Ashen Monsters

Chapter 124: Ashen Monsters

/The chase was long and brutal on the young Hunter. They'd been living in the wilderness for a while now, certainly, and they had hunted creatures superior to them one way or another. Critters were fast, large animals were strong, and so on. Yet they had never once been so thoroughly outmatched.

Whenever they ran, they could not shake pursuit. When they stopped to rest, they were ruthlessly attacked from any direction. There was no space for stopping, not for eating, drinking, or using the bathroom, and still their pursuer remained entirely hidden from them.

It went on just like that for almost a full day, before the young Hunter finally managed to find a hiding spot with a mad dash and a Skill of theirs. While anyone could end up being hunted, only an idiot would run without a plan, and it would take someone even more stupid not to regain their calm head eventually.

While the young Hunter knew little about their pursuer, they had not run pointlessly. Throughout the chase, they had been probing the other's skills. They had run faster and slower, used different methods of detection, and surveyed the nearby area, while setting up a hiding spot as well.

Now, with but a moment's respite, their mouth twisted upwards into a grin. The call they had felt was finally silent within their chest. This was the moment they would prove themselves worthy, or they would die. To overturn the odds using only one's skill and what was at hand, that was what hunting meant to them. If they died in the field, well, that was simply due to their own incompetence.

The young Hunter already had a ruthless outlook on the world, but they were even harder on themselves. It was clearer to them now, that this was not just a test, but also a learning experience for them. What better way, after all, to know how prey would react, than by being in their shoes for a while?

And so, after minimal respite, the young Hunter's mind was made up. Their determination as solid as steel, they were set on wearing themselves down until they had nothing more to give.

Leaving their hiding spot, the chase resumed, and went on for days, a game where both parties staked their lives on every move. They ran, set traps, lashed out, hid, and tried to find each other again.

Without ever having laid eyes on their foe, the young Hunter knew they were formidable, always staying hidden, but both of them were still not giving it their all. The first day passed, then the second and the third. On the fourth, when neither of them had slept for even a moment, the young Hunter felt their limits approaching.

It was grueling, grinding on their nerves. They had to be meticulous in every step, since even just a single slip up could mean death, and they had been keeping it up for four days. By the time night approached again, they felt entirely drained.

There was no more stamina left to give, no more tricks up their sleeve, and yet, somehow, they made do. Their traps became less fancy, more resourceful and tricky. Their steps more measured, quiet, not even a sliver of energy wasted. Everything they did was done with ruthless efficiency, polished to a shine in the face of pressure greater than they had ever faced.

The fifth day went by slowly, both parties drained, dancing around each other like wounded animals, careful not to make a single misstep, and finally, on the dawn of the sixth day, it was over.

Young Hunter was worn down to the bone, their senses and movements sharpened to the very limit. Their mind was teetering on the edge of insanity, clinging to life with all they had just to survive another second. They were hungry, thirsty, and tired enough to collapse, yet they remained awake.

They'd used Skills to make up for their slowing cognition, and their levels had increased more than in the last year combined. This had been fruitful, so very worth it to them, and when they finally found their enemy locked in their trap, they rejoiced. Perhaps somewhere, deep down in their soul, a part of them wished for an even greater challenge, yet that day, they screamed in joy, because the first game of death had ended in their victory./

(Legends: The Hunter - 3; Game)

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Gritting his teeth, Mercury dragged his feet further and further up, the few centimeters of ash soon feeling like a wall he could only barely cross. Bit by bit, he continued the journey, watching the nearby streaks of blood end as he himself left one behind.

Where did the bodies of his predecessors go? He didn't dare ask. Something about the place still felt so distinctly wrong, pushing him to hurry, rather than rest. Perhaps it was the adrenaline in his veins, or the near-death experience he'd recently had still driving him, but with great force of will, Mercury left behind his own trail of blood.

Soon, although the time that passed felt excruciatingly long, the ascent was done. Somehow, where many others failed, he succeeded. Perhaps it was due to <Breath> or his willpower, he didn't know yet. At the very top of the hill, the strange pressure he'd been feeling vanished, and was instead replaced by a calm air of quiet.

