Ch 86: Smile

Lucien cut down the last member of the troll group he had stumbled upon, his sword sweeping in a single diagonal arc past the beast's raised hand before it could reach him, and with another slash at the beast’s head, the creature's enormous body fell to the ground with a heavy thud, its ugly head rolling across the dirt and coming to a stop before the sprawled remains of its companions, dark crimson blood pooling slow and thick beneath each of them.

Lucien felt his body rejuvenating, new energy flooding through his limbs and fresh mana surging into his core as the final body settled to the ground. The sword in his hand trembled with something that felt almost like joy, its black blade painted crimson with troll blood, yet as though the blade were a living thing the blood was being steadily drawn inward, disappearing into the dark blade with each passing second. The longer Lucien watched, the more power he felt radiating back into him, his core filling steadily, The sword was sucking the blood in and was giving him mana the very instant.

"You're enjoying it, aren't you?" Lucien murmured, his eyes fixed on the blade as the last drop of crimson vanished into its surface, leaving the black blade clean and gleaming once more.

The sword hummed in his grip and Lucien felt a distinct pulse of excitement and satisfaction emanating from it. Truth be told, he felt much the same as the sword. His body was excited, blood was pulsing fast inside the veins…

But these feelings died down as he looked at the ugly bodies of the trolls, something unpleasant stirred in his stomach. Their enormous frames, that mottled mix of brown and dark gray skin, their severed heads lying apart from their bodies, made for a nightmarish sight in every sense of the word. Corrupted as they were by dark miasma, their eyes had gone entirely black, some of them still staring with wide disbelief at the sky above.

Those black eyes unsettled him more than anything else. They were the unmistakable mark of miasma corruption eating through a creature from within, leaving nothing behind but a beast that would attack any human unfortunate enough to cross its path.

The moment Lucien had spotted them they had noticed him too, alerted by the rustling of leaves and grass as he passed nearby. They had let out a shriek so piercing that Lucien, already restless and already simmering with the kind of quiet anger that had been following him all day, had turned fully bloodthirsty in an instant. Without allowing even one among the nine trolls to lay a hand on him, he had killed them all in a single fluid sequence. Despite such a gruesome fight his clothes remained dry, not one drop of blood on them, not a bead of sweat on his face.

It had been so easy that he felt he could have killed a hundred of them without pause. And the trouble was that nine had done nothing to quench the bloodthirst curling through him. He needed more. It did not have to be trolls; he would be satisfied with any beast as long as it was living and breathing.

Pushing a hand back through his slicked black hair, he turned his head and closed his eyes, extending his hearing outward until the forest resolved into a map of sounds. Footsteps reached him from the right, a soft and rhythmic kissing of paws against the ground, and without hesitation he blurred in that direction.

There was nothing worth taking from the ravaged troll corpses behind him. Their bones and hides had uses in alchemy and other crafts, true enough, but he had no interest in stopping to collect them, and he certainly was not about to soil the inside of his dimensional ring with something so foul when he had far more precious things stored within.

Lucien leaped onto a low branch and began moving through the canopy, his feet finding each branch with practiced ease, hopping from one to the next in smooth, effortless succession. His balance was so natural, so deeply ingrained, that if any student of his were watching from below, they would have thought he was walking across solid marble rather than narrow, swaying wood. Some branches were thin enough to splinter the moment his weight settled onto them, yet he was already gone before they broke, launched toward the next. The moon had reached its zenith and the temperature had dropped enough to coat every surface in a fine layer of dew, the branches slippery and treacherous in the dark, yet Lucien did not falter once.

He made one final leap and landed silently on the ground below, because he had just found what he was looking for. A pack of wolves were moving together. A great number of wolves formed a group, and he knew without question they would be enough to satisfy him. And if they were not, the forest was vast and its beasts were endless.

"Awoooo!" A dark black wolf threw back its head and howled, drawing the attention of the others as they turned toward Lucien.

Lucien found the alpha almost immediately. The wolf that had howled stood nearly three times the height of the others, its dark black fur catching the faint moonlight, and along its flanks and shoulders Lucien could make out the distinctive glint of razor-sharp quills that the creature could launch or unleash upon its enemies at will.

"Rrraaaowl!" A collective growl rolled through the pack as they all fixed their attention on him.

Lucien swept his gaze across them and his eyes sharpened with a cold and eager gleam. There were at least twenty of them, and all had been moving together in the same direction, following their alpha with a single-minded purpose. He did not care what their purpose was, or why they traveled in such numbers. He only cared that something that looked very much like a golden platter had just been placed in front of him.

The wolves surged forward together, their mouths hanging open, strings of drool trailing in the dark air as they charged toward him in a roaring tide. Dozens of bodies moving as one looked like a wave rolling in from some distant ocean, and had Lucien still been the man he was in his previous world, powerless and ordinary, that wave would have swallowed him whole.

But I am no longer in my old world. And I have powers now.

