Chapter 23 The Chief's Last Breath

Chapter 23 The Chief's Last Breath


Crunch.

One rock slid beneath the heel of Alex as he sat on the tip of a rough boulder, his legs hanging as though he was watching a play on the street, instead of a murder that was on the verge of being committed. All the air was full of blood and wet fur, and it was so thick that it was sweet to the back of the tongue. The shrieking in the village had long since died away in the background of the trees, and only the harsh grunts of beasts and the rumbling, moaning growl of something mammoth circling around the chief of the village, remained.

His robe was torn, and the sweat streaming down his face like oil, his eyes bespeak that special sort of rage which causes a man to lose where the border of reality is.

The huge wolf came striding on before him, shoulders twitching beneath his fur like boulders that roll, mouth dripping blood and saliva, every stride making a little shudder in the ground beneath him that bade the earth open its mouth to give him his place.

The chief lifted up his hand and flicked his fingers.

Fwoosh.

There was a summoning circle and a wolf came beside him--smaller than the one before, but solid and muscular and trained to just this sort of work.

The lips of the chief were drawn in to a half-grin and half-snarl, as he pointed forward.

He would kill this beast, I will kill you right after, Alex I will kill you right after! I will kill this beast, I spat; and then I will kill you!

The expressions rolled over the devastated clearing, harsh and loud. But Alex could read the truth of the man in his shoulders, in the little forward bend of one gripping himself to something that he is really afraid of. The chief himself was in terror, and there was nothing like terrified men being quiet.

The vice chief, standing next to him, came forward with his face contorted in a mingled feeling of anger and excitement. He raised his palm.

Fwoosh.

A second wolf sprang into the world, and snarled his jaws and pawed the air impatiently.

Laugh, the vice chief laughed--a dry harsh ugly laugh. "No hurry, Chief. Kill him the proper way. We break him first. We get him to beg. then we kill him.

Alex did not blink. He made no movement or change of expression. He only bent a little, his chin on his fist, and gazed at the entire picture as though he were a man looking on what he has already witnessed at the close.

Then he smirked.

You do anything you want to do, he said, voice easy as it was to be offensive in itself. But perhaps you'd better do with that big wolf first before you begin planning the party.

Neither man responded. Individuals such as them never heard when they thought they had won. When the blood was theirs, they then began to listen.

The chief gave a jerk of his hand. "Attack!"

The vice chief was his equivalent. "Tear it apart!"

They both called wolves and they came at the same time with their nails sinking in the earth. Their bodies blurred, the wolf first struck the big wolf in the front of the legs and drove the fangs deep into the thick muscle on the ankle. CRUNCH. Bone gripped and flesh yielded and the great wolf uttered a terrible bellowing, which shook the leaves off the close-by branches. The second wolf circled round and round, and then bounds and cuts through the ribs of the great wolf two long lines of red, through the black fur.

The large wolf threw its head down. SNAP. But the little wolf shook himself off, and bit again, and again. The large wolf was of size and weight, but corresponded in level to the two trained beasts upon which it was driven in tandem--one to hold it down, the other to cut it open--and brute strength alone would not avail to lift it out of that time. The large wolf pawed the ground. Its legs started trembling under it. Its breath came in and out of time. The blood fell in long streams on the ground.

Alex stood and gazed his fill. Nor did he flinch or change his pose or alter the expression of his face. The smile went round, perhaps, a little broader.

Not bad, he said to himself, the tone he applied to it containing some degree of approval to seem like he was commenting on a test. Your domesticated animals are good. So strong that they can haul that huge mutt down with no great difficulty.

the chief listened, and laughed, the laugh of a man whose confidence has just been restored to his heart. He stood and watched the huge wolf go down on a knee, and trembled as the blood continued to flow.

Your beast is dying, chief said, and whatever I said felt to him like nectar. "Time to end this."

But Vice chief had spoken no more.

His smile was gone.

His eyes were fixed upon Alex, and what was going on there was not confidence--it was the gradual, malaise feeling of a man who has just become aware of something wrong but has not yet been able to tell what that something is. He looked out at Alex and at the dying wolf and at the wasted space behind them and at Alex once more, and struggled with it, as he did with a problem that I could not find a solution to.

Wait, said the vice chief slowly and his voice falling. Something wrong, Chief.

Shut up, said the chief without a glance at him.

The vice chief made no shut up. Too calm, he said, and that was warning, come out like a warning, calm.

The light fell on the eyes of Alex.

Once he snickered, very low and short. Wow, he said, and it almost sounded as though he were really impressed. You are not so thick an ass, vice chief. Not like your chief over there. He leaned back his head. But too late.

The two wolves of the chief struck the throat of the great wolf with one blow, and tore it open.

RIP.

The gigantic monster fell. Its eyes went flat. Its chest stopped.

One-half second silence.

Then came a change of air.

A whistle, sharp, clean, sudden, in the night.

FWOOSH.

Two shapes dropped from above like stones falling from a height—two birds, small-bodied and razor-beaked, built for nothing except speed, diving in a straight line with their wings pressed back and their beaks pointing down like blades.

The vice chief barely had time to widen his eyes.

One bird went for the chief. The other went for the vice chief. The chief, still riding the high of watching his wolves succeed, was not looking up. He was not turning around. He was already smiling at what he thought was coming next, and that smile froze on his face and stayed there.

PFFT.

The beak punched between his ribs and found his heart with a precision that left no room for argument. His eyes went wide and his mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Blood moved up his throat and broke at his lips. His knees gave way like something had simply switched off inside him, and he went down.

The vice chief saw it happen. He tried to move. He tried to raise his arm. He tried to shout something. But the second bird was already there.

PFFT.

