Battle
When you return to your safe zone you immediately gulp down your prize and fall asleep, not knowing how long your body takes to recover from the constant frantic movements and sensory processing.
You find yourself waking up way later, not even knowing how long you’ve been sleeping for. It feels like it’s been a few days. You feel so groggy that you almost fall out of the tree. As you contemplate how you’ll spend your day today, you think, “Obviously I can’t spend every day dancing around in threes; last time was almost too close of a call.” You need to figure out what you’re going to do in this life, in this body.
Your mind flashes back to the other day, “Who could have shot that arrow?” You think to yourself. Your mind begins to wander and race once again, “I need to find them!” A stern self decision made in an instant.
You heave your body up and begin to steele your mind about how you should go about this.
You think of the places where you could have seen this individual, “Maybe that was them.” you ponder, as you remember the encounter from the first day, “Or maybe it was that vicious tiger.” You begin to worry again. You’re now wandering around from the treetops as you feel it’s less easy to be spotted from this vantage point. Even at this level your senses make it clear that there are different threats unbeknownst to you just yet; every rustle makes you feel uneased.
You use your feet to hear sounds from several meters away, and you sense movement from above, “Macaques?” Their primate smell permeates around you while you continue your scout around the area. Suddenly you realize that you can easily communicate with them, so you make up your mind to approach.
You come to find two young monkeys playing together in the tree, so caught up in their banter that they barely notice your slender figure slinking quickly towards them. “Hello there!” you say to them, catching their attention; they freeze. Terror fills their eyes, you remember that this time around you are the predator. The young ones bolt off into the distance, leaving you behind in their scent. As it fades, terror grips you again, as you smell the same dank scent as from that night. Why was it so hard for you to differentiate?
In an instant the branch below you is swatted down, directly below you is the beast who has been hunting you for weeks. Your body plummets to the ground, slightly shaken up you struggle to regain yourself. The tiger now above you, and slowly stalking his way back down to you. A smaller figure barrels past you, grabbing your attention. You recall the figure’s elongated head from the other day. It then leaps into the tree and knocks the tiger out of its perch. It swats at the small tan figure and slashes its chest nearly open.
“No!” You cry out, the figure bleeds out before clutching the spear tighter and driving it repeatedly towards the tiger. A stab, a slash, a swat away from a vital organ, the figure struggles to fend off the way larger creature. In the battle the mask is knocked off, along with a delivered gash to the face. This is it, the small figure seems overpowered by the tiger, viciously attacking its way smaller opponent. “That thing can really hold its own, but I need to do something.” you look to your environment for help, a branch, some vines, a rock, anything that could help you quickly take out this tiger.
You then spot a jagged bone sticking out of some carrion, probably from a previous kill. In an instant your instinct carries your body once again to strike hard and true. You slay the tiger with one bloody stab through the chest, the beast falls over with a thud.
The figure looks at you, you look at it, blood gushing from all sorts of places.
“I need, the elder..” They say before nearly blacking out. “SAVABAXIAZ”
You know this person needs help, she saved your life the other day, you feel the need to return the favor. Your senses once again kick into gear, you turn to the direction you saw the kids run off to, and you use your expertly tuned nose to follow the scent, still stinking with the blood of your kill.
Written by Driftingdragon on 09 October 2019