by Bruce Sentar
It snarled and tore at her ribbons while she took a few steps back.
“I need help, Lug. Sharp teeth work very well against me.”
Dar stopped staring at the direwolf and jumped into action. He had to get it off Sasha first. In a knee-jerk reaction, he smashed his fist against its skull, causing it to stumble and shake its head in a daze.
He was strong, but that didn’t stop the pulsing pain in his hand from the punch. Patting at his belt, he came up empty-handed.
Damn it, his bronze sword was still in Cherry’s cart, wasn’t it?
He’d beat himself up later for that; this was a world of danger and he should keep a weapon on hand. It seemed like basic survival now that he thought about it, but he came from a different world, one where danger wasn’t quite so readily available.
While the wolf recovered, he ran to the cart and grabbed the sword. As he turned away, his eyes caught on two wolves that were whimpering, tied up by thorny vines. Cherry stood over them, tapping her foot in disappointment, like she was scolding them.
It was a ridiculous sight, the petite woman scolding a wolf that would eat her in the blink of an eye. She looked in control of things here.
Trying not to laugh, he turned back towards Sasha, resolving to deal with Cherry’s situation later. For now, he used the beat-up sword to stab the wolf harassing Sasha, freeing her ribbons.
“Thanks. But there should be more.”
As if they were cursed by her words, howls pierced the night all around their camp. A whole pack of direwolves had descended on what they must have seen as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Game time. At least they were kind enough to announce themselves, he thought.
Dar jumped into action, with Sasha following him. Her ribbons danced in the wind, catching and tangling up the big, hairy beasts while Dar did his best to kill as many as he could while not hitting her ribbons.
The monsters were large predators, but Dar was enhanced by the enchantments on his body, and he was starting to love it. The battle almost called to him, his body seeming to react more naturally in its swings than he had expected.
Pivoting after hitting a wolf, he focused just in time to catch the long, glistening teeth slamming together right in front of his face. Lunging backward, he barely avoided the sharp bite as he swung his sword up into the direwolf’s throat.
As the strike hit the direwolf, its teeth managed to catch his shoulder, tearing his skin and sending him tumbling to the ground. His sword clattering away from him as he lost his grip.
He needed to get a better grasp for his surroundings, and he needed to hold his sword better.
Another wolf took the opportunity, pouncing on him, snapping at Dar’s head. As the maw descended, he acted on instinct, grabbing one of the top and bottom canine teeth in each hand, ignoring the saliva that started dripping down his arms. The wolf pushed forward, trying to close its jaw as Dar used his strength to keep it open.
The wolf’s jaw was strong, but Dar could feel he was winning. He just needed to pry this sucker open. Dar strained against the wolf, and to his relief, he started to win and widen the toothy maw.
As the wolf’s mouth yawned open, it lost its leverage, and it became easier for Dar. Finally, he had the thing’s mouth open wide and had managed to push it back off of him a bit, getting to his knees.
“Got you.” He smirked, but the wolf yelped and was flung backward.
Thorny vines held up the wolf and twisted themselves into a grinder as it tore the wolf apart, showering Dar in blood. He was so surprised by the scene that he just stood there dumbly for a moment. Cherry was terrifying.
“Thanks?” he said, looking over at Cherry who smiled brightly.
“You are a good man. You saved my tree, and these are naughty wolves. They tried to chew on my tree!” She nodded to herself, confirming that they needed to die.
More vines sprang up from the ground, pinning several wolves.
The villagers were all awake now with something sharp in hand, and they attacked the remaining wolves with the savage fury of someone fighting for their lives.
Seeing that Cherry had the nearby wolves under control, Dar moved over to help Sasha, who was still contending with her own wolves. She was only barely keeping them at bay with the swirl of ribbons around her. So many of them were torn and tattered from their claws.
He wondered if she would need more ribbon to keep fighting. He still hadn’t figured out how her dao fully worked. As he contemplated it, the moment of distraction was all it took for him to end up tangled in her ribbons.
Sasha gave a frustrated yell, and a large section of her defense drew back to her, releasing Dar and two wolves.
He reacted first and cut one deep across the shoulder, but that wasn’t where he was aiming. His bent sword was throwing off his swings. The two wolves split apart from each other immediately and came at Dar from two directions.
He met the uninjured one head on as it bit his sword. Dar had to roll to the side and thrust the one wolf into the other, knocking them both down in a tangle of furry limbs.
There was no hesitation in Dar as he plunged the sword deep in the top wolf’s gut, jumping back to avoid the snapping jaws of the other. A thirst for the battle was radiating through him, catching him off guard, but he didn’t have time to let those thoughts distract him.
The second wolf rolled out from under the now dying wolf and got to its feet in a smooth maneuver.
“Come get it, big guy,” Dar said between pants as he angled the sword towards the wolf and crouched low on the balls of his feet, ready to spring forward.
The wolf lunged, and Dar sprung forward, lashing out with the sword. He meant to meet it halfway, but the wolf twisted midair and landed with a single paw, changing directions as its fangs sought Dar’s throat.
