Along with the Valkyrie

Rustle. Rustle.

'Where am I?...'

A young man suddenly woke up and he scanned his surroundings. He was atop a pile of fallen leaves that rustled as he moved around. Thick and tall trees with vast canopies surrounded him on all sides. Light rays shined through the tightly packed leaves and fell down on the moist grassy floor of the dense forest.

Lost in the woods and confused about what to do, the young man stood up and stared aimlessly. Unbeknownst to his mind, his body was moving around searching for the bare necessities of life.

He found himself a tree full of juicy fruits and happily munched down on the fallen fruits that were still in good condition. He found a bunch of half-eaten fruits scattered on the ground which made him a bit cautious for what hid inside this mysterious forest. He was not alone.

Focusing on the fruit in his hand, a bunch of indecipherable rune-like words appeared. Not just the fruit, the words appeared for most things he decided to focus on. The words seemed different for each discovery even though he couldn't understand any. He decided to stop investigating when his head started to hurt from overuse.

Hearing the sound of flowing water, his body took him to a stream near a small patch of clearing. Gulping down the water, a rustling sound nearby caught his attention. The young man approached the clearing and he saw a strange yet familiar creature come out of the bushes.

The creature looked similar to a rabbit except for the fact that it was bigger, and had a menacing horn on its head. Focusing on it, strange words appeared over its head trying to describe the creature. Alas, he could not comprehend.

The horned rabbit-like creature suddenly noticed his presence and instead of fleeing like typical rabbits do, it decided to charge at him. The young man freaked out and decided to run away but his body did not listen to him. Instead, it took on a battle stance he did not even know that he could do!

'Okay, I'm dead.'

The young man closed his eyes as he braced for the impact, leaving his fate to his strange independent body. And his body successfully dodged the attack from the critter, at least most of it. Blood ran down his left arm, his brain unable to register the pain due to a rush of adrenaline.

He begged his body to run away, to which it complied. However due to his blood loss and having inferior stamina to this wild beast, the horned rabbit closed the distance between them in an instant. As though to add insult to injury, the beast suddenly roared and the shockwave hit the young man, making him trip and fall.

The vile vermin finally caught up to him and looked down on him like he was a worm, a pathetic prey. After this act of humiliation, the horned beast pounced at the young man, its horn aimed at his heart. Assuming that his life would be over soon, he thought:

'I guess this is it. What a shitty life, killed by a rabbit… Well, to be fair, it has a horn and I'm unarmed. Still, what a shitty life…'

It was often said that a person would relive their whole life during their final moments, but he had no memory of his life before waking up in this peculiar forest. All he could do was close his eyes and wait for the moment when the horn of the accursed creature would pierce his heart. To wait for everything to be over…

But, that moment never came.

Reopening his eyes, he saw a knight adorned in full plate armor. The shape of the armor and the slight opening of the visor betrayed the gender of the knight in shining armor.

'A Valkyrie? Am I in Valhalla?'

Indeed, the beautiful lady in front of him was definitely worthy of the title "Valkyrie". Her strands of golden hair that came out of the helmet sparkled as the rays of sunlight shined on her. Her sapphire eyes rivaled the beauty of the vast blue sky.

Despite not having a set of wings and a winged horse as a royal mount, the beauty still held a well-made spear, bloodied at the tip from the slain enemies. She certainly looked like a Valkyrie descending to the mortal plane.

"Am I dead? Are you here to take me?" the young man asked, still in confusion from the events that just occurred.

*"Who are you and what are you doing in our forest?"*

(*He doesn't understand the language*)

The Valkyrie was saying something to him but all he could hear was gibberish.

With a confused look on his face, he replied:

"I don't understand what you are saying. Can you repeat that please, Valkyrie-sama?"

The Valkyrie looked at him with a stern expression and said:

*"Follow me"*

As she gestured with her hand in a universal body language for asking someone to follow.

`Is she telling me to follow her? Alright, I guess. Valhalla, here I come!'

The young man got up and tidied himself before following the Valkyrie on her path.

On the way, he saw many bizarre creatures such as wolves with three eyes, giant birds patrolling the canopy, little rat-like creatures, strange plants that ate those rats, and many more he couldn't describe.

Of course, all of those creatures had specific indecipherable words of their own above their heads. As soon as they set off on their little adventure, he realized that he was in fact not going to Valhalla. He was alive and well. Though, he was still sure that the knight lady was a Valkyrie. Of course, he did not fail to notice some gibberish words above her too.

Why was he suddenly able to focus and look at these words without suffering from a headache, you might ask? Well, the Valkyrie gave him a bottle full of goopy green liquid a while back which he happily gulped down without a care.

He immediately regretted this decision when the strong flavour of various herbs combined with the bitterness of the miraculous liquid started attacking his poor tastebuds. Yes, despite the vile…ahem…acquired taste, the liquid was indeed miraculous as it healed his injured left arm, refilled his spent stamina, and even allowed him to use his weird focus sight thingy without the fear of invoking a terrible headache.

He even heard a ringing sound in his head accompanied by a sentence in the same indecipherable language after many of his focusing attempts.

'Am I going crazy?'

Losing his memory, lost in an unfamiliar forest, almost getting killed by a rabbit, being saved by a Valkyrie, and unknown words constantly poking at his curious mind, it would be crazy to not be crazy. The day was still young. Yet, there were more to come.

After trekking through various obstacles and vanquishing the creatures that stood in their way… the Valkyrie's way, they arrived at a village. The village was quite humble, if humble meant having a bunch of aesthetic and practical treehouses here and there as well as a huge tree surrounded by a magnificent lake at the heart centre of the village.

The Valkyrie took the young man to one of the houses on the ground which he failed to notice because he was mesmerized by the treehouses above. To his defense, the houses were perfectly camouflaged since they looked like hobbit holes with a tree or two growing on top of each house. Going into the house that the Valkyrie brought him to, he was flabbergasted to find out that the house was more spacious inside than it looked on the outside.

An old lady sat on a chair inside the living room. She had dark greenish hair and a pair of jet-black eyes exuding an aura of mystery. She also wore various accessories apparently made out of animal bones and the interior of her house was decorated with various trinkets.

The hunchback old woman looked like the amalgamation of an alchemist and a witch doctor. The most peculiar part of her appearance was neither the peculiar hair color nor her equipment. It was her pointy ears.

The Valkyrie and the old woman chatted for quite some time, often pointing and glancing at the lost young man

`I wonder what they are talking about.'

Soon, the old lady took an odd stone out of the drawer beside her. It appeared to have been there for quite a long time from the dust it had collected on its shiny black marble-like exterior. The shine was now nearly unnoticeable due to the dust coating as well as the corrosion over time.

She gave the mysterious stone to the young man, chanting something in the unknown language. Suddenly, a terrible headache took over his mind. Millions of words and pictures appeared inside his head, translating each and every one of them into the language he was familiar with. He felt as if his head was splitting open.

Crack!

Something indeed split open and fortunately, it was not his head. The mysterious stone was halved as if cut by a swordmaster. Whatever remained of the dark shine it had earlier was now completely gone, reducing it to a normal-looking stone.

After the bombardment of knowledge, despite not having taken it in properly yet, the young man's world grew dark.

He had fainted.