I looked at the little one while she did her best to try and get closer and closer to me. It was a very valiant try from her, but she was more or less just slightly off whenever she charged. And every moment she tried to do so, to try and tackle me, she was faced with the tree once again as I sidestepped her attempts. "Are you truly trying little one? Use your dexterity. It's a natural and completely normal aspect of elves. You can jump from branch to bra-"
She immediately pulled out the sling I handed to her all that time ago and aimed right between my eyes as I ducked from the smooth pebble she seemed to have collected.
"A pebble? Well, it's smooth, so it's a very easy one to fling out, but a pebble won't completely help you."
My words were offered as she grit her teeth and kept running at me. There was something a lot more different this time. She was getting better. She was gliding through the snow at this rate. All her hatred was doing something really special for her.
And she even leapt to give me a very good figure to try and figure out. There weren't enough words within my vocabulary to try and describe my actions to come in a more appropriate manner, so forgive me on that.
I reacted as best as I could and actually caught the pebble she threw out with my mouth, but it rattled me real hard. My teeth were shaking a little as I was little too late to be able to catch her kicking my stupid ass right in the chest and back into the trunk of the tree.
The wood really hurt my back as I groaned and tried to get up, sadly, I think she genuinely shattered my spine. I sighed and looked at her, who still had a lot more fight left in her. "Go on, you know what to do. This cycle will continue as long as you aren't capable of completely keeping me down."
Those were my words as I accepted this defeat and tried my best to rebound from it. She was getting better and better at the sort of damage she could do to me. It was literally a fucking week since she buried her brother.
And yet she didn't, instead, she handed me the bone knife and took the bone axe with her and gave a very awkward pose. I blinked a couple times while slightly smiling at the pep.
"Kid, that's the stupid move to do. When the opponent poses enough of a threat, you do your best to make sure that they stay dead. An enemy that doesn't seem to be worth keeping around, is an enemy that must be removed for the sake of those that you care for, and your own."
She didn't seem to care much for the words of an old man as I felt my spine slowly but surely getting better. The snow was still my friend, and the warmth also helped a little.
I adjust my grip on the knife a little as I did the same grip you'd do for a shortsword and waited. It was her move, and she did her damnedest as she dashed right for me and tried to hook my leg.
I let her do so since I wasn't reacting fast enough and quickly got forward and evaded the overhead swing she was about to pull on me. I swiped at her hamstrings as she jumped forward just enough for it to just barely nick her.
I groan from my back still being an absolute bitch here as I tried to watch her moves. She was more dominant with her right hand, and her left foot was a bit of a limpy thing, so I made use of that and swung my knife around into a reverse grip.
I let out a deep breath seeing her pace around in the snow as we circled each other. I feinted once as she took a step back. I try to close the gap between but the size of the bone axe was just enoufh to keep her out of my reach.
My reach was shit in the first place. So I feinted again, this time, she actually swung the axe to her left, and left me a chance to thrust for her arm.
And yet somehow, she was nimble enough as a child to bend backwards, readjust herself and get away from the confrontation. The kid was damn good, or I was just downright demented and actually thought that I had actual fighting skills.
She actually took the initiative in the next bout as she thrusted her axe right at me. I was confused for a moment until I sidestepped it to the right instead.
The horrifying part was that she was getting faster at readjusting her axe. And this time she got her axe near her elbow again as she grabbed it with the other hand and swung right for my chest.
The axe hit home, and did it hit hard. It wasn't all that sharp all things considered, but it was still shaped like one enough to be able to properly penetrate, albeit it was a very messy cut/crush.
My sternum was almost fucking powder as she ripped the axe out of my chest by kicking me away. She aimed for the stomach to try and kick the air out of me, and it worked all too well.
Now, I was back in the snow, dyeing it red withy own blood as my chest stung and slowly but surely healed. She wasn't the type to allow that as she kicked me over to really hack into me.
That gave me the chance to throw some snow in her eyes, which just barely worked as I dragged her down with me and grabbed her by the throat.
I was panting from the entire fight as I was just on top of a child elf, in the position to poke a hole straight through her windpipe. So I didn't, getting off of her as I fell to the ground from the exhaustion.
Remember what I said about her doing the charging at me and then eventually fucking up and slamming face first into the skeleton tree? Yeah, that was a week ago. She's a damn good improver.
And I pat her on the back as she sat up again from being in the snow.
"How I do old man?" The little tyke asked me as she looked at the axe and clicked her tongue.
"You're getting good. And I would suggest you change how you speak. You're eventually going to be an idiot if you keep ignoring my actual language lessons."
The kid didn't even hear me again as she stood up, stretched, looked at the blood patch in the snow, and subsequently my own chest. "I hit hard."
"Yes, yes you do. But always remember, if you're going to kill something that's around the same smarts as you, expect them to fight to the last breath. That's how much staying alive means to them. Honor your brother by never not going all out."
".....Fine."
Those were some of the only words I needed to hear from her in that moment as I nodded my head and collapsed to the ground.
"You're getting better. That much is certain. Always remember though, I'm just an old man, I'm not the strongest thing in this world, and if you choose to try and take a journey, make sure you don't leave any threats alive."
