--- Juglerr ---
"What's a frisbee?" I ask Kaz.
"A chakram that doesn't cut."
"Sounds kind of useless. How am I supposed to fight with that?" I say when I finish cleaning the Katar I threw at the tiger's face.
"It's not for combat, it's to distract animals," Kaz replies, looking around us.
Only now have I stopped to think about what this commotion might attract to us.
"If the way to use it is to shoot at the target, we can just buy another shield for him," Mingten begins to speak while wiping the blood from her saber and turns to look in my direction. "You already use any weapon like one of those frisbees anyway. Why not something you can use to defend yourself too?"
I'm so mentally exhausted that I don't even care if it's a joke or a serious suggestion.
"You still haven't given our performance reviews." I say, shifting my attention to Kaz.
"I want to check the area first." Kaz nods slightly before replying, still keeping his attention on our surroundings.
"Jill!" Kaz calls to our guide.
"Yes!" She replies with more nervousness than when she had an army of beasts trying to kill her.
"Continue with the brats until about two hundred meters ahead. I'll catch up with you when we're done here." Kaz says, fixing his eyes on a part of the forest.
"Is it really necessary for us to move away?" Mingten asks, looking at the tiger's carcass. "You were supposed to show how to use the remains and the probable core. If we keep postponing tasks, I'll never advance to the next stage."
"Hold on, I almost died a minute ago, can't we almost die again, especially not so soon?" I say, approaching Jill, who remained in the opposite direction from Kaz.
"Can you protect them while dealing with the pack?" As soon as I reach her, Jill asks this question.
"Not without destroying the forest," Kaz replies in a nonchalant tone.
"You can, but you think it's too much work." Mingten barely lets Kaz finish speaking and continues, "At least that's what I think."
With a sigh, Kaz turns to face Mingten.
"Let's change it then, you stay with me. Baha and Jill will go ahead."
I honestly didn't expect the arsonist demon to agree with Mingten, but I was wrong.
Wait a minute!
So he really was just too lazy to protect us.
Not that I want to be near the likely carnage he's going to cause.
New fact about Kaz: he's lazy at heart.
"Okay." Jill replies briefly and starts to walk away from the two, and I follow right after her.
Unlike Mingten, I'm not going to test Kaz's patience by questioning his change of mind.
When we're about a hundred meters away, even though I feel like we've walked more than that because we have to dodge or jump over the giant roots, Jill slows her pace.
"Any problem?" I ask, less because I expect an answer and more because I find the silence uncomfortable.
"Just checking the area around us using different 'filters' to make sure we don't have another surprise like the wolves ahead of us." Jill replies calmly, which really surprises me.
Thinking about it, she's only lost her composure when interacting with Kaz; for the rest of the journey, she's remained quite calm.
And that answer also reminded me that I stopped using my 'filter' as soon as we found the winged tiger.
As Mingten would say: rookie mistake.
Kaz will probably just call me a scatterbrain.
The fact that I can't argue this time is kind of infuriating, and the other half is me calling myself an idiot.
"Do I have to worry about some stalker or a sudden ambush?" I ask Jill after finishing ruminating on my disappointment with myself.
"Not at the moment, but it's best not to let your guard down." Jill replies calmly, which I still find unusual.
--- Runaway ---
Kaz and I immediately retraced our steps in the opposite direction from Jill and Baha, who, now that I think about it, the old monster managed to avoid showing me how to use the remains of a ferocious beast.
The possibility that he made me follow him because he finds it less work than explaining the process is, unfortunately, quite high.
Kaz walks calmly among the gigantic roots until he stops in an almost open space out of reach of the roots, with rays of sunlight more clearly piercing the foliage of the trees.
"There's a pack of snake-eye wolves, a species of ferocious beast capable of tracking prey by smell, heat, and with incredible hearing; their vision isn't that good, only recognizing general shapes." Kaz, slightly shifting from his gallon-drinking mode, speaks without averting his gaze. "This might seem like a disadvantage, but in their case, their vision is not very dependent on light; honestly, their vision seems to filter only the minimum amount of light to see, so tricks like blinding them with a flash won't work."
Is this a precautionary warning?
Is Kaz genuinely acting as a mentor?
That's bad, these wolves are probably too much for me.
"Thank you for the warning, but tricks involving temporary blindness aren't the only weapon in my arsenal." I say apprehensively, not understanding if the warning is out of concern considering my recent battles, or if he's continuing the agreement to train me, to train us, but Baha isn't here.
"What do you think our objective should be here?" My doubts vanished.
Kaz is in training mode.
