Chapter: 659
Each step was concise and purposeful as he navigated around the field.
Suddenly an intense burning pain came from Jay's arm - looking down though, there was no mushroom clinging to it.
He didn't have time to worry about it though. The beast was gazing at him coldly, ignoring the skeletons for a moment as it shrugged off the hits. It waited to watched Jay die.
Its eyes squinted for a moment as it gazed, and finally it saw something which re-ignited a fire in its belly: a skeleton was on the other side of the field, two skeletons were in front of Jay, also crossing the field.
The beast wasn't mindless, and after living for so many decades, it's intelligence grew along with its strength. It was its intelligence that stopped it charging recklessly into the mushrooms in the first place, but right now it was only thinking one thing: there was a way across.
The prey was not dead.
The hunt was not over.
Finally it would steal a meal back from the damn mushrooms.
As Jay dashed across the field, there was a change in the sand - instead of shifting constantly by all the wriggling and squirming lizards underneath, it suddenly stopped.
But only for a moment.
Suddenly, the small waves of sand were moving in one direction: towards Jay.
“Oh fuck, oh shit... what are they doing?” he thought, dodging another mushroom.
So many variables and thoughts were running through Jay's mind at once:
- where would he run to next after crossing the desert?
- Will the beast follow him across? How would he outrun it now? The only chance of living would be to miraculously find a dungeon on the other side, somewhere in the forest? Since when did he have such profound luck.
- Why were the lizards suddenly all coming towards him?
- Oh, stop! Dodge that hanging fruit!
- Why is my arm burning with a hot itchiness?
[Your skeleton has been slain]
Now the death notifications were annoying him in the already stressful situation.
If Jay could put his current situation into words, he would only have three: “I am fucked.”
The gaps between the mushrooms got skinnier to run through, and he wasn't even half-way across, though he came to the area where the skeletons started cutting away the red fruits - this only made it harder as now he had to push past the hanging tendrils, and if the skeletons missed even one fruit, Jay would only be able to escape via amputation.
For a moment, he wondered if his situation could get any worse.
As if responding to his thoughts, a new threat emerged from the sand - the damn lizards.
Each of them were no real threat to Jay, however they had one ability which set them apart from all other little critters: they could utilize the fruit.