[[ Return Scroll ]]
[[ Tear this Scroll to return to modern-day Thare. You have until the end of this Trial to tear it. Happy hunting. ]]
Instantly, Magnus was intrigued.
"Happy hunting?" He asked himself, "Are the trials telling me to continue risking my life in this ancient world where I can die at a moment's notice?"
Of course it was.
And Magnus wouldn't have it any other way.
Of course he was going to stay.
He was going to look for more ghouls to kill and eat. The hunters will become the hunted today. He just needed a way to deal with their speed.
'Indeed. If my own head goes flying at a moment's notice, there will be no way for me to dine.'
He would probably have to stay up high in the sky and try and spot the ghouls from there.
Which he promptly did after taking off his shirt.
Much like a while ago, the temperatures in the area were shifting heavily. The winds were suddenly hotter than a summer breeze.
The updraft was blazing hot. It felt like standing above a chimney when the fireplace was ignited.
Magnus was instantly sweating bullets, and he felt like the sun above his head was a lot bigger than usual. It reminded him of his time visiting a desert when he was young.
When he visited Egypt and rode the camels with his parents and siblings.
But that was a memory far off.
'I don't even know where they are,' Magnus thought to himself, 'And I don't care...'
The Hivemine doesn't even let him stay with normal people. Why would Magnus want to bring even more problems unto himself by searching for the family that always messed with him?
He understood his parents, but his siblings? They were hell to live with.
It's why Magnus studied so hard—to go to school abroad, in the artificial country at the centre of the Pacific.
Shaking these thoughts out of his head, Magnus continued to search as his laboured breathing fought against the high heat.
Several minutes passed with nothing relevant to speak of.
'This is not going to work,' Magnus thought to himself, but just as he did, he noticed something.
Something was flying towards him. And it looked familiar.
"...It's similar to that duck from before,"
He muttered to himself as he got ready to fight.
He was already familiar with the way their species fought, and he even won against them with just his gravity and Kwashi's punches. They had frail bodies despite their big sizes.
They weren't even as fast as the ghoul.
But as the duck drew closer, Magnus realised a big problem.
It was a big, big problem.
"No wonder I could see it from so far away," Magnus gulped in absolute awe at the sight before him.
The duck flew over his head, casting a shadow that consumed the entire area. The bird was flying above the clouds with a wingspan as wide as an aircraft carrier was long.
It was ginormous, and Magnus doubted everything that he knew.
A single flap of its wings sent him tumbling towards the ground, and a huge amount of dust was stirred.
Magnus watched as the duck perched on a mountain peak, just a little ways off. It then sent an earth-shacking,
"SQUACK! SQUACK!"
The sound waves shook Magnus' balance as he held his ears that may just be bleeding.
"Fuck!" He cursed, but even his curses were drowned out by the echoes that followed and wreaked havoc by themselves.
Magnus instantly began fleeing.
Such a being was too much for him to even be near to. If he couldn't handle what seemed to be a normal sound, then it was best he left.
Moving closer to the ground, Magnus avoided the powerful gusts of wind by hiding being natural rock formations. Dust flew into all seven of his orifices and made breathing extremely difficult.
Magnus even made attempts at creating some kind of gravity forcefield but failed several times. All he could muster were several waves of repulsive attacks.
Another powerful gust of wind once again blew against him.
'Shit! It's aimed at me!' He realised the difference of this time's gust.
He found himself thrown into the skies at a velocity his gravity couldn't handle.
Like a missile, he was sent somewhere, and Magnus watched as the images of different sceneries passed him by.
He was phasing through solid objects and terrain as if they did not exist.
It gave Magnus several mini-heart attacks as he braced himself for a world of pain each time.
Eventually, though, he got used to it, else he would've died from stress.
Thus, as he flew threw what seemed to be a grand distance, Magnus wondered, 'Just where am I going to end up? That gust of wind was weird. I don't know what it did to me.'
Just as Magnus had those thoughts, he found himself actually hitting something.
"Ack!"
He threw up a mouthful of saliva.
"W-What the hell…?" He muttered as he got up.
In front of him was a set of mountains that towered into the heavens. Their peaks couldn't be seen from where he was as they pierced through the highest clouds.
