Ch. 2
"So how are we going to find my friends?" Cassy asked.
"We'll just head to the Temple, since they're heading that way, anyway," I said.
"Shouldn't we try to meet up with them on the way to the Temple instead of at the Temple?"
"No, we would just waste time looking with no guarantee of finding them. We at least know that they'll be there at some point."
"Good point. . . Soooo, why are you all the way out here?"
Crap, I always forget to plan for this, I thought.
"I kind of live around here," I said, and instantly berated myself for saying such an obvious lie.
"Do you mean the nearby village?" she asked.
I can't say I do, since I wouldn't know anything about the place. What else can I be?
"No, I'm from a nomad group that came here recently," I said.
"Oh," She said. "I thought they would stay away from the large Nevermore nest."
"We're kind of a warrior group. We're actually more likely to go towards danger rather than veer away from it."
"Well, where are the rest of them?"
"Well, we just arrived, so we're spread out mapping the area."
"So we'll find more of your friends along the way?"
"No. We aren't allowed to interact with each other while at this stage. This way, we don't make the habit of trusting each other in analyzing areas and are less likely to miss something somebody else missed."
"So why did you take me away from my group?"
"I needed to know who you were without raising too much suspicion. You see, my clan has recently gotten into something of a war with another group. Since I'd never seen you around the gatherings, I thought you might have been part of the other clan. So I nabbed one of you when the opportunity struck to do so without it looking like an actual kidnapping."
"Okay. One more question: why did you choose me as . . . well, whatever I was back at the tree?"
"You were a hostage at that point. As for why I chose you, it looked from what I could see of your group that you are the weakest of them."
She nearly tripped at that.
"WHAT!?"
I had to stop myself from grabbing my axe, much less cutting here head off. She was loud.
"HOW DO I LOOK LIKE THE WEAKEST OF OUR GROUP!?"
"Well, your clothes are in no way something to wear on a Hunt. You carry yourself with no clear focus on your surroundings, you had no real weapon on you when compared to the gear the others were carrying, and, frankly, you look like a model."
"Ah - wait, I look like what?"
"A model. Models don't fight, they pose."
"I-I don't know whether I should smack you for saying that."
An Ursa (*A bear type of Grimm) suddenly busted out of the forest a ways in front of us. It did the usual roaring and intimidation before charging towards us. Cassy instantly went to a fighting stance, her staff head glowing as she readied herself to kill the Grimm. (*Not bad, but she would have been caught off guard if she was attacked from the side like that)
"Stand back, I got this," I said.
"What?" she asked.
I stepped in front of her and braced my feet for what I planned. Cassy looked like I was insane, but kept still as the Ursa came at me. Just as the thing pounce, I threw the punch I had been building up with my Aura. I clocked the thing so hard, it bounced of a tree.
It didn't get up again.
"Okay, let's go," I said.
"R-Right," she said.
We walked through the rest of the forest with no incident. Mostly because of what I did. See, Grimm have a basic intelligence. No more than a typical dog, but dogs understand when they're outclassed. With that show of power, I effectively showed that I'm the king here, and they should stay away if they want to live.
"Soooo, what were we talking about?" I asked as we kept walking.
"Oh, nothing important," she said, a little nervously. (*I guess I scared more than the Grimm with that show)
I decided not to push the subject.
"Alright," I said. "So who are the others in your group?"
"Well, Chaz is the one that leads us."
"He was at the head of your group, right?"
"Y-Yeah. Were you watching us?"
"For a bit."
"Well, that's a little creepy."
I shrugged. (*At the time, I didn't think spying was anything different than looking at someone)
"So, anyway, Chaz leads us. He's a little apathetic, but not enough for many people think he doesn't feel anything. Fair warning, if something is his, and you know it's his, do NOT mess with it without asking him. He will go nuts."
"Dually noted."
"Joseph is the other guy in our group. He's a goof, but I've yet to see anyone lay a single hand on him in a fight. He jumps around like a frog and is as agile as a monkey."
