The forest seemed to hate life.
Sap oozed from broken trunks like old, congealed blood. Every branch drooped, skeletal, draped in fungal veins that pulsed faintly. There were no birds. There were no wind. Just the distant, hollow clunk of the Spiral Bell from a village that had already forgotten him.
The ground squelched under his boots while running, moss, blood, something or older. He didn't question it. He didn't have the leisure to. The forest breathed around him like a throat about to scream, or was it his lungs screaming? He doesn't know.
Bloody light filtered through the canopy, thick with smoke. The air smelled of iron, and rotting bark.
Then it came the sound that always heralded the beast.
Roar!!
The slaughter god is here.
Branches snapping from everywhere. The ground trembling like it was having a roaring stomach. Then silence.
A silence that screamed to be broken.
Sssshhhhh~
Dominic crouched beneath a fallen elderpine. Bark shredded like old scabs. His lungs burned. One hand pressed against a blood-slicked wound under his ribs. His shirt clung to him, soaked in sweat, resin, and survival.
The pouch of the hunter's compounds was still warm in his hand.
No blind spots. The Tarrasque didn't just hunt like a predator. It also observed. An apex sentinel, bred to kill and to watch despair and death unfold.
He reached down, dusting the final mixture with trembling hands. Memory, training, the hunter's son, and his own instincts all clicked into place:
Pitchroot resin. Sticky and flammable.
Ash pepper. An irritant for mountain cats.
Squill bark. Powdered to smoke.
Rock shards from crushed rocks.
"Let's see if gods can cry from the eyes," he muttered.
Or at least squint a little. Come on, eye gods, blink for this daddy.
He tossed the first decoy, a strip of cloth soaked in his sweat, into the underbrush left of the ridge. Leaves fluttered.
Then the beast came.
It stepped into the clearing like a mountain taking shape. Bone-plated legs crushed trees under their weight. Its face was a shrine to violence, a maw lined with crooked fangs. Serpentine eyes like molten forge-coal.
A beast is a beast.
It lunged at the bait.
Dominic screamed. Not in fear but in fury.
"Come see me, you blind bastard."
Skirtsh—
Mid-air, it ignited.
Bang—
A flashbang of an ancient hunting alchemy that shouldn't have worked but probably through the stroke of a miracle. White light exploded. Shards tore at its left eye. Resin stuck. Ash pepper flared.
That's right, eye-for-an-eye, buddy.
The Tarrasque shrieked, shrieking like rust tearing through bone.
One eye ruptured.
The other dissolved in smoke.
It spun wildly, blind. Clawed at its own head. Crashed through trees, shattered stone, roars like planets screaming.
Dominic ducked behind charred wood, grin splitting his bloody mouth.
"Well look at that. Even gods can flinch."
Then the grin faded.
The god was still moving. Not dead. Not slowed long enough, still angry.
And it was coming.
The forest seemed to hold its breath, tense.
Every tree, every branch, every fungal-rooted smell of wind carried the same question:
Will it kill him… or just maim him first?
"It looks like I overdid it a bit," he muttered. With a smile that was not a smile.
Would he die now? Or later?
A bang.
A flying tree trunk slammed toward him, trying to wipe that ugly grin from his face. He dodged but not cleanly. Pain bloomed along his left shoulder.
Thanks, physics. Always a buzzkill. With a bitter grin, Dominic limped from the shrubs. One arm dragged like a broken wing.
Blood soaked his left boot. Every step slapped wet against cracked roots.
His breath came in short bursts. Through his lungs like rusted bellows.
The stink of death clung to him like skin. His own? Maybe.
"One more mile, baby. Just one more miracle."
Behind him, the Tarrasque snorted.
A snort like glaciers cracking. It was slow, deliberate, and deeply annoyed.
He had led it eastward, down ridgelines sloping like collapsing towers. The trees thinning out as he moved. The rocks jutting out like teeth.
Every hundred meters, he left a breadcrumb: strips of cloth soaked in sweat, twisted branches smeared with blood.
It followed.
Not just with rage and bloodlust. But with obsession.
A mere ant dares injure a god.
Dominic was no longer prey. He was a blasphemy. Rival. The scar in its memory.
Each footfall cracked the earth. Even the air trembled.
Then—
The cliff.
It rose like a cathedral of broken gods. Or like it would soon break a god.
The edge draped in morning mist.
Suuuuuuu—
Wind whistled.
Dominic staggered up the narrow slope half acting and half breaking.
Every breath tasted like iron.
He counted the distance by instinct: about seventy feet across and forty feet down. Definitely more than six feet underground, enough to keep it there forever.
The jagged stone teeth waited below like death yawning wide.
He set the final bait: a strip of his shirt, torn fresh, still warm and bloody, tied to a crooked sapling.
Then he stood at the edge, a silhouette against the dawn.
A martyr with no cause but survival.
Then the Tarrasque came like judgment bursting through from the tree line, snarling, limping and foaming.
One eye dangled like a ruptured fruit; the other had vanished in smoke.
Its front right leg dragged from traps it had failed to avoid during its rampage.
But it still came. With no hesitation and no calculations. Just fury. Pure, blinded fury.
Dominic gave it a crooked grin that didn't reach his eyes.
"C'mon, sweetheart."
"I've got a last dance with gravity you'll never forget."
Preferably without me breaking every bone first.
It charged.
Soil crumbled under claws like wet sand.
At the last second, Dominic vanished not into the void, but into precision.
A single branch jutted from the cliffside.
It held. Barely.
His ribs screamed as his weight rested on it. His legs dangling with one arm clutching the branch slick with dew and sweat.
Above him, the Tarrasque realized too late.
Hope you like climbing, buddy. Dominic snickered
Momentum was no longer an ally. It was an executioner. It was physics.
It's claws slashed the air.
And it's roar shattered birds mid-flight.
Then it fell. Fell like a god stripped of worship, like wrath with no foothold.
Gravity always collects its dues.
Bam—
Impact. Not the rocks but the beast.
Its belly split first, skewered on stone spires.
Spine bent, snapped. One leg twisted in ways mocking anatomy.
Chuuu—
Blood and ichor fountained.
Hissss—
Steam hissed from punctured lungs.
One final shudder. Then stillness.
Dominic dangled from the cliffside to solid ground. Blood still in his teeth, laughter in his chest.
Bitter, raw laughter a cough pretending to be a joke.
"Could you please stand? Let's see who's taller."
A pause.
"Oh wait… you can't."
"Forgot you can fly. But only once."
He laughed, coughed, laughed again, then blacked out as his tense nerves relaxed.
For the first time in a while, the forest was silent.
[DEATH OF TEENAGE TARRASQUE DETECTED]
[SACRIFICE ACCEPTED]
[YOU HAVE BEEN BOUND]
[IDENTITY: DOMINIC SOLARI — STATUS: BOUND BY FLAME AND GRIEF]
[EIDOLON DESCENT: PHASE I INITIATED]
Ding.