After a few hours of boring, unremarkable, mindless walking, which unsettlingly reminded me a lot of my centuries as a soul, I finally encountered something other than trees and streams.
It was a small pack of... Deer-like beasts, with big, hulking bodies and sharpened, tough-looking antlers. By the time I realized, I had already [Inspect]ed one of them.
Manypike Soileater - 7th Rank - level 3
Element: Earth
Attributes: 42 STR, 68 AGI, 36 END, 37 VIT, 2 INT, 3 CPT, 16 SPW, 6 CHA, 19 PER, 4 WIL
Skills: [Descriptions: OFF]
Antler Charge (Level 2)
Soil Digestion (MAX)
Description: If you already have a class and can avoid their dangerous charges, taking out these dirt-eaters will be easy with a blow to their neck or underbelly. Earth attacks won't work well, but they are very weak to the air element.
There was... quite a lot to unpack just from those few lines, ranging from how OP it was to be able to see the opponent's skills and their descriptions to the fact that there were three more hidden attributes which I somehow knew were Charm, Perception and Capacity, but unfortunately I didn't have the leisure to stand around pondering stuff.
Why? Because several Manypikes were currently steamrolling towards me, with one of them several meters ahead of the rest, and collision was imminent in about...
Right now.
To be fair, it was pathetic for someone with double their Agility to get caught like this, but between my distraction from all this new info and my still poor control over this body, I barely had time to position myself so that my durable arm took the brunt of the impact.
And the impact was strong. It wasn't at the level of a wrecking ball, and I wasn't really sent flying due to being extremely heavy, but I could feel the vibrations running through my whole body even several seconds afterwards. Fortunately, my massive Endurance pool prevented me from actually taking any damage, and the Manypike...
I instinctively covered my mouth, but if course, no puke came out. 'Thank goodness for my lack of digestive system...'
The animal's head had been cometely obliterated, leaving a mess of blood, bone splinters and brain matter littering the ground near it.
I immediately looked away, but the image had been burned into my mind. I had 'seen' plenty of gore as a soul, but it was my first time actually seeing something like that. I didn't know what it was that made it so much worse. Maybe the colors? The details? Maybe it was a mix of many factors, but it left me never wanting to see something like that again.
'Fuck. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. It way have actually been a good thing that I had to deal with it already. I gotta try and get used to seeing first, since I'm sure I'll see a lot more of them from now on.'
I forced myself to look back at the grisly scene, and was thankful to realize that the other Manypikes had been smart enough to run away. Still, I could barely look at the gore for a few seconds without cringing and closing my eyes, something that could cause big issues in a life-and-death battle.
'Come on, I just have to get this over with now.'
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Half an hour later, a mechanical golem could be seen moving through the woods, slumping heavily and looking as if all life had been sucked out of him. His body was not trembling because it wasn't physically capable of doing it, but if someone had high-enough Soul Power to see his soul, they would have seen it rapidly expanding and contracting inside its container, clearly having trouble calming down.
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The next few hours were just as unremarkable as the first few I spent in the forest had been, although I did encounter some more groups of those Soileaters more than a couple of times. I gave them a wide birth of course, not out of fear but because they brought back bad memories.
They had stopped appearing for some time though, and I hadn't seen one for almost three hours already.
And as I thought of those things, my [Map], which I had made a habit to keep activated at all times, finally showed something other than forest ahead of me. The trees seemed to become less dense and gave way to plains around 15 kilometers ahead, and there was even a small village there! There were barely 30 buildings and they all looked shabby as hell, but the prospect of human communication excited me.
'Oh wait... communication... damn, I still don't know how to use the voice enchantments!'
Reprimanding myself for my lack of foresight, I started tinkering with the complex enchantment network that occupied the totality of my throat and the lower part of my head.
By the time I was 1 kilometer away from the village, I had already worked out how to push out each individual sound, and now was practicing how to string them together. My voice still sounded quite rough, but hey! It was an improvement of ∞% over the 0 that was my previous ability to speak!
'Alright, now with the G.'
"Gaaaaahhh, Geeeehhhh, Giiiijhhh, Ghoooooohhhhh, Ggguuuuuuuhhh..."
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"Remember, safety comes first, and never go too deep into the forest! If the sun gets covered by leaves, go back the way you went in. Alright, Millie?"
"Yes momma, don't worry! Millie is all grown up now, I can gather berries on my own!"
Millie's mother smiled and affectionately ruffled her curly, hazelnut hair as she gave her daughter a warm smile.
"Of course honey, I'm just a bit worried since it's your first time going on your own. Get a lot of them, okay?"
"Yeah! I love you mommy! Goodbye!"
Millie excitedly ran out of the house, but she slowed down when she reached the woods as per her mother's advice. She had tripped over many roots and mounds before learning her lesson, but now that never happened anymore. As she excitedly swung around the reed basket she had made herself, she searched for the nearest berrybush.
All the nearby ones were picked clean, but the dense woods were still far ahead. As she got further away from the village, she started finding more and more berries, and soon her basket was almost full.
She was preparing to go back when she heard a strange sound. It wasn't very loud, but it was quickly getting closer.
"Gaaaaahhh, Geeeehhhh, Giiiijhhh, Ghoooooohhhhh, Ggguuuuuuuhhh..."
The sounds vaguely resembled an adult man's voice, but they were... rough. They were like sandpaper going over wood, and extremely gutural. They sounded unnatural too, as if the one responsible was trying to imitate a human, but missing the mark by a bit. It was... hard to explain, but it scared Millie, so she started making her way back to the village, quickly, but without running.
'No running in the forest.'
But the strange sounds just kept getting closer, and at one point, her curiosity won over her towering fear and she looked back to take a peek.
What she saw made her stagger.
It was the size of a tall adult, but its skin was completely grey, and it reflected light like the swords that Millie's father made. It was also... weird. The skin was split up into many small parts, especially near the places that could bend, and some went below or above other parts as the thing moved.
Millie let out a scream.
'It' heard her, and it started running towards her, its movements unnatural and ugly, but its speed fast. It started shouting out those weird sounds, which only made the terror inside Millie greaten.
At that point she was already running with all she had back to the village, her basket left behind just as she had left behind her mother's advice.
She was still shouting, the shrill noise covering up the loud mumblings of the thing chasing her, providing the tiniest ounce of comfort to her faltering phsyque.
She fell, but she ignored the dirt and blood on her knees as she once again got back up and kept on running.
She fell again, but she barely felt the pain on her palms, as the village had, at long last, come into sight.
She saw all the villages gathered at the entrance of the forest with concerned expressions, and her mother running towards her, crying.
Millie's mind shut down as she dived into her mother's warm embraced, and she looked back just as her eyes were closing by themselves...
The gray creature wasn't there anymore.