Xander slowly came to, "What??" He started to close and open his eyes, "Where am I??" he said groggily.
He shook his head, finally waking him up a little.
He looked around to find himself in the dark, the only light the little bit of moonlight that managed to squeeze through the canopy.
"What's that smell?" Xander could smell a strong scent of blood.
He rubbed his hands together and found that his hands were wet.
"What is that?" He brought his hands to his face and smelled them.
"What the f***?" His hands also smelled strongly of blood.
He looked down at himself and came to the realization that he was covered in blood.
"What did I do?" He tried to take a step forward, but he tripped on something.
"What was that?" He looked down and saw a dead Quadramon at his feet.
He quickly looked all around him and saw nothing but dead Quadramons everywhere.
"Did I do this?" Xander couldn't believe it. It seemed that once he passed out, he walked back down the mountain into the jungle and went on a killing spree.
"Wait, before I passed out my death charge was at 26%," he said, thinking to check the death charge to see about how many beasts he had killed.
[First Trait: Reaper's Revival] - [Death Charge: 79%]
"Damn," Xander said, barely able to believe he had killed that much while he was blacked out.
"Well, at least the charge is almost full," he told himself, trying to think of a positive about the situation.
After getting his bearings, he realized his core was low on Qi, so he sat down and meditated until it was full again. Then he climbed up a tree and tried and failed to get some sleep.
***
After four hours, the sun was finally up, so he climbed down and started to dig the beast cores out of all the dead Quadramons. Before long, he had roughly 30 beast cores in his spatial ring.
He didn't bother to go looking for the other beasts he killed and made a beeline straight for the mountains again after climbing up a tree to see which way he needed to go.
***
Six hours later, he was back at the bottom of the mountain and started his trek up once again.
About half a day later, he managed to climb up to the top of the mountain and looked down the other side.
"Phew."
"Almost done," he said.
He still didn't know where he would go after reaching the bottom of the mountain, but he would decide that when he got there. He was hoping he would be able to see into the distance and hopefully a city or something, but it was just too foggy to see anything.
He started his way back down the mountain, and before long, the night had come and passed, and he was halfway down the mountain.
***
"Bang!" Xander heard a loud noise directly below him.
"Shut the f*** up! How many times do I have to tell you, be quiet. Daddy isn't going to come save you." A man's rough voice could be heard about 20 meters in front of him and about 10 meters down.
'What the hell is going on?' Xander thought to himself as he eased his way over the edge of the small cliff and looked down. He was lucky enough that there was barely any fog, so he could clearly see the three rough-looking men pulling along two kids, a boy and a girl, who seemed to be about his age, with chains on their arms and around their waists attaching them together.
The three men were all high G-ranks, while the two kids were low G-ranks.
'What the hell is this? Did they kidnap these kids?' Xander thought, which made him think back to the time he was knocked out and thrown into the colosseum during his trial.
'I've got to do something.' Xander thought. While he honestly didn't care too much about this situation, he couldn't in good conscience leave the kids to their current fate.
Plus, this was an opportunity to get stronger, to get more experience, to battle a human to the death and feel absolutely no remorse about it.
'Ok, what do I do,' he began to think of a plan.
After coming up with his plan, Xander quietly ran farther down the mountain to a place where their paths would naturally cross, and he waited behind a large rock.
***
After five minutes went by, he heard and sensed them through his mirage realm.
'It's time.'
"Phew," he let out a silent breath.
Then he did what he had wanted to try for a long time. He entered the mirage realm.
After entering the mirage realm just before they passed the rock, he waited two seconds to see if they would notice him.
He was both happy and sad to see that they didn't see him, but one of the guys had turned in his direction with an odd look on his face.
"What is it?" one of the men asked.
"Ah, nothing. Just thought I sensed something, but it was nothing," the man that had sort of noticed Xander said as he stopped looking in Xander's direction and started to walk forward again.
Xander let out another silent breath, not sure if they could hear him while he was in the mirage realm or not.
'So they can't see me if they directly look at me, but at least one of them is good enough to be able to sense me a little,' Xander thought as he started to stand up while summoning his spear.
'Hopefully, I can kill all of them without being seen.'
Xander began to walk briskly toward the closest guy, but as soon as he started to move forward, all five people turned in his direction, and the three men all pulled out their weapons.
"Who's there?" "Come out!" "Who is it?" the three men said in unison.
'Dammit.' Xander stood there frozen and noticed that they still didn't seem to see him.
'So they can sense but not see me.'
Realizing he was now just wasting time and Qi, with 9 of his 30 seconds having gone by, Xander said screw it and ran forward toward the closest man, who also held a spear.