Unfortunately, this means I have to think carefully about my answers. I almost sigh from the pre-emptive exhaustion my brain feels at the thought, but I hold back and answer, trying to hide my exhaustion:
"Assuming the entire pack is too much for me and you're not willing to eliminate the entire pack, the only viable option is to scare them away." How to scare them away isn't something I'll say now; if Kaz decided to be a good teacher for an hour, I'll take full advantage of it.
"Hmm." If he hadn't nodded in agreement, I wouldn't have understood that. "Most animals don't hunt problematic prey since that defeats the purpose of hunting. Try to scare them away yourself for as long as possible; when you feel you've reached your limit, I'll switch with you."
I look at the water dispenser, and unfortunately, nothing about it inspires confidence.
Still, I want to move forward, to reclaim what is rightfully mine.
"Okay, my sixth sense has a range of about six hundred meters in diameter, how long until the wolves arrive?" Let's see if I have the opportunity to recover a bit from the battle against the tiger and maybe prepare myself.
Kaz extends his left hand with his fingers extended; given our positions, I only see his back. He bends one finger, his thumb. No! He's not doing that.
He bends his index finger.
Damn it.
The middle finger.
A countdown to the clash?
The ring finger.
Of course he was going to find a way to have some fun...
The little finger is bent, at the same time that the wolf at the front of the pack enters the range of my sixth sense.
...with my suffering.
Any idea of rest or preparation is thrown out the window for me; six hundred meters in diameter is a reasonable area, unfortunately the wolves are coming in a straight line, only half that distance until they reach me.
I assume a combat stance, gripping the saber with both hands and disregarding the clinking of the rings—stealth was never an option in Kaz's mind.
Moments after the gallon-guzzler finished his tasteless countdown, one of the wolves finally comes into view.
Something too big to be a dog is running straight at me, fully intending to collide with me.
It has gray fur—darker around the neck, where I sometimes catch a glimpse of greenish snake-like scales beneath the throat and above the legs—and yellow eyes with slit pupils, like a snake's.
The smell and the sound of the growl reach me along with the image, thanks to my sixth sense; honestly, the wolves actually stink less than I expected.
Without wasting a second, I tilt my saber slightly, and just as the wolf comes within range...
The saber comes down on its neck, using the weight of the blade itself rather than my strength to sever the wolf's head.
The cut could have been cleaner; the spurting blood fills the air with a pungent, metallic smell.
The second and third wolves come into my line of sight, and through my sixth sense, I notice wolves number four and five slightly altering their path.
Are they going to attack me in a pincer movement?
Alright. Finally, I call upon my Ki—which had been as calm as a breeze within me—and let it surge outward, transforming into something closer to a gale; by layering the effect, I make the surrounding wind move in sync with me. This grants me the small but crucial advantage of always having the wind at my back.
Wolves number 2 and 3 soon come running toward me, one on each side. I don't think one of them will just stand there while I kill the other.
Divide and conquer. Isolate one of the wolves; a cloud of dust should do the trick.
It's what my training would tell me to do, but—as Kaz explained—I don't have many tools here to separate the wolves, so I do something potentially stupid, yet something that makes my heart race with excitement: I charge forward.
With every step that glides through the wind, I drive the blade of my saber into the first wolf's jaw; harnessing the force of our colliding, moving bodies, my saber tears the wolf's jaw open vertically.
Before I lose my momentum, I arc my saber, sweeping it out the side of the wolf while already aiming a thrust at the second one; I pierce its stomach and—without waiting to see if it's enough to finish the job—kick the wolf to dislodge the blade from its body.
Three and four are closing in on me from behind, damn it.
Let's try some new tricks.
I channel a bit of my Ki into the vision lapis stone; for a moment, I find myself in a gray world, outside my body.
I quickly switch the target of my synchronization and repeat the process with each wolf, gaining an idea of how they are organizing to attack me. While also confusing them with the constant shifting of perspectives.
Although I managed to gain a few seconds with this trick, I'm a little uncomfortable because it's still a visual trick.
At least it has nothing to do with blinding them.
Okay, before my extra seconds run out, I visualize a thread between my fingers and the red lapis on my saber.
The heat lapis, I send a bit of Ki into the stone along the trajectory of the line.
Layering the heat with the blade.
And with that, I'm at my limit: one bridge to overlap with the wind, another in parallel overlapping the heat from the lapis with the blade of the saber.
I hope I don't need to use this combination very often.
I run toward one of the wolves that were coming up behind me, and before it can reorient itself, my heated saber cuts through its neck like butter.
I don't want to have to do maintenance on my weapon in the first serious fight I have using it.