"...Looks like we're having more than just potato today."
Casimir was ready to strike at any moment—yet something held him back. First, he couldn't identify the thing in front of him. Second, his blade was damaged, limiting the techniques he could execute before it failed completely. Third, most of his Qi core had already been drained in the earlier duel.
His heartbeat fell into an erratic rhythm. A suppressed unease crept in—unfamiliar, distant, something he couldn't remember feeling in a long time.
The silhouette in the haze drew closer, its outline gradually sharpening. Just before it broke through, Casimir frowned—the thing stood several feet taller than the ten-foot creatures lining the hillside treeline like soulless husks. Its approach alone revealed its mass; each step carried the weight of a boulder, sending tremors through the dark slopes and snow as it advanced.
Finally, through the haze, its true physical appearance emerged.
It stood roughly twelve to fourteen feet tall, its height exaggerated by a hunched, forward-leaning posture that made it look like it was always advancing.
Its body was massive, thick-limbed, and uneven—covered in dense, matted white fur that hung in heavy, damp clumps, streaked with grey and shadow like it had absorbed the storm around it.
The shoulders were broad and sloped, giving way to long, overextended arms that hung lower than natural, ending in large, clawed hands. Each finger was elongated, jointed like a predator's, tipped with curved, black talons built for tearing rather than gripping.
Its legs were powerful but slightly bent, digitigrade in stance, with wide, clawed feet that dug into the ground for balance, as if it carried constant weight.
The head was the most unnatural part—a fusion of beast and bird. A narrow, elongated skull pushed forward into a sharp, hooked beak, dark and worn.
Above it, two thick, ridged horns curved outward and upward from the sides of its head, like a mountain goat's but heavier, more rugged, marked with cracks and age.
Its eyes glowed a dull, unnatural yellow—round, unblinking, and fixed, giving it a constant, predatory awareness stare.
At the first sight of the furred, ape-like creature, caution took hold. His mind briefly drifted to escape—slipping away through some side route, avoiding a direct encounter.
He dismissed the idea almost immediately. It was a risk he wasn't willing to take. If this unknown creature managed to track him back to his home, the threat would be far worse than facing it here. The chances were low—but not something he could measure with certainty.
On second thought, even if he escaped cleanly and left no trace, another possibility gnawed at him—sooner or later, these unknown creatures might find their way to his hamlet anyway.
Without thinking further, Casimir drew in a deep breath of cold air and let it out slowly through the corners of his mouth. Then he moved.
Before the fiend could react, he flashed past it with inhuman agility. His blade cut through its arm—dark red blood burst out, spilling violently as he lowered his weapon and turned.
WHAMMM—
The creature's claw slammed into the ground, aimed to crush him. Casimir reacted on instinct—slipping sideways, then springing back as the other arm came hurtling toward him.
'Curse it… I struck with enough force to sever that arm—yet it barely bruised him? But…'
THUD—THUMP—CRACK!
The creature surged forward, pummeling relentlessly. Each strike tore through the hillside—trees splintered, mounds collapsed, the terrain itself ripped apart under its claws. It moved in a feral frenzy, fast and unrestrained way yet eerily silent, not a single roar or snarl escaping it.
'What is an Awakened Creature doing in these hills… and of this high rank? I've never encountered anything like this.'
Casimir was caught off guard by the creature's speed. Despite its massive frame, it moved with unnatural agility, forcing him to focus entirely on evasion. He could barely keep up with the barrage, let alone think of counterattacking.
He kept retreating, eyes locked on its movements, searching for an opening. The assault looked chaotic—but there was structure beneath it, something precise he couldn't fully grasp yet.
'Crap! Those huge, abnormally long arms ain't leaving any effective opening. Even to escape from here I would atleast need to distract or immoblize it for sufficient time.'
After observing the creature closely for a while, Casimir began to see a pattern. It relied solely on its clawed arms—one slammed down, then the other followed. As one claw struck the ground, the previous one tore upward, ripping through everything in its path before the cycle repeated.
There was a brief gap between motions—an instant when one arm lifted as the other landed.
That was his window. He would have to slip through it, lunging past without hesitation—without getting caught or even grazed by those claws.
One clean hit from them would reduce him to nothing but mangled flesh and blood.
Casimir gathered all of his strength, driving it into his legs before surging forward in a single, explosive leap. Using a nearby tree as leverage, he propelled himself past the creature's sweeping arms with precise timing.
He made it almost—
—but then the creature's beak slammed down, cutting off his path.
Casimir reacted before he could even think—twisting midair and kicking off the beak, flipping over it by pure reflex, that saved him from being torn in half. He slid back on landing, driving the broken tip of his sword into the ground to halt his momentum.
A cold breath slipped through his teeth.
In the next instant, he surged forward again — closing the distance in a blur and driving his blade straight into the creature's lusterless black beak.
However, it didn't go as he had anticipated.
Instead of piercing through, the blade barely grazed the beak.
However, it didn't go as he had anticipated.
Instead of piercing through, the blade barely grazed the beak.
Before Casimir could see any of it—let alone retreat—the creature snapped its head upward. The force hurled him diagonally into the air, sending him higher than the monster itself.
For a fraction of a second, he was weightless.
Ready to get mangled or shattered with a immense blow of abomination's arms alone as he began to fall down.
Casimir was perfectly aligned above to one of its aberrantly long arms to get killed in mid air any time a talon reached to him and vice versa.
