Draven stirred. His head was banging. He couldn’t even get up; he lay still and tried to gather his thoughts. His body was weak, and his bones felt even weaker. He was lying on rough ground yet he couldn’t summon the courage to stand up. How long has it been since he was asleep, so much so that his muscles had lax and become weak? His memory came back in hazy bits. He felt so drugged and his memory felt so distant. Weren’t he and Leo walking into the cave when they perceived that delicious meal? What happened after that?He groaned internally as he remembered the exact thing that had happened. Of course, he had fucked up. They ate the soup without exactly caring for the source it had come from.“See what the chickens brought in?" He heard a female say. “I think this one is handsome.” She kicked Leo and emitted a groan from him.“You’re going to ruin his pretty face by the time we’re ready for him,” another said, male this time.Draven heard the girl sigh as she walked to an angle. He
Draven’s sword was nowhere near him. He panicked, patting the sides of his trousers to realize that it really wasn’t on him. The kidnappers had probably taken their weapons off them, Draven knew, yet he did not feel comfortable knowing that the sword could be anywhere in the room and they could easily be killed by the now rising numbers of killers. If only he could find his weapon…“What are you doing?” Leo yelled at him. “Let’s get out of here!”“I can’t find my sword!” Draven yelled back, pushing someone off him and standing to his feet. “I need to find it. It should be around somewhere!”“We’ll get another one!”“No, that was a very sharp sword!”“Are you serious right now?”“Yes, I’m very much serious!” Draven pushed someone off him yet again and ran about, searching for his sword among the chaos.Leo seemed very upset about this, but he didn’t know what to do as more people rushed towards him. He picked up a sword on the ground and started slashing mercilessly, screaming while at
Leo ate his crackers as he watched Draven train with his virtual trainer. It was an interesting sight, but not as interesting as the crackers he was eating. It had a sour sweet taste, a welcome snack at the thought of eating stones. As he watched Draven train, his mind went back to when the trainer appeared. Master, he was called. Draven had been taken aback at the thought of his mana reducing, which he’d been working tirelessly for the past three nights. After the second night, Leo summoned the courage to ask Draven to ask Master about the stones in their belly. Draven had accepted, because it felt odd to him too. It looked as though they were no ordinary stones, and it made them heavy and breathless.“We ate some stones mistakenly on the way here,” Draven said to the Master. “What do you reckon we should do?"“How did you eat a stone mistakenly?” Master asked, his expression stiff and emotionless.“It was a series of stones," Draven answered. “We were trapped and deceived…”“I know
They walked a long distance, Draven following Leo’s steps. Ever since he agreed to find monsters on their own so Draven could increase his Mana level, Leo had been pretty hyped up. Draven understood the need, of course, but at the same time he felt skeptical about searching for something that wasn’t searching for him. All he wanted to do was calmly follow the route that would be easy for him and get it over with this game, that was all. Leo, however, was riding on the desperation of wanting to relieve himself; which was completely understandable, of course.“We’re here,” Leo said.“Where?” Draven asked a little too loudly.“Shh!”He instantly kept quiet. They were hiding behind a large rock big enough to crush them to death. When he walked around the corner of the rock, he saw that there was a sort of house strewn together with leaves and tree bark. It wasn’t exactly a house, but you could call it one since it was housing some monsters within. Draven craned his neck forward, as if he
The beast snarled its feet, charged and ready to battle. It was larger, more dangerous and more likely to kill them with one big step. The two boys stepped back, afraid and worried about what to do next. The arrow, bow and sword seemed useless against the big animal. There was no way they could succeed if they actually tried to fight back.“Where’s the other one? I’m sure they were two,” Draven asked in a shaking voice.“I don’t know,” Leo whispered. “I worked the whistle around a big unsuspecting waterloo so they must have fallen into it.”“This one clearly survived. And he’s going to eat us alive.”“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone monster hunting in the first place!”“How else are we going to get points if we don’t? It’s not like other players have specific points to give!”The beast took one step forward and the earth shook. The two boys shuddered and stepped back. Coming to a face to face confrontation with another monster unplanned was not what they had expected at all.“We only hav
Draven carried with him the ash of his sword in a mud jar that he’d made in a rush. Leo was not comfortable with it; he felt that the ash of the monster had combined with the sword when Draven was gathering the ash.“You don’t need the ash,” he said to Draven. “Just ask your master to make you a new sword.”“If it were that easy I’m sure he would have made me two,” Draven replied sarcastically.Besides, he could decipher which was his sword and which was the monster. With his growing powers that came with his upgraded points at level three, he could absolutely beat this. He wasn’t sure if the master had disappeared with the sword, since he made this with his hard technical strength.“We can just go back to the last place your master was and summon him to make you a new sword,” Leo said again.Draven was irritated by his annoying nag.“At this rate you’re going to turn into a woman with the way you keep yelling at me,” he said to Leo. “Besides, it’s too risky to go back to the very pla
“Hey, not so fast!”Draven grabbed Leo by the hand, severely wounded. Leo cried out in pain, bowing his back immediately and lowering down to his knees. Draven removed his hand in shock and surprise; he hadn’t meant to squeeze him that hard.“Sorry,” he said, uncomfortable. “I was just thinking we should eat first and get energy, you know, as we planned earlier?”Leo raised himself with the other hand and stood up straight. He was out of breath and blood from the badly dressed wound dripped from his hand and onto the ground.“Jeez man,” Draven said, taking his hand and examining it. “We need to have your wound checked. It must have festered badly and you may have poison.”“I’m… fine…” He was finding it hard to make one coherent sentence.It was as if the wound had dug deep and a sort of toxin had passed through his body, paralyzing him. Draven had no knowledge of medical skills, but he had the skill of survival instincts at his increased level, so he knew that Leo was badly injured an
“What’s going on?""Leo asked in panic, trying to draw his arm back.Draven held him steadily, examining the wound with a horrified expression on his face. Leo was so scared that he immediately sobered up. Plus the heat from the fire was becoming unbearable. The scent of the cooked meat that Draven had pierced through with a thin stick was even more unbearable.“There’s a bit of a spike in you. I think that’s what’s spreading the poison,” Draven said, his eyes on the wound.“What?!” “I’ll have to take it out, burn the skin to stop the festering and then give you the tea.”On that note, he stood up and checked the bowl of water he’d placed above the fire. When he saw it had heated, Draven hurriedly put pieces of the leaves and grass and flowers he’d picked into it. Leo watched him, impressed. The man was innovative. He wondered who Draven really was in the life he lived before coming to the game. He had somehow placed a long flat wood on the fire with a