For a few moments, Mercury decided to rest. He didn't dare lay down, staying vigilant, but he first looked around rather than press on. There were a handful of trails that led all the way to the peak of the hill, though he didn't know whether half of them were leading down instead. It would paint an even bleaker picture if that was the case.

By itself, the place he had now reached didn't seem all that special. It was high enough to let him see further, of course, but other than that, there was only one more landmark. It looked like a summit cross, though Mercury wouldn't call it one, given the height of the hill. <Appraisal> only told him it was a structure to denominate the highest point of a landmark as well, which wasn't helpful.

Pushing off his scouting for a few minutes, Mercury took the time to study the cross. He didn't want to take any risks while he was looking for things to eat. Walking up close, the mopaaw sniffed the thing, then looked at it again, trying to see if there were any special details.

Its smell was that of metal and ash, one he had grown more than familiar to in this place, yet it was also mixed with something else. The putrid hue of sulfur wasn't in the air here, but to Mercury it felt more like a trick to get him to feel calm. His close inspection revealed something else, being runes. Countless of them were etched into the cross, small and unassuming, woven together.

Mercury hadn't learned as much about them as he'd hoped before, but even with his limited knowledge, he could tell they combined to form more than the sum of their parts. In fact, the feeling they gave off was almost familiar in a way. It felt as though they were meant to protect, rather than attack.

Having read barely enough of them to conclude nothing would jump out from it to kill him, Mercury swiftly laid his eyes on the landscape down below. The sight was disheartening, to a degree, seeing it put into perspective just how lifeless the plains really were. Ash, ash, and even more ash were all that seemed to cover the vast land in front of him.

Somewhere up ahead, he couldn't tell what cardinal direction it was in, he could see mountains rising, but even those seemed lifeless and grey. To his right, left, and behind him, there was just a vast amount of nothing. However, there was a silver lining. Despite all the ash, Mercury could occasionally catch glimpses of movement below it.

There was something alive down there, at the very least. Mercury took a few moments to try and understand what kind of beings could survive in an environment like this, and to estimate their size, but with so few reference points, it proved rather tough. Still, he tried his best to remember their approximate location, when his ears picked up something.

Spinning around to his back, Mercury saw that the ash on the horizon began to rise, slowly lifting from the floor, revealing the dull, lifeless rock. Then, the flakes danced, first slow, then quickly, then faster still. They moved into the sky, forming a large wall of grey, dragged along by a vicious storm.

"Shit," Mercury cursed. Maybe this was why nothing else had moved. If storms like this one were frequent, anything living here would've needed to adapt to it, and hidden away. They probably just saw it coming earlier than he did.

Seeing the stormfront move closer, Mercury thought for a while, then decided. His safest bet was probably the cross. It still stood, after all, and it could provide some cover at the very least.

The mopaaw used his last moments before the winds hit to try and carve himself a spot at the base of the metal, brushing aside the ash, before using his mind's hammer to try and shatter the stone. Yasashiku had always told him that a hammer with too much power would only break things, and the old man was right once more.

When Mercury compressed his rijn down further, from the size of a hammerhead to about half that, he could see the stone begin to crack. He was lucky, too. The rock was brittle, filled with holes and pockets of gas. If it had been something tougher, it might have been his rijn that shattered against it.

Feeling his mind compress more tightly was equally strange, the hammer growing firmer when he struck a smaller area. He could tell the blows were powerful, sending cracks through the rocks, but he could also feel the aftereffects. Keeping his mind this tightly knit was taking its toll on him, too. Combined with repeatedly bashing it against a hard surface, he could feel himself getting a headache and start sweating, but kept it going nonetheless.

Mercury didn't stop until the storm had grown much closer, when he finally ended his rijn, allowing himself a moment of respite before moving the shattered stone aside with <Telekinesis>. Making the burrow had taken him around ten minutes or so, and it was barely deep enough for him to lay inside, but with the metal cross in between him and the storm, it was much better than nothing.

