Eik cupped a hand around his mouth as he called back to her. “Not yet. But I think he should be somewhere around he—”

He stumbled over something large and soft. “Heath!” he exclaimed, grabbing for his friend. What met his searching fingers, however, was sticky blood and thick, tangled fur. He lifted it up to his eyes so he could see it through the dust cloud, only to come face to face with the mutilated, severed head of a monster.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

With a yelp, he jerked back, tripping yet again on something large, his E-rank coordination not saving him from falling on his ass. This time he definitely got a handful of fabric. “Heath! Heath, is that you?” he shouted at the top of his lungs, coughing violently between the words. “Sonja, I think I’ve got him over here! Come quickly!”

Just as Eik had taken another clump of poison and gotten his hands under Heath’s arms, the sheet of dust, which was now beginning to settle, suddenly began to undulate fiercely.

Something was moving inside the still opaque expanse of gray.

“Sonja, don’t come! Stay away!” he screamed as he dragged Heath in the direction that would hopefully lead back to Michael. “There’s something here! Run away!”

With haunting silence, a gigantic eye flowed into view, slitted pupil searching. The sweeping pupil halted on Eik and Heath and observed them for a second. Then it disappeared again, the lake serpent pulling its head back so quickly and forcefully that all of the dust was dispersed at once.

Eyes skyward, Eik saw death. More than a hundred meters above, the lake serpent gazed down at its prey, eyes cold and unfeeling. Wounds and bruises covered the length of its visible body like a testament to the extensive battle with the strongest forces of Forest.

As the beast prepared its attack, one could hear the pops and snaps of muscles tensing. The air stood still, as if the whole world was waiting for that final strike that would snuff out Eik and Heath.

Without any real consideration or intent, Eik heaved Heath’s inanimate body up into his arms with a grunt of exertion and threw him to the side toward Sonja whom he could now see again. Then he triggered Movement Boost and set off in the opposite direction, waving his arms madly.

In one moment the snake towered over the forest and in the next its gaping maw covered him and turned the world black. Earth and rocks boiled up from beneath his feet, getting into his clothes as he was pushed further up into the darkness.

The fleshy walls of his new prison flung him around like a rag doll, bouncing him back and forth as the lake serpent moved at high speeds. Several times Eik attempted to plunge Venom Fang into the belly of the beast like an ice pick, but the constant movement made it too unstable.

For a moment the serpent stopped slithering and Eik saw his chance to get the knife in deep enough to provide a handhold to prevent further descent into the stomach. Presumably, there would be stomach acid down there that could dissolve a guy like him in seconds.

Before he could position himself properly, an enormous impact rocked the fiend like a subway tunnel during an earthquake. The shock threw Eik up and into the bouncy tissue above, his knife almost cutting his own throat by accident.

The moment he fell back down, multiple other, smaller impacts followed, sending disorienting tremors throughout this new, linear world. Then, out of nowhere, the whole thing tightened up like a knotted balloon, instantly arresting his tendency to ricochet and squeezing him mercilessly.

The damn thing was trying to swallow him. Twisting and wringing, Eik was transported steadily downward. That finally gave him the freedom to do what he had been trying to do since he was eaten. Activating Movement Boost, the keen tip of Viper Fang slammed into the stomach lining but was stopped dead with about half of the sharp blade’s full length inside the flesh.

Wiggling the knife forcefully around in the wound, Eik sent spouts of Profound Toxin into the bleeding gash. Immediately, the edges of the injury began to turn sickly purple with a glowing, blue overlay as the poison made its way through the lake serpent’s blood vessels and into its circulatory system.

A sonorous howl sent vibrations through everything and almost forced Viper Fang out of the gash, but Eik hammered on the pommel repeatedly with a palm. The tight flesh and muscles that had kept the knife from digging deeper must have weakened locally due to exposure to the Profound Toxin because the knife penetrated almost to the hilt.

Eik never let the surge of toxin lapse. With a victim as large as the lake serpent, he could let it flow for as long as it took.

With a roar of anger he slammed his palm down on the pommel of Viper Fang, the metal ripping into his hand painfully. The meaty thunk of it was barely audibly inside the body of the lake serpent, but the stability it offered allowed him to put both hands on the handle and focus on releasing as much Profound Toxin as his body could.

Not just from his hands, but from every inch of skin the blue substance began to bubble up and run down the monster’s throat. Eik didn’t know if Menka Tokanami—the woman whose son had been murdered and eaten by the Moon Shall Swallow cult, resulting in an attempt to kill Eik as revenge for the perceived failure of the rescue mission—was as strong as the lake serpent, but Profound Toxin had had a clear effect on her.

Granted, he had managed to spit it directly into her eyes and mouth, but throat, stomach, and circulatory system seemed promising as well.

“Count yourself lucky that I’m letting you order from the special menu this evening. Coming up is our signature beverage, Blue Lagoon, made with a mix of poison and…” he snarled, digging one hand into the deep gash and releasing even more Profound Toxin into the lake serpent’s blood. “venom! Drink up, asshole!”