Chapter 15: Revelry
Vendus quickly swerved his head away and back behind the tree.
A dozen thoughts shot through his mind as the black lion cub tremblingly snuggled to his side.
The first and foremost thought he had was if whether or not the tree they were hiding behind could withstand the barreling impact of a colossal sized boar.
Another thought passed by, questioning if he should grab the lion cub and run further away from the path of the boar’s mad dash. Fast things usually did not turn well, and with the colossal boar blinded in both eyes, maybe they could position themselves safer, and further away from the beast’s path.
The last thoughts he had however, struck at the crux of the situation, ‘What or who did that to such a beast?’
‘No…who is doing that to such a creature right now?’
Vendus decided to stay still, afraid of the answer to that question. He hugged the trembling, black-furred lion cub close, thinking to himself the cruel way of how multiple arrows were struck into the beast's eyes.
As the heavy booming of the boar’s steps started to become infrequent, but no less approaching close, Vendus celebrated how his decision in that moment turned out to be correct.
Finally, a thunderous dull boom shook the forest, as its colossal body finally fell just ten meters away from the tree Vendus and the cub hid behind.
Vendus held his breath, and started to consciously lower and erase his presence…
…Though, quickly he realized something. Instead of the essence of trying not to be found, he put his focus towards the essence of simply being not-worth-noticing.
The lion cub glanced upwards at Vendus. Even though the creature could feel the touch of his clothes and skin, it felt as if his perception of Vendus was dispersing. In his place, the space he occupied started to feel like air, the air that was present at all times, and yet, easily forgotten and overlooked.
With the mythical blood flowing in its veins, the lion cub somehow resonated with Vendus’s wondrous state, and the pair’s presence became muffled and muted.
To any ordinary person, out of sight meant out of mind, but they were trying to hide not from the average individual, but whatever terrifying and cruel existence put those arrows in the boar’s eyes.
Other than logical reasoning, the extreme fear they both felt was powerfully instinctual. Moreso the case for the lion cub, who mysteriously sensed the danger minutes before it actually arrived.
As the two kept quiet, fearful of that existence, that same person approached.
As acute as both their senses were, they were unable to hear his expertly silent steps.
Standing on top of the colossal boar’s dead body, was a tall man with medium-length black hair. Eerily and unsettlingly, his eyes stared unblinkingly forward.
Levian was scrutinizing the gargantuan tree trunk, noticing how such a specimen had actually grown near the borders, instead of its actual home which lay deeper in the outskirts.
Usually his regards for such things stopped there, but he found himself still looking at the gargantuan tree.
Moments passed by, and Levian’s presence near the borders seemed to create an eerie silence over the forest that was never more terrifying. For the pair behind the tree, each passing moment struck waves of fear into their hearts. They could muffle and mute their presence, but they could not hide their fear.
And as their fears rose growing into tall black tides or dark dread towers, Levian’s desire to investigate behind the tree rose along with it…
He took a step forward…when suddenly, that feeling altogether disappeared. The former ranger frowned, feeling as if he had just woken up from a daze. Nonetheless…he continued in what he was going to do.
Overconfidence played a great part in his neglect, believing that if there was truly something or someone behind the tree, his keen senses and intuition as a former ranger, would have noticed.
‘Could it be an aftereffect of the heart-eating ritual?’
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“The mana within my node is unstable, and…tainted, in a way I don’t understand.’
‘Could it lead to odd mental effects and moments of absence?’
‘Dangerous. Especially if I lost myself during a hunt.’
As Levian was thinking of ways to resolve his irregularities…
Behind the tree, Vendus was staring in amazement at his lion cub friend. The black-furred cub had stopped trembling, and instead, his eyes were vaguely glowing in an ethereal, dream-like shade of blue.
Emanating from him, Vendus felt invisible rippling currents soothing his heart and mind. In the face of that gentle but powerful calm, any and all fear dispersed without a trace.
Furthermore…mysteriously, the blood within Vendus reacted, expanding and growing hotter under the phenomena which came from the black-furred lion cub. From out of nowhere, ideas and most importantly comprehensions, were then bestowed to him. Like unraveling a gift, he sounded out in his mind, ‘Lion’s heart? Lionheart?’
Clang!
Before he could ponder upon the words deeper, the sound of iron striking stone echoed through the surrounding forest.
What followed next was a constant jagged screech, both sharp and dull in a way that similarly grated one’s ears.
Vendus almost wanted to peek his head out from the tree to look at what was happening, but although he lost his fear he didn’t lose his cautiousness.
Caressing the lion cub’s adorable head, he patiently waited for the predicament to pass.
Not thirty-seconds later however, a shattering explosion resounded. To Vendus it was similar to the shattering of a mirror, but not quite.
Fragments of metal shot past the gargantuan tree, and similarly across random haphazard directions in the surrounding area. A few of them, even embedded in the trees near Vendus.
