Chapter 6
Yes. The answer is yes. You can call a spear in your arm a splinter because the victim has the right to call it whatever they damn well want. I think it's a splinter, and if anyone else wants to challenge me on the subject, well, let's see them get a spear in the arm and see what they have to say on the topic. Otherwise, they can shut the fuck up.
Ignoring the latest pain inflicted on me, I stumbled around until my body was sideways, giving a smaller target to the location where the spear came from. For a fleeting moment, I imagined that the spear was a legion shield, offering all the protection I would need to shuffle the last distance to the forest. However, my imagination shattered into countless shards as the wound flared with pain, my wishes unable to change reality.
Quickly scanning the ground to ensure no one was charging me, I was unsurprised to find nothing but dirt… and then I realized how absurd that fact was. Despite my situation, I took another moment to glance around the area again, actually taking in what I was seeing.
Or, more accurately, what I wasn't seeing. You know, given that the area was covered in grass, flowers, and piles of pointy leaves literal seconds ago, seeing nothing but bare dirt was a little strange.
Where the fuck are the— You know what, crows take it, I don— Ahh! Bastard! Can't I have a moment to myself? I was drawn out of my thoughts by a second spear flying at me, which I easily hopped to the side and dodged now that I was paying attention. These spears really weren't meant to be thrown from the air, and it was probably more luck than skill that I was hit by the first one at all.
I looked up, attempting to plaster a cocky smile onto my face, but it didn't last more than a moment before it became a grimace as the spear shaft bobbed at my movement, tugging and jerking on my flesh. Though I hadn't inspected the wound closely, I knew from what I felt that if I kept moving around, the torquing of the spear shaft would tear apart the skin flap holding the weapon in place. But that was a problem for Future Green to worry about, the unlucky bastard.
Scanning the sky, I wasn't surprised to see four brown and white birdkins hovering thirty feet in the air fifty feet away from me. Quickly flicking my eyes to the side at some motion, I saw two others gliding to a stop on the ground, where the eagle finally finished his tumble in a cloud of dust.
Unable to stop myself, my eyes slipped to the side of the birdkins to take one more glance at the Dawn Tree. Spitting in the face of my hope, I could not deny the tree was still dying. More of its bark flaked off every moment, exposing the trunk underneath and sending me into the pits of despair at the sight. What should have been a golden yellow of the tree's heartwood was already a cracked and lifeless gray, like the inner parts of the Dawn Tree had been left to shrivel into a husk for years under a hot sun.
Not that its impending demise took away all its grandeur, as it still towered hundreds of feet in the air. Though now it was more like a dead stick thrust into the ground rather than a bastion of life reigning over the forest. As I watched, many of the smaller branches were falling apart, leaving only the most prominent limbs still intact, if partially broken.
And then the tears I was barely holding back moistened my eyes before dripping down my cheeks as I saw what was happening a hundred feet past the Dawn Tree's trunk. The Guardians were dying.
Like the Dawn Tree, they were wilting, becoming brittle and slow. In a matter of seconds, it was like watching potted plants slowly wither over weeks as no one bothered to water them. With every moment, their once graceful movements were becoming sluggish and jerky.
As I watched, different sections of bark that made up the Guardians' knight-like appearances fractured and fell away, revealing the softer wood underneath. When their heartwoods were exposed to the air, the substance would flake away with every puff of wind like a cloud of dust. And that was before the beastkins struck them to hasten the process.
Blows that the Guardians should have shrugged off with little more than a chip in their bark armor sent cracks over and through their bodies or knocked off whole limbs. As for the beastkin's strikes that landed on intact armor, they would create crevasses that would not close and only grew more prominent as the attacks continued to rain down.
With no effort on my part, I could make out many Guardians on the ground that had already been broken in the one-sided battle, as none of the Guardians were fighting, simply standing in the beastkins' way, blocking their path. Rage boiled inside me, drying up my tears as my skin tingled with the adrenaline flooding my body, my heart beating faster and louder in my ears until it was all I could hear.
But I didn't want to hear. It was bad enough that I had to see mythical figures be destroyed as I stood helpless to stop it. Why would I want to add sound to the horror? The thought of running at the wolfkins in a mindless rage flickered through my mind, but I pushed down the idea along with my emotions.
Taking a few stumbling steps back, trying to distance myself from everything, I used my good hand to wipe my eyes clear as I turned my head up to the hovering figures. A slight shiver of shock ran through me as I inspected the quartet, though I was pretty numb to the feeling at this point. These birds also had arms, so it wasn't a one-off anomaly with the eagle, which was probably a bad sign.
