The woods were quiet as I drifted through them under the morning light of day break. The animals and all the other critters living in the underbrush hadn’t quite woken up yet and so they, and the forest alongside with them, were all still quiet in the moments just before the new day began its morning.

I was quiet too. But in contrast to everything else I was wide awake… and eager to kill something.

It was almost a month ago that I reached the end of my endeavour, practising every single Baptism for every single Warriorhood technique ever developed over the span of 12,000 years by the greatest and most well funded minds across the entire history of the Coalition's existence.

A grand achievement for sure. Though all it left in my mouth was a bitterness that filled me with a foul resentment.

I had of course prepared myself for the disappointment, this last year especially as I began scraping the bottom of the barrel so to speak. Truly nearing complete and utter failure in what I had dedicated a literal lifetime to. But even during those months I had held on to a sliver of hope that it would all work out.

It didn’t.

A fact that became undeniably clear a month ago when I performed a certain sand type affinity Baptism, the only one I yet unperformed, and got the same result as all the 2808 Baptisms that came prior.

After that happened… I lost it.

Despair. A great flood of despair rushed into me. Over half a century of dedicated practice and patience, wasted, on what now seems an idiotically naive idea. Desperation took a hold of me like it had never before as I tried to deny what I now knew but could not bear to accept.

In revolt, I blazed through all of my techniques again, performing all of them once more in an obsessive mad craze, deluding myself into thinking that I had missed something, that I had made some mistake. My time blurred from that point on as everything became trying to prove the past 68 years wasn’t a mistake.

All that mattered right then, was performing one Baptism after the other. Trying to find where I went wrong.

Everything else was superfluous.

So superfluous that I couldn’t even remember anything else. The farm, my animals, my music, my archery. Even food, water and sleep were left by the wayside… until either of the three sent me into a fainting spell, after which I would then wake up to gorge myself on my fortunately nearby stored up supplies till I was ready and able to go again at my futile mission.

Eventually I made it to the end. Once again performing every technique and exercise contained within my 45 Volumes of techniques, the moves this time coming right away as their former hammering into my body from all the previous performances made each new repetition rudimentary. Only one try each time it took to get the flicker when I finished a sequence of moves.

When I finally concluded my seclusion of crazed denial, I emerged outside into the open air of the world again, bitter and defeated, now faced by all that I had neglected during my unhealthy absence.

Crops were still growing though clearly had been nibbled by some pests, grass had overgrown and gotten unkempt, some of the animals coats had gotten too shaggy, and everything was generally just looking unseemly and dishevelled. Not at the standard I had always maintained for the previous 68 years straight.

It… didn’t matter. Fuck the farm. I had to get out of there. I had to get away from my failure and the monument I had constructed around it in all the time I had spent working on it.

So I washed, changed my clothes, and gathered all my supplies including my bow and arrows, and set off into the woods to escape from it all, at least until I had let off some steam.

The moment I jumped over my fence and started entering the trees, I instantly began to feel a little better. Not a lot of course, everything still weighed heavily on my shoulders, but a little better nonetheless now that I wasn’t right in the face of it.

I stealthily stalked through the trees as I delved deeper into the woods beyond the border of my land, throwing myself into the smooth and quiet gait I had worked to near perfection from the beginning during my hunting expeditions, and as I did so, I thought of Kara.

I had of course thought of Kara before over the years. In my time at the farm in the quiet moments I sometimes found, whether they be during meals or in bed as I waited for sleep to take me over I had thought often of her, and Elde also. Sometimes even, in the especially quiet sombre moments, I sent my thoughts back to the life I had before I ever met the Wizard, to recollections almost too blurry to make out now.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking of now, what I was thinking of now was Kara. Till this day, remorse still dwelled in my heart due to what I had let happen to Elde all those years ago. But with Kara… with Kara I had always consoled myself with the fact that the choice I made back then was the correct one, even if it felt so very wrong.

Now however, my reasoning no longer felt like rationality, but rather consolation..

The terrible ending that I had left Kara to in her final moments when I chose to save what I now know were pointless books, rather than be with her, dredged up a guilt in me I had long thought reconciled but now reared its ugly head as I realised the fantasy I had been living in since her death.

These new feelings of guilt piled on with the regret, the disappointment, the frustration and the resentment, was now all culminating, transforming, into another crystal clear emotion that burned within me.

Anger.

Anger that needed to be let out. Set on something. Something to hunt.

…something to kill.

The rage now growling inside of me, it needed out. Let loose on something, on anything, on whatever dared cross my path.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Although I wasn’t clear on my exact age, I was confident that altogether my years alive to this day had well surpassed the two century mark.

Living that long, despite how young and spritely I still feel, had instilled in me a calm rationality and focus that was as much a part of me as my beating heart. And no mere small bird or creature could push past this collected state of my mind to cause me to unleash my discontent.

I needed a challenge. An ordeal.

So I stalked through the forest, looking for an opponent. No!… a worthy adversary, who could force me to unleash all my negative emotions onto them and at the same time would push me to my mental and physical limits.

Once this idea sprouted in my mind in the dark depths of the forest, it was all I could think about.

Don’t think about your mistakes, don’t think about your regrets, don’t think about your failures. Only find prey, worthy prey… and kill it.

With this immovable drive festering deeper and deeper in my heart, I journeyed further inward into the untamed forest that surrounded me.

Days passed. At some point I stepped over the unmarked border denoting the boundary between my usual hunting ground and the outer wilderness I had yet never ventured into. However there was no hesitation as I set my foot over it, the wariness of the unknown depths before me only greater stirred my anticipation for conflict.

I moved like a shadow through the woods, travelling past trees and moving above them in their branches, scuttling through the underbrush, scrambling over rocks and mounds of Earth. I waded through still creeks and shallow streams, swimming when necessary through rivers to cross to the other side. And always, always, I was waiting, watching, ready… for when I would meet my quarry.

The years had made me an excellent hunter, well familiar with travelling through the woods and hunting game and had honed all the skills needed to live and thrive out here.

However, that wasn’t what truly made me confident in my deadliness. Despite the failure that was my endeavour, all the Baptisms I had tried and failed through the decades, there was one undeniable benefit they did give me.

My physical fitness.

Now raised to a level I couldn’t even previously conceive as possible. A level at, where I would guess, was very likely somewhere around the stage of an early Initiate, if only lacking the mana component.

The reason this was so was because the Baptism techniques I had been practising with utmost dedication everyday for 68 years, were in fact exercises that pushed the body to the absolute limit. Each one being unique and totally different from each other.

What this can be surmised as, is that during these past 68 years I had spent on the farm and out here in the wilderness, I had in essence trained in and mastered 2809 different martial arts.

What this had done to my body was staggering, now being basically forged to perfection. My