‘What was that?’ Vendus thought to himself, before he heard a voice exclaim.
“Tch. Another one.”
Levian pulled out another dagger from his left arm strap. Skillfully it danced on his hand and between his fingers, before switching to a reverse grip where his thumb pressed on the dagger’s pommel.
Resourcefully, Vendus looked towards one of the dagger fragments across him, observing the scene through its small blurry reflection.
In the next moment, the man’s hand holding the dagger started to glow faintly with a blue mist. It was an outward, visual phenomena of mana, and mana that was dense enough to be seen by Vendus, who had no superhuman sight nor abilities in particular.
The blue mist gushed down from his hand and into the dagger, infusing and imbuing it with properties in a way that Vendus could only guess.
To Levian, what he was doing was one of the most crude forms of mana injection— increasing the durability of an item. There were a thousand more ways mana could be used, for example, increasing the metal’s sharpness or piercing effect, but Levian himself needed the assistance of a mana node to do such things.
Raising the dagger above his head, his arm swung, turning into a blur, before the same sound of iron striking stone resounded through the forest.
It was only now that Vendus realized that the boar’s skin must have been especially tough. If the reflection in the dagger wasn’t so blurry, he’d notice too that none of the many arrows attached to the boar had actually pierced through its hide. What truly ended its life, was the multiple arrows pushed further and further into its brain through its eye sockets.
As Levian skinned the creature, sparks flew out constantly, and a screeching sound wailed from the intense friction between enhanced dagger and mythical skin.
Soon another shattering explosion was heard, followed by a cluster of flying metal pieces. A few more lodged into the trees near Vendus, and he could only pray that Levian’s eyes didn't wander over to their tiny but gleaming reflections.
Luckily he was too focused, and perhaps eager for something.
Apart from that, Vendus made a guess for why the daggers exploded in the first place, ‘Normal metals aren't able to handle the infusion of mana?’
‘Or maybe…it's more like they can only handle so much.’
‘Adamantine, mythril, orichalcum— is that why knight’s armors and swords are made out of them?’
As Vendus and the black lion cub waited patiently, an odd cycle of explosions, grating screeching, and angry curses repeated.
In the middle of Levian pulling out his seventeenth dagger however, he suddenly stopped.
The silence made Vendus more uncomfortable than he already was, as he attentively watched the scene reflected in the dagger’s gleam.
The tall man with medium length hair bent down, before pressing his ear against the massive beast’s corpse.
Vendus was not quite sure what he was doing, and it was hard to see the man’s expression within the tiny and blurry image, yet it felt no less unsettling.
In the next moment, a banshee’s scream erupted from the man, filling the forest with nothing but its cutting shriek. Vendus covered his ears from that piercing noise, yet his hands still felt red liquid pouring out from those orifices. In that short burst of a moment, his ears were wounded to the point they bled.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Though he was in pain, Vendus still focused on the scene playing out in the dagger fragments.
Levian had started to kick the boar’s dead corpse. Over and over its massive body shook, returned to stillness, then shook again.
Together with the mutilation of the boar’s eyes, the callousness and cruel harshness of this encounter made Vendus start to feel more and more disgusted, and terrified.
After a few minutes of abusing the corpse, Levian once again pulled out a dagger, and started to carve it up with the help of his mana.
The cycle of shattering explosion and grating repeated, this time without the tall man’s angry curses. Somehow, that made hearing the sounds even worse.
Then…silence reigned again, and just as when Vendus and the lion cub thought it was all over, they next heard wet, messy, and sloshy chomping.
Levian had bent down on his knees. After penetrating and cutting a fair amount of the boar’s skin, he started to gorge himself on its raw flesh gratifyingly.
In the dagger fragment’s reflection, his hands up to the forearm were bathed in red, and so was his mouth, and a good part of his chest.
Riiip! The tearing of fabric could be heard from behind the gargantuan tree, as the fiend had ripped his tunic. For him, it provided release and increased sensitivity to the sensations he wanted to lose himself in.
Vendus turned away from the hellish and profane sight, and tried his best to ignore the sounds that followed.
Hands clasped tightly in prayer, he prayed to the gods he knew, and called out to those he didn’t but were willing to listen, ‘Please, help us.’
Moments passed but timely enough, a subtle ‘ssssss’ sound started to echo throughout the forest. Immediately, Levian pulled himself out of his perverted blood revelry, and his eyes went completely wide in full alert.
Vendus was unaware to Levian's exact changes, but he knew that the fiend had stopped according to the disappearance of the gorging sounds.
Instead of them, a soft, continuous whisper seemed to approach from the direction of further south.
It was only when those whispers turned into the rustlings of hundreds of thousands of fallen leaves, did all three entities within the area, discern that it was the slithering sound of something immense.
The lion cub started to tremble again, and this time so did Vendus. Levian, without even thinking, dropped everything he had and started to flee.