Free Web NovelChapter 13: Lands of Horror [2]
The forest stretched wide before me. Towering, majestic evergreen pine trees reached toward the sky with straight, pillar-like trunks and canopies of green needles. The trees were so tall they nearly cleared the enormous walls of the border.
I felt as small as an ant.
Damn, seeing it with my own eyes was something else entirely.
As the party of adventurers headed towards the entrance, Ezio moved us out of the girl’s shadow and teleported us meters away from them, deeper into the forest.
Once we were at a safe enough distance that they wouldn’t notice us, we stepped out of the shadows.
"Being inside a shadow is really uncomfortable. How do you feel at ease in there?" I said, finally able to move my body again.
"The shadows are my home." Ezio said, deadpan.
"Figures."
I looked around. Sunlight filtered through the trees. The air was crisp with a sharp woody fragrance and I could hear the chirping of birds, see a squirrel carrying nuts in its mouth, and spot a deer eating grass a few meters away.
It would have been a perfect place to sit and take in if I didn’t know how deadly it was. All of this was a facade hiding the true horrors lurking deep within.
The Lands of Horror stretched wide across the northern and southern borders of the Kingdom of Arkens, the Kingdom I was currently in, covering roughly 40% of the world and sharing borders with several other empires.
You all remember those imaginary monsters we dreamed about as kids, the ones we thought were hiding under our beds?
Yeah, unfortunately, those kinds of abominations are real in this world, and this is their home.
And if you thought this forest, Silva Viduata, was all there was to the Lands of Horror, you would be mistaken. This was only a small part of it.
The forest was so dangerous that you needed a party just to guarantee your survival, unless you were powerful as hell.
I had briefly considered bringing one, but how would I explain knowing the forest so well despite never having set foot in it? That would only create unnecessary problems.
Besides, I had Ezio with me, so it was fine.
"You can go back to my shadow. I will take it from here on my own. Don’t lend me a hand unless I ask you to." I said as I started walking.
Ezio looked at me like I was a madman.
Was I?
Yes. But you have to be a little mad sometimes to get things done right, don’t you?
"As you wish." I felt Ezio sink into my shadow.
’Let’s level up, shall we?’
...
Moments after Yves and Ezio had crossed the border, a tall woman with short white hair cut into a bob landed from the sky atop the walls and looked down at the spot the two had stood moments before.
"Hmm... I swear I felt a familiar energy..." She squinted in suspicion.
For a moment, she considered jumping down and following the direction from where she had sensed it, but quickly dismissed the idea.
"Tsk, maybe I just drank too much, and I’m imagining things." She scratched her head, then vanished as if she had never been there at all.
...
Ezio, hidden in the shadows and watching the woman who had just disappeared in the blink of an eye, let out a quiet sigh of relief.
"I swear this young master of mine is going to get me killed. I had to use my shadows to mask our presence and blend us into the environment, but if she had actually decided to come down, we would have been finished."
Ezio dissolved back into shadows and returned to Yves.
...
I walked in silence, hand resting on my katana and ready for anything. I was a little more relaxed since this stretch of forest wasn’t particularly dangerous, being near the entrance, but it never hurt to stay sharp. Things could always go wrong when you least expected them to.
Paranoia was a healthy habit out here.
After walking for a bit, I pushed through some bushes and came across my first encounter. A group of wild white rabbits eating grass, about a dozen of them.
One of them noticed my presence and stood up on its hind legs, looking at me.
It looked undeniably cute, its fluffy fur soft-looking enough that anyone would want to take one home as a pet.
Not me though. I was a dog person, but that wasn’t really the reason I wouldn’t want one.
If you know a guy named Subaru, you’d understand. freewebnovёl.ƈom
The one that had stood up hopped over and, when it reached my feet, started sniffing my boots before looking up at me with those cute red eyes. The others followed, gradually surrounding me, and somehow there were no longer just a dozen of them. There were about 40, coming in from all sides. I had no idea where they had all come from, but it was exactly what I had wanted.
They were all making different sounds, happy purrs and little honks of excitement, and those red eyes, those damned red eyes, were fixed on me with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
I knew exactly what they were trying to do, but it wasn’t going to work on me.
I activated my first Main Story ability. Darkness spread from my feet and covered the ground beneath the rabbits. Then dozens of spikes made of darkness erupted from the ground and impaled each one mercilessly, tearing through flesh and spilling blood across the grass.
Staining it red.
Their shrieks of agony sent the birds in the trees scattering.
The rabbits that survived looked at their fallen kin, then at me. Their cute demeanor vanished instantly, replaced by something cold and malicious. Their red eyes blazed with bloodlust, and their teeth shifted into sharp razors that I could tell would tear through flesh without effort.
At that moment, the remaining rabbits launched forward at a speed no normal rabbit should be capable of and pounced on me.
My katana was already flashing, splitting the closest one cleanly in two. The others attacked from all sides, snapping and lunging.
"Where did that innocent look from earlier go?" I said as I ducked and punched a leaping rabbit, turning it into paste when it hit the ground.
My katana moved like an executioner’s blade, cutting down every single rabbit that came within reach. Each time one fell, a soul fragment entered my core, and I felt my body and soul grow stronger.
They kept coming until the last one fell.
I stood surrounded by dozens of severed rabbit corpses.
"Well, that was easy." I swung the blade to clean the blood off it and sheathed it.
It was my first time killing a monster, and it didn’t feel much different from killing a person.
"You just killed a bunch of innocent bunnies, and you are smiling?" Ezio said from where he sat lazily on a tree branch above me.
"Innocent my foot." I scoffed. "Tell that to all the people they killed with that innocent little act."
These rabbits were called Red-Eyed Blood Rabbits. Monsters of the Lesser rank, the weakest rank of monsters.
They mostly inhabited the outer stretches of the forest and were a treacherous bunch to deal with, not just because of their numbers but because of their ability to hypnotize.
They were born with a natural charm that lured people in with their cuteness, making rookie adventurers drop their guard since they looked so harmless that you would easily mistake them for ordinary rabbits.
Once someone looked into those red eyes without a strong enough mind, the charm would take hold. And by the time they realized the danger, they would already be surrounded and eaten alive.
That was why so many rookie adventurers fell for it and died to something so small. The adventurer’s guild drilled warnings about them constantly.
The rabbits would simply wait, charm their target, and eat. freёweɓnovel.com
Since I had [Eyes of the King] as a passive ability, their charm had no effect on me. So I had just stood there and let them think I was caught, drawing as many as possible into one spot to wipe them out in one go.
Honestly, anything that looked small and cute in a deadly forest had to carry some kind of lethal trait just to survive in it. That was just how nature worked. The smaller the creature, the more dangerous it tended to be.