He pulled back his sword in time to shove it into the wolf’s mouth and lock it there as the two settled into a deadlock. Dar angled the blade and pushed it deeper into the wolf’s gums until it yelped and pulled back.
Dar didn’t let the opportunity go and followed the wolf, moving the sword and stabbing it through the throat. It whimpered one last time before it slid off the bent bronze sword and sagged onto the ground.
The wolves had scattered; only one fight was left in the distance, and Dar watched two guards die as a cluster of villagers finally managed to take down the last direwolf.
Dar wiped his brow, realizing a bit too late that his entire arm was covered in gore and blood.
He frowned; he really needed a bath after this.
Chapter 7
The villagers dealt with the direwolf corpses like an assembly line. First, they were skinned, then their large fangs were taken for someone to make knives out of, and then they were passed to a butcher to carve their meat up for cooking.
Dar watched curiously as they went about the process of breaking down a direwolf with the utmost efficiency of people who had worked their whole lives. He helped where he would do the most good, which was mostly lifting and moving the horse-sized wolves.
There were so many that some direwolves were just left off to the side untouched, at the edge of the woods for nature to take care of.
Several villagers who hadn’t made it through the battle laid there as well. They had been stripped of their weapons, which were stacked in a nearby pile. Dar wandered over, feeling morbid looking through a pile of dead people’s weapons, but he knew he needed some if he was going to protect the village.
Calling most of them weapons was… generous. In the end, he found a hammer and managed to hammer his sword out on a rock back to something resembling straight. While it looked like bronze, the metal was far more malleable.
Dar wondered if he could get actual iron or a forge to mix more tin with the local bronze to make a firmer metal. Nonetheless, he also found a decent looking hatchet that still had a fine edge and took that as well, tucking it into his belt alongside his now crudely flattened sword.
Dar’s ey
es wandered to the monster corpses nearby, wondering how he could get a moment alone with them to bring them into that small space inside him. He counted twenty-three direwolf corpses and knew it would be a great boon to the little dao tree.
“What’s got you thinking, Lug?” Sasha teased with a grin. She was back to using his pet name now that the heat of the moment was gone.
She seemed to be distancing herself again by using his nickname. He knew she would far outlive him. Trying to create something between him and the beautiful witch would only hurt her in the end.
Besides, he had more things to worry about as he was caked in blood.
“How did I get this dirty?” Dar grumbled. The blood had dried quickly, and he tried scrubbing himself with a clump of dried grass pulled from the ground, getting rid of most of it off his skin, but it wouldn’t come out of his clothes. They seemed to be a permanent shade of dark red now. Apparently, that was going to be his new fabric color of choice.
“Makes you look like a warrior,” Sasha said.
“Well, where I come from, most people shower every day and wash their hands dozens of times a day. I feel dirty.”
Sasha blinked. “How do you get anything done washing that many times a day?”
Chuckling, Dar tried to figure out how to explain to her that it hadn’t required actually fetching water every time you wanted to wash up. He never thought he’d miss faucets so much.
There were always stories of someone bringing modern technology to a backward world. In this world, water was a grand dao. That was a lot of work for a functioning faucet. Teaching these people to just lay pipe might be easier.
“It was different, but still, I feel dirty.” Dar had an idea. “I might sneak away during the trek today and find a quiet place to wash up more thoroughly.”
Sasha shrugged. “I’m sure you’d have no issue catching up, just don’t get yourself in trouble.”
The plan started to come together, and he smiled, feeling good about his day. He’d use the excuse of wandering off to wash to also be able to double back for the wolf corpses, absorb them for his little dao tree, and grow stronger.
Thinking of the tree reminded him of Cherry. She had been monstrously strong in the battle. Dar had a feeling that she had more power than they had yet seen.
There was a chance she might have even been able to deal with the devil attack on her own if she had really wanted to. The branches she had summoned that had ripped the direwolves in two had been incredible, and she’d done it while also holding back another dozen wolves.
Now Dar understood why Sasha was disappointed with her silk dao. There were other dao with massively different potentials. And he still had no idea what dao he could choose from, or what type of dao he was most interested in, assuming he could in fact learn one.
Earth called to him for its strength and power, although he didn’t love that he’d follow the path of a troll, but he was definitely more of a fist guy than a gun guy. There was something impersonal about shooting something; punching somebody who came at you was so much more satisfying. Hands on always felt better to him.
But metal or force dao could probably help him more in the long run. They seemed like they had a lot of different ways they could evolve.
He sighed. There was so much to learn, and it sounded like he’d mostly get one shot to get it right. He’d have to take some time to figure it out.
Dar continued to ponder the dao paths as he grabbed the cart with Cherry’s tree and started pulling it into line as the townspeople all prepared to head out. They began moving east, heading towards what he assumed was Bellhaven.
They were maybe half an hour out when they passed a stream and he looked at Sasha with a pleading face. “Could you pull the cart for a little while?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I don’t want you smelling when I study your dao tonight in any case.”
He handed the cart off to Sasha and was surprised when she was able to pull it easily. It wasn’t intensely heavy, but he had expected her to have to exert a bit of effort to pull Cherry and her tree.
