FOREST FIGHTS

The group started maintaining a routine. Theo accompanied Hamon on the fight against his first orc and taught him some tips. It wasn’t a fair fight since the orc was tired, bleeding, poisoned, paralyzed, and encumbered, but those were mere details Hamon glossed over when posing above the dead orc.

Eventually, Hamon began pestering again to learn how to focus his experience points. Because of that, Theo began teaching him how to absorb only a fraction of the life force. That was useful training to manipulate it in the future.

They started sleeping on the treetops above the razor nest. In the morning, they set out and prepared the concrete bombs, as Hamon called them. Hamon learned how to fight and listened to how to deal with humans and beasts. One thing Hamon really drilled in his mind from the lessons was how humans didn’t just fight you, they had the ability to prepare beforehand everything to kill you. Hamon felt this example on his skin, seeing how the orcs, beasts much stronger than them, fell by their hands.

The first hiccup happened on the third day, they had caught four orcs already. The orc who appeared this time around was carrying around a metal sword. The duo had to come down from the tree much sooner to fight it; otherwise, it would damage the nest. Theo said they couldn’t risk it. They both fought it together, but it was mostly Theo dancing around it and Hamon throwing things from afar.

Hamon was stumped by how Theo kept dodging the orcs swings even though he was much slower than him. He felt frustrated. Even though he was much stronger, he wasn’t of any help. He was too overconfident seeing how he finished an orc by himself just yesterday, the number thirty-eight on his physique blinded him. Fighting was something way above numbers, this was real, and he would get there.

Hamon tightened his grip around the rock he was preparing to throw, waiting for a chance, it was the only thing he could do now. The battle didn’t seem to be going well since Theo didn’t have a proper weapon to damage it. It happened in a second but was enough to topple the orc over. As soon as Theo touched its head, the beast collapsed.

Hamon came running straight away towards him, who sat on the ground with both hands holding his head. After some time where Hamon could only feel anxious, Theo extended his hand to the orc and absorbed its life force. “I’m fine now. What did you think? Cool, uh?” Theo gave him a tired smile.

Hamon was caught off guard but soon got elated. “It was amazing! I thought we were goners, how did you do that?”

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Theo laughed, “magic,” and snapped his fingers, “or rather, mana manipulation, I guess.” He started floating a leaf close to his palm. “Mana can be used to move things around us.”

“And how moving a leaf knocks out an orc?” Hamon asked.

“Instead of moving a leaf, we shift part of its brain around and serve its connection with the rest of the body.” Theo gave a creepy smile. “Not all moves need to be huge, sometimes small things can have disastrous effects.” He shrugged. “It also needed to be something small since I almost didn’t have enough for that.”

“Yeah, that’s cool! Teach me.” Hamon kept bobbing his head up and down.

“No way,” Theo waved him away. “Too much work for useless results. If you still want later when we get to a safer place, we can work on it, but I bet you won’t like it. Beating things away seems much more your style.” Hamon pouted at that, but Theo wasn’t finished yet. “Oh, and that stays between just the two of us, understand?” Theo used his serious tone, and Hamon complied.

That was a dangerous technique, but by the time others had the finesse to execute it, the others would already have enough magical resistance for it to be inefficient. Here on the kingdom depth, where almost everyone except the strongest had almost no magical resistance, it was an overpowered killing technique. Obviously, it could be foiled by diverse means, but Theo bet he would have many other methods when it came to that point anyway.

On the fourth day, they had fought their eight orcs. Hamon wasn’t quite to the point of being able to hold his ground yet, but he managed to help a lot. The sword he got from the first orc they fought played a huge part. He found that he quite liked hands-on fighting. The adrenaline was incredible.

Theo was really proud of the boy, Hilda’s son really lived up to the expectations. He managed to survive quite long by himself in his past life. Only the future could tell how far the boy could reach this time around. Theo has been getting used to manipulating mana with the dull body he possessed now. He had to adapt many of the techniques and predict things much more steps ahead during the fights. Mana could be used to boost and control blessings, artifacts, and spells. However, it could also be manipulated by itself to change the world around it. At the moment, Theo was using it to speed up his movements, feel for the orc’s movements on his blind spots, and finish the fight with a spinal or cerebral blow.

“Hey, look, Theo! Level 1, I leveled up.” Hamon celebrated.

“Neat, me too.” Theo gave him a thumbs up. “It means your total attributes have reached a hundred.”

Hamon laughed. “I’m super strong now. Soon I will fight those orcs head-on.” He flexed his muscles. “I was super worried I would become a ball of muscles, but that didn’t happen. I’m athletic and nice. But I could have used a growth spurt.”

“Don’t worry about those things, you will only grow with time.” Theo pushed the newly killed orc body closer to the nest. “You should also consider putting some experience in control, or else you will become too predictable. You would be doomed in a fight against anything with half a brain.”

As they were talking and chilling, a woman’s scream echoed in the distance. They gave an understanding nod and ran to help. Theo didn’t plan on going around the forest, searching for people to offer help, but he wouldn’t ignore someone who came to his doorstep if possible.