The bastard kept wailing as it thrashed against the thread holding it to the tree, its long limbs scraping wildly through the dirt while the trunk between us shook beneath the force of every desperate movement.
Fuck, I could not hold it there.
I could feel the thread protesting against the strain, my arms already burning as I tried to keep it taut, and yet its sharp edge continued to bite deeper into the Hollow’s shoulder, black, murky blood oozing from the wound as the strand cut further into its hide.
I tried pulling harder, hoping I could simply slice it clean through before it had the chance to do anything else, but my heart dropped at the sound that came from the roots beneath the tree.
The Hollow thrashed once more, far more violently than before.
The thread shifted up its body as the tree between us swayed towards me, its roots tearing free one after another beneath the force of the creature’s struggle.
Shit.
I barely had a second to process what was happening before the entire tree came crashing down towards me. My eyes widened, and at the last possible moment I threw myself to the right, letting the thread run slack as I hit the ground hard and rolled through the dirt and roots beneath me.
For a second, I did not even know what had happened.
My arms still burned from holding the thread, my body aching where I had struck the ground, and some dumb part of me honestly did not want to get back up.
But then the Hollow let out another guttural roar, pulling me out of my reverie.
Shit, it’s free.
I scrambled to my feet, my eyes finally catching the creature through the cloud of dust and torn leaves around us, only to widen when I saw it already barrelling towards me.
Dammit.
I barely managed to bring the Jian up before it was on me.
Its right limb came crashing down from the side, those twisted bone-like claws aiming to tear straight through me while the short tentacles around its knot of a head curled wildly through the air.
I brought my blade up in a backhanded parry just as the limb struck.
The force travelled straight through the Jian and into my arm, my elbow twisting painfully as the impact knocked me off my feet.
The Hollow had not even put that much strength behind the strike, and yet it still sent me flying through the air as a burning pain spread down my side.
Damn this useless weak body.
For a second, I just hung in the air, my breath caught in my throat, before pain came all at once as I crashed into the ground and rolled.
Shit, I need to move.
I could already feel the earth shaking beneath me, the beast turning back towards me as I tried to force myself onto my feet.
Shit, it’s too close.
A thought passed through my mind.
My Act.
Hadn’t it been about death?
Maybe if I let this thing kill me, maybe then I would finally understand how Thread’s Warning worked. Maybe that was what it needed; maybe I had spent the past two months trying to figure it out in the wrong way because I had never actually been close enough to dying since the Trial.
The thought stayed there for a second.
But then I understood how stupid it was.
I had no idea whether it would work. I had no idea whether the Act would save me at all, or whether I would simply be letting some malformed bastard tear me apart because I had been desperate enough to gamble my life on a line of runes I still did not understand.
I had already had more than enough of trying to fight against fate.
The Trial had made sure of that.
No. I was not going to test it like this.
I pushed myself to my feet again, gritting my teeth as the Hollow charged towards me, its limbs tearing through the roots and undergrowth in its way.
I let the thread run from my left hand.
I had noticed it before.
This bastard did not even have eyes.
I did not know what twisted sense allowed it to see me, or whether it could somehow feel the Ichor within me, but its head had never turned towards the thread. It had never even seemed to realise it was there until it was already too late.
The strand was thin enough that even a human would struggle to see it in the middle of a fight, and this thing had looked half-drunk on blood when I had first found it.
Still, some part of me knew it was a gamble.
But a gamble was better than standing still and letting it tear me in half.
I sent the thread straight towards it, keeping it low as I ran backwards through the mud, before guiding the strand up at the final moment and looping it around the cluster of short tentacles jutting from the base of its knotted head.
Well, let’s give you a haircut then, shall we?
The Hollow kept rushing towards me, its bone-like limbs tearing through the ground as it closed the distance between us, while I let the thread twist further around the writhing tentacles.
It was barely a few feet away from me when I finally made my move.
With a sharp tug, I wrapped the thread around my gloved palm and pulled it taut.
The bastard screeched.
Its head snapped forward as the loop tightened, and its body came crashing into the mud face-first, its long limbs flailing uselessly through the air as I kept pulling the thread towards me. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
The tentacles thrashed wildly against the strand, but the thread continued to cut through them.
The first one fell to the ground with a wet thud, black blood spraying through the air as it twisted uselessly in the dirt. Then another followed, and another after that, until the thread finally closed in on itself and sliced through the last of them.
The Hollow screamed so loudly that my ears rang.
But that gave me the few seconds I needed to end it as I pushed forward.
The creature was still thrashing against the ground in agony, its limbs swinging blindly through the air as I moved around them, one of its claws cutting past close enough that I felt the wind against my face.
I brought the Jian up and then I drove it down into the Hollow’s back.
At first, the blade failed to sink deep enough, stopping abruptly against something hard beneath its hide. Bone.
The Hollow wailed and bucked beneath me, its body nearly throwing me off balance, but I did not stop.
I pulled the blade free before bringing it down again, this time slightly to the left as the Jian went in deeper.
Black blood sprayed across my armour and hands as the Hollow continued screaming beneath me, its limbs clawing uselessly into the mud while I stabbed again, then again, each strike digging further into its body.
I lost count of how many times I drove the Jian into it.
At some point, the screams became weaker, and the limbs stopped striking the ground with the same force.
And then, finally, the Hollow went still as its limbs dropped to its sides.
I stood over it for a few seconds, my breathing heavy as I stared down at the thing I had just killed, before I finally pulled my Jian free from its back.
That was when I felt it.
A violent tug ran through my torso, almost as if something had struck me from the inside, while a cold and strange force pushed into me, churning wildly through my body.
For a second, it felt as if it would consume me whole.
It was Miasma after all.
But then my Reliquary reacted as the Miasma was caught, pulled inward and moulded into something else, something my body could actually use.
Into Ichor.
I let out a breath as I looked down at myself, at the thin armour already drenched in black blood.
Shit, I really needed to fight cleaner.
I turned, shaking the blood from my Jian, when I heard it.
The same faint dragging and shuffling through the forest, only this time, there were two.
Dammit, this bastard’s yelling probably brought them here.
Yet knowing that two more Hollows were coming, for some weird reason, I almost welcomed it.