With a final deep breath, the storm reached the mopaaw.

Within moments, Mercury felt his whole world had suddenly lost all colour. Everything he saw, even the crimson sky, was now painted in tones of grey. The flakes of ash moved too fast to pick them out individually, melding into an everchanging blanket for his vision.

The storm stung in his eyes, forcing Mercury to close them shut, and instead rely on his sense of mana to try and figure out whether something was approaching or not. Having his world plunged into darkness was unsettling for the mopaaw, but he prevailed, digging his claws into the stone as the winds tried to take him off his feet and hurl him into the sky.

Feeling the storm whip his back, Mercury endured silently, keeping his face as low to the rock as possible so he could still breathe at all. It was considerably harder now, like the wind was trying to pull the air from his lungs, but once again <Breath> helped him considerably.

He still endured, when small pebbles began to be dragged up as well, shards of rock soon cutting into his fur and skin. The wounds were small, but they soon began piling up, and the ash that filled them hurt like a bitch.

Then, the storm continued to gain force, and soon, it felt like it was pulling the blood from his veins, only to have that same blood chained by the strange force that encapsulated the hill. Mercury could hear the wind howl even louder in indignation, and for a few moments, he thought he felt genuine malice in it, but only seconds after, the storm turned and began to weaken.

Mercury cowered on the ground until it had thoroughly left, only then shaking off whatever ash he could and grimacing. He enjoyed a few deep breaths of air, then looked at the landscape down below again, and found himself surprised.

There were bodies of creatures around, not even few of them. They looked a little like manta rays, except with dark grey skin on top and a long, thin feeler coming off their back. He saw smaller critters, ones that looked something like centipedes feasted on the dead ones, while the life ones fed on them in exchange.

Soon though, more creatures began to emerge, eager to pounce on the storm's bounty. There were lumbering, ape like things, with the stature of gorillas, but their eyes were white and empty. Somehow, they would walk using their arms to support themselves, yet they remained almost perfectly silent as they approached their prey.

Whenever those things' fists struck, Mercury would hear a sickening crunch, and the fight was over. Then, their lips would part to reveal fangs and mandibles, which they used to tear apart whatever they killed.

This is how most of the gorilla-things died, too. They got careless while eating, and pounced one by one of the things that came out the rifts in the blood eclipse. The strange humanoids somehow seemed to crawl from cracks in the ground, their joints bending to let them fit into tight spaces. When they rose, some would howl and hunt, other remain silent and pounce later.

However, even those were not the greatest predators around.

Some time after the storm, when Mercury was still observing the carnage below, he felt a shudder. For a moment he thought he might be cold from blood loss, but that would be strange, given that his wounds had mostly developed scabs by now.

Then, a second shudder, and he noticed it began from his legs. He wasn't shaking, the ground was.

After the third one, Mercury could finally see it. One of the hills near him, one without a cross, he noted, had begun rising. It simply lifted off the ground slowly, giant pieces of rock raising from beneath it. Slowly, it rose higher, as more rocks extended to support its ascent.

Soon, the hill was no longer a hill, but instead some sort of gigantic tortoise, yet it was not. Its shell was made from the blackened rock, its skin grey and full of cracks. It looked more carved from stone, rather than alive, yet it so clearly was. Its tail was the stinger of a scorpion, curling up into the sky, and its head boasted small horns to its side and upwards.

Its eyes sweeped the surroundings for a few moments, seeing some of the larger targets, before its tail swept across the landscape. Somehow, from between the chitin plates, more appendages sprung. There were arms, almost human looking, but with dull grey and black scales covering them, which reached out for the crushed bits of meat. Some of them lifted things far bigger than them, betraying their strength, before drawing their spoils within.

Maws opened up next to the arms, a countless number of them, and were fed with anything that moved, until hardly anything remained alive within the behemoth's vicinity. Then, the walking hill simply withdrew its tail and head, folded its legs, and laid down to rest in silence once more.

