Whiteclay V

Irwin had always known that he was a force of nature, at least by the time he got back from the second greatest mistake of his life. With an effectively unlimited arsenal of mystical items created by the world's greatest craftsman and powers gifted by the creator of the universe himself, it should have been apparent that no singular force could stop him with a wanton guarantee.

Yes, that would be including the Archangels and the Horsemen that have long been forgotten by mankind.

But knowing something was undoubtedly different from realizing it, one of which being the words being dissimilar to each other. As such, the moment he realized that he could actually keep up with the Wendigo's fleeting charge towards its safe space, Irwin abandoned all notions of caution and the plan he had set up beforehand in exchange for hunting after the Wendigo this very night.

"Giddy up!" He bellowed mockingly, spanking his ass twice like a jockey before noticing that he was slamming the butt of his pistol in his skin.

Through thick foliage and deep snow, the Wendigo and he raced each other in a winding forest. The Wendigo, being spurious and deft by nature and nurture, called out to him through voices of its victims, all of whom were crying and pleading for him to stop and to let them go.

"Where you going, bitch?"

It was infuriating and, much like any other person who was being mocked by the sounds of innocent victims, Irwin's wrath soared like thunder in an electromagnetic storm.

"Flagello!" He growled and whipped forth his arm, sending a stream of blazing blue fire towards the Wendigo.

The Flaming Whip ripped through the air and latched onto the hind leg of the Wendigo, causing the monster to trip and fall to the ground with a dull thud when he pulled it back.

The Wendigo was surprisingly light, but that was probably because it was in a running motion and its center of gravity was in its upper chest. Still, it confused Irwin that an eight-foot-tall monster that could rip a human in half would be that easy to stumble.

"Something's wrong."

Yet he still moved forward, nearly leaping to get there faster as the Wendigo thrashed around while its leg was being burned to crisps. Its screams were reminiscent of its earlier taunting, except that its intensity was grating to Irwin's ears.

"Shut the fuck up!" Irwin skidded next to the Wendigo, breaking the snow and leaves that had fallen since the start of winter.

Before he could inflict any more damage, however, the Wendigo abruptly halted its thrashing and gained an uneasy sentience to its cataract-ridden eyes. Dismembered joints flexed unnaturally and swung at Irwin with vicious intent, nearly clawing out the man's face off.

Irwin, however, had more than enough experience with attacks like these and evaded at the last second. Only the tips of the Wendigo's razor-sharp claws had scratched a minute line on the tip of his nose.

He rolled back his Flaming Whip and wrapped it around his left arm, but before he could smash the Wendigo's head in, it had rolled away and scampered a tree away from him.

'What the fuck? Is it a racoon or a Wendigo?' He thought worriedly, eyeing its movements with impunity.

The monster roared indignantly, flexing its long limbs as it hugged the entirety of the black oak tree beside it as if it was its comfort pillow. The more Irwin scrutinized the monster, the more he realized that it was showing more human traits that the monster should have absconded the moment it turned feral.

"C'mon. Don't tell me that Wendigo's lore changed, too." He muttered with a groan. He had thought to observe it first, but seeing as his Supernatural Record would inform him of anything that had changed from the television series, killing it now while it was still within sight was for the best.

He rushed forward with a quick push and whipped forth the Flaming Whip which the Wendigo evaded with ease. The whip slices through the oak tree like a rusty chainsaw, sending wooden shrapnels all over the area and momentarily blinding his vision of the Wendigo.

The next second, the monster was far away, which irked and delighted Irwin. "Getting my cardio in the middle of the blizzard." He muttered to himself as he began running. All the while, his Flaming Whip whirred around his body and kept him and his clothes warm and dry from the snow.

He ran and ran, following the Wendigo as it tried to lose him on several occasions. But try as the monster might, it was as if Irwin had placed a tracker on him and would still find him, even against the dark light brought about by the storm up ahead.

The tracker theory was not necessarily untrue, as Irwin had thought about buying a magical one in the Trade Store, but decided against it when the smell of burnt flesh wafted through his nose. He had once likened himself to Garfield following the smell of fresh lasagna amidst the dark woodlands during the hunt.

"Goddamn, do you cannibals not get tired?" He muttered briefly as he jumped over a frozen river and landed on the other side with a roll.

Much to his relief, the hunt soon turned into a standstill when he entered a clearing and the Wendigo vanished before his eyes. It still left the smell that permeated the entire clearing, reminding Irwin that it was hunting an ambush predator with the strength of seven bears and the agility of nine mountain lions.

He crouched low, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to. There was an inkling at the back of his mind that reminded him to use his god-given abilities, but this was a real hunt now and he would be damned if he couldn't enjoy the taste of a monster that was not otherworldly in nature.

The smell was wafting away from the river and to the north where, as he gazed past the trees and its thick foliages, were home to a series of hills and buttes. He knew there would be a cave there, and one of those caves would be the home of the Wendigo.

He sneaked forward, careful not to disturb the shrubbery buried in the snow. That caution halted after a few minutes when he got sick of it and returned to running at full speed.

Although he was undoubtedly superhuman at this point, even superman gets tired of running for almost an hour.

"God, I have to train my stamina." He said to himself as he panted, arriving next to a series of cave walls that balded a part of the forest. 

From there on the smell had lost its intended effect. No longer was he able to track the monster effectively.

"Yeah, now I'm regretting my choice." He joked, invigorating his magik to increase the illumination ferried by the Flaming Whip around his left arm.

He entered the biggest of the cave and an immediate smell of musk, blood, feces wafted into his nose, nearly causing him to gag and vomit out his late lunch in the airport. He tore a piece of his undershirt and used it to cover the lower half of his face before walking forward, using the Flaming Whip to illuminate the path forward.

In direct contrast to the freezing weather outside, the cave felt stifling in its warm humidity. Breathing became hard, even for him, due to the stink and the warm wind coursing through the cave tunnels.

His light suffering was soon rewarded as a shuffling sound broke the momentary piece. It came away and to the left, where the tunnels broke off into two paths, one straight and the left one leading to another, smaller tunnel.

He could see scratches around the entrance of that tunnel and traces of blood, both new and old, on the ground.

"Unsanitary." He muttered as followed the blood inwards where he soon came upon a set of bones. Humanoid by the fact that it had a skull and pelvic bones similar to the ones he saw in documentaries.

That was not, however, his most grave concern for as soon as the tunnel ended, the howls of a man reverberated across a vast chamber that dwarfed the tunnels he had been in for the past five minutes. Stalactites littered the arching ceiling as it threatened to spike any poor fool who emitted a sound higher than fifteen decibel, but again, that was not his most grievous concern.

Not far away from him, in a clearing free of unnatural rock formations and stalagmites, was the Wendigo circling around two men and one woman. One of the men was clearly dead and had half of his head eaten off while the woman had a bleeding stump for a leg.

What was curious, however, was that the other man had a makeshift torch with him and was using it to ward off the Wendigo. That would not have worked easily normally, but given the fact that Irwin had just burnt its leg off earlier, it kept them alive.

'Not for long, though.'