Elucard raced his way through the twisted woods. Screams echoed all around him. Some were cut short, while others slowly withered into the clutches of the Blood Forest.
You have the skills I taught you over this last year. Stealth and combat you may think are key, but do not forget your most valuable asset: How to think.
Legion's final words were still fresh in his head.
The sun's descent was swiftly approaching and Elucard knew that soon what little light left would fall on the moon's soft glow. An elf had better night vision than a human, but even they couldn’t see in absolute darkness. They still needed at least a sliver of light to see.
Elucard stopped for a moment and got to one knee, feeling the vibrations in the ground and listening for any foreign noise. Someone had been following him for the last twenty minutes or so. Now that the screams were dying down, he could make a move to dispatch his shadow.
Catching a quick glance over his shoulder, Elucard ducked behind the nearest tree and vanished into the darkness. Immediately after falling out of sight, the stranger made an appearance. Garbed in traditional black training armor, the elf had a twin scar on his left cheek, a crooked nose, and dirty chestnut hair. Elucard recognized him from when he was still training under his first teachers. This elf was named Leos.
Leos cursed as he scanned trying to find him, but Elucard continued to observe from a safe distance. Leos palmed a dirk from a sheath attached to his thigh, still cursing under his breath.
“Master, will I be able to make it through the forest without taking a life?” Elucard asked, accepting a cup of black tea. He quickly blew to cool the liquid before drinking it, anxiously awaiting an answer. An answer he already knew the question to. Months had passed since he killed the man in the woods and yet the nightmare he was roused from felt like it had happened only the day before.
“Elucard are you afraid to take a life?” Legion answered with another question. As if this question was to open up to the truth behind Elucard’s hesitance.
Elucard silently crept his way behind him and freed his sword, careful to avoid the blade gleaming in the light. With a swift action, he dashed in and sliced cleanly at his target's leg. His opponent collapsed to one knee, but before he could let out a whimper or roar, Elucard quickly covered this mouth with his hand, “Hush now, I'm not going to kill you, but I can't have you getting me killed with your yelping.”
More gagged noises vibrated into Elucard’s glove.
“My master would have me kill you. Would you prefer to have it his way?” Elucard asked snidely. Leos bit his lip beneath Elucard’s gloved hand. He knew better than to bother with a response, “There, now hold still, I'm going to knock you out.”
A quick bunt to the head with his sword's pommel left Leos out cold. Elucard made sure to search his body, but found only a few shuriken and the dirk he was wielding. He quickly stuffed the shuriken into a pouch on his belt. However, he paused as he went to pick up the dirk. A small cloud of leaves came drifting down into his sight.
“I’m not afraid to take a life, it’s just that…” Elucard struggled with the question as if he were fighting Legion in a duel.
“It’s just that you still question if taking someone’s life is the right thing to do?” Legion finished for his student.
“Is it really our task to judge whose life gets taken? I never asked for such a responsibility!” Elucard shouted in an outburst deeply rooted in his conflicted emotions.
A blurred image fell from the canopy and a swift drop kick sent Elucard flying forward onto the rough bark of the branch he’d been standing on. Flipping through the air, Elucard attempted to stabilize himself as he thudded into a neighboring tree. The figure, already dashing after him, drew out his sword to strike, but Elucard deflected the blade into the wood next to him. Bark sprayed as the metal blade dug into the soft sapwood beneath it. Elucard answered back with a heavy fist to the stranger’s face. The blow jogged loose a silver fox mask, revealing the face of a young teen of Elucard's age.
His opponent jumped back, lifting several throwing stars from his back pouch, and tossing them at deadly speeds. They sunk deep, splintering the tree's bark, as Elucard nimbly ducked. Taking his own blade, Elucard stepped forth and slashed in an arcing motion, but barely caught his target's stomach, releasing a drizzle of blood in the air.
Elucard’s foe slid backward along the thick, giant branch. He caught his breath, briefly checking on the close call of a wound. Elucard, peered through the darkness, taking advantage of shafts of moonlight. He gasped when he recognized the face he had been fighting.
“Izian? Izian of Ravenshore, is that you?” Elucard called out.
The boy in question looked up, and matched Elucard's gaze. Slowly it dawned on him that he had been fighting an old friend.
“Elucard? Where have you been? We all haven't seen you in forever! We didn't know if you were killed or what!” Izian exclaimed with a hint of relief in his voice.
“We?”
“Geven and Myler! They're both with me. We’re teaming up to get out of this Gods forsaken forest! You should come with us. You fight pretty good.”
Elucard sheathed his blade, finally happy to see a friendly face. He stepped over Leos’ limp body and sprung off into the forest with his old friend.
***
Myler and Geven waited, alert and afraid, within a hollowed out tree. Izian told them to wait there while he scouted ahead. That was thirty minutes ago.
“He's dead… We should get moving” Geven said, breaking the long silence between the two. He combed his thick black hair with his fingers. He was nervous. Izian had always been the strongest of the three boys and had acted as their stalwart leader.
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“Let's wait a bit longer, maybe he ran into some trouble?” Myler was antsy as well. He had not been taking his training too well, showing defiance whenever he could. However, he stuck with it for the sake of surviving with his childhood companions.
“If that's the case, we should go after h–” movement through the trees in front of them cut his words short. Geven slid out a dagger and crept forward, crouching to keep his figure harder to decipher in the cool, dark woods.
Dropping silently to the ground like an owl snatching up its prey, were two figures. Myler immediately recognized one of them as Izian.
Myler and Geven kept their distance before breaking out into a shaky laughter that resounded with relief. Izian stepped forward, waving to them to come meet his guest, “Guys, guess who I found!”
