GROWL.
Ender's heart raced as he held the magical shield, desperately trying to keep the enormous wolf at bay.
The creature's growls and snarls reverberated through the barrier, sending shivers down his spine.
He could feel the pressure from the wolf's powerful jaws as they gnashed against his shield.
"Will my bones at least survive that if I get beaten?" Ender muttered with a profoundly bitter sarcasm through gritted teeth.
He was already quite low on mana from training rigorously the shield spell. Thus the constant assault wasn't much appreciated.
Huff. Huff.
'I really don't like my odds here.'
Ender's knuckles became white as he maintained his concentration with the spell. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead as he struggled to pour more mana into the shield, reinforcing it before it got damaged again.
"Curse you wolf! Just leave me alone…" Ender shouted towards the wild beast.
The wolf didn't respond to Ender's pleas. Was it because it didn't understand him or care? Ender didn't know.
It kept pressing forward, its eyes filled with a menacing hunger.
As moments stretched into what felt like an eternity, Ender managed to glean something peculiar about the wolf.
'It's hurt! Holy shit, it's hurt!'
He noticed a strange pattern in the wolf's movements. After every attack it would land carefully. Ender didn't understand what it mean at first, but after seeing the pattern he noticed something else as well.
The wolf's fur was matted with blood in several places. He couldn't see it before, the forest being as dark as it was but now that it was so close, the light of his shield made the dark red stand out from its black fur.
The source of the blood were a few deep gashes that could have only been made by another creature, probably more ferocious than the wolf itself.
It seemed that the wolf had already been in a dire battle before encountering him.
'If I keep the shield up for long enough, it should grow tired and leave,' Ender thought as he continued to maintain the shield spell with renewed vigour.
As the seconds passed, the wolf's movements were visibly getting more lethargic. However, Ender's shield spell also kept losing its shine.
It was a battle of wills and perseverance. Ender knew it. Did the wolf though?
With a surge of determination, Ender pushed all of his remaining mana into the shield, reinforcing it with every ounce of strength he had left.
'It's up to luck now. Perfect.' he thought self mockingly and tried to keep the shield stable. It wouldn't be good if it started flickering.
The wolf, sensing the change in the shield, hesitated and retracted its jaws from the shield. Its prey was not as easy to overcome as it had initially thought and it was seriously hurt and tired. It had to leave and recover.
Ender immediately saw his chance. The very moment that he noticed the hesitation in the wolf, he cancelled the spell. He knew that, had the wolf backed off and waited for a few more seconds before attacking again, he wouldn't have enough mana to cast another shield spell.
'This is my only chance.' he shouted inside his mind, the adrenaline surging through his veins
The wolf, had stopped its mad push and was about to turn around and leave. It didn't expect the shield to suddenly disappear.
That's how it found itself falling slowly and awkwardly in front of the human that it tried to hunt.
It couldn't do anything. It was in the air, slowly falling, unable to move away or attack.
"Aha!" Ender shouted gleefully.
Had fortune favoured Ender at last? Ender doubted it, but the wolf's unexpected falling, as if inviting its imminent demise, certainly caught him off guard, though in a good way.
He was prepared for a hard fight to the death, after all.
Having already taken out his new knife, Ender moved it towards the wolf's neck.
As the wolf kept falling towards him, Ender plunged his knife deep inside its neck.
There wasn't any professionalism or any flashy moves. It was just a simple stab.
'Fuck.'
With a yelp of surprise, the wolf crushed on top of Ender, hitting his head hard enough to give him a headache that couldn't be slept off.
He was so dizzy that he couldn't think straight. Ender's vision blurred as the weight of the wolf pinned him to the ground and he could almost see stars dancing before his eyes.
Desperation welled up within him as he struggled to regain his bearings.
The expected paws ripping his body to shreds never came.
When Ender finally managed to pull himself away from the wolf and get up, he let out a sigh of relief and dropped to his knees, utterly spent but victorious.
The wolf was dead! The battle had been intense, but he had managed to come through alive and relatively unharmed.
He got a few scratches and bruises on his body from the sheer force of the wolf falling on top of him
"That could have gone way worse. Way, way worse…" he muttered annoyed. It was only because of luck that he didn't get injured.
He was acutely aware of how close he had come to losing his life in the confrontation with the wolf.
With slow movements, Ender slowly got up and headed towards the wolf, his whole body aching.
"I'm getting into way too many kill or be killed situations lately. What would Catherine say?"
Sighing, Ender bent down and pulled his knife out of the wolf's neck. It came out with surprising difficulty.
'Just like the stab,' he thought.
Earlier, when Ender stabbed the wolf, the stab was anything but smooth. It require a lot of force from Ender to dig inside the wolf.
'Probably because it's quite cheap. Maybe I should get a hunting dagger. The best idea though would be to learn some offensive magic spells,' he mused.
"What in the world?" Ender exclaimed in astonishment, his voice echoing through the eerie silence of the forest.
The wound created by his stab emitted an eerie glow.
Ender approached the hole with a mix of caution and curiosity. With a steady hand, he reached into the puncture and extracted the source of the strange luminous energy.
The said source was a small orb like substance that emitted a weak brown light.
"A RANK TWO CORE!? There's no way that wolf was a rank two magical beast… It didn't have any abilities after all!" Ender was flabbergasted.
He couldn't believe that he killed a second rank beast. He didn't even hunt a rank one beast yet!
Yet, it was the case. The core's colour was all the evidence he needed.
RAWR.
Suddenly, a powerful rawr was heard not very far from Ender, breaking him out of his musings.
'That should be the beast that injured the wolf! If it managed to do so much damage to it, I don't want to think what it could to me.'
As soon as Ender finished that thought, he stashed the newly acquired core and immediately started running.
After a few minutes, he successfully got out of the forest. This time without any incidents.
"I wouldn't have survived any incidents anyway," he murmured tiredly and started heading towards the city.
He paused by a small river to clean the blood off himself before heading straight home. When he got inside his bedroom, he dropped on his bed and immediately fell asleep.