A little yellow fish was calmly swimming above the lake's floor. It entered a thick section of seaweed where it would've returned to its home, but a giant hand broke through the surface and tried to grab it.
Luckily, the fish dodged the hand and swam forward as fast it could. Unluckily, the hand attacked again, this time getting a firm grip on the flailing fish.
"Got one!" Teerom pulled the fish up and held it up.
"Only one in half an hour?" Amasha and Reben waded through the water.
"I bet Paley's already caught a bunch of big animals." Reben was the only other one who managed to catch something. Something being a starfish barely the size of his hand.
"Then we just gotta catch more." Amasha held his fifth batch of seaweed.
"You're just collecting seaweed," Reben said, to which Amasha nodded.
"I mean if we can eat it, we can eat it." Teerom shrugged and placed the fish into his shirt, which he used as a bag. "That's one down." He dove underwater again, leaving Reben and Amasha to meander around since they were too afraid to submerge.
He swam towards the middle of the lake. The ground became steeper and then shallower until he reached the floor of the lake. It was about ten meters down from the surface and was unusually clean in contrast to the shallower parts of the lake.
He spun around, looking for fish, and found one that emitted a soft purple glow. His breath was about to run out, so he quickly resurfaced, took a deep breath, and went back under to catch that fish. But when he got back down to the bottom, the fish was gone.
He searched around for it and saw it in the distance, swimming swiftly towards the shallows.
"I found a weird one!" He came out of the water and chased the fish. It wasn't trying to escape from him, but it was so desperate that it swam onto land in pursuit of something.
"I'm not that scary, am I?" Teerom joked to himself and went to catch the fish, but it jumped and whacked him in the face.
"Ow!" He cried out and fell back into the water on his butt.
"What is that?" Amasha and Reben came over to see the fish flapping around, making slow progress towards a tree.
"I don't know..." Teerom crawled forward and touched it, making it suddenly stop moving, "Wow, it's so warm. It's almost nice-" Teerom suddenly screamed in agony. He jerked backward, grasping his right hand in pain. The one that touched the fish.
A red circle appeared on his palm, and within that circle, an eye opened through his skin, looking around frantically with its beautifully blue pupil.
"What the hell!?" Amasha and Reben were startled but more disgusted by it.
"Why!? I thought I got rid of you!" Teerom screamed. He referred to his blood. The lineage of people who were capable of summoning demons. The eye stopped twitching its gaze around and settled in one direction. The opposite direction that the fish was going.
Above the eye, outside the circle, a smaller black circle appeared. Another one began to form beside it.
"This shouldn't be-" The pain began to subside, being replaced by a cold numbness in his hand, "I think... A demon is going to arrive here."
"A demon!?" Amasha, despite wanting to exterminate the demons, was scared shitless.
"What's that eye on your hand!? How do you know that someone's gonna summon a demon?" Reben asked.
"My blood. My Dark Conjurer blood. An eye opens on our right palm when we summon a demon. But that's the thing. I didn't even begin to think about summoning a demon. Either one is somehow coming through or someone nearby must be summoning one." Teerom panted.
"What're we gonna do!? What about Paley and Adimia?" As Reben said that, thousands of fireflies emerged from within the forest. Their glow wasn't visible under the sunlight, but the shade provided by the forest canopy was enough.
They assimilated themselves into letters.
"What does it say?" Teerom had begun to lose his vision, so he could barely make out the first letter. Another side effect of summoning a demon.
"It says... You have to save him," Amasha read.
"What are you?" Reben tried to touch the fireflies but they dispersed in a panic.
"Come on," Teerom gained the strength to stand up and ran off to look for Paley and Adimia. Amasha and Reben followed him, but Reben looked back hesitantly. The fireflies began to assimilate again.
They read: "The half-blood will go berserk"
"Uh, guys?" He ran after them to tell them, but they were already too far ahead.
Paley felt the taste of mud fill his mouth. He was trapped under a branch, watching Adimia try to desperately lift it as an army of rabbits and their giant mother approached.
The giant rabbit mother had jumped off the air just when they thought they escaped, biting Adimia's foot off. Paley managed to cushion Adimia's landing, but he forgot about his own, breaking his forearm and getting stuck under the branch that the rabbit had leaped off.
"Adimia! Get away! I'll manage!" Paley shouted desperately.
"Don't lie to me! I can tell you're out of mana! You should've said something before we went hunting!" Adimia shouted back.
He gritted his teeth to get his mind off the searing pain caused by the open flesh in his foot grinding against the dirt.
"Adimia! I'll heal your foot once we get back. Just go! I'll get back. I promise."
"I'm not losing someone else like this!" Adimia was suddenly angry, "My brother sacrificed himself to save me! He promised me that he would come back to me somehow. He promised me! Is he here!? Is he!?" When Adimia and his older brother - only by a few years - were cornered by the Oava's smaller slugs, his brother had stayed back to buy Adimia time.
He would often tell Adimia made-up stories of how he beat armies of monsters whenever Adimia couldn't sleep in fear of a monster in the floorboards or spiders under his bed. That was why Adimia believed him. He believed his invincible brother could beat the demons and come back to him.
