CHAPTER 62: Who You Gonna Call When You Have Rampaging Beasties?
The boy stopped moving after a bit of struggling. I had run him through in his chest, and my hands were now sticky with crimson blood.
The metallic smell of blood was irritating for me, so much that it made me frown.
It was a strange sensation, to be uncomfortable in the presence of blood, almost alien. Don't get me wrong, I should be able to kill someone without thinking about it, since I've done it before.
Now that I think about it, I've really only killed someone up close and personal once before, and I didn't feel like that this then. Why did I change now?
Do I not like killing? No way, that's not possible. Well, I know I don't like to kill, but I don't hate it either. At least I thought so. When I kill, I don't feel anything, but it seems my body does.
Is it good my body and my mind are acting contrary to each other? Probably not. But what can I do about it?
I pulled the spear out, wincing at the feeling of tearing flesh and wiped it on the grass.
I turned to walk back my base of operations when I remembered about the name tag.
I delicately touched the body and tried to remove the tag on his chest to find that it was attached to the shirt and couldn't be removed on its own.
Because of that I had to tear the fabric around it and remove it that way.
I walked away in high spirits as I silently clapped myself on the back for having killed two people by the time the first two days were almost over. If I keep on like this, I should just be able to make up the required amount by the time we run out of time.
I stopped in the middle of my celebration while my eyes widened, my mouth made an 'o' shape and my arms just dangled at my sides.
I haven't killed two! Hmm, well, technically I have killed two but I did not get the name tag of the girl that I kicked off the cliff.
There was no way for me to get it anyway, so I shouldn't beat myself up over it.
I frowned and put my hands on my head, while taking care to make sure that the spears didn't touch me as it was still drenched in blood.
That's troubling. If I've only gotten one tag, then there are still six I need to get. If I am able to only achieve one kill a day, then I won't make it time.
I need to speed up. Maybe I shouldn't have backed off and let those two girls escape.
But still, it's not as if I could have beat them anyway.
The girls that I were talking to myself about were currently stalking through the trees and laughing quietly to themselves like they had an inside joke only they were aware of.
One of them whispered to the other.
"We're almost there. Just a few more."
She smiled.
"Isn't it fortunate that that person didn't notice he had five tags with him?"
The other girl furrowed her eyebrows.
"I'm still not sure about that whole thing. It seemed very sketchy."
The other kept the silly grin on her face.
"Who cares? We have what we came for. That corpse was so stupid, he actually bragged about having five tags on him. Did he think we were pushovers he could just kill easily?"
They kept walking farther into the foliage.
"They ventured deeper and deeper into the unknown, hearts pounding from excitement, eyes looking ahead at the future that was just within their reach, which would surely be bright. But right at their backs was a knife aimed directly at them, unknown to our heros but perfectly clear in the eyes of their enemy. Will our brave heroes make it out of this trap carefully prepared for them?"
A small girl lay on a tree branch, muttering to herself about strange things.
Her eyes were glazed over and unfocused, like she wasn't paying attention to what was going on around her.
Her short, shoulder length strawberry blonde hair and her enchanting indigo eyes that were like the ocean's depths drew you in and didn't let go were truly a sight to behold.
If left to mature, she would definitely become a once in a lifetime beauty.
She sat up, her eyes gaining focus once more, but she stared straight ahead without seeming to look at anything in particular.
She turned her head in the general direction of the route the girls took while keeping an emotionless expression.
The twilight was beginning to descend, with the wind gently flowing as it carried a premonition of the strange and marvelous things that were going to happen on this very cloudy night.
The girl stood, and one could see the tag on her chest that had the number two on it. She fell softly from the tree to land on the ground without hearing as much as a twig breaking.
She gazed up the sky, only to speak emotionlessly.
"It's time."
She blended into the darkness perfectly to completely erase her presence, her body disappearing.
At that moment I was back at the riverside preparing to rest for the night when I got a shiver that ran through my entire body, giving me goosebumps and a sense of dread I didn't understand.
Then I heard it. Voices.
They were coming from up the river, and they sounded like a group of not a small number.
I immediately got up and climbed the closest tree to me and watched from a vantage point where I had a complete view of the area around me.
A group of maybe twenty showed up and looked around here. From what I could hear, it seemed they thought they had gotten a great place for themselves to stay.
I was going to leave, although a bit begrudgingly, but I remembered I still had my spears there.
Shit! Do I try to get them? No, there's no need to risk it. I can always make more.
I was about to leave, when the ground trembled and shook. I lost balance and fell to the ground and got myself a nasty bumb on my head.
However, that was the least of my problems, as I felt the gazes of twenty-ish people on me.
I gulped and started to make up my excuse, but didn't have any chance to talk due the trembling of the earth getting worse and worse. To top it all off, there was one sound that made the feeling of dread I had earlier finally make sense.
The sound of stampeding beasts.
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