Ndiogou Gueye led his band of hunters south at a pace halfway between a jog and a full run. Since all of them were above level fifteen, their enhanced attributes allowed them to cover the distance rapidly. Pre-integration, the trip from Malanville to Parakou took about five hours by car, but the five men did it in three. As they neared the city, Ndiogou screeched to a halt and held up his arm, signaling for the four men following him to wait. Without a word, the four hunters found cover, several activating skills to make them harder to spot.
Ndiogou sniffed the air, sampling the many scents found there. There was a hint of something that he did not recognize wafting around, and it made him cautious. Little did the Blind Hunter know that he was sensing the lingering radiation from Raul Sanchez’s Gamma-Ray Cannon.
It took a few minutes for Ndiogou to be satisfied with his initial observations. The city was safe for the team to enter, or at least as safe as any place could be without having to put up with the tyrannical gangs that ran Lagos. With the initial sweep finished, it was time to get to work. So, the Blind Hunter activated the Special Ability that earned him his nickname.
The Special Ability activated and Ndiogou felt a tug almost toward the exact direction that he was facing. He sighed as he wondered how far away his target was and what exactly his target was. Loathe to get started, he pulled up his Quest notification again and reread it.
Had there been other humans around, Ndiogou would have asked them about this “huge explosion,” but the streets were deserted. Even the lizards, which were everywhere in Benin, had seemingly abandoned the city of Parakou. It just didn’t make sense. Without any other leads, Ndiogou figured that his Special Ability was the group’s best bet at finding whatever it was that the Lord Brett wanted dead.
Lowering his hand, he leaned forward, allowing the invisible and largely intangible thread connecting him with his quarry to adjust his heading just the smallest bit. Then he set off at a jog, trusting that the others would keep up, and expanded his powerful hearing and Extra Sensory Perception Skill to the max. There was almost nothing alive in the city at all. But “almost nothing” was a good deal different than “nothing”, and he remained on guard as a few birds and other small creatures entered his sensory range. There were even a few powerful microorganisms, but these were easily avoided and not dangerous for high-level individuals.
The invisible string began to pull harder as the five men approached what used to be a compound of some kind near the city’s outskirts. Ndiogou called for another stop. The strange sensation that he had felt in the air was stronger here, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the explosion that the Quest had mentioned.
“Hey, boss, something about his area feels funny,” Salifou, the group’s sword and shield fighter announced, as if to echo his own thoughts.
“Shh,” Abubakar, the eldest of the group, hissed.
Ndiogou walked backward to rejoin the group and whispered his findings to them.
“Whatever we’re hunting is just up ahead. Salifou, you’ll take point. Whatever it is, there’s not enough natural cover for us to sneak in as a group. We’ll go in standard battle formation, assuming that the target will be aware of us. Once we get inside, we can reassess if the target is mobile.”
The men, who were used to taking orders from the Blind Hunter, sprang into action. They readied their weapons, mostly throwing knives and spears, while Salifou unsheathed his sword to join the rondache-style shield that he carried at all times.
The five men moved slowly but steadily, advancing with the assurance of fighters who could rely on those around them. Everyone immediately took their place in the formation and moved together as one. In just a few minutes, they entered the old poultry farm, passing through the front gate and picking their way around a couple of buildings to reach the open space in the center. An enormous bird was laying in the middle of the clearing, flopping around on the ground like a fish out of water.
Ndiogou reached out with his Extra Sensory Perception Skill. The bird lit up with an aura that he had never seen before. It was blue tinged with red, and there was a dense blue ball of glowing energy inside the creature’s chest. As Ndiogou watched, fascinated, a bolus of energy was sucked into the ball, causing it to spin faster and grow just a tiny bit larger. The bird, clearly in agony, did not notice the men approach at all.
“Well, looks like we’ll be eating well tonight,” Ardo said as he took a few steps closer and readied a javelin. “That is one big chicken. If your Special Ability led us here, it must be pretty high level too. I wonder if that means it’ll taste better, or if it will be tougher.”
The Blind Hunter signaled for Ardo to stand down and approached the giant bird. He once again reached out with his special sense, this time checking out the rooster’s brain. He sighed again, deeper this time, and made a decision.
Stolen novel; please report.
“I’m not killing this thing. For one thing, its brain is more complex than yours, Gaji. And secondly, it looks like it’s going to die soon. In fact, it’s basically got a huge energy bomb in its chest that’s slowly overloading. If you kill it, who knows what will happen.”
“But we have a Divine Quest! Brett himself asked us to handle this,” Salifou reminded Ndiogou. “No harm is going to befall us if we have been chosen to perform this action in the name of our God.”
“Do what you want, I’m done. I’m going to look for my children, like I should have weeks ago,” the Blind Hunter retorted. “I’ve done terrible, terrible things to survive. We all have. But that doesn’t mean that we have to keep doing them. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to see my children again.”
“You can’t,” Ardo joked, “You’re blind.”
Ndiogou fought down the urge to attack his former teammates as he turned around and walked away, leaving the men and the bird to sort out their differences without him. He was done hunting beasts…it was time to hunt for family.