Elucard lowered his mask around his collar and lifted off his hood, revealing his dirty blond hair. He gave a weak smile, unsure whether his old friends would remember him after so much time apart. His question was answered when Myler let out a big smile and slapped his arm around Elucard's neck and shoulders.
“Elucard Freewind, where have you been? It's so great to see you… alive for that matter!”
Geven shook his long lost friend's hand vigorously, “You're a sight for sore eyes. With us four watching each other's backs, we'll be out of here in no time!”
Elucard nodded, “I'm game. The more people I don't have to fight, the better. No skin off my hide. Let's quit standing around with targets on our backs and move out.”
The three other elves gave a short fist pump in excitement and followed Elucard further into the forest.
***
“It’s true, you may have never asked for it…but the responsibility chose you Elucard,” Legion said softly.
“I don’t want it, Master. I don’t want to take a life!”
“A true Rabbit does not want to take a life…but will,” Legion said, pouring himself and Elucard another cup of tea.
Elucard knocked away the cup, “Then I am no true Rabbit!”
“That remains to be seen.”
Elucard and his three companions felt as though they’d been sprinting through the forest canopy for an eternity. It was as if the woods were endless in their span and ruthless by their very nature. Massive branches covered in rough, splintery bark surrounded the boys and weaved through the forest much like giant threads of a rough, itchy cloth. The three boys had encountered no one and had heard nothing in the dense forest. The only sounds that they heard were the sounds of their heaving breaths that were muffled by their masks and the grinding thud their feet made as they dashed along the enormous branches.
Elucard grew increasingly suspicious of the quiet. He raised his hand to signal those behind him to halt. He slowly lowered his hand and motioned them to crouch and stealth. Pointing quickly to several seemingly random directions, he himself jumped a short distance to a nearby branch.
With Myler, Geven, and Izian keeping watch over several of Elucard's blind spots, he narrowed and focused his senses to better observe the area. He held his breath and calmed his heart beat to sharpen his hearing… nothing. He made use of what little moonlight glittered through the canopy to better see his surroundings… nothing. But wait, he did see something. Something faint, that glinted softly in the distance – a sliver of a silver metal line. Elucard noted that it cut across the gap of trees up ahead. Even if his group members had been paying close attention while hopping from branch to branch, they would have still been clotheslined by the thin wire.
Elucard leaped to where one end of the line was tied to a tree. Undoing the knot, he inspected the wire more closely, identifying it as a garrote or choking wire. This was a trap, but where was the trapper and who was he hoping to catch? A stifled gag from behind him answered his question.
Elucard quickly jumped back to where he had left his friends, his blade drawn. Searching frantically, he found no signs of the trio, but from the shadows stepped three new faces.They wore dark blue garbs with black trims. Muffled laughter erupted from all of them as they drew a variety of weapons.
“Keth says we can't kill you just yet, but that don't mean we can't have a bit of fun,” said one of them. He was a bit more husky than the other two.
Izian, Geven and Myler were the last remnants of his past. Even if the Black Rabbits attempted to beat the last inch of Ravenshore out of him, he wanted his friends to still be by his side. Rabbit or not, he needed them. Now the Blood Forest was planning to take them away. He couldn’t let this happen. He wouldn’t let this happen.
Elucard clenched his teeth under his mask. The obvious move would be to question these strangers. They clearly set the trap. 'Who was Keth? Where were Geven, Myler, and Izian?' That would be the obvious course of action, but not the logical one. No, he needed to dispatch them quickly and efficiently and leave only one conscious for questioning. Clearly he would need to save his energy for this “Keth.”
“Ain't you going to ask, where are you friends at?” The husky one said snarkily.
Elucard mapped out the fight in his head. His eyes were closed as his eyeballs flinched left and right, projecting imaginary images. He would move to the middle one first, running low and hacking off a leg with a clean slice; a roundhouse kick to the now one-legged minion's chest would knock him off of the tree.
Next He would side step a vertical slash from his left and retaliate with a thrust to the kid's left shoulder. A twist of the sword's grip would ensure that his foe would be crippled in pain.
He would finally turn his attention on the one he wanted to question. He didn't know the goon’s loyalty level to Keth, so he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t run. A flying jump kick to the face or the back of the head would bring him down to an appropriate position for questioning.
Elucard was silent for only a moment. Keth's allies cocked their heads waiting for an answer. The husky one took a step forward and spoke an annoyed, “Well?”
Elucard snapped open his eyes and in a matter of a few short moments, Elucard's enemies were incapacitated, save for a sniveling husky goon with a quickly forming black eye from a well placed flying kick.
Elucard pressed his sword under the boy’s plump, thick neck and spat, “No, I'm not going to ask where they are, because you're going to tell me.”
The blade pressed further into the neck fat, and Elucard's answer was squealed out.
“Down by the tree shaped like a spider. Keth is there too!”
Elucard threw a fierce jab to the boy’s face, “How many more are with Keth?”
“Four more, I swear! Please don't kill me!”
Elucard shook his blade in anger. Who was Keth? Why did he specifically want him dead? These were questions for Keth, clearly. He needed to rid his mind of the questions and distractions that plagued him. He needed to rescue his friends, if they were even still alive.
“Please! Let me live! I told you everything!” the fat boy squealed again.
Elucard turned his attention back on his captive. Should he kill him? No, he needed to get through this forest without killing, he needed to keep a small piece of past self alive before the Black Rabbits killed what remained of his old life, “Tell me your name, if you want to live!”
“Eris!”
“You're lucky, Eris, You'll live another night in this forest. I need you to bring me to this 'Spider Tree'.”