Havok froze as he immediately recognized the beast as it damn near killed him on his way to the cave. His time in the library helped him identify the animal as an elk.
Like the man said, anything able to absorb mana will benefit immensely. This seemed to be the case for the elk as its size, strength, speed and even its look was drastically different from what Havok read about.
Its remaining antler was damn near twice as big as the book said they should be, it was also matte black. When he first laid eyes on it, the one antler it had left had blood dripping from it. It seemed like it just killed another animal recently. Its fur seemed to be in the process of turning black just like its antlers. Standing at 6 feet tall it was taller than Havok by a wide margin. Havok was 10 years old, and he would be considered above average height for someone his age standing just below 5 feet tall. Yet the elk menacingly towered over him, like an unclimbable mountain.
He killed the elk purely by chance and some luck because the elk was already wounded when he fought it or Havok would have stood no chance.
Havok continued to stare at the corpse and shivered at the thought of fighting this beast when it was healthy. While staring at its body the memory of the fight came flooding back.
At the start of this shitty journey the only reason that Havok even entered the forest was because he felt something calling him and he needed to enter the forest to find it. He knew from books in the library that animals were sensitive to smell so he covered himself in mud to try and mask his scent. Anything that happened before the elk was a blur as he was just sprinting to where he felt the calling coming from and trying to avoid any unnecessary hassle. Though that energy he absorbed while trying to heal himself in that dark torture chamber in the basement of the complex mostly almost completely healed all of the damage inflicted upon him during the torture, he had not exercised for quite a while and his stamina was not good. That was why he wanted to get to his destination as soon as humanly possible. He preferred not to enter the forest, but the feeling he got from that calling was too mysterious and his gut told him that he needed to find where the calling was coming from.
Havok sprinted away the instant he noticed the elk as it seemed he just accidently stumbled into the elk's territory. The elk and Havok locked eyes for a split second before he took off and the elk immediately charged at him.
Havok tried to dodge the elk using the trees in the forest as cover to dodge behind them when he heard the elks' hooves get close to him. It continued to sprint by him at ridiculous speeds trying to ram with the only half of its antlers that it had remaining. Occasionally the elk would clip or just run through the trees blowing them to smithereens and sending wood shards everywhere and some of them were blasted into Havok. They mostly stuck in his back, any normal person would be in tremendous pain, but the torture had raised Havok's pain tolerance.
The chase didn't last that long as there was no way Havok was fast enough to escape the elk.
After what seemed like a lifetime of sprinting, Havok was beginning to slow down as he accumulated more splinters from the trees that kept being blown apart by the elk and his stamina ran out. The most recent tree explosion managed to knock him to ground as he barely managed to dodge the elk and the beast followed up by ramming its antler at him as he was on the ground. It managed to stab Havok on the right side of his abdomen. The only reason he wasn't stabbed directly into the stomach and killed, was because he rotated his body just enough just as the blow was about to connect.
Havok managed to stop the blow from killing him, but his situation was still horrendous. The antler went all the way through his side and came out of his back and was stuck in the ground. This was both a blessing and a curse. The curse was that he was now impaled nailed to the ground just a foot away from the mouth of a violent elk. The blessing was also that he was pinned because the antler was stuck in the ground and the elk was also immobilized as it tried to rip its antler free. If that antler wasn't stuck the elk would just raise up and stomp him to death with its hooves or just use its antler to lift him and fling him off the end of his antler. Also, the antler was so long that the elk's mouth was not close enough to bite him.
Havok was now desperately searching for a way to escape. While he was pinned, he grabbed around the ground desperately looking for anything he could use as a weapon. He knew that he needed to get free from the antler and off the ground before the elk managed to pry itself free and kill him.
After a few seconds he finally felt something hard, grabbed it with his right hand and with all the power he could muster he stabbed it into the elk's left eye. Once he landed the blow, he wondered what was able to be stabbed through the elk's eye. As it turns out, it was part of the elk's own antler that had broken off before he met it. The elk roared in pain and yanked its antler free from the ground and Havok. While he was free, the elk ripping its antler away caused even more damage.
He struggled to get off from the ground as he held his side in immense pain, this was the most pain he had ever been in. Which is saying a lot because he has been tortured before and yet, the difference in the amount of pain between that and this injury were not even close. He was also losing blood at a tremendous rate. He finally got up and he heard the elk roaring. He frantically looked for a place to hide. He looked around with his heart pounding knowing that if he couldn't find a spot to escape to that he would die.
His eyes darted around, and he noticed a trail of blood on the ground not too far from him. The adrenaline flooding his body was managing to numb some of the pain and give him a boost in energy, but he knew that it would not last too long. Holding his side he did a stumbling jog over to the trail of blood. While heading over there he remembered some crucial information that he learned when the elk had him pinned to the ground. He saw that the elk was injured by what looked like a huge claw mark from what he guessed was a giant animal across its chest. With that information he knew that some other animal had managed to injure the elk in a fight and seeing the blood trail he knew this must lead to where their fight took place.
He didn't have a weapon. He figured that the claw of whatever animal injured the elk before should be a weapon he could use. As he stumbled his way to the dead animal, he noticed it was a brown bear and was shocked that the elk won the fight. Based on what he read he knew that bears were insanely strong and could stand on their back legs. Which he thought should be a massive advantage against an opponent that can only stop, bite or ram. However, reality proved him wrong.
He put that to the side and focused on finding the bear's claw, the elk managed to calm down just enough to see Havok and the dead brown bear. It started to sprint over, roaring as loud as it could.
Havok could hear the elk getting closer, so he needed to come up with a plan and fast if he didn't want to die.
He decided to wait for the elk to get close enough to him. He could use the brown bear's body as cover and use the extremely long and sharp nails from its claw to stab it in the eye he injured earlier and continue all the way through to the brain.
That was his plan and his life depended on it working. The closer the elk got the more the ground shook, that was how he was able to tell how close the elk was. Right as the elk was ramming its antler toward his back Havok spun around using the bear's body as a shield. The adrenaline was beginning to wear off and the pain from his earlier injuries were returning full force. He used the last bit of strength he had to jab the bear's claw towards the elk's eye that he damaged earlier. However, he missed his intended target, but luck was on his side as he managed to land a blow on the other eye and the nails stabbed through the eye and stabbed its brain killing it instantly.
Havok just barely managed to roll out of the way as the elk's body fell to the ground. If it landed on him, it would definitely crush him to death.
Havok couldn't even celebrate as he figured he was about to die from blood loss. He knew that he couldn't stay out in the open. He miraculously managed to stand up somehow. He stumbled forward as he coughed up blood, the blood continued to spill out of his side. He made his way towards the cave that seemed to appear out of nowhere along with the cave's appearance the feeling that led him through the forest reappeared.
Havok was confused as to what this feeling was and what was causing it, but he had much bigger problems to worry about now. He saw a man appear out of the darkness at the cave's entrance, startling him. The man started to speak as he looked at Havok with a smile. Havok didn't get the chance to hear all of what the man said as he blacked out due to blood loss.