She nodded as I smiled a little and closed my eyes again, and when I opened them up, my body was next to me as I clicked my tongue.
'Death by exhaustion is a thing that exists, but this is just ludicrous. I died that quickly?'
I got up and stripped my corpse, getting more annoyed that I needed to have another headache from my realm in order to properly get more clothing for me and the kid.
'That reminds me, I just call her kid. What should I call her? Does she even want a name?'
No thoughts were left out of my head as I collected my mildly ruined clothes and my body as I hauled it over my shoulder and whistled all the way back to the tree.
The kid was still a xenophagic, and I wasn't exactly sure what to do about that but to continue supplementing her diet with a healthy serving of roasted human flesh, harvested from me.
This world is making me do some things that still don't make any sense at all to me. But then again, it's not like I'm that stupid, right?
Actually scratch that, I'm terrible at fighting, my intelligence is more or less slightly higher but now I can't access some of the older memories within my head all thanks to me eating the curse, and I still don't know what the story of this world even is.
All of that, all of that fucking bullcrap in about a couple months of me living in this shithole. Yeah, it's not all that fun if it was someone else doing it?
I suppose I deserve this special form of hell, I chose to live further like a coward and now here I stand, in the snow, "teaching" a fucking child how to properly kill a man by using myself as a test dummy.
Climbing the tree again I see the kid staring at the fire once more while I threw my dead body near the fire enough for it to be a little easier to chop up. The clothes were just outright burnt since they didn't have purpose.
"Tell me story."
I took a minute to recollect what she said as my hands were bloodied from me making use of my axe to cut open the body. "A story? You want me to tell you a story?"
She nodded her head as I looked back down, and then up into the cloud-covered sky as I took a long and deep breath. "Alright, let me finish cutting this body first, you need to eat."
And so I kept cutting at myself. And this gave me the chance to properly tell whatever the fuck happened to my boy after I ate the curse, but sadly, there wasn't a whole lot of change.
Large intestine was a lot cleaner than I anticipated, which must explain why I don't really take a shit often, but I do piss a lot more. Renal systems are a lot more robust I suppose, to allow me to filter out the toxins a lot better through there.
I grabbed my heart and looked at the little blood that was left in it before I cut it up into cubes and stuck them onto sticks for a treat for myself.
I know, it's grotesque, but it's meat, and it's my own. These are the weirder things that happen to me on a normal basis. I groan from finishing up my handiwork as I took mot of the fat and let it burn in the fire.
"Now, I suppose you want your story."
The elf child nodded her head as I sat down and tended to the food that needed to be cooked. "Once upon a time, when the world was young, and the stars sung, there was a planet called Earth. This Earth was the world, and everything that lived on it was happy.
Then, all of a sudden, a little creature, who was very mischievous, and wanted to own all stories, was a spider. The spider's name, was Anansi. Anansi did not have a lot of things. But he was wise enough, to know what to do. He went to a tiger, who owned all the stories, and he asked him "Tell me friend, what must I do to earn all stories?"
The tiger laughed at Anansi, and said "I want you to do two things: Catch a hundred hornets in a calabash and bring me a snake on a bamboo pole, then and only then, will all stories be yours."
Anansi was a small spider, but he had a good head. For the hornets, he splashed water on himself and on their hive, and tricked them into going into the calabash by telling them it was raining hard. And as for the snake, he tricked the snake by slowly tying him to the pole one part at a time, by asking if he was longer than the pole."
The child looked at me as I rolled my eyes and continued with the story. "Anansi got all the stories from the tiger in the end. And whenever we tell a story, we make sure to remind ourselves that all of them come from him, and that we simply borrow them for a moment."
The elf looked on in confusion as I handed her portion of meat. "Don't be so serious about trying to figure out how a story makes sense. Just do your best, and use your head as often as possible."
She just sat there as she ate her cut of meat while I continued to tend to my heart, which was strangely enough starting to look more sumptuous as it cooked, little by little.
'Looks just about good enough.'
I took the stick from the fire as I blew on it and slowly but surely began to consume my own heart. It was an odd thing to do, but organs always had a large amount of vitamins and minerals, so I'll take advantage of it as best as I could.
And so we kept living in the flames and cold, the days passing by us while we continued to train her and harvest my own body, all the while I prepared for the spring to come earlier.
This was going to take so much more time, but I suppose that's all that I have at this point, time.
And one day, while the snow was getting heavier, the little one was looking at me working on more logs to become proper planks, she said something that I didn't quite get.
"Why are you do this?"
"It's not "why are you do this?", it's "Why are you doing this?". You missed three letters. And why, well, I'm trying to figure that out as well."
She just continued to watch me in the snow while I stripped even more logs. Let me summarize everything that I was able to do. I kept most of the actual strength, so I can still haul logs, but I can't increase my size.
My sense of smell is slightly better than before, I could still make my hands and parts of my body calloused, and I still have the help of the cold to heal me. It's like an antifrostbite. I don't quite know how to properly explain it.
But, she nodded as I continued to work on the logs. They needed to be ready for the spring, whenever it may come.