Approximately a week had passed in the red forest. The sky was still pitch black, so the haven did little to help in telling the time.
Ikky and Astrid had taken shelter within an expanse of the forest, in a tightly packed formation of trees.
In front of them was an opened bag of raw meat and vegetables, enough to satisfy a group of five. Although, Astrid insisted that she did not need to eat, so the food was just for Ikky.
The amber-eyed man shrugged before ripping apart a piece of meat with his hands, ready to devour it when Astrid suddenly asked,
"What are you doing?"
With the raw beef in front of his open mouth, Ikky rose an eyebrow in question as he looked down at the decapitated fairy's head beside him,
"Huh?"
"That meat. Don't stuff it into your mouth. It's unsanitar—"
CHOMP!
Biting into the black meat, Ikky ripped out a chunk, chewed, then gulped it down all the while the beheaded fairy stared in bewilderment. Ikky could even swear he had just seen her eyes twitch with anger.
"Disturbing." Astrid whispered with an indifferent sounding voice but a clear undertone of psychological pain.
"Get over it. Cooking is a waste of time anyway.
Astrid sighed. "Even if you don't care about what bad things uncooked food will do to your body, you should at least want to savour it."
"Mhh. Yummy." Ikky rubbed the raw steak around his lips as he mocked. "Am I savouring it enough?"
"..."
"Tch." Ikky scoffed at her unreadable face before continuing to chow down on kilogrammes of cold spirit steak.
"Augh!" Ikky moaned in delight. This was the first meal he had wrestled off one of the sprites that roamed the haven. Before now, he'd just been getting bags of water after fighting them. Hence, the hunger attributed a fraction to why Ikky was rushing his food, even though it was uncooked.
Although he would have done it one hundred percent if he had known it would break the fairy woman this much.
"If this is how you live, then I don't know how you're still alive." Astrid said blankly, trying and failing to not let Ikky see her uncomfortable twitching eye.
"What can I say? I'm just built different." Ikky picked up a tomato and threw it in his mouth. "By the way, it's storytelling time. Remember anyone else you know and we haven't talked about yet?"
Ikky had made Astrid cough up any good information she had at hand about the exam, and who the people he should be wary of were, with the promise that he would return her head.
So far, she had told Ikky about a lot of people and given him a good and satisfying amount of advice on what to do in the haven, albeit Ikky keeps shifting the time for him to uphold his end of the deal, under the claim of wanting Astrid to jog her memory so she could remember more.
Truth be told, Ikky was just keeping her on reins because of how uncomfortable he felt about her powers.
When the fairy woman had taken control of him before, Ikky's body had let go as if to submit to an unavoidable fate— one that she would decide. The thin strings of control that he had managed to attain over his cursed body had suddenly surrendered to the one's she had pinned unto him. Ikky got to feel how puppets did, and he loathed it.
Astrid would have asked how long Ikky plans to keep her like this, but even she had picked up certain things from Ikky's character throughout the past few days; she was staying that way until she answers the real questions he had. Or at least until he learns how to resist Astrid's strange puppeteering. But she wasn't going to aid any of that.
The fairy woman sighed out as she started,
"... The next person I know, is a man who comes to the exams often... too often. Each time he shows up, he leaves with new teams. And each time he returns, only he comes for the Anointment. You know what that means, don't you?"
Ikky nodded slowly, his ears perked up in attention as Astrid's calm voice was being carried through the cold air. The mood fit perfectly with the eerily dark ambience.
"Although the Prophets on Mahar suspect this man of being the one really orchestrating his unfortunate fate, no one knows whether there are valid evidence to hold him accountable, and worse, why there are no related authorities keeping him from coming back here to recruit more victims."
The only reason a person formerly in a group would be allowed to participate in the anointment exams again, would be if the rest of their entire team had perished. So it wasn't unthinkable that this man, whoever he was is suspected for murdering his comrades since he came back almost every single year for the past eight anointments. But if Astrid's second guess about there being no authority to stop him from coming back here was true, then this man had to be more than a Believer grade Prophet, and possess astounding authority or backing.
She continued,
"There were some people who had tried to take matters into their own hands long ago, but each one came back more frightened than the last, swearing to all they came across, that he wasn't a human, but a devil."
With the urgency and threat level of this new person Astrid would talk about established, she began to explain what the Rift of Hell could do... what Simon, could do.
———
His outfit looked too polished, too straight and stainless for someone who had spent eight days in this free-for-all haven.
The shoes of his that brushed over the red grass and brown floor were black and shiny, his pants looked neatly ironed, and his white sleeves were folded well, along with the shirt tucked neatly into his pants, below his black waistcoat.
The rectangular earring on his left ear jingled as his fair smooth arm reached for the defeated opponent beneath him.
He held up her chin and brought his face down to her white scale covered neck as steam escaped through the gaps of her skin, and her mouth.
He inhaled the steam for a while then savored it, before exhaling strongly as if the vapor was a hard drug.
"Ikky... what a peculiar name." Soft words escaped his thin velvety lips before they curved into a smirk.
The woman pulled her head away from his palm, turning to the side as she pleaded,
"I lost. Now please, call back that thing!"
The man looked towards the direction the woman had nodded at— at the long limbed humanoid creature holding down her white and blue bellied dragon.
He shook his head, placing his hands in his pockets and walking away.
"There was no fight for you to lose. And there is nothing I can do about that creature. So unless you have a solution... Axe is pretty much dead."
Izel's eyes opened wider in panic and disbelief. The humanoid creature held Axe in its big hands like he was a pipe, making the serpentine dragon bleed black as it pulled.
"No!!!" Izel roared, ramming into the creature for it to stop. It didn't.
Simon looked back at the scene one more time before leaving it behind.
He was unperturbed.