"Are you ready, boy?" Lucien addressed the sword, rolling his wrist in slow circular arcs to stretch his arm. The sword hummed and vibrated eagerly in his grip, radiating an unmistakable impatience, a clear message that it was done waiting and he should stop teasing it.

Lucien had no desire to wait any longer either. A wolf launched itself from the ground, front paw slashing toward his face, but before the beast covered half the distance Lucien's blade cut clean through it horizontally, dividing it neatly in two. The upper half tumbled toward him and he sidestepped with a single fluid step, the remains landing where he had just been standing, the wolf's eyes still wide and stunned as they stared upward. The lower half hit the ground a short distance behind it with a dull, wet thud.

Lucien turned toward the rest of the pack. They had slowed, every one of them trembling where they stood, fear clutching them tight.

However, it did not last long.

"Awoooo!" The alpha's command rang through the trees and the wolves obeyed, charging forward again even with fear still gripping them, and this time they were close, very close, but Lucien had no intention of letting them reach him.

Because I am coming for you guys.

Lucien smiled faintly as a cold breath of wind touched his face and set the hem of his shirt fluttering. He blurred forward into the mass of wolves, a slash to the left and one body fell away, a pivot and another beast collapsed to the side.

Wanting to end it cleanly, he swept his blade in a single wide horizontal arc across the collective body of the pack, one long curved slash that passed through half their number at once.

Some lost the tops of their skulls, gray matter scattering across the ground. Others lost their heads entirely. The unlucky ones had their legs cut from beneath them, their upper bodies left to drag and roll, trailing lines of dark blood through the dirt, waiting for a certain death.

"Rrraaaowl!" The alpha snarled and charged toward him, fury overtaking seeing its pack dead. 

Lucien was not in any mood to draw this out any longer. He cut a single vertical slash downward and the very air seemed to split along with the wolf's body, one half toppling left and the other right, its eyes locked on Lucien with rage as it fell.

Lucien turned to what remained. Several wolves had fled outright, their tails pressed between their legs, sprinting blindly into the dark trees. Others had simply stopped, cowering in place, some of them having lost all control of their legs entirely, collapsed flat on the ground with their chins pressed to the earth as though they had forgotten entirely how to stand.

Lucien did not prolong their suffering. He ended the ones still cowering with clean efficiency, and for those who had run he drew on his space affinity, sending slashes ahead of them through the fabric of space itself so that the blades appeared directly in front of the fleeing wolves, dropping each of them before they could take another step. Every one of them died with the same expression, wide eyes and open mouths caught in a final moment of shock.

The sword grumbled in his hand, displeased at having been denied the leisure of savoring the blood at its own pace. Lucien tightened his grip and the sword quieted. He had fed it well enough tonight. He had killed every beast efficiently and without waste, and that was what mattered. He was not willing to spend unnecessary time or mana on theatrics, particularly knowing full well that beasts far stronger than trolls or wolves roamed this forest, and that among them some might actually be capable of giving him trouble.

The trolls and the wolves had all been weak, ranked at Master [Lower] Level for the most part, with the alpha wolf and a handful of the trolls reaching Master [Upper] Level.

All of them inferior to Lucien, none of them capable of making him work for his kills. But that was no reason to grow careless. Even the mana returns from the sword were less than impressive when the prey was this weak, the blood of lesser beasts yielding far less than he needed to meaningfully restore his core to the brim. He had even tried letting the sword drink from the already-dead troll corpses afterward, but the blade had refused them outright, indifferent to blood that had already gone cold. Whether the sword only fed from kills it had personally made, or whether it simply demanded fresh blood still warm from the wound, Lucien did not yet know.

Lucien tilted his head back and looked up through the canopy. The moon had traveled well past its highest point, dropping steadily toward the western horizon, and the cold wind moved freely through the treetops, sending leaves hissing and rustling in long waves. The stars were brilliant overhead, sharp and clear in the cold air, scattered thickly across the dark sky, and Lucien allowed himself a quiet, faint smile as he looked at them.

Crunch. Crunch.

Footsteps reached his ears, hurried ones, the cadence of someone running rather than something prowling. He turned toward the sound and stood still, weighing his options. Hide, or remain as he was. After a moment he decided there was no reason to hide.

His bloodthirst had been satisfied completely and he felt no particular urgency about concealing himself. His original intention had been to enter this part of the forest quietly, but here on the far side of the mountain, deep enough that no patrol would ever reach, there was no one he owed an explanation to. And whoever was running toward him was moving fast, with an urgency that made him curious enough to wait and see.

The bush directly ahead of him shuddered and parted, and a boy came bursting through it. A girl followed close behind his back, her face nearly buried in the back of his shirt as she ran. The boy stopped dead the moment he saw Lucien and the girl ran straight into the boy, her forehead bumping hard against his shoulder blades. She stumbled back a step, looked behind her with naked fear still bright in her eyes, then looked at the boy, then looked forward, and her face drained of every last drop of color at once.

"Aaahh!" she shrieked, the sound tearing out of her before she could stop it.

***

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