Huh. I wonder what she was before she became a demon.
Watching her a moment further, he pivoted to go about his new tasks. He ran towards the stream, waiting until he was out of sight to veer to the side and head back to the corpses they had left behind in the morning.
It wasn’t hard to backtrack the path they had taken. A hundred sleds had made quite the trail. He made a mental note that anybody else wanting to track them would also have no trouble.
Dar found the site of their last camp and the direwolf corpses, along with all the humans. He hesitated there, thinking about the human corpses. In this world, Darwin’s law of the fittest was the highest law he’d seen, but something about absorbing the human corpses set him on edge.
He stood there for a moment, cursing it before he stepped up to the humans. “I’m sorry, but your body will strengthen me to help those who are still alive.”
Dar bowed to the corpse and took a deep breath, focusing on the space behind his navel. Feeling a sense of warmth and letting it build.
It was strange, like the sense of a hole opening in his gut as a vacuum, pulling in the corpses and even some debris from the fight into the world inside him.
He decided he should put a name to this weird sensation. Since he wasn’t about to tell anybody at the moment about it, he’d just have to decide on what he wanted to call it. It was a space within him, almost like a world onto itself. So, inner world? Nodding, he figured that worked.
Dar stepped over to the wolves and did the same thing, drawing them one by one into his inner world, like a tractor beam from some sci-fi movie. They moved straight into his inner world as they went.
Part of him felt a bit of revulsion at it. It was becoming clear that he’d need to take on more of a survivalist mentality in this world, but he hadn’t realized that would mean using dead corpses to strengthen himself. He continued to remind himself that it was what was needed to gather the strength to protect those still living.
When the last of the corpses floated into his inner world, he paused, trying to figure out how to get back into his inner world. He needed to bury them in the soil around the dao tree.
Sleeping was how he got there before, but since he’d been there before once, he hoped he could do more easily this time. Standing there, he just repeated ‘inner world’ to himself a bunch of times, beginning to tap his foot with impatience when nothing happened.
Cracking his eyes open to confirm he hadn’t gotten there, he let out a frustrated sigh. He closed his eyes again, casting it a bit like a spell, doing some funny gestures and swirls of his arms to see if that might bring him to the space, but he had no luck.
Frustrated, Dar played back what it had felt like in the space. He realized that there’d been a calm feeling, almost like serenity in the space. Sighing, he decided he needed a softer approach.
Sitting down cross-legged in the empty campsite, he took some deep breaths and tried to go about it like meditation. He slowly focused on his breaths, on the world around him, and on the dao that supposedly made it up. He slowly felt himself sinking deeper into himself, his consciousness drawn down into his inner world.
He worked hard to keep focusing on the breaths and not get too carried away in celebration and ruin the meditation. Soon he appeared in his inner world, although it was a bit less peaceful than he remembered as it was now filled with corpses.
One by one, he hauled them into the dark soil around the dao tree sapling and buried them in the loose soil. It was slow-going by hand. He made a mental note to remember tools next time.
It had taken him maybe half an hour to bury them, although by the end, he was mostly just covering the bodies with a fine dusting of soil. He hoped it was enough; he was out of energy to dig any deeper.
Looking back at the sapling after he was done, he was surprised to see that it had already grown a foot taller. New leaves were sprouting, and there were
a few buds, each brimming with potential dao.
Pausing, he realized the dao wasn’t random. The dao was the same as the residual dao he’d felt on the direwolf bodies as he’d buried them. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
“You mean that you absorb their dao? What if I gave you someone with a strong dao, like Cherry?” He felt bad even insinuating hurting Cherry, but the tree seemed to do best with more defined terms, and he didn’t know anybody else as powerful as Cherry yet.
The tree showed an illusion of nine Cherry’s all being planted in the dirt to yield a single, yet rich tree with power, fruit.
Dar shivered. The desire for more power was innate to humans as far as he was concerned, and he had to admit there was a part of him that craved it. He also acknowledged that it could create villains. He’d have to be careful to find the right balance.
In good news, it would be crazy difficult to find nine dryads like Cherry to produce a fruit, so the temptation likely wouldn’t become a reality anyway.
Rationalizing away the fear, he smiled as he took in the growing tree. But soon the tree seemed to have consumed the corpses and began pushing images of stronger bodies towards him. The tree was a greedy little thing.
With a shake of his head, he left his inner world only to see himself covered in a basket of branches.
“You know, you shouldn’t meditate out in the open, and you certainly shouldn’t meditate near the smell of carrion.” Cherry stepped out from behind a tree.
There were several large vulture-like birds impaled on branches around him. He wondered if he would have awoken out of his inner world at the pain, or if his body had been entirely vulnerable while he’d been under.
Sweat beaded down his back as he realized just how stupid his actions had been.
“Thank you for helping me, Cherry,” Dar said, looking up and realizing she’d lost some of her innocent demeanor. He’d always taken the dryad as powerful, but a bit of an airhead, maybe even a bit naïve. But the Cherry watching him beside the tree was intelligent, old and wise. Her eyes had a depth of green seas that had churned across time and space.