"…The Heaven-Touching Mountains? Why am I here?"
Magnus began to float around as he wondered. He moved up the slopes with ease, propelling himself off the branches of trees and soaring through the air in reduced gravity.
It was a magical feeling to do parkour in such an environment, and Magnus quite liked his brief brushes with danger.
Eventually, Magnus reached the area where Quarteridge would be in the future. He saw the dark valley where Thawsore would be and looked around.
It was a breathtaking sight to see it all.
'But I still don't know why that bird sent me here,' He thought to himself, wondering what that wind was for and why he was the one hit with it.
Until Magnus caught sight of another blur.
Magnus dodged hurriedly, and the blur brushed past his face, leaving a cut on his cheek.
"I am the cause of creation,
The maker of stars!"
Magnus did his invocation as he let his golden sphere out and into the air. Instantly, the field of battle changed. A small, dense, and golden object was pulling things in. From soil to leaves, and grass to stones.
These objects all began orbiting Magnus' sphere as rings that spun at relatively high speeds. Magnus poured more power into the sphere, increasing the gravitational pull.
It caused the blur's next attack to miss just like the ghoul from before. Magnus now caught a clear sight of his enemy;
"Another ghoul it indeed is," He said to himself as he summoned Restiel and had him slash the monster's head off.
Thud!
After the first battle, Magnus had already seen through his opponents, and thus everything was as easy as addition and subtraction. The head of the ghoul rolled and Magnus got what he originally wanted.
Meals.
And so, Magnus ate.
.
.
.
After that meal, Magnus felt himself get boosted to 1.4 stars. He was getting ever closer to the status of being a 2-star threat—an achievement that Restiel was infinitely close to.
For some reason, he was stuck at a 1.9-star rating with no way to progress.
It baffled Magnus.
'Will I experience the same bottleneck as well?' He wondered as he continued searching for more things to kill.
Magnus was surprised to spot a few more ghouls roaming the area of the forest. These ghouls were muscular and were likely stronger than the ones he had easily slain from before.
"Could there be humans around?" Magnus instantly made a connection as he hid in the bushes.
And indeed, after a while, Magnus spotted a few humans dressed in animal skin.
They truly fit the term, 'primitive' with their hunched backs, ungroomed bodies, and no sense of the languages that Magnus was familiar with.
All Magnus could see were gestures and grunts as a way for them to communicate. Different sounds and movements made for a colourful conversation.
It was a bunch of human men, with weapons in their hands, looking for food to kill.
Unbeknownst to them, they were not the hunters this time.
Ghouls were lying in wait.
It made Magnus curious.
"Will there be a fierce battle, or will it be a simple massacre?" He thought about the humans of the future and thought it quite likely that there would be a fierce battle.
He was right.
With adult humans naturally becoming 1-star threats at adulthood, they could contend with ghouls as long as they had sufficient training.
"RARGH!" The humans let out a battle cry as soon as the ghouls emerged in a rush.
They brandished their weapons and parried the sharp, caustic claws of the ghouls. Special stone spears stabbed forwards, skewering one of the ghouls in the heart as the human wielding the spear was torn apart.
A trade, one for one, was completed.
The battle then continued and Magnus decided to join in. He sent Restiel out to duke it out with the ghouls, swinging his massive scythe and cutting them apart whenever a ghoul was distracted by a fast-moving human.
The humans were happy to have an extra ally as they rallied forwards. The battle, from there, became, a massacre, but not in the way Magnus first thought of.
The primitive humans could match the ghouls in speed, displaying their 2-star threat strength. Restiel could barely follow their movements, but that was all that mattered.
The humans knew what they were doing when it came to fighting ghouls.
There was even a moment when Magnus witnessed a Blessing get activated after the utterance of the corresponding Molecular Text. It was a language Magnus understood.
"I am the berserker of the pioneers!"
It was a one-liner, but Magnus could hear potential from it. If it grew, it would grow into a strong Blessing that could surely aid beautifully in battle.
When the battle ended, Magnus used the techniques he learned from Jistill and looked into the thoughts behind the primitive humans' words.
"Birdman. Friend." The primitive humans nodded before gesturing, "Come with us?"