After a few days of following the river and hunting some wildlife along the way, Yore looked much more like a gruesome survivalist. His clothes were additionally torn from numerous fights with bears and wolves. However, he now wore crude hide pelts over his torn clothes and carried meat that he had dried in his satchel. He knew that the scent of the meat was what kept attracting the bears and wolves to him, but he knew he needed to learn to fight better to stop dying so damn much.
Honestly, he had gotten pretty good over the last few days. Yesterday he had fought a pack of six wolves and came out with only one bite and a handful of scratches. He was getting better at controlling multiple blood weapon projectiles such as kunai, darts, and daggers while fending off any attackers.
He would start with an opening attack that usually surprised the group and then would go in for the first creature that would recover from the disorientation. It seemed like an effective strategy and he could use the initial injuries to poison the creatures, making the rest of the fight easier for him.
Now he was strolling along the river, chewing on some bear jerky, chatting with Morrow.
“Hey Morrow,” Yore said. “Do you think that there were other portals that brought people here? We haven’t seen any more people since that first day and I’m wondering if we were the only ones.”
“I’m not sure,” Morrow replied. “I’ve been with you the whole time and like you said, we haven’t seen anyone else. But I think it is possible. Do you want there to be more of your people here?”
“I don’t know. It would be nice if I wasn’t the only survivor, but I also wouldn’t wish the travesty that we went through on anyone else. People were dying before they even knew what was going on.”
Just then, they heard a clicking noise that seemed to echo through the woods.
Yore stopped in his tracks and listened to try to hear where it was coming from. While doing so, Morrow entered Yore’s body as part of their pre-combat routine that they had developed over the past few days.
More clicking noises came. Then Yore heard some shuffling off to his right and saw a trail of tall undergrowth swaying as a creature moved to flank him and he readied himself. Then he heard a screech from above. He turned his gaze upward and saw two Mantis armed creatures leaping at him from the canopies.
These creatures looked like xenomorphs from some scary movies Yore had watched in his last life. They had elongated heads, razor sharp teeth, and a pair of bladed arms. They would be about a meter tall standing, and about a meter and a half long. Yore dubbed them Mantises based on their arms and lack of a better name for them.
Yore side-stepped one of the two leaping down on him and thrust his spear into the open mouth of the other, while simultaneously launching blood darts out from his hide skin cloak at the first leaping Mantis and the one flanking him through the undergrowth. The thrust spear entered into the second leaping Mantis’ mouth and spear head exited out the top of its head, the spear head guard stopping the head from traveling down the spear shaft and the Mantis’ body going limp on the spear as it loosely dangled from the end.
Yore twirled around, the spear morphing in his hand as he did so, letting the Mantis it held fall to the ground. The spear re-morphed back into its original shape, but backwards from how Yore had been holding it, the spearhead now at the other end of the shaft.
As the spear was pulled out from the Mantis, a geyser of blood sprayed out of its mouth with it. The spray formed dozens of tiny blood darts that shot out in the direction of the flanking Mantis, while Yore plunged the new spearhead into the side of the Mantis that missed its leap on him.
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As the spear pierced the side of the Mantis with a loud crunch as it punctured the creature’s carapace. Blood iron spikes then burst out of its torso in all directions with an array of crunches as the carapace ruptured from the inside out, making the Mantis appear like a bloody morning star. It let out a screech as it died. The spikes then retracted and Yore pulled the spear out of its torso and reformed it to have the spearhead at the front end once again and turned to the Mantis flanking him through the brush.
As the third Mantis stumbled out of the brush at him, slowed and injured from all of the darts, he spartan kicked it in the side of the head. Its head twisted with a loud crack as Yore followed up by skewering it in the torso and bursting blood iron spikes out of it, just like the second Mantis.
Yore retracted the spikes and withdrew his spear, readying himself for more, but none came.
Then the bodies began to deflate, with black smoke escaping from their corpses. The smoke however didn’t disperse into the air, instead it gathered around Yore as his body began to absorb it.
The smoke smelled putrid like someone was burning the corpses from the inside. Yore gagged as he was inundated by the foul smoke.
“Morrow,” Yore coughed out. “What was that?”
“I’m not sure, but I feel invigorated by it. What about you?”
Once all of the smoke was absorbed and Yore stopped gagging from the smell of it. Yore took a minute and reflected on his senses. He did feel good. It was like he just woke up from the most refreshing night of sleep.
“Yeah, you’re right Morrow. I feel good. Well aside from wanting to hurl my guts out from that smell. But other than that, I feel refreshed. How come the other animals didn’t do that when we killed them?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we check their corpses and see if there was anything different about them.”
“Good idea,” Yore replied as he moved closer to one of the corpses.
The body seemed hollow, like all of its insides had simply evaporated, leaving its carapace behind like an empty shell. Yore gravely looked at it for a moment, hesitating to get closer.
“I swear, if there are face hugging spiders in these woods, we are turning around Morrow!”
Yore cautiously got closer to the corpse and looked inside the burst open chest cavity from his morning star burst. He could see something glisten in the sunlight that shown down through the wooded canopy above. It was about where he would have expected the creature's heart to be. He reached inside the hole in its chest and pulled out what appeared to be a black stone, about the size of his palm. It looked like obsidian.
“Hey Morrow. Do you have any idea what this is?”
“There is a familiarity to it, but I’m not sure. It’s like I should know what it is, but don’t. Sorry Yore.”
“No worries, just checking. Either way, I’ll gladly take gemstones from creatures. After all, it doesn’t seem to have any blood left for us to take. Maybe we can sell these if we come across a town or something.”
After mentioning the lack of blood to Morrow, Yore inquisitively looked over to where he had killed the third Mantis. It still had the blood darts stuck in its carapace. Even the ones that he had formed using the first Mantis’ blood. With a thought, Yore recalled the darts and they flew back into his hide skin cloak.
“That’s funny. The blood weapons I created during the fight didn’t evaporate into that awful smoke. I wonder why that is.”
“It is probably because you claimed that blood to make weapons out of it and it no longer belonged to the creature. It’s like the blood I’ve absorbed from your previous fights. I sense that it belongs to us now and not the creatures it came from.”
“Hmm. I guess that makes sense. We’ll have to try draining one completely before it evaporates and see if that affects how much smoke comes out of these things. Anyway, I guess we should check the other corpses and see if they have gems in them as well.”
Yore checked the remaining two corpses and each of them had a similar obsidian gem, roughly the same size and shape as the other one. He collected them into his satchel and they began to move once again, this time in the direction that the creatures came from, leading them away from their river, but in the roughly same direction.
Morrow didn’t reemerge, seeing that they were now on the hunt and wanted to avoid unnecessary danger.