Chapter 68: Calfeeths [Power Stone Bonus]

Arthur didn’t ask if we were ready. He just grabbed Sera and jumped.

A vine cracked out from his sleeve, caught the cliff face, and the two of them were airborne before Sera even finished her yelp. He swung her up in one clean arc, dropped her on solid ground, and was already diving back down for Mary before I had even processed what I had just watched.

’Okay, that never stops being terrifying to watch,’ I thought.

He got Theodore next, the two of them swinging through the same lazy, ridiculous arc, Theodore’s face somewhere between annoyed and impressed the whole way up, boots kicking uselessly at empty air like he still hadn’t decided whether to trust the vine.

Then finally me, hauling me up in one clean pull that ended with my boots hitting the cliff edge harder than I would have liked. I staggered, caught myself on one knee, and looked down.

"..."

I blinked. Something new was down there.

A corpse was sprawled across the forest floor, huge, serpent-like, its scales a sick shade of green against all that crimson, its long body coiled loosely like it had simply stopped fighting whatever killed it partway through the effort, one massive coil already sunk halfway into the mud. Even from this height, I could see the way its head lay twisted at an angle that had nothing gentle about it.

And crawling all over it, tearing chunks free with a kind of frantic, joyless hunger, were shapes that shouldn’t have been visible at all.

I had to squint. Even then, they kept slipping out of focus, edges bending wrong, half-there and half-not, like my eyes were actively being told to look somewhere else. The harder I tried to pin one down, the more it seemed to slide off to the side, as though the whole idea of being seen offended it personally.

It wasn’t until something behind my sternum flickered to life, my spiritual intuition finally catching up, that the shapes actually held still long enough to register.

They were Hyenas!

No, not actually Hyenas... Something that looked like Hyenas and was opaque, all matted fur and hollow eyes, moving with a jerky, wrong sort of hunger that didn’t belong to anything I’d studied back at the Academy.

[You Are Looking At Beast Horrors: Calfeeths]

The name settled into my vision and sat there, cold and clinical, offering absolutely nothing useful about how to actually kill one.

Beside me, Sera swallowed audibly.

"Two options," she said, eyes still locked on the feast below. "We act like scared little kids and back off. Or we go get our feast."

The old me would definitely have already been three steps back from the ledge, already halfway through some excuse about scouting a safer route.

However, the new me just felt my hand tighten around nothing, itching for a weapon, adrenaline already doing the thinking my common sense usually handled.

"Let’s go, then," I said.

Arthur nodded and summoned Poet’s Dream, the worn leather settling into his palm like an old habit. Theodore slid Weight onto his index finger without a word, jaw already tight. While, Mary snapped Moon’s Door onto her wrist, the metal catching what little crimson light filtered through the canopy.

I frowned at her. "Why didn’t you just use that to get us up and down here in the first place?"

She looked at me, her expression completely flat. "Arthur seemed a little too excited about the swinging."

"I was NOT."

"You absolutely were."

That got a laugh out of me before I could stop it, quick and stupid, and it spread through the rest of us like something contagious. Even Theodore cracked a grin, brief as it was. It felt good. Weirdly good, considering what was waiting below, chewing on a dead serpent and not caring who noticed.

I didn’t reach for Thunder Sunlight. That thing ran hot, too hot, the kind of heat that ate through me in minutes and left me swaying on my feet if I pushed it too far.

Not exactly ideal against something I could barely see coming, let alone track once it got close.

Instead, I pulled out something that I had bought from the shop two days prior: Hunger of The Creepy Dagger.

It’s ability was that every time it was used to cut a creature, it also at that moment attacked the spirit of that creature.

The catch of it was simple, and simple was exactly why it scared me a little.

It was that if you held it too long, killing intent would swim like an ocean inside you and you would want to kill anybody you see.

It’s blade was opaque in color, while its hilt was composed of shiny gold with a layer of design.

Next, I wore Starlight Hurricane. And again, I felt my body as light as a feather, the familiar weightlessness settling over me like slipping into a coat I had worn a hundred times before.

Mary glanced around at all of us. We nodded back. And as soon as we did, she shook her wrist.

A door bloomed open in front of her, a ring of symbols spinning into place before splitting straight down the middle. Pale fog rolled out low across the wood, curling around our ankles like it had somewhere to be.

I let out a slow breath, watching it curl around my boots.

Seeing this I couldn’t help but remember Eliza once again...

However, I quickly stabilized my emotions by going in a state of cogitation and letting my Spirit get calmed, pushing the memory back down to wherever it usually stayed quiet.

Arthur gave the door and fog the same tired half-smile I probably had on my own face, the kind that said neither of us were talking about whatever we were actually thinking about.

Afterall, it had only been one month since Eliza had left us....

Sera stepped through first, dragging Mary in right behind her without a second’s hesitation.

Theodore followed with his shoulders squared like he was walking into a bar fight, not a monster feast, cracking his knuckles once for good measure.

That left me and Arthur at the edge of it.

Neither of us moved for a second. The fog curled patiently in front of us, waiting, as if it understood exactly how much weight sat behind that silence.

"After you," he said.

"Efficient as always."

I stepped into the fog as he followed right behind, the pale mist slowly swallowed the both of us whole, cold and damp against my skin, the last thing I heard before everything went white was a low, distant screech of something down in that forest finally noticing we were there.