Fourteen
 
“Faster! Faster!” Alice urged him with a laugh. Kon grit his teeth and pumped his arms as the baying of the monsters behind him sounded closer and closer with each passing moment. He risked a look backward and saw the sleek, reptilian hounds as they leapt over a fallen log. Four and a half feet long with leathery skin, red eyes, and a yellow frill that ran down the length of their spine.
Alice leapt from tree branch to tree branch above him, easily keeping pace as she seemed to be enjoying herself. Occasionally she would duck away and the sounds of fighting would erupt, only to end moments later when Alice returned to pace him.
Kon turned his head back around just in time to run face first into a golden tree. His nose flattened and he bounced backward to slam into the ground with a loud thump. The thick forest floor did little to pad the landing, but he was moving instantly to get back on his feet and running again. Alice’s laughter had redoubled.
A tongue lashed out, slimy, pink, and way too long, and struck the tree closest to him. Hissing emanated as the saliva started to melt away the metallic surface, gray smoke rising up in a noxious cloud as the monsters loped closer and closer.
“You won’t get away. Turn and fight them!” Alice yelled down to him and Kon was forced to grit his teeth and accept the inevitability. He spun on his heel and was forced to throw himself to the side to avoid three lashing tongues. His rapid deceleration and turn couldn’t be replicated by the three attacking hounds, they shot past him as they dug short claws into the loamy soil. Furrows were dug as they twisted in futile rage as the flashed by him.
The last two had enough time to slow down, but they didn’t stop. The closest leapt at a tree and bounced off of it to come flying toward Kon with a row of needle teeth that were long enough that Kon had a brief thought that the teeth shouldn’t be able to fit in its head.
He dropped down to the ground and kicked his legs out, both heels hitting the hounds chest. Fragile bones broke under his heels, but his knees twinged as the unexpected weight nearly buckled them. Kon used the beast’s own momentum to throw it at a tree. The hound’s back broke as it made a U shape around the immovable trunk.
Kon rolled backward and came to his feet just in time to watch as the second hound’s tongue rocket toward him. Wet and slimy was his first impression as it hit his bare forearm. Then pain as the hairs on his melted away and his skin began to blister and he had to bite back a scream of pain as his skin began to melt.
“FOCUS!” Alice roared and the threat of losing his concentration disappeared. Kon charged as fast as he could, legs churning in a blur, at the now startled hound. It looked at him with wrathful red eyes as its tongue shot out again and again. It was small and close to the ground, stubby legs that couldn’t backpedal fast enough.
Kon leapt at it and took another shot from the acidic tongue, a grazing blow along his cheek, and then he crashed into it. The frill along its back was spiky and his blood flowed as multiple spines ripped into his shoulder. They rolled along in a snarl of grasping hands and snapping teeth until Kon managed to get his hands around its thick neck and began to squeeze.
Its leathery skin was cool to the touch but rough with thick muscles that protected it as he started to squeeze. For a moment. Then he started to squeeze, squeezing so hard that something popped in his hands and another pain assaulted his battered mind, but he kept going even as dull claws ripped at him. He twisted so that its claws found his side and hip rather than his soft underbelly and kept squeezing until the hound stopped moving.
“Wow. That was intense,” Alice said from right above him. Kon looked up, his vision tinted red with either blood or in rage, and he staggered upright and away from the dead animal. His clothes, already in dire straights, were in tattered ruins that draped off of him. His forearm was a burnt mass of flesh and blood, his face felt strange and wet, his shoulder didn’t move correctly and he limped as he tried to walk.
“Hold up.” Alice lifted her hand and her full rune appeared and the same healing power washed over him again. He could feel his skin stitch itself back together, muscles rebuilding themselves and a broken off spine push itself out of his shoulder. Absence of pain caused him to cry out as his knees buckled and he hit the ground while Alice slumped over. She buried her axe in the ground and reached into the bag and pulled out some wrapped up pieces of meat.
“Eat. There’s three more.” The thick piece of meat hit him square in the chest and only with the most desperate attempt to grab it did he prevent it from falling to the ground. Reptilian growls rolled out of the forest and he could hear the rest of the pack getting closer.
“Did you push them further back?” Kon asked.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
“Shut up and eat,” Alice scolded him as she took the first bites of her own charred steak. Kon shut up and ate even as the hounds got closer. The muscles in his cheek felt weird as he bit and tore apart the steak. Like always, the D-Grade meat his stomach like an energy bomb, power surging through him as he swallowed piece after piece.