The shiver that ran across Mercury's spine was genuine this time, his hair raising in fear. He looked down at the ground below his feet, at the hill he was standing on, and used <Appraisal> again.

[A hill.]

Mercury let out half a sigh of relief, then decided it was better to be safe than sorry. His mana had recovered quite a bit, and he decided he might as well invest it into something, using his spell,<Revelation>, for the first time.

[Consumed: 100 Mp.]

[A hill made from volcanic rock. It is consistently covered in ash, most of it raining down from the sky, while some is generated by the stone itself. It is inanimate.]

Mercury breathed a sigh of relief at those words. They had been a little less detailed than he would have liked, and there was most likely more to it than met the eye, but for now, he could at least know that it was fairly safe.

After all, some of the creatures below had seen him and attempted to climb up, yet their hunger was quickly overwhelmed by the strain the ascent caused them. Even to monsters, their survival was more important than securing a measly meal, and everything that attempted to approach him stopped or died just around halfway up.

Curiously, while things were trying to move up, the runes on the cross glowed lightly, and Mercury could feel the ambient mana being drawn to it. However, when they died, he saw something else entirely, as their bodies would rapidly darken, then turn black, and finally fall apart to ash.

Sensing the mana in the air, Mercury could tell what was happening. The cross set up a magic field, feeding off the ambient mana for its enchantments, which wore down anything within a certain range of the hilltop. Then, if it killed anything, a latent spell would take effect, converting almost anything into mana which was fed to the cross, and anything left over was discharged back into the air.

While the cross was still creepy to him, it also served as a form of protection for now, which Mercury was grateful for. Feeling a little safer, he allowed himself to calm down slightly. It had been a very, very stressful few hours in this place, and it was only now that he finally got a chance to wind down a bit.

He'd been tense as a bowstring ever since he'd arrived here, and with good reason, too, but it had also led him to make a few rash decisions. Perhaps he really should have thought about ascending the hill surrounded by blood for a little longer, yet he didn't. Now though, he was glad for it.

Maybe it was his <Intuition> helping him again, whatever the reason, he was still alive because of it.

Really, he was quite happy with his skillset right now. He was decently well versed in fending for himself, and his skills reflected that. Most importantly, he was adaptable, and able to learn quickly. Being a mopaaw also had helped him with his appetite, seeing raw meat now didn't really bother him anymore.

If he could have one additional Skill though, it would be one to conjure some form of water or food.

Immediately after, he wanted to smack his own head. He pulled up the Skill shop and searched for anything related to eating and drinking for quite a while. He found Skills like <Overeating>, <Nutrition Storage>, <Water Storage>, <Fast Metabolism>, and even <Omnivore>, but sadly nothing related to actually producing food.

Perhaps if he'd really understood <Nothingness> he would have been able to just weave food with his dreams by now, but unfortunately, that still needed more practice.

Sighing, Mercury looked over the plains below again, seeing that some of the fighting had now died down, with most carcasses being gone and many skirmishes between critters having finished. Occasionally, he'd see a wounded creature win a fight and have any cuts or bruises vanish almost immediately, probably regaining Hp from a level up.

He'd have to go out hunting soon, but right now, he needed some time to recover. His wounds were barely closed over, and his head still lightly ached. His rijn wasn't really ready for breaking stone quite yet, but it was still a start.

For now though, what Mercury needed even more than food was a cool head on his shoulders. So, the mopaaw went back to his small burrow, then forced himself to close his eyes, and began breathing rhythmically. He felt that his <Breath> had been improving again too, recently, but for now, he put that at the back of his mind. He still had some way to go, after all, which meant he needed sleep.

Despite his dangerous environment, once Mercury convinced himself he needed to sleep, the fatigue set in. The poison that wasn't completely out of his system, all the blood he'd lost, and the long march he'd undertaken had worn him out. Once he woke, he'd certainly be ready to tackle the challenges up ahead, but they could surely wait for at least a little while.