The sun had come up by the time August shot the last beast –a gargantuan snake– in the eye and watched it fall at his feet.
He crashed his back against a tree and slid down it, panting.
Alia pulled her sword from the head of an almost tiger looking creature and came over to him. Both of them were drenched in blood and August's entire body was pulsing in pain.
His armor did not break, but it cracked, and it did not prevent his body from feeling the pain of being thrown around.
He wiped some blood from his cut forehead and smiled. A few weeks ago he would have collapsed to his knees and broken down if he was in this situation, but right now, it was starting to feel like another day on the job.
He looked back on himself and how much he had grown in just a few weeks, and it warmed his heart. So much so that he couldn't help but let a small smile tug at his lips.
Alia looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
"What's got you so happy?" She asked.
"Nothing, just thinking." He replied.
She sat across from him and sighed, then flopped back. He shook his head and looked around.
They must have killed dozens of beasts over the course of the night, because the ground was littered with corpses and blood. Most of which was thankfully not theirs.
The beasts of the forest were persistent, throwing themselves at the pair in waves, ceaselessly attempting to whittle them down. Although, only the weaker creatures seemed to pursue them, which was lucky.
'Ah, I've just jinxed it haven't I?' August couldn't help but sigh into his smile.
He fought his aching body and got up, walking through the field of corpses and collecting aura molds.
After killing the armored rhinoceros, August had not recieved another of the special molds. It made him quite eager to fight another challenging beast. A thought which he quickly dismissed as soon as it came.
'If I heard myself a month ago, I would have thought I'd lost it.'
And lost it, he probably had.
In the end, he'd collected sixty-eight more aura molds. They no longer held much value to him other than to create lackluster weapons that simply broke when faced with any competent adversary, they only served to bolster his arsenal, and nothing more.
Each day, he found himself growing closer to using the [White Lion's Legacy].
He sighed and cracked his neck, hearing a rustling in the bushes near him, before a large wolf shot out of them and attempted to bite his head off.
He summoned a lance and blew the head clean off the beast instead.
Wiping some blood off his exhausted face, he looked at the headless creature.
He recently learned that he could summon his weapons anywhere, within a few rules of course.
Firstly, his weapons could not occupy the same space as another object or person when they were summoned, that one made sense, overlapping matter seemed to be impossible.
The second was that the further away he summoned them, the more time it took for them to appear, this one was a bit harder to explain, but he had yet to find a suitable reason for that problem.
The last was that when he summoned them, they remained in the exact same state they were in when they were returned to storage, this one applied to any inanimate object he stored.
It also meant he eventually would end up needing to clean each weapon individually. Alia also complained if he summoned bloody weapons in front of her face, calling them rancid. Which was what prompted him to create many different types, so he could keep track of them.
He returned his lance to storage and stumbled over to where Alia was still lying on her back.
He summoned two bunches of a fruit they had found a few days ago, they seemed to look like grapes but tasted like somewhat like apples. They had not run out of berries yet, but he found it beneficial to switch the flavors once in a while.
He tossed one bunch to the redhead, who grabbed it and immediately started eating them. He then sat down and asked.
"When do you think we're getting out of here?"
She swallowed a few more fruits before sitting up and sighing.
"Honestly, I'm not sure."
August shrugged, he had expected this answer. They had probably traveled more than half a thousand miles with the speed they went, yet the forest showed no signs of coming to an end.
"I'm starting to get tired of this scenery" he said.
"You could hand me one of those and look at the world forge instead, I need a change of outfit." She smiled.
August recalled how she had been when she first asked him for a sword, which would be essential for their survival, and how it contrasted to her currently asking for a change of clothes.
He shook his head.
"I'm not going to give you one just for that." he responded.
"I killed more than half of these things myself." she said.
"Oh please! Half? More like a quarter." He scoffed.
"I could always start keeping count." she shrugged.
"Go ahead then, I'll do the same, we'll see who killed more."
He leaned against a tree and then closed his eye. Taking the hint, Alia got up and then began to assume watch.
He thought to himself about how much the two of them had changed. At first, the redhead had been one of the first few people he was able to make a connection with, but now, she had become something of a sister to him.
He would go as far as to say that she was his best friend. Of course, it was much easier to say that when he had no friends in the past, any friend would have been his best.
'Ah, sister comes before best friend? Did I mess up the ordering?' He thought.
Regardless, the two of them had been through quite the ordeal, and for some reason, August felt as if this was simply the beginning of the journey they'd share.
August was finally starting to understand why friends were so important.
Without the redhead, he would not be alive, and without him, she wouldn't have been either.
He had no time left to think about this though, as he felt sleep beginning to drag him into a warm embrace.
Only to be awakened by a scream, what felt like only moments later.