"Got it. What about the girl?"
"Oh, Hailey. She's . . . well, she's secretive. Honestly, I don't know anything about her, other than she's always eager to complete a mission or get in a fight, but not in a hot-headed way."
"Alright. That's good to know."
"So what about you?"
"Me?"
"Yeah. I never even got your name."
Name? I thought. Right, people have names. Well, I can't say its codename Paladin. What would be a good name?
"My name is Kuraz," I said, remembering a doctor that was nice to me. I haven't seen him in years, however. Probably dead, since I was getting close to him. They never liked attachment at 'The Program.'
"What's the name of your nomad group?"
"No name. We're just a group that finds Grimm that would kill normal people, even Hunters, and fight them. Test our limits and all that that."
"Well, what are your interests?"
"Not sure. I've only ever fought since I was born. Not much else."
"It shows," she said, and when I turned to pay more attention to what she was saying, she was looking at my armor.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"Uh, nothing," she said hastily. "So, you fight a lot?"
"Yeah."
". . . What have you fought?"
It basically went like that for a while. (*Sorry if I rambled on in nostalgia when writing the dialogue) For a Hunter, she was rather chatty. But I liked that. It was the first conversation that I've ever had with a person that wasn't about pleading for their life, reviewing my skills and operations, or what I needed to study next. I regret having to lie to her the whole time, but I wasn't exactly free to talk to people about being a bio-weapon. That usually ended with somebody killing the person I talked to and having me forced to do more advanced pain training.
We got to the Temple without a problem. I could see Cassy's group in the twilight, their camp fire sticking out like a sore thumb with my vision.
"I guess we now go our separate ways now," I said.
"What?" she replied? "No, please, come join us."
"Nah, I'm just gonna hop inside the nest to see how big it is. Later."
I didn't really wait for a response. I just walked away without saying anything else. Not because I HAD no manners, I just didn't know WHAT manners were then. I do now. Heck, I've gone through textbooks of what they are and how they came to be. (*You may know that your mom is wrong when she tells you to keep your elbows of the table half the time. You can put them on there if you're talking with people, but not when in the act of eating)
I'm off topic. Anyway, I went a ways with my tried and true tree swinging method. I aimed for what I guessed (*Correctly) to be the old entrance when this place was in use. There was some rubble, but not enough to actually impede my progress.
The entire inside of the building wasn't there. It was just a large hole in the ground everywhere that there should have been an inside to the building. It was as if the outside of the temple was nothing more than a soap bubble over a sink drain. (*And just as structurally sound, to)
The inside was like a pit with no bottom, even with my enhanced eyesight. Throwing a rock to where I thought was the middle, I heard a hollow 'thunk' that was it dropping onto the bottom. About 40 seconds after I threw it. That made it pretty deep, but I couldn't properly tell if there was any large nooks or hollowed on the sides of the whole for a Nevermore nest to be situated.
My only option was to climb down and see for myself.
Now, to fully explain how I was able to climb down a dirt wall by jabbing my hands and feet into said wall, there are important details to keep in mind. First, when the dirt is loose, you have to pretend your arm, from the elbow to the hand, is a spike and stab it as deep as possible into the dirt. At minimum, you should have the dirt halfway up your arm shin (*IDK what it's really called, and seeing as I was operated on by doctors while conscious constantly, I'll assume you don't, either)
Next, if the dirt wall is very firm, like a strong mix of clay and asphalt to make a natural concrete kind of substance, it is possible to use only your fingers to grip on it. However, your grip must have the competitive power to hold a basketball with one hand, facing down, and not even be trying. The wall must also be gripped in the same way. No stabbing into the wall this time.
Lastly, never trust anything that looks like an embedded boulder unless absolutely necessary. They are rarely secure enough to hold your actual body weight. After that, the rest is regular climbing tips.
Anyway, I must have gotten as far as halfway down into the pit before I noticed the wall was beginning to curve away from me. It was similar in shape to an Erlenmeyer flask, (*The one cup that looks like the bottom half is a pyramid in chemical laboratories) and I was on the inside.