Charlemagne listened as the humans argued among themselves before one of them turned and walked away from the group. It was an illuminating conversation for the young rooster: one of the humans recognized Charlemagne’s mental superiority and did not wish to fight. Since that particular one did not seem to have anything that the rooster needed, he supposed that he could let that one go. But the others didn’t seem to want to leave. In fact, it looked like they had decided to use the rooster for target practice.
A small portion of Charlemagne’s awareness devoted itself to dodging the various projectiles that the four remaining humans hurled his way. It wouldn’t have been particularly hard, even with the vast majority of his attention devoted to containing the rioting mana inside his chest so that he didn’t explode, were it not for how weak the rest of his body was. So, the rooster flopped around on the dusty ground, narrowly avoiding serious injury as the men attacked with spears and throwing knives.
Apparently growing frustrated with their lack of success, one of the humans decided to change things up. An enormous bow appeared in his hand, while a quiver full of arrows that were almost as long as the man was tall sprang into existence on the man’s back. Slowly, the human nocked an arrow, took aim, and fired.
The arrow slammed into Charlemagne’s enhanced plumage, losing momentum as it did. Then it reached his reinforced skin, which also failed to stop the projectile. Penetrating into the rooster’s chest, it was stopped by the sheer density of the pectoral muscle. Charlemagne was already in so much agony from his Mana Core attempting to destroy him from the inside that he barely felt anything, but the arrow did trigger a response from the battered rooster’s body.
Now that the System recognized that he was in battle, his Meditation skill activated. And because he had taken so much internal damage to the areas around his mana channels, Zenrage activated as well. The upshot was that Charlemagne’s control over mana immediately surged, granting him a respite that he hadn’t anticipated.
With the immediate danger from his own Mana Core having passed, Charlemagne was able to redirect more of his attention to the rest of his body. Mana flowed out of his overly packed core, modulated in a way that actually reinforced the damaged pathways that circulated mana throughout the rooster’s body. Some of that mana began to soothe and heal the damage in his extremities, while a portion made its way to the wound in Charlemagne’s chest.
“Hey, your arrow is getting pushed back out!” yelled one of the men to his comrade.
“There’s no way! I hit that thing in the lung…man what a tough old bird,” the other man complained. “All right, cover me. I’m going to get a bit closer.”
The man with the bow and arrows took three cautious paces towards the downed rooster. Charlemagne did not overly concern himself with the weapon, he had recently faced much worse in the form of Raul’s minigun. But as the human nocked the second arrow and began to draw, he also activated a skill.
“Power Shot!” he called, causing a golden light to emanate from the arrowhead.
“Aimed Shot!” he added, which not only intensified the strange power swirling around the arrow but also caused the man’s aim to improve.
The rooster decided that he did not want to get hit with that particular arrow, but he did not trust himself to dodge.
The man loosed the projectile with a twang and the whoosh of rushing air. It raced forward, outspeeding even the sound of its flight, and struck with a bone-crunching crack. A cloud of dust enveloped the scene as the supersonic projectile’s impact displaced the air all around its target.
When the dust cleared, Charlemagne realized that he could understand the emotion that was written clearly on the four men’s faces. It was fear.
“It’s…it’s completely unharmed!” one of the humans yelled, backing away on unsteady legs.
“How did it do that?” another asked, unable to spot the rooster’s mana shield through the dust cloud.
“It has some sort of energy shield!” shouted the man with the bow, pulling out another arrow and hastily drawing it back, his arms trembling from the effort.
Seeing that the arrows being fired were unenhanced, Charlemagne allowed them to strike his body. In just a few seconds, almost a dozen arrows were sticking out of various places: his thigh, his wings, his chest, his abdomen. The only place he bothered guarding was his head.
The reason that Charlemagne allowed the arrows to strike him was not to raise the humans’ hopes before expertly dashing them. That was a happy coincidence. No, the simple reason he allowed it was because he noticed that expending mana helped relieve the enormous strain on his Mana Core. It was simply trying to grow too fast, and he needed to do something with the excess mana.
When the humans finally ran out of arrows, spears, throwing knives, they started throwing rocks instead. It was then that the rooster decided to initiate phase two of his plan to use more mana. He opened his mouth, and began forming a mana ball.
It took the humans a few seconds to register what was going on. It took them a few more precious moments to decide that they needed to run away. They were fast, Charlemagne noted, at least for humans. But they weren’t fast enough to outrun his supercharged mana attack. When the attack finished charging, he fired.
“Buck-kawk!”
The ball flashed out, not travelling quite as fast as the human’s arrow had but steadily closing the distance to the fleeing quartet of men. The blue orb radiated a heat that was strong enough to sear flesh, courtesy of Charlemagne’s latest skill acquisition: Pyro. But the heat wasn’t what finished the humans off. It was the explosion.
The rooster’s control in manipulating mana was still growing by leaps and bounds. This iteration of his mana ball attack was inherently unstable on purpose. It took only a small nudge at a distance for the attack to destabilize completely and detonate, releasing a deadly wave of mana mixed with traces of primordial fire that engulfed the fleeing men. There were no survivors.
Charlemagne rose to his feet, his Mana Core feeling much better after expending so much excess energy. As he sauntered over to feast on the flesh of his latest prey, the squiggles arrived to reward him in a different manner.
