Chương 7: Magic
A massive beast towered before Moreen Dell. It had three yellow eyes forming a triangle on its wide forehead. Red-skinned, biceps bulging with muscles, the Hill Giant laughed at how tiny Moreen was. A booming, derisive laugh that echoed throughout the grass clearing, carried by the whistling wind blowing from east to west. Rays of the mild sun hit the back of the giant, casting upon Moreen an enormous shadow the deformed image of his colossal opponent.
Moreen's only weapon was the double-bladed axe he held with both hands. The edges of its crescent blade were fine and sharp. At the summit of its metal pole was a spherical ruby gleaming with bloodthirsty sheen. Earlier he had hunted small animals with it, with the largest being a ram-sized beast with six feet and a snake tail. He was dubious as to whether his weapon was effective against something as thick-skinned as a four-man-tall giant.
The giant growled. It brought its fist down on moreen, tailed with the shrill sound of air being cut. Moreen jumped back, barely escaped being pummeled to death. The soil trembled as if the giant's fist was a boulder that fell from the sky.
He had to run.
Moreen kicked the ground and ran as hard as he had ever ran. Just when he thought he was getting away, he looked back only to see the giant's stride diminish the distance between them in a second--a distance he accomplished in more than three seconds. He admitted he wasn't the athletic type of person, and his running speed had always been ridiculed by his peers back in middle-school, but seeing the giant shrink his gain in just a stride brought his self-esteem to its all-time low. He should've gone out a bit more, instead of holing up in his room, playing video games 24/7.
The giant launched a downward jab to the direction he was going to run to. This time, his momentum did not allow for him to dodge. The red fist of the giant was fast approaching, and in a last ditch effort to save himself, he swung his axe toward the giant's fist just before it slammed against him.
The giant's fist and Moreen's body recoiled from the impact, although he was worse off than the giant. He flew four, five meters away from the impact, a few of his bones cracking as his body rolled across the dirt, mowing grass in his wake. His vision shook, his consciousness groggy. His axe lay a good three feet ahead his sprawling body, half its blade buried into the soil. He wanted to crawl but his hands numb from the impact didn't have the strength to carry his body.
The giant roared. It cried as it picked up three fingers severed from its right hand.
"So it works, huh?" he looked at his axe that stood out from the ground. Its edge was bathed red with blood, which seemed to flow from the blade, to the pole, then sucked into the ball of ruby embedded into its pole. The ruby glowed blood red, and soon the edges of the blade lit with the same atrocious color.
The enraged giant caught sight of Moreen. It bellowed, slamming the ground with its left, undamaged fist. The sword tattoo on Moreen's right hand glowed faint, growing brighter each second, but he didn't notice. His eyes were on the giant, who shook the ground with each furious step it took toward him. He was going to die. His body won't move. His axe glowed red with power, but he didn't have the slightest capability to walk up to it. The giant once again casted shadow on him, as it towered before his laying body. The giant was not exactly pleased his fingers were cut. The giant's nostrils flared with untold rage, and red veins have webbed into its three yellow eyes.
Projectiles flew from the corner of Moreen's vision. Three ice shards, each a meter long and emitted white vapor, shot through the air and dug into the giant's bulging biceps. In a flash they exploded into a rain of smaller shards, and the giant's whole red arm turned crystal-blue as ice encased it. The giant pounded with his left hand the ice clinging to his right arm, in an attempt to break his arm free. The ice did break under the giant's brute force, but with the ice came the whole of his arm, severed from the shoulder down and broken to pieces with the ice still clinging on its skin. The giant roared in pain louder than before, almost destroying his eardrum.
Moreen's breath caught in his throat, as he watched the monster he found impossible to defeat just lose a whole arm with one attack.
Attack from whom?
"Are you okay?" a woman's lovely voice reached his ear. He turned to the direction of the voice and found a girl running up to him. She had straight and long black hair, a contrast to the white coat she wore that billowed outward from the wind. On her left hand she wielded a rapier. Her right hand glowed bluish-green. A Player. An enemy. But he felt hope swell up from within his heart at the sight of something other than monsters and trees. While the giant mourned for the loss of its arm, the girl helped him up.
"Can you stand?" the girl asked sweetly. She slid her silver rapier into the sheath hanging from her waist and draped Moreen's left arm over her shoulder and carried him away from the giant.
She was beautiful, Moreen thought. Her skin was porcelain white, her eyes a swirl of amber and gray. And she smelled nice too, with a floral scent he haven't smelled before on Earth. Unlike him, who had been stick roaming the forest the whole two weeks he'd been here in this world. He was not in a shape to feel self-conscious, but he felt it anyway. With such a beautiful girl around, who wouldn't be?
"Wait," The girl looked back. When she saw the giant slowly come to sense, she unsheathed her blade and brought him down gently to the ground in a sit. "stay here, okay? I'll be back."
"Uhmm... Yeah." Moreen nodded.
The girl smiled. Moreen melted into a speechless lump of goo. The beautiful girl charged the beast head-on, her long black hair flowing with the wind as she ran.
She thrust her right hand forward. She opened her hand and two ice shards flew out of her white palm. One ice shard hit the giant's chest, freezing the entirety of its massive torso. The other shard pierced its only arm left, which turned into a block of ice. The giant couldn't bare the weight of its arm and fell to its knees. The girl used the monster's frozen arm as a staircase to its body, though Moreen didn't know how the girl didn't slip off the ice. With her rapier gleaming from the sunlight, she thrust her blade into the giant's frozen skin. To Moreen's surprise, the rapier did not break the ice. Instead, it phased through the ice's crystalline surface, as if it was a ghost. The giant couldn't even spit out a last cry, and just fell to the ground with a shockwave of dust and grass, its three yellow eyes still open.
Atop the fallen behemoth stood the mysterious girl, her coat and hair swaying with the wind, right hand glowing green as bright as his was. When the game started, when he saw in his booklet the first death, he thought for sure all Players were at each other's throat. Now, as he watched the girl jumping off the giant's carcass he realized one thing.
Not all Players are killers. At the very least, one of them isn't. Two, if he counted himself.
The girl ran toward him with the light strides of someone in a good mood. Both the girl's and his mark glowed more intense as they got closer to each other.
"That was amazing." Moreen stretched an awkward smile. The girl smiled at her in return.
"Isn't it? I only learned that two days ago."
"How?!" Moreen asked. Two weeks into the game and all he learned was how to skin weird animals and cook their meat. And while he was playing forest chef, this girl was training to be a badass, cool and beautiful giant-slaying battle-mage straight out of an RPG game.
"How? Don't you have one? It's a Crest..." the girl fished for something on the flip side of her coat. It was the green booklet he also happened to have. "Look." she opened the book, turned a few pages, and showed him a page with the words "God Crest" written on top.
Below the page title was a sketch of a weapon. It looked like a scepter with its pole roughly sculpted from ice, with ice shards floating beside it, and was encircled by two long dragons chasing each other's tail.
Under the sketch was a name and a description.
Poeia
Crest of the envious god imprisoned in eternal cold.
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