Straight into his chest. Straight through to the heart. His body jerked hard, and his eyes filled with a disbelief so complete it almost looked peaceful—the look of a man whose instincts had been right and whose body had simply run out of time to act on them.

Both men hit the ground within a breath of each other. Their wolves turned and growled, confused, searching, but the people who had given them purpose were already gone.

Alex stood up from the rock.

His boots pressed into the dirt as he walked forward at the pace of a man with nowhere he needs to be in a hurry. He stopped and crouched down beside the chief, close enough that the chief, still breathing in thin wet pulls, could see him clearly.

Alex leaned in. His voice came out low and almost gentle, which somehow made it worse.

"Give my regards," he said, "to your son. And to the villagers you left behind to die so you could run." He paused, and then the smile came back, sharp and satisfied and without a single trace of apology in it. "Say hi to them in hell."

The chief's eyes trembled once.

Then they went still.

Alex straightened up and exhaled through his nose.

The clearing had gone quiet. Just wind moving through the leaves and the fading sounds of wounded animals, and nothing else. The beast tide was finished. The chief was dead. The vice chief was dead. And Alex stood in the middle of it looking, if anything, slightly bored.

He turned his attention inward, toward the interface only he could see.

His Hack Points were nearly empty. Completely drained by the work of twisting the beasts into rampage mode—forcing madness into them, overriding every instinct except aggression, turning a wandering herd of animals into a living disaster that rolled through the village like a flood. The hacked beasts had died too when it was over, their bodies giving out once the forced state ended, because the method Alex had used was the cheapest one available. And cheap hacks always had a cost attached to them.

Alex looked at the bodies scattered across the clearing.

"Damn," he muttered. "HP's empty."

His system sat inside him, cold and quiet and patient, like a tool waiting to be picked up again. The Beast Hacker System—the cheat he had received when he transmigrated into this world. It let him rewrite beasts the way a programmer rewrites code. He could force mutations, override loyalty, corrupt aggression, turn a tamed creature into something feral and uncontrollable with a single command. On paper it sounded like something that could level mountains. In practice it was expensive in the way that every powerful thing is expensive, and HP did not replenish itself out of generosity. It had to be collected, pulled from materials that carried life or essence or any residual spiritual energy, absorbed and converted into something usable.

When Alex had been a sacred tree, he had taken in whatever the villagers left as offerings, the bodies of dead beasts, the thin traces of energy left behind by prayers and rituals. It had been pathetic. Barely enough to sustain him. A trickle when he needed a river. But now he had a body. Now he could move through the world and take what he needed directly. And right now he was standing in a field full of corpses, which meant the situation had just become extremely convenient.

A slow smile moved onto his face.

He raised his hand slightly.

"System," he said quietly. "Time to work. Absorb everything. Do not waste a single body."

The system responded immediately. An invisible pull expanded outward from him like the air had grown a set of lungs and begun to inhale. The corpses—beast and human alike—began to change. Not rotting, not decaying, but drying out from the inside, moisture disappearing, flesh drawing tight against bone, the color leaching out of everything as whatever energy remained got pulled free and converted. The smell shifted too. The thick iron stench of blood faded and was replaced by something sharp and dry, like air after a fire has burned everything clean.

Alex watched it all and felt the numbers climbing inside him. Slowly, then steadily, then faster as the process found its rhythm.

His smirk came back.

"This is why having a body is better," he muttered to himself, sounding genuinely amused. "So much more efficient."

Because the truth was straightforward. This body had not come from luck or fate or the goodwill of any god. It had come from him. He had built it, starting from a single drop of his own blood that had soaked into the soil when he was first thrown away during the war. He had not wasted the time that followed. While he was still a sacred tree, still trapped and limited, he had pushed every last point of HP he could spare into that blood, forcing it to hold, forcing it to preserve itself and grow, forcing it to slowly stitch itself into something with shape and function. It was a process that had taken years and felt like building something intricate out of nothing but patience and spite.

The body formed in stages. At first it was fragile and unformed, barely a shell. But before Alex could move into it himself, a wandering soul had slipped inside—some weak, opportunistic spirit that thought it had stumbled into a second chance. That soul had taken the body. The villagers had found the child and brought it home. And Alex, still rooted in the ground as a tree, had spent years watching someone else walk around in his own flesh, making decisions in his own face, living in something that had been built from his blood.

That had nearly broken him. Not physically, but in the way that only truly specific injustices can break something in a person—watching what belongs to you being worn by someone who has no right to it.

So he played a long game. He appeared to the body as a sacred tree. He offered a golden apple loaded with his own soul fragments, his own energy, a concentrated piece of himself packed into a fruit. The moment that body ate it, Alex's soul went in like a blade going into a gap between ribs. The soul inside never had time to resist. It was erased, consumed, replaced, and Alex reclaimed what had always been his—his blood, his flesh, his vessel, fitting him perfectly because he had made it for himself.

There was still one question that sat in the back of his mind, though, irritating in the way a splinter is irritating. Why had the previous soul fit so well into this body? It should not have been possible. The body had been built to hold Alex specifically. Something about that was wrong in a way he had not yet resolved.

But the dead did not deserve his time. Plans did.

He opened the system interface and watched the numbers level out and stabilize.

\[Hack Points: 10,000.\]

He looked at it for a moment without speaking.

Then he smiled.

"Not bad," he said, his voice carrying the quiet satisfaction of a man who has just confirmed something he suspected was true. "That is a lot."

His eyes narrowed and the smile stayed but changed shape into something more focused and deliberate.

"But still not enough," he said softly. "Not for what comes next."

He closed his fist slowly at his side.

His next plan was simple to describe and insane to actually attempt. He wanted to use the system on himself. He wanted to rewrite his own talent from the inside. And there was a very specific reason why, when he had constructed this body all those years ago, he had built it without any talent at all.