A half moon was shining brightly in the sky with its silver radiance, down on the earth a shadow moved through the cover of darkness gliding across the land till it reaches a quiet grassland filled with tall blades of green grass.
The shadow paused for a second before diving into the field of grass and disappearing within.
'Curses, this had better work.'
Leo frowned as he was forced to navigate through talp blades of grass while trying to avoid holes in the ground. The one thing he found a bit annoying with the death critters was the fact that every night they would did a hole to sleep in and in the day cover it up only to dig up a new one in a different place entirely.
He had to make sure he was on high alert where he stepped and where he should avoid. For a normal person this would have been near impossible under the cover of darkness but Leo now had perfect eyesight in the night.
When the world grew darker his vision grew much sharper and clearer making it easy enough to see as well as he did in the day. When coupled with his heightened hearing he was practicing well suited for the occasion.
Several minutes passed since he had entered the grassland and he was beginning to get a bit bored of it all. He had half expected for things to go horribly wrong at this moment but everything was still fine.
'Stop it you fool or you'll jinx it.' He repeated the warning so many times in his head that it soon be ame a mantra.
Still he continued to walk forward without a hick, his senses on high alert. However this strange silence did not last for long, a few seconds after a voice spoke.
It was the very same dark menacing voice that had spoken the very same day something had taken over his body and killed the young legacy bearer.
He could hear the voice in his head speaking in a low tone that caused Leo to shudder and stop in his tracks.
'Pathetic!'
Leo could not help but feel suppressed in a way he could not explain, he could feel eyes staring at him from within him.
He opened his mouth and spoke in a bare whisper, "Who the hell are you?"
The voice fell silent for several seconds before speaking again, 'The rat does not know who I am, how infuriating.'
Leo continued to walk forward when the voice spoke again.
'Tell me little rat, what happened to the old man?'
Before Leo could come up with something to say he felt his boot step on something. It gave the crunching sound of bone snapping and then a few seconds later there was the loud squeak of a rodent coming from beneath him.
He looked down in a hurry to see that he had stepped on the tail of a death critter. His eyes flashed in rage as he stomped on its head and crushed it. "Damned rodent, you couldn't dig a bloody hole and crawl into it?"
The voice of the sphere sounded.
[You have slain a dormant bea—]
Before it could finish however it was drowned out by the cacophony of squeaks that assaulted Leo's eardrums. He had to focus to tone down the frequency of the sound.
"Curses." He spat out.
'What are you going to do now little rat?' The strange voice sounded again.
Leo hissed out, "Shut the hell up you psycho."
'Oh, is that anyway to treat your guest?'
Leo wasted no time arguing back, he knew he had two options. To run either forward or back, ironically he had just reached halfway. Because he had wanted to avoid waking the herd he had wasted a lot of time and running in any direction would have worked out fine for him.
The second option would be to fight them off but the again, he was anything but crazy. There was no way he could stand a chance against an herd of such magnitude.
So he ran forward while trying to summon his weapon, since summoning a weapon into existence too several seconds— seconds which he did not have he had to move quickly.
Unfortunately for him the ground before him burst open like a volcano erupting only this time there was no molten magma, there was a horde of blood thirst dormant beasts.
More beast burst out of the ground around him causing him to halt his forward charge. His eyes shot to his side to see the rapier halfway formed from the weake of golden sparks.
"Curses." He hissed as he watched a wave of monstrous flesh charge at him on all sides.
He rolled out of the way to avoid most of them, but some managed to land on his body delivering bites that caused his body to revolt at the sheer pain of it.
He screamed as he tried to shake them off him, another death critter sank it's long fangs into his thigh causing him to experience a pain he believed could only be from another world.
He used his free hand to throw them off him and felt them bite out chunks of his flesh with it. He kicked another in the head and crushes it.
Again the voice of she sphere came again to his ears but he ignored it and focused solely on surviving. He dialed up his senses and relied mostly on his eyes and ears alongside his movement and reflexes to dodge the lunge of the beasts.
All that remained was the firepower.
The second the thing black shine of the rapier manifested into the waking world the air around Leo changed, his eyes grew darker and more vicious. His grip tightened on the hilt and he moved on muscle memory, remembering all the time he had spent training with the awakened artifact.
He lunged forward and missed his first thrust by a few centimetres, he took a few steps back to reposition himself. He was fighting multiple beasts of the dormant rank, attacking rashly would cost him dearly. All he needed was to kill as many of them as he could with one or two strokes.
He steeled his resolve and thrusted his rapier with practiced precision, it hit it's mark and drilled its way into the skull and came out of the other end with ease. Leo then moved the thing blade upwards cutting the beast in tow perfect halves, his lips curled slightly not in a smile but in a look of worry.
The odds were against him but what could he do about that?