As I watched, the four hovering figures split up. The two birds holding one spear broke up and slowly glided directly toward me, their gazes filled with hatred as they attempted to kill me with will alone. The other two turned and rapidly flapped to the sides, arcing wide as they swooped down to just five feet above the ground, the spears clenched in both of their outstretched hands leading their path.
Quickly gathering my mental energy, I released a pulse, wanting a better idea of my surroundings without turning around to look. If I still had my sphere of perception, it would probably do the job, but it dissipated at some point during my mental struggle with the Dawn Tree, and I didn't have the willpower to reform it. As the information flooded my mind, I smiled, feeling the blood from the minor cuts over my head drip down my scalp and onto my lips, staining my teeth red and filling my mouth with copper.
Taking a breath to calm my heart, I lowered myself into a crouch and repositioned my body slightly to the right so my chest faced one of the beastkins swooping in from the side. At the same time, I kept looking at the pair of birdkins that were slowly drifting higher into the air while keeping the one swooping at my back in the corner of my eye. I wanted to keep all of them within my vision for as long as possible, and once they were, I waited.
With every beat of my heart and flap of their wings, the two beastkin approaching me from my front and back drew closer. Soon, they were less than twenty feet from me. As if their distance was some sort of signal, the two still hovering in the air gave one large flap of their wings, propelling themselves a body length into the air. Then, they each pulled their arms back and whipped them forward, releasing their spears at me.
The moment that the wooden shafts left the beastkins hands, I burned some of my mental energy within my mind, slowing the world around me. A single second stretched into half a dozen, and I had the time to idly watch the weapons traveling through the air. The spears might not have been the best for throwing, but they were balanced enough to do the job, as the one in my arm attested.
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Perhaps I might have started accelerating my perception too soon, as spikes of pain drove into my temples from the strain, but I ignored the warning and continued the casting. I needed to wait for the right moment, and this was one of those things where it was better to start too early than too late… because being late means death. Slowly, as if they were walking through the air, the two birdkins on the side flapped their wings harder and faster, trying to increase their speed.
Anticipation and a thread of fear filled me as the world slowly moved, giving me plenty of time for doubts about my stupid plan to pop into my mind. Come on, come on… I thought before I felt a spark of relief followed by a flood of dread. Blood and ashes, this is gonna hurt, I mentally sighed.
When I first came up with my plan, I created three telekinetic mental strands, one of which I stretched out behind me, sweeping it back and forth just above the ground. I knew the shaft of the second-thrown spear was stuck up into the air behind me, but it was one thing to know it and another to find it with a tendril that had the feeling of a numb hand.
Finally locating the spear after a second of frantic searching when I was positioning my body, I wrapped the tendril around and down the shaft before wiggling the spear stuck in the ground, ensuring it was only loosely lodged. With my other tendrils in place, I waited for the moment when my counterattack was right, which was right now.
Ripping the short spear free from the ground, I whipped it at the beastkin swooping at me from my back. At the same time, my second tendril was carefully wrapped around the shaft of the spear lodged in my arm just below the tip.
Dragging the spear through the wound, I drove the blood-stained weapon toward the birdkin at my front as I screamed in pain and challenge, "Aargh!" Blotches of white flashed in my vision as it began to tunnel, but I forced back the encroaching darkness with gritted teeth.
Grunting at the effort, I leaped into the air — adding to my momentum by pulling up on my harness with the third mental strand — while my free hand scrambled at my waist. Pulling up on a leather strap, I reached inside the rigid container, grabbed one of the clumps of cloth wrapped in a knot, and slapped it on the wound on my upper arm as I impassively watched the two thrown spears pass below my feet.
The two birds coming in at me from the sides tried to swerve around the guided spears, but the one to my chest reacted too late to dodge, and the weapon buried itself between his neck and shoulder. The other beastkin managed to swing wide, avoiding my initial attack, but I used my mental strand to continue the curve of the spear's trajectory, and as it came into my line of sight, I propelled the spear into the beastkin's side. With a twist upward and a shove down on the spear's shaft from my tendril, I threw the beastkin into the ground.
As I fell, I reshaped one of my tendrils — that was about the diameter of my pointer and middle fingers — to be no thicker than the stalk of tall grass. I shoved the end of the tendril into the hole at the base of the knot before worming the mental strand into the bandage, splitting the tendril into two at the last seven inches.
By the time my feet hit the ground, I had tightly wrapped the bandage around the new skin loop on my arm and tied it off. Half turning around, I saw one spear lodged into the soil a few feet from me and the other lying on the ground a couple yards past it.
Looking back at the last flying beastkins targeting me, my eyes widened as I saw two more quickly approaching from the far side of the Dawn Tree clearing. And I seriously doubted they would be the last beastkins from that direction.