Paley fell silent, unknowing of what to say. "Adimia, I-"
"I don't care if you're a Quimnia. I don't care if you *can* escape by yourself. I don't trust promises like these. And I never will. I won't lose anyone ever again!" Adimia managed to lift the giant branch with his sheer will. He didn't even need reinforcement magic to give him a bit more strength.
He was just that kind of guy.
Paley felt his back free up slightly, but at the cost of Adimia's foot becoming more injured. If having the whole thing ripped off by two giant buck teeth wasn't already bad enough, his shins were now exposed.
He felt barely any of this pain. The adrenaline pumping through his body was far too strong.
Paley couldn't stop watching Adimia's foot squirting blood. The skin breaking and tearing. The muscle fibers twisting and ripping horribly.
He was staring at it with wide eyes. Not from disgust. Not from fear. But from something entirely different. Something that caused a great hunger to rise from within him. The same hunger that he felt when he awoke on the riverbank. The same hunger that he always felt, lingering in the back of his mind and stomach.
The only time he found respite from this hunger was shortly after he defeated the Fulguron to save Amasha. He had no idea why. All he knew was that he was full.
'Someone... Please. Anyone...' He begged for help in his mind. Not for Adimia, but himself. He was starving to the point that he was drooling heavily. His eyes began to twitch violently, scanning all the smaller rabbits one by one and returning to Adimia's exposed ankle every time.
Teerom was running desperately. Watching the eye on his hand to make sure it doesn't suddenly change which direction it was looking in. The second smaller circle was now complete and the third had begun to form. The circles were spread out like numbers on a clock except there were going to 6 circles not 12.
"It's actually coming. A demon is actually gonna be summoned." He said as he heard Adimia's roar of sheer will as he tried to lift the enormous branch that Paley was stuck under.
"Teerom!" Amasha tugged at his pants since he wasn't wearing a shirt, and pointed slightly right. Teerom saw Paley underneath the branch, unable to move, and the injury that Adimia sustained, and he sprinted as fast as he could towards them.
His hand began shaking violently as he neared them.
"Adimia!" He called out as the giant rabbit jumped onto Adimia and bit into his shoulder. Reben tried to cover Amasha's eyes, but he had to quickly throw up from the bloody sight before him.
The smaller rabbits tried to surround Teerom, but he used reinforcement magic on himself and kicked them away. About ten of them attacked him before they became too scared to approach him.
"Adimia! I'm coming!" He sprinted towards Adimia, but his eye twitched violently, almost jumping out of his hand, as he passed Paley.
"Teerom!" Paley growled, "Get this branch off me."
Teerom hesitated but decided that Paley was the only one who could beat the mother rabbit and picked up a stone. He reinforced it with magic and quickly smashed away at the trunk to isolate it into a liftable chunk above Paley.
"Reben, Amasha, help me!" Teerom used only his left hand to lift it since he had a whole eye on his right hand. He didn't notice that there were now three circles on it. And that the eye was wide and staring at Paley.
'Is this it?' Adimia thought as the Rabbit stood over him. It had pinned him against a boulder, but he was already unable to run away due to his foot.
'I hope... That Paley got away,' He tried to smile. Something he always did to cheer himself up in the darkest of times. After he lost his family. When he was all alone. And now, when he was about to lose his life.
'I don't wanna die,' It was his last dark thought.
A hand had covered the rabbit's face. It was pale white. Its fingers were digging into its left eye, gouging it out violently. Furious nerves were swollen all over it. Paley's face emerged from over its shoulder, painted in a blind rage.
'Paley?' Adimia couldn't help but feel even more cornered now. There was now another monster before him.
Paley roared, and, with his other hand, punched the rabbit. It fell on its side from the impact. Its two buck teeth had been shattered by the blow.
Teerom and the other boys watched as Paley approached the quivering rabbit. It was five times bigger than him. But at that moment, it was the prey. Paley jumped onto it and pummeled its head until the bones crunched and the flesh tore open.
Adimia fell onto his face, but he managed to turn to see the sprays of blood. Paley finished his onslaught of punches mixed with clawing and stumbled to his feet. He was breathing heavily, still gritting his teeth.
"P-Paley?" Teerom tried to call out to Paley, but he was already unconscious. He fell backward onto the dead rabbit's belly. Its children had already run away.
"You guys help Paley, I'll get Adimia." Teerom rushed over to Adimia to try and stop the blood flooding out of his foot - or where his foot would've been.
"It was supposed to be a fun camping trip," Amasha said, tearing up as he stared in disgust at the rabbit's mashed-up head.
"Good thing we didn't bring Bacha along. She would've had nightmares of this for ages." Reben tried to stop the bleeding from Paley's broken knuckles with his shirt, but it just kept flowing. The bones were completely shattered, cutting into his inner flesh.
While they tended to Paley, Teerom was now staring at his right hand. The eye had closed, and the circles had begun to dissipate.
"Was it you?" Teerom mumbled to himself and looked at Paley, sleeping strangely peacefully atop the rabbit's belly with the panicked Reben and Amasha by his sides.
"No. There's no way." He ignored the thought.