Luan placed a palm on the left side of his chest, feeling his heart rumble even louder than the giant's footsteps in his mind, but a smile tugged at his lips.
'For the first time, I'm not half-dead. That's a large improvement, I guess...'
Rubbing his nose, he picked up the bow frame he had so painstakingly carved with the edge of his austere blade and couldn't help but feel a tiny sense of accomplishment.
He knew that compared to the bows of actual craftsmen, his was nothing but a pile of trash.
'Still... not every 14-year-old can carve a bow in a cursed forest...'
Shaking his head at his thoughts, he focused on the thin vine in front of him.
The vine wasn't always this thin, in fact, it wasn't even the same vine he had cut the first time.
The vines always lost their tensile strength whenever they were made into strings, causing them to snap whenever Luan tried to pull them, but eventually, he had managed to find a vine that was not to dissimilar to the wood he used to make his bow.
In short, a special vine that didn't snap even when shaped into a tiny string.
Luan fastened the string to the two nicks he made at the ends of the curved bow and pulled.
'Using a tendon would've been more acceptable but...'
Only when he pulled to the extent that the string had started digging to his fingers did he place his craft down and let out an exhale of satisfaction.
The next thing he got to doing was creating arrows.
As for where he would put them...
***
Rolan, the blue haired youth that had stared Zindi down earlier suddenly found his face twisting in an expression of incredulity.
One moment, the wall of earth had been lowered and the next, the old man was a bloody mess that had apparently been knocked unconscious.
He watched as the youths with him panicked and as Beatrice, the green haired girl tried to heal him, a breezy green light glowing from her palms.
'There had clearly been no attacker, or the wall the old man hurriedly held up would have crumbled by now.
'If it wasn't a beast or a monster, then could it be that those bizarre entities the old man was going on and on about are real...?
'Wait a minute... if they're real and have attacked old man Zindi then...
'!'
"Moretz!"
The red haired youth with a fiery temper looked at Rolan with an inquisitive gaze.
At that moment though...
SKREEEEEEEE!!!!!
A sharp scream of pain and horror rang out in the cave, causing Rolan's face to snap towards the source.
What he saw made his stomach churn in disgust and revulsion and horror to flood his mind.
One of the youths, a girl who had been dressed in a short gown, was now nothing like her previously beautiful appearance.
Half of her fair, flawless face was gone, replaced by revolting tentacles that dripped with slime, flaying about as they knocked everything in the space around them about.
Her clothing was torn to shreds, but the sight of black veins as thick as an arm snaking across the most sensitive areas on her body didn't make it any soothing to look at.
The way each vein wiggled as if something living was moving under her skin made it even more hard to stomach.
As the final straw, her back burst into a rain of blood and bone shards, only for tentacles even longer and more grotesque than the once on the girl's face to emerge.
At the girl's feet lay two corpses, one had its head bashed in while the other one...
Was torn into four parts, blood and viscera pooling.
SKREEEEEEEE!!!!!!
Another scream tore through the cave, but a pillar of fire and two boulders smashed into the figure before it could be completed.
***
Arrows flew through the air, splitting the wind as they moved until they embedded their sharpened wooden heads into the thick walls of the temple.
Luan exhaled as he lowered his left hand, bringing the bow he had carved to the ground.
"These can be called wooden sticks, but they still have my strength behind them.
"Unfortunately, they simply break apart after using them for a while..."
He shrugged to himself.
"At least it works."
He picked up the bow in one hand and was about to place them somewhere in the temple when two thoughts crossed his mind.
'Where do I keep the arrows?
'Would the pool be helpful to the bow?'
The first question was as a result of his negligence, mostly, while the second question was borne out of pure curiosity.
The pool had made his tunic more comfortable than it had ever been, so wouldn't it have the same effect on any other inanimate object?
Seeing no harm in trying, Luan picked up the bow and unceremoniously tossed it into the pool of rainbow liquid.
'Since it isn't corroding, I might as well leave it there... I have all the time in the world anyway.'
He exhaled, then scooped up the arrows and placed them beside the last tree branch that had surprisingly managed to survive Luan's crafting session.
Then, with such dexterity and meticulousness that put any random crafter to shame, he started making a quiver out of the wood.
He didn't know how long it would take him, but he did everything carefully.
From the shaving of the outer bark to its shaping, to using the sword to hollow out the bark and then cutting part of it to make it more travel-worthy, he did everything without a hint of impatience.
Even when he heard the rumbling of the giant's footsteps and he felt the fog billowing and churning restlessly, he remained unmoved.
It was as if he wasn't a part of the world at that moment.
Eventually, he sheathed the austere blade and placed it on the ground beside him.
He looked at the makeshift quiver in his hands and sighed a bit before tossing it into the rainbow pool.
'Ah... no more work to do to distract myself...
'Now, I really need to think of the answer to the question... why did that giant act the way it did towards me?'