It was long past time for me to run.
Turning, I bounded to a sprint as fast as I could, groaning with every step as it felt like a knife was being driven deeper into my arm. I also had a pounding headache as my willpower and mental energy were being stretched far past my normal limits, and the cuts on my head stung as sweat got into them. But really, who's counting?
Ignoring the twinge of pain from my back, I scooped up one of the spears as I passed it. Popping up, my head was on a swivel, and my feet pounded into the ground as I tracked the closest and most unarmed pair of flying birdkins. The others would be a problem soon, but right now, they weren't, so I put them out of my mind. Turning my head forward, I focused on the tree line before glancing over my shoulder at the beastkins again, judging my changes.
With every step, I drew closer to the tree line, but I was still dozens of feet from safety. And the stupid flying assholes were approaching me far faster than I was moving. If things stayed the same, I would never enter the forest's woody embrace. All the assholes had to do was slow me down enough for their hounds to catch up, which wouldn't be hard, as I was pretty close to being unable to move from exhaustion.
Pulling all but the last few drops of mental energy from my core, I immediately felt hollow and light-headed, almost like the gnawing hunger a starving person feels in their gut, except in the head. Which wasn't a great feeling. My control wavered as a spike of pain was driven behind my eyes at the action, but I pushed past it and crudely reshaped my tendrils with my mental energy and as little willpower as possible.
A feat that would typically take me a second and be done with as little concentration as taking a step caused me to break out into a cold, clammy sweat, and my head throbbed in time with my heart. I didn't even extend the tendrils out to five feet from my body, stopping at what was more like three.
But I did it. The three strands were evenly spaced around my chest, dividing it into thirds. The tendrils were stretched perpendicular from my waist above the ground before turning ninety degrees. I had shaped and angled them to look something like a windmill, if a windmill only had one blade, before gently pushing them into the bare soil.
Grunting from the effort, I started spinning the tendrils. Within a second, dust flew up into the air as I scraped off the top layer of the earth, creating a dust storm that obscured my vision and everyone else's. As soon as I thought the dust was thick enough, I slightly changed the angle I was running. I needed to get off the last line the beastkin saw me on and silently hope I was lucky enough that they wouldn't be. It was up to fate now.
Either they would dive through or throw something into my personal dust storm and hit me, or they wouldn't. There was also the possibility that I would look like a total asshole and that I would get turned around as I ran and ended up circling back to the dying Dawn Tree. But I trusted my ability to run in a straight line even through a dust storm. At least, I believed I could do it for a little while… Hoped really.
Not that I had much choice in the matter.
The dust swirled off to the side as a dark shape dove through the storm, and less than a moment later, a second shadow followed on the heels of the first a little off to the side. I jumped slightly in panic, but my feet continued to thump into the ground, punctuated by a jab of pain that was spreading its burning claws into my chest and down my arm, causing my breathing to hitch.
"Pffft— Arghh!" I spluttered, trying to spit out the dirt I had licked off my lips. I had tried to soothe my parched lips and instantly regretted it. I shouldn't have been surprised, as I could feel dirt gathering on every droplet of sweat covering my body, but I was.
I hated the feeling. I might have grown up in a rural village in the forest, but that didn't mean I liked being dirty. Or that I liked sucking down a mouthful of grit with every breath. Ignoring everything but putting one foot before the other, I continued onward at a sprint until I couldn't.
"Ahh—!" I screamed as I stumbled to a stop before I began taking staggering steps to keep moving. I will not die! I will not waste the Dawn Tree's sacrifice! The thoughts played over and over in my mind as the dust dissipated and I recovered from my casting shattering from a sudden impact.
As I reeled from the backlash and my vision swam and was clouded with dust, it took me a few moments to realize I had already entered the forest. I had put so much attention on running and maintaining the integrity of the casting and keeping it spinning into the ground that I didn't prepare to… let's say, completely hypothetically, hit a hard object. Like, oh, I don't know… one of the trees I was running towards.
I only knew two things at that moment. First, the mental casting shattered, causing a backlash to hit my mind like a club making the world spin. Second, anyone who thought I was a dumbass because I didn't prepare for hitting the trees I was running toward would be the dumbass.
I didn't hit a tree.
From the chunk missing, I obviously hit a rock. Totally different. It was leaning against a tree's trunk, and it was the same result, but anyone who might have thought I would hit a tree was wrong, and they fucking know it.
The dust settled even as I stumbled past the slightly blurry trees and let out a sigh that mostly held relief. I made it to the forest, and now the hill was next. "Caaaaw!" screamed an angry bird off in the distance.
"Aww, come on… Give me a fucking break…" I whined.