By night, I reach the nearby village. As I flop on the bed in the inn and drift into my sleep, rain begins to pour.
Morning arrives and as I go to get food, an eerie silence and fear filled the atmosphere of the inn. Maybe, it was because I was sleepy or just ignorant, I missed to notice the same atmosphere yesterday too.
I probed the innkeeper about this. It seems there has been sightings of a pale woman in a green dress playing a flute, inside the nearby bamboo woods and the woman had taken the lives of a few villagers. Anyway, it seemed I had to check up on the situation.
As I moved deeper into the woods, I heard something slithering. I couldn't track the direction of the sound. Soon, I found myself surrounded by the bamboos on all the sides. I was too deep inside the forest at this point. I saw something moving rapidly behind the bamboos on my side. So, I did what any sane person would do. I cut down all the bamboos around me in one strike. Soon, two things caught my eyes. The first was that a panda was waltzing towards the fallen bamboos happily. The other thing that caught my eyes was the eight-inch-tall centipede towering over me.
The centipede was not happy, seeing that it lunged at me without any warning. As I started playing tag with it, I brought it under a cliff and waited patiently for it to leap at me and it did. Except, it crashed into the cliff, only for the top of cliff to fall directly over it. At this point, I stood over the centipede that was bruised all over its body, due to moving through the concentrated bamboo forest. I began brandishing my sword when a shout made me lift my head.
"What do you think you are doing to my pet?" the voice boomed. The voice belonged to a pale woman in a green dress floating in the air. The woman looked ethereal, in the literal sense. She was a spirit.
Spirit is a term used to refer to all things that shouldn't physically exist in the living word. Some spirits are representations of abstract things like human emotions, while some are simply dead people roaming about. Looking at her I just swung the sword at her.
Yelping, she dodged. She started frantically began dodging screaming, as I continued striking at her. Seeing her cursing with unknown words and tears, I slowed down. "You are a spirit, right? Why are you dodging my sword?" I asked, curious. She stared as if I was an insane person. "Don't you know what that thing in your hand is? That thing can cut anything, even me, I can feel it. It is dangerous."
After calming down and settling on top of the fallen boulder, she asked if I knew about her. "The legend goes like a once famous local chieftain woman fell out of grace and took revenge on those who wronged her. It's about you right?"
"So people still remember me-"
"Ah, stop it there. I am not exactly interested on your story. I just want you to stop terrorizing the villagers, if not, I will make you stop."
She was flabbergasted and then she began rambling angrily about how some idiots had destroyed her grave and had disturbed her rest. Hence, she used her familiar, that huge centipede to get revenge. I simply turned my attention to the panda which was eating happily.
At the end of her rant, she decided that she would stalk me. I don't understand how it came to that point, but I was sure she wasn't going to leave me. So, on the condition that she wouldn't appear in front of others and not infringe on my privacy, I let her be.
After that mishap, the rest of the journey to the northern frontier wasn't much difficult, except for her annoyance, which I have gotten used to.
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For the past few weeks of staying with this kid, I realized that he is not normal. Abnormal does not even start to describe him at all. After time something ever so slightly inconveniences him, by some god's grace, it gets resolved on its own. The situation is maddening, like how does a ten foot bear feared for its ferocity gets tamed by him, a bridge made by insects forms out of thin air just for him and anywhere he goes people fawn over him for absolutely no reason, even those who don't know he is the hero. When confronted, he shrugs and acts oblivious to everything that is happening around him. The other thing I have learnt is that he is emotionally detached from everything.
He simply doesn't care about anything at all. Even if I pry into his past, he just dismisses the talk. He doesn't even know my name and just calls me 'spirit'. But, for the last two days I have noticed something, he either wakes heavily sweating or randomly begins shivering and has panic attacks. It seemed like a deep-seated scar, something he carried for years.
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I hadn't gotten near the front-lines yet but noticed that the destruction from the monsters had reached even to villages far behind the front-lines. After gathering information, it seems that as the monster attacks broke through the outpost, people abandoned the villages for safety. The whole problem started from two months ago, when suddenly the monsters who avoided human contact began attacking the outposts. At the start it was manageable, but soon even the outposts were overwhelmed leading to the current situation. After resting for the night in the village inn, I left early in the next morning to scout the front-lines.
Climbing the highest point in the area, though I didn't get to cover much distance in area, I saw something that I needed to check. It seemed like the monsters were carrying the corpses and piling them in a single place and there was a person covered in rags standing there. I moved to check up on him.