Getting a little lower, I then stopped and decided to face a little vertigo.
I focused on making a small, but strong, ball of white light appear 10 feet below me. I slowly had it float down to see how much farther I had to go.
It went down 100 feet before it shined on the bottom.
The strain of hanging on tight to a wall while willing an orb of light 100 feet from you to shine is like holding on to a jungle gym with one arm at a 90 degree angle while using the other arm to hold a large feather still in a small storm. So I had to let the ball dissipate so I could climb lower and see what was at the bottom then.
Just as I climbed off the wall, I hear something large move in the space at the bottom of the pit. However, because of the slightness of the noise, the seeming largeness it entailed, and the size of the pit, I had no clue where the noise actually came from.
I stood still for minutes, making sure I was safe while trying to pinpoint the sound. When I felt enough time pass, I made a small ball of soft, blue light - no more so than a baby baseball - float 10 feet above me. (*Blue travels farther than normal light while blending in with darkness. This way, I barely made any light, but I could see tremendously better.
No Nevermores where here, but there were a large number of nests strewn about the area. Each nest was the size of a small house, each spread at least a block from each other. Most of them had an egg or two in them, each the size of a large bed.
But that wasn't the scariest thing there. A King Taijitu, (*Two sided snake Grimm, one black half with a head connected to one white half with a head. The digestive concepts of this thing are a nightmare to think about, and it doesn't look nice, as well) the largest probably ever, was in the center of the place. The white head was visible, and it was so large, it could have swallowed ten of me whole without trying. It slept, sometimes its tongue poking out silently to smell the air.
But the strangest thing about it was that, on closer inspection, it wasn't a normal King Taijitu. It only had one head and a stump where the other black half would be. It wasn't a new wound, so a Nevermore didn't bring it like this. In fact, the stump was mostly healed over, so it must have had it for years. But how did it get here, then?
A noise had me immediately dissipate the blue light, putting me back in the dark. But not for long.
It's going to be hard for you to imagine this, but there is no other way I can put what I saw into another sentence. Please bear with me on this.
A figure walked out of what I would later find to be a side tunnel, the exact size of the King to crawl through. Though the entire chamber was in shadow - the light above mostly still blocked by the Temple - the figure was a pure black wherever you looked. Imagine if black crayon markings were in front of a sheet of black construction paper. It wore robes that hid most of its build, but it was almost as tall as me, extremely lanky, and had a hood to hide its face.
It was clear, however, that the person was using some sort of power to make themselves completely black.
So, I thought, seeing this persons' height, power to hide himself, and where he came from, I think it's safe to say that I was sent here to capture or kill whoever this is. But what's his connection to 'the project?' Why the Nevermore nest? And why is such a giant but obviously crippled King in here? So many Nevermores in one place I can buy, but Grimm don't usually pair up with different Grimm.
"Soon," said the figure, at least telling me that she was a female, "I will have what I need to pay them back. We shouldn't have been raised - shouldn't have been BORN - but they'll pay for their tampering with life. And I might save him. After 14 years -"
She stopped suddenly. I held my breath, thinking she may have heard me.
"Bof," she muttered, then ran back the way she came. I thought to give chase, but she didn't know I was here yet and I wanted to keep the element of surprise until the last moment.
Okay, I thought, think over what she just said. 'I will have what I need to pay them back'; she's after revenge, and since she walked in here with no fear, the Grimm must be her tools to do so. 'We shouldn't have been raised'; she may be some product of science like me, and she is either not alone or knows where others like her are. The 'tampering of life' comment supports this. 'And I may save him'; she didn't sound that old, so she's been wanting to help someone for a while. '14 years,' she said.
Something scratched at the back of my head, trying to make sense of what I had seen and heard. Instead of pushing it off to the side, I closed my eyes and focused calmly on what I knew.
Shadow powers, tall, girl, escaped something, Grimm, 14 years, life tampering, revenge, mutters to herself -
And it hit me.
It was Priest.
