As the scraggly bearded man was coming back to the hidden camp with his group and his leader, he suddenly got a bad feeling, as if something was about to go gravely wrong. He had always had a stellar instinct, so he suddenly burst off running towards the camp, yelling for the others to follow him.
He was the trusted second in command and everyone knew very clearly the extent of his intuition. They quickly followed him towards the campsite where they had set up.
When they got there, they were met with a horrific scene. The man that had been left there to guard lay on the ground with his face shriveled and black, with his mouth foaming and a black and scarlet arrow sticking prominently into his heart. He lay there dead as the poison continued to erode his body.
A few meters away from him lay Will, curled up in his wings on the ground. Through the gap in between his wings, wedged in tightly, was another shaft of scarlet and black. However, unlike the one in the guard's chest, his was in his lower abdomen. Despite this, he still lay on the ground unmoving. Despite this though, his body was still perfectly intact and not corroded by the deadly poison. He lay there in a half-dead state as the scraggly bearded man quickly ran up to him and looked at the arrow.
After accurately determining which arrow it was, he said with a grim tone, "It's him, the city master of Hidden Valley."
The leader of the group responded with, "He seems to be fighting the poison. Quickly administer the antidote before he dies!!" he yelled with urgency. Despite not knowing this boy, like the scraggly bearded man, he could see that Will was a very special person and that he would be a genius if he could bring him back to their kingdom.
They quickly put a blue pill in Wills mouth and forced him to swallow it. As soon as they did that, he seemed to look better and as if he would wake up soon.
However, they knew that there was no way to bring back the guard; he was too far gone.
Since there was nothing more that they could do to help Will, they decided to pack up their stuff to go. However, when they did this, they noticed that many sets of trees and rocks were cut cleanly in half without a crack in them.
This astonished them as they had never seen something like it.
The old and short leader privately said to the scraggly bearded man, "This should be from the boy, right?"
"It should be," the man replied with a pensive look. He knew that Will's wings were real, but that was all he knew about them. He only wished that the guard was alive so he could ask him what happened here.
At this moment, a loud clanking sound was heard as if two steel bars were colliding against each other. Everyone quickly looked over at Will, who's wings were now shifting, both moving towards the arrow that was lodged in his abdomen. The people had tried to remove the arrow earlier but it was too firmly lodged in and no one could get it out, including the leader.
With a loud *CRACK* the arrow instantly got pulled out and shattered a second later. This arrow was made of steel, but against the sheer force of the wings, this arrow was shattered as if it was made of a brittle glass.
After this, Will slowly started to stand up, still groggy from the poison. The first thing he saw when he woke up was the pieces of the arrow laying on the ground in front of him.
The very next thing he saw was the scraggly bearded man quickly approaching him, after which he quickly grabbed Will's arm so that he wouldn't fall. It was clear to him that Will was still groggy and that he might fall if not supported properly.
However, although he didn't say it, the man was secretly extremely surprised. No one had ever recovered from the city master's poison arrows so quickly before. The city master's arrows were coated in a poison that was made to quickly kill an opponent, and even with the antidote, few people ever survived. The princess of Scorching Sun kingdom was one of those people who didn't recover, but she didn't die on account of the fact that she had the best doctors in the kingdom working to keep her alive. However, Will had recovered from the poison with only a couple minutes of time after taking the antidote, and it seemed that he might be able to recover even without the antidote, but the man clearly didn't want to test this theory.
Being still quite groggy and dizzy, Will didn't reject the man's help and instead looked toward the leader of the group, who was stronger than the man supporting him, leading him to believe that he was the leader of the group. "Who are you?" Will asked with a slur. He was a bit numb, but he was still thinking clearly.
"You can call me Old Man Dai. The better question is who are you? I've never seen someone who has wings, can cut through trees, and can heal from the city master of Hidden Valley's poison arrows so quickly," Said the old man with a clear tone of curiosity.
"I'm just someone looking for a home," Will responded with the slur already disappearing. His recovery speed even from poison truly was monstrous but he already expected this because of how fast he healed back when he was in his home kingdom.
No longer able to contain his curiosity after seeing that Will would be okay, Old Man Dai asked, "So how did you manage to cut through all these trees and rocks?"
Without replying, Will quickly released himself from the grasp of the scraggly bearded man and approached a tree. He was no longer dizzy so he could do this just fine. Then, without a sound, his wing slashed out so quickly that the only one able to properly see it was Old Man Dai. With a loud *CRACK* the tree fell. All that was left was a clean cut, separating the tree from the trunk.
Everyone except for Old Man Dai simply saw a blur, but he saw in much better detail. What he saw was every individual feather on Will's wings working together in perfect synchronization, quickly cutting through the wood with a sawing motion like a razor sharp blade through butter.
He was amazed at not only the power of this simply swipe, but also the pure fluidity and grace of it. It seemed as if Will had practiced that move for longer than the old man had even been alive.
By now, Will had completely recovered and was lively as ever. Even the giant gash in his abdomen from the arrow had completely disappeared.
However, Will now noticed that he could clearly percieve what kind of person Old Man Dai was, and every other person too. It was as if he could see their emotion and innermost desires. He could tell that Old Man Dai was kind yet merciless, and that the scraggly bearded man was loyal and trustworthy, but he wasn't bloodthirsty. He also noticed that his senses towards danger were much higher than normal, otherwise that arrow would have hit his heart.
Suddenly, *WOOSH* an arrow flashed towards Old Man Dai, the same type of arrow that had nearly killed Will earlier; a scarlet black arrow with a ghastly yellow poison on the tip.