Chapter 9: Chapter 9: the hunt begins

I turn to look in the direction that the arrow came from and spot an elf, who is holding a bow. He dares to shoot me? I start to run at him, while he prepares another arrow. Seeing the arrow come makes it easy to swat out of the air with a lightning bolt. 

I step around his honestly unimpressive swipe with his dagger, before I grab him and force him into the ground.

“WHY DID YOU ATTACK ME?” I yell at him. Honestly, why would he attack me at all? I release him and stare into his determined eyes, waiting for him to answer.

After a moment of staring, he yells for someone to attack me, before striking me with his fist. How dare he! I attack him back with a lightning bolt and he goes limp. Just afterwards, I hear a sound from my left. Turning to look at it, I see a smaller elf hiding in some bushes, looking absolutely terrified.

I turn back to the rude elf and shake him to see if he wakes up. He doesn’t, and might be dead, which is honestly good. He attacked me with the intent to kill, so I say to him “Serves you right”.

Shortly afterwards, I hear the other elf run off somewhere. I just stand there looking at him for a while, before I start to loot his corpse. He has about a dozen arrows to go with his bow and a decent quality dagger. Aside from that, he only has his clothes, which is not that interesting, though I take his dark green coat for its fabric.

As I walk away from his remains, I feel an urge to look at the wound his arrow left. I can’t really see it without a mirror, so I use the angel's reflection. The wound is small, and doesn’t even bleed any more. I might need to keep it clean until it heals properly though.

After stowing away the mirror, I return the stag. How should I deal with it? Should I butcher it? I take out one of the metal tables, and heft the carcass on top of it. I take out one of the knives I found in the basement, which I assume is a butcher's knife. How to butcher a deer though? Should I preserve the skin?

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I have no idea how to butcher something, so I just cut it into manageable pieces and stow them away into my inventory after removing the pelt and organs from the pieces. I do keep the antlers though. The parts I don’t care for I just left on the ground though, such as the hooves.

After eating one of the pieces, I continue traveling north for the remainder of the day, before recreating my fort. I do realize my mistake after assembling the fort though. One of the metal tables is now covered in deer blood which is dripping over the edges. I decide to not use the metal tables as covering until I can clean them. Luckily the sky is blue and rain is unlikely.

 

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The monster didn’t seem to follow me, but you never know with vampiric beasts because of their intelligence. The village guards seem worried as I run towards them, even more so when they realize that my brother is not with me. It only gets worse for them when I explain our encounter with the powerful vampiric beast. They immediately set about reinforcing the village defenses while I run off to warn the village elders.

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The elders are in the town hall as usual, discussing something. They halt their discussion as I enter the hall. I freeze on the spot, as I feel all their gazes move on to me and only regain my senses as Ares urges me to speak what I came to say.

I take a deep breath and go on retelling what happened while me and my brother were out hunting. Their faces become hardened during my story. They ask a few follow up questions about it, such as if it spoke, or just made similar noise, which I think it did, and why it didn’t attack me.

Afterwards, they had a few choice words for my brother since he antagonized it, and also for me, since this is the reason we hunt in pairs, one mana user and one stamina user, so that we can warn each other if the beast is too strong to handle. 

Having conveyed their words of wisdom, they send me off to eat and prepare to hunt it down. I head home and eat some food, and return to outside the hall, where I wait for them to meet up with me.

Almost half an hour later, Ares returns with Gulme and Kortni. Ares is the strongest mana user in the village, and the other two being the best stamina users, Gulme with his trusty spear and Kortni with her bow.

Once we are ready, I lead them back to the location of the attack. Rafael’s body is still there. I don’t quite manage to suppress my tears, but at least it didn’t eat him, which means we can give him a proper burial. 

After paying our respect, we walk over to the location of the stag, where there is still a lot of blood, and a few parts of it remaining. I didn’t notice immediately, but I notice when the other pointed it out, the stag appears to have been butchered and not eaten. This means that the beast is more civilized than I realized, which in turns means that it might have allies. The thought of there being more of equal power sends a shiver down my spine.

The trail shows that it went northwards, so that’s the way we go, though more cautiously than previously. While following the trail, the sun sets all the way, but we have to deal with this as soon as possible, to avoid the threat to our village.

After about an hour, we find it. It’s sleeping on top of a low wooden table with a couple of cushions on top of it. I guess that is a way to sleep. Ares is speechless for a moment, since the beast has a third more mana than him, and is heavily attuned towards lightning, to the point that excess mana spills out as electricity rather than dissipating. 

We take our time to determine that it is alone, before Kortni aims her bow at it. She puts her all into it, with the goal being to end it with one shot. 

Just as she releases the shot, it stirs and lifts its head, causing the arrow to miss its head and go through the cushion and the table.

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