“I have maybe one more full heal like that in me and then you’re on your own. I would suggest not fighting like that again,” Alice said. She had ate her own share of the meat, about three times as much as Kon’s, and was looking tired again. She grabbed her axe and leapt flatfooted fifteen feet straight up and onto a tree branch. She slumped down and let her legs dangle off the sides as she placed her back against the trunk.
Kon looked around until he saw a branch on the ground, suspiciously close to their fight with the break clean looking, and he grabbed it. It was nearly the same height as him but only as thin as his thumb. The metal in it made it heavy to the point it was cumbersome to use, but it was better than trying to strangle another of the hounds.
“I can do this, I can do this, oh this is going to hurt.”
The first of the hounds came rushing at him by leaping of the trunk of a tree above head height. Kon’s body responded before his mind could, rearing back and grabbing the end of the staff like it was a baton. He put his back into it and cracked the monster across its jaw, the blow nearly jarring the tree limb out of his hand. The monster’s momentum was diverted and it flew to the side to hit the ground and roll over and over until hitting a tree and laying still.
Kon didn’t have time to look at it as his attention was immediately occupied by the other two hounds that came running around trees. They formed a V with Kon at the bottom, both of them rushing roughly in time with each other. Kon couldn’t fight them both at the same time.
He charged forward, yelling at the top of his lungs with the six foot branch cocked behind his head. The leftmost lizard hound tried to slow down as he charged it while out of the corner of his eye he saw the other hound change direction to get to him. It wouldn’t be in time.
A tongue lashed the air and jumped to the side in stride, spun on his foot when he landed, and leapt off the other foot to land in front of the hound before it could react. He crushed its skull with a single mighty blow that blew apart the metallic tree branch in a spray of splinters, leaving him just a jagged two foot long twig.
Setting his feet, he stared down the last hound as it bounded around another tree and cut the distance to just a few feet. If there was any type of intellect to these monster’s, it was buried under layers of unending violence. It attacked without fear or hesitation and Kon met it with the same aggression.
The energy that pulsed through his veins, the fresh healing, and his instincts all urged him to attack. It was alone, isolated, and weak. He had to kill it before more of the hounds arrived. With ten feet separating them the lizard’s tongue flicked out and Kon dropped into a slide, foot first, and crashed into the lizard’s own legs. The monster folded and flipped over him as its momentum was destroyed and it landed on its back in a crash.
Kon’s ankle ached but he still rushed it, lifting the spike of splintered wood over his head and fell forward in a lunge. Sharp splinters tore through muscles and bone, piercing something important, and the last of the pack died at his hand.
Kon looked around himself for a moment, panting hard and gasping in shock as he surveyed the destruction all around him. Five dead lizard hounds lay in different levels of trauma, broken tree limbs and smoking tree trunks were scattered about. Kon’s blood had been liberally splattered around the ground and he thought there was a chunk of his skin and muscle laying there, but it was hard to tell.
“You’re being immodest right now. That jumpsuit is in rough shape,” Alice commented as Kon flopped to the ground and tried to catch his breath. He shot her a crude gesture, too tired to do anything else.
“You kept these ones in mostly good shape. I’ll make you some leathers.” Alice jumped down off her perch and began to harvest without looking at him. Five F-Grade cores were soon piled up next to him while got his breath under control and got to his feet. She had started a fire and was roasting something in it, which she waved at him to help himself too.
“Your node is way stronger than I thought. I think your next one should be a repair node.”
“What’s a repair node?”
“It’s a piece of my Regrowth rune, but focused on only one thing. We can make it muscle recovery. With how well your first node processes energy it’ll help fuel the second node and that will help you with your training. Muscle recovery is important.”
“When can I get a rune that makes fire or shoots lighting or something like that?” Kon asked. The last fights had been brutal and bloody affairs which left him exhausted and wounded.
“When you have a core that can sustain that type of energy expenditure. Your first core should be tied to five or six nodes that are all passive. Working in the background to keep you on your feet and growing stronger. Second core and node network will be active, things you activate consciously, again should be to recovery and cultivation. When you finish the first web that’s when you should look at some projection runes like I have. Of course the full runes you’ll inscribe on your cores will be able to be projected, but they’re expensive.”
She had expertly skinned all the lizard hounds and hung them over a tree branch. Another rune fragment appeared over one of her fingers, one he hadn’t seen yet, and the gore and viscera disappeared off of the skins.
“Allright. Let’s get your measurements real quick and I can try to make you a set of leathers. I will warn you, that this will likely chafe.”