Chapter 93: On the border again
The night went by without any surprises or extraordinary events.
Here, at the edge of the jungle of death, there simply weren’t enough people for abnormal things to happen. And whatever happened in the jungle... thanks to the guardians of its periphery, was rather likely to stay in there too.
Even though we were far away from the border of the jungle, none of its monsters could realistically threaten us, the mere presence of that arena was enough to stop us from making advances on the other.
It was thanks to this slightly unsettling aura of nearby danger, and the degree of relaxation I brought to Selia with my massage, that we ended up simply sleeping through the night under the protection of the guardian stone Selia brought.
Our time to rest came to an end as soon as the sun finally peeked from behind the horizon, basking the area with the first rays of its warm light.
"Come on, come on!" Selia woke up first, only to end up vigorously shaking my shoulders to help me wake up too.
Opening up my eyes, I nearly recoiled from the intensity of excitement seeping out of her face.
’Damn, man,’ I shook my head and pushed my upper body up, half-shocked by what I just witnessed. ’Screw sex and all, just seeing her happy like that is fucking best!’
For the first time in my life did I see something that could be described as a bundle of joy that wasn’t a puppy. And by all means, right now, Selia looked like one.
Not physically, obviously. But in every other possible way.
She wasn’t walking around our makeshift camp, she was skipping. She wasn’t eager to go, she couldn’t wait to.
And throughout all of this, she was perfectly happy and enthusiastic to share this joy of hers with me.
"Come on! Why so slow! Hurry it up!"
While her words, when spoken with a different tone and cadence, would fit perfectly on a training ground, here they sounded as if they came from an excited child, unable to wait for its sluggish parents to come down the stairs to check on the presents Santa Claus left under the Christmas tree.
I basked in this happy-go-lucky attitude of hers for quite a while. Yet, before long, Selia suddenly calmed down and slowed down. And a mere moment later, she grew all serious while grinding down nearly to a halt.
"Okay, that’s as far as you go," she said while reaching out with her hand only to place it firmly on my chest, stopping me from taking even a single step.
"The strict border?"
"Yeah," Selia nodded her head. "Any further and we will attract it," she explained.
"Where is it?"
"Over there," she pointed out towards a small bump on the otherwise perfectly flat ring of open space stretching in front of the jungle’s tree line.
Somehow, before she pointed it out, I couldn’t even notice such an obvious bump in an otherwise perfectly flat stretch of land. A bump that became increasingly obvious the more I looked at it.
Then, I started to make out smaller details of it.
It wasn’t a hill, it was too perfectly round. And yet, the closer I looked, the better I could spot small nooks and crevices in it, all of them unnaturally straight or gently curving lines.
Just like a predator that mastered the art of hiding in plain sight by curling up to hide the contours of its body and then visually merging with its background.
"That one is quite tricky to spot," Selia continued, already lowering her voice to a whisper, "it even brought its temperature down to that of the ground. But guess what happens once I prod it a bit..."
She didn’t need to tell me to stay where I was.
I’ve already seen her fight and seen her fight with an earlier iteration of the guardian beast of the jungle of death.
In a fight like that, I would become nothing but a burden.
"I will be going, then," Selia whispered before gently pushing her elbow into my side.
Looking over, I caught her throwing me a wink...
And there she went, disappearing from where she was only to reappear half the distance from the monster away.
Then...
BOOM!
It felt as if lightning struck the bump on the even terrain. And by all means, it didn’t look any different either.
Jumping just before the guardian beast started to rise up from where it hid, Selia unleashed her power mid-air, collected it in her hand before throwing it at the monster with so much power, her body momentarily suspended in the air.
Then, the force of her attack struck, cleaving nearly a third of the monster’s body off before it could even fully get up to its legs!
A hit like that would be enough to finish off any man.
But Selia’s opponent was no man. It was a truly frightening beast.
Even with a third of its body now gone, it still rose nearly ten meters into the air, standing firmly on a total of six legs spreading out into six directions at even angles from the very center of the bottom of its body, making it seem like some weird mix of an insect and an arachnid.
Its upper part was a lot simpler, appearing to be that of an oversized gorilla with a set of three, massive, sharp spike-horns growing from each side of its head.
Or so they would, if not for a third of the monster’s left falling off from Selia’s initial attack only to crash into the ground and start rotting away at a visible rate.
The attack, however, barely had any effect on the monster as it took a moment to regain its balance on its four remaining legs, somehow spearing them from its underside to maintain a uniform angle between them before raising its arms...
PENG!
The monster’s torso was covered in thick fur. Its neck shielded by something akin to a chitinous armor – from where I stood, I couldn’t exactly see any details.
But whatever defenses it had mattered not when Selia dropped down and slid her sword across its neck, severing its head from the rest of its body.
Before the monster’s head could fall or before Selia herself could touch the ground, she executed another, precise strike, driving her sword into the very center of the monster’s ape-like chest.
She didn’t drop down, though.
Somehow still alive, the monster swung its massive arms down on its own chest, determined to squash the tiny human that dared to hang on to the sword it just pierced its chest with.
Selia, however, wasn’t just holding on to her sword for fun or out of sentiment to the fine piece of craft.
After stabilizing herself for half of a second, she tensed up her arms and pulled herself up, tossing herself up just high enough to use the very same handle as a foothold instead.
And somehow, against all the laws of physics that I knew about, from such an unstable footing, she managed to reach to the back with her hand...
Before driving it right into the monster’s chest again, perfectly between where she sliced off its neck and where she drove her sword into the middle of its chest.
Thud!
The monster’s fists finally struck its own chest, far too late to catch Selia hanging from her sword. All it achieved was to make her wobble on her tiny footing for a second.
But that second was all that she needed to reach with her hand to the back again before throwing another fist.
This time, however, the beast came to a full stop.
The dark-green blood suddenly ceased to flow from its severed neck, its arms falling powerlessly to its sides.
Then, a golden light suddenly exploded from the beast’s wounds, the very same light that I would write in my dreamscape whenever Selia’s mana would join the equation.
The light persisted for a second before slowly dimming down, all the way to the point of completely disappearing by the time the monster lost all of its coordination and just collapsed to the ground, allowing Selia to casually jump down to the ground, reach out and then pull her sword out of its chest.
Swish!
She swung her weapon against the air, scattering the blood that remained on its blade across the open field.
"Woah..."
Standing quite some distance to the back, I could only gawk at the image of the warrior saintess, an image that over the course of all her playfulness and teasing I’d somehow managed to forget.
Even though, in my eyes, she was this cuddly, teasy, playful girl who loved sweet stuff and to edge me on... This Selia on the field?
That was her real self. One that I didn’t really get to see much, even though it was exactly the picture I saw when she first appeared before my eyes.
’But...’ I gulped down my spit as I noticed a weird sense of fear and reverence well up in my soul, making me hesitant to even approach.
Then, I shook my head, disgusted with such a crude feeling.
’This Selia is as real as the Selia I learned all about back in the city,’ I thought, gritting my teeth in frustration over my own, faulty self.
With that thought in my mind, I took a step forward... and then another one, keeping at it all the way until I reached Saintess’ side.
"How was it?" she asked with a smile underlined with a slight sense of unease.
Even with the distance separating us, she must’ve felt my momentary fear.
"Awesome," I smiled before reaching out, grabbing her free hand and then raising it to my lips, only to then lower my face and plant a gentle kiss upon her fingers. "I nearly forgot how much of a badass my girlfriend is."