Before any of it could harm him, he angled his broken blade into the incoming talons, colliding with them just enough to deflect his own falling trajectory. The claws swept past him, missing by a narrow margin.
Additionally, as he came down he dragged the blade along the length of the creature's arm, carving a deep, vicious line through its flesh — landing hard and abrupt with both feet on the ground.
The moment his feet touched the ground—
A raspy, screeching growl emanated from the creature's maw, ripping through the hillside like a shockwave—that made Casimir snap rigid and nearly buckle. It almost crushed his ears outright. He felt his organs lurch as though they'd been wrenched loose, a searing nausea rising through his gut, his skull throbbing as if it were on the verge of splitting open. The force of it left him paralyzed where he stood.
And now the claws were coming for him.
He couldn't process it — couldn't think, couldn't move. All he had left was conviction. He gathered every last scrap of strength and willpower he could drag up from the marrow of his bones and forced his body to obey. His eyes bulged against the pressure. His throat felt raw and torn, tasting of blood. Every muscle in his body flooded red with the sheer strain of it, veins rising to the surface as he pushed — and pushed — and refused to stop.
FWOOSH—WHAM!!!
He dropped back to the ground, barely saving himself from being cleaved in two — but one talon still caught him, raking a deep diagonal gash across his torso as he fell. The wound was severe enough to kill him slowly if not outright.
He could feel his lung collapsing beneath it, yet that same slash had broken him free from the paralysis. The threat hadn't passed. Another claw was already descending, and he still had to get out — somehow.
His vision had gone to smear, his senses dulled to near nothing, his body stripped of whatever strength remained. He gave none of it a second thought. He forced himself upright, and immediately doubled over, coughing a gout of blood from his throat.
He staggered and dropped to one knee. But he couldn't rest — not even for a breath. His jaw clenched, slicked with blood, and his grip tightened around the hilt of his sword.
He rose with his head low, drops of blood pattering dark against the white snow. 'Its screech is pesky...'
He dashed — evading another claw with the reckless looseness of a man on the edge of going feral or blacking out — and drove his blade into its left leg with everything he had, circling all the way back around as he pulled free, leaving a deep wound weeping dark blood into its fur.
The back of the creature's claw came down heavy. His body would collapse the moment he let up — he knew it. He met the strike at the last instant, blade angled, steel sliding along the limb and redirecting the force past him as he stepped off-line, letting the weight carry through rather than taking it head-on.
'Maybe killing it would have been easier if I knew where its core aperture resides.'
He slipped past it without breaking stride, and without wasting momentum drove himself onto its right knee, using it as a springboard to launch higher — and drove the sword in just above the abdomen.
At the same instant the blade sank into the fiend, its black beak caught him from the side with a thunderous ram, wrenching the sword from his grip and hurling him across the air. He skimmed a tree and crashed hard into the ground, throwing up a violent burst of snow dust around him.
The fiend turned and lumbered toward where he had fallen.
But when it arrived, Casimir was nowhere to be found.
STEP!
'I... need to go home.'
He scurried at a groggy, lurching pace — as fast as he could manage — one arm wrapped across his torso, subtly channelling all his Qi toward the grievous wound and the internal bleeding beneath. Blood reddened the snow and terrain behind him as he walked, completely worn out, in a state one could only describe as gruesome.
'I can't defeat this thing right now. Crap, c'mon... I can't die here. Not here. Not yet.'
He wobbled on a small snow-buried stone he hadn't noticed, his vision bleeding into blur, his senses dimming with it.
'I... I just need to survive and reach home. I've always survived — I can do this again. I need to cure Мама. There's no way I can die before seeing Мама smile the way I wish for once.'
He coughed, half-choking, spitting blood.
'I want to go home... please, go—'
WHOOSH—!!
Casimir flinched as he sensed something hurtling toward him — but his body couldn't keep up, couldn't turn in time.
The impact struck him square in the back with overwhelming force, launching him far and dragging him across sharp, irregular stones as the hill's slope carried him further down.
He landed face-first in the white earth. Red blood surged from his mouth and split lips, and from the wound across his torso — not yet fully sealed. It spread beneath him and around him, seeping into the snow, staining it in a way that looked strangely surreal.
It had been a tree trunk. Hurled at him like a javelin
The haze was thickening, and the snow had risen unnaturally, swallowing what remained of the visible terrain.
Behind him, he could hear the heavy gait of the furry fiend closing in.
'This hairy beauty is annoyingly smart — not just wild.'
Before shutting his eyes he forced his gaze to drag across the surroundings. Then he noticed a particular tree a little ahead.
'Isn't it... the same place where I first encountered them?!' He closed his eyes. '...Am I hallucinating?'
He drew a laboured breath. 'I don't know. Hallucinations don't usually work on me. But I do know one thing...'
He drove his left fist into the snow, then raised his other arm and pressed it forward, palm clenching into the snow — bracing to rise as the creature bore down on him.
GRAB—
—?!
His right hand felt clutching around something hard instead of soft snow when a faint smile ghosted across his bloodied face.
The creature's left claw hung directly above him, poised to mangle.
SLASH—
In the next instant, Casimir flashed past it. The creature's left arm had been severed clean near the forearm joint and dropped into the snow, its open wound freezing over enigmatically all the way to the shoulder.
Casimir exhaled — a slow, bloodied breath from the corners of his mouth.
'...Killing is the key rule of survival.'