The forest met him with dense, green silence. But it was silence only to the human ear. To Izayoi, whose senses operated in a different range, the thicket roared.
He stopped in a small clearing where the roots of ancient spruces had heaved up the earth, and closed his eyes.
The world changed. The visual picture faded, giving way to a three-dimensional map of sounds and vibrations. He heard a fox crunching a vole half a kilometer away—the snap of tiny bones sounded as crisp as breaking toast. He heard the rustle of an owl's wings gliding on air currents. He even heard the sap flowing inside tree trunks, obeying capillary pressure.
"Too much noise," he whispered soundlessly.
Izayoi concentrated, recalling the sensation he had experienced in the shop. That specific, barely perceptible resonance emanating from the crystals. It was like a low-frequency hum mixed with the smell of ozone after a thunderstorm. A cold, structured signal.
He began to "filter" the incoming information. Screened out the wind noise. Removed the heartbeats of small animals. Expanded his perception radius, overlaying an energy search filter.
And the forest "lit up."
Dim lights began to flash in his consciousness—small monsters, insects saturated with mana. But that wasn't it. He needed bigger game.
Suddenly, on the edge of his perception, about two kilometers to the east, a spot pulsed. Four sources. Dense, heavy clumps of energy moving in sync. They were pushing straight through, breaking the shrubbery.
Izayoi opened his eyes. His pupils narrowed, turning into the vertical slits of a predator. The corners of his lips curled up, baring his teeth in a smile that would make any beast want to hide in the deepest burrow.
"Bingo."
Four ogres were walking through the undergrowth, leaving a clearing in their wake.
These weren't the fairy-tale giants drawn in children's books. These were killing machines created by evolution in mana-saturated conditions. nearly three meters tall, with gray, lumpy skin resembling stone, and disproportionately long arms dragging on the ground. Their small, bloodshot eyes scanned the space in search of food.
They were the apex of the food chain in this sector of the forest. Even the "wandering" wolves steered clear of them.
One of the ogres, walking in the rear, suddenly stopped. He twitched his nose, sniffing the air. It smelled of something alien. Sweet. Human. But strangely... the scent carried no fear.
The ogre grunted, attracting the attention of the others.
Ten meters in front of them, sitting on a fallen tree trunk, was a human.
He was stripped to the waist. His clothes were neatly folded and hanging on a branch higher up, out of reach of dirt and blood.
The youth sat relaxed, flexing his back muscles. Sunbeams played on his fair skin, highlighting the perfect relief of his musculature.
"You guys are big," Izayoi stated, jumping off the trunk. He cracked his neck. "That's good. Means there should be plenty of useful stuff inside."
The ogres snarled. Their primitive minds couldn't understand why this "food" wasn't running. But hunger was stronger than curiosity.
The first ogre, the leader with a broken club in his hand, roared and charged. The ground shook from his run. The club, weighing no less than a hundred kilograms, described an arc, aiming for the insolent brat's head.
The blow should have turned the human into a bloody smear.
But the club met empty air.
"Slow," a voice sounded right by the monster's ear.
Izayoi stood to the side, right next to the giant. He used no martial arts stances. He simply delivered a short, straight kick to the knee of the monster's supporting leg.
CRUNCH.
The sound of the breaking tibia was like a gunshot. The ogre's knee bent backward at an unnatural angle.
The monster didn't even have time to scream. Izayoi, using the inertia of the falling carcass, jumped and drove his heel into the creature's temple with a spin kick.
The ogre's head jerked, the skull deforming like a rotten pumpkin. The massive body collapsed, raising a cloud of dust.
"One," Izayoi said calmly.
The remaining three froze. Their brains couldn't process the information fast enough. Their leader had died in a second.
But the pack instinct took over. Two charged simultaneously, trying to flank him. The third circled to the rear.
"Tactics?" Izayoi dodged a clawed paw, letting it pass a millimeter from his nose. "Commendable. But the execution is kindergarten level."
He intercepted the wrist of one of the ogres. The monster's skin was as hard as tanned hide, but under Izayoi's fingers, it crumpled like paper.
A yank.
The three-meter carcass, weighing half a ton, flew into the air like a feather. Izayoi used the monster as a living hammer, swinging him into the second attacker with full force.
The wet, sickening sound of flesh hitting flesh. The ribs of both monsters couldn't withstand the collision, turning into mush. They rolled on the ground in a shapeless tangle of broken limbs.
Izayoi stepped toward them.
"And now, the main question," he looked thoughtfully at the twitching bodies. "Where is that damn battery inside you?"
He didn't have a knife. Dismembering a carcass with bare hands was a messy business, but he had no choice.
He stepped on the chest of a wheezing ogre, pinning him down.
"In the heart? Or the head?" he reasoned aloud, like a pathologist at a lecture.
The last, fourth ogre, watching the demise of his kin, made the only rational conclusion in his life.
RUN.
He turned and, breaking bushes, bolted into the thicket. Terror gave him speed.
"Where to?" Izayoi threw out coldly. "You're running off with my paycheck."
The ground beneath his feet exploded. The dash was so fast that the air behind him collapsed with a pop.
Izayoi was on the back of the running ogre in an instant. The monster howled, trying to throw off the rider, but it was too late.
"Don't twitch," Izayoi wrapped one arm around the thick neck, and raised his free right hand for a strike. "This will be quick. I hope."
He formed his fingers into a spear-hand.
Strike.
Izayoi's fingers pierced the tough hide, muscles, and back ribs as easily as if the ogre were made of jelly. Hot, thick blood fountain out into his face, covering his eyes and chest, but he didn't even blink.
His arm plunged into the beast's hot insides up to the elbow.
The ogre wheezed, his legs buckled, and he plowed the earth with his nose by inertia, sliding another couple of meters.
Izayoi, inside the living flesh, clenched his fingers, feeling for a hard, pulsating object near the spine.
"Found it."
A sharp yank back.
Along with a stream of steam, blood, and shreds of lung, he ripped his hand out. In his palm, slick with crimson, lay a crystal.
The ogre's body beneath him twitched one last time and began to turn gray rapidly. The magic sustaining the monster's life dissipated, and the flesh began to crumble into black dust, leaving only bones.
Izayoi jumped off the remains, fastidiously shaking some slime off his hand.
He held the find up to the light.
The stone was the size of a fist. Uncut, with sharp facets, it glowed from within with a deep, rich violet color. It was warm, almost hot, and vibrated slightly, resonating with the residual mana of the Ogre.
"Decent quality," he appraised, wiping the stone on the grass. "If that hag is to be believed, they should shell out a handful of gold for this."
He looked back at the clearing where the other three bodies had already crumbled to dust. Among the black ash, three more stones glinted dully, having fallen from the bodies after their hosts' deaths.
"Hm," Izayoi smirked, looking at his bloody hand and torso. "But I don't like working as a washerwoman."
He walked over to the stones, picked them up, and threw them into the sack.
"Four stones for five minutes of work. Labor efficiency is off the charts. But," he looked deep into the forest, where his hearing was already picking up new signals, "I need more. Much more."
He picked up his clothes from the ground, checked for blood splatters, and, satisfied with their cleanliness, carefully placed them on top of the crystals in the sack. He was in no hurry to dress. The hunt had just begun, and ruining his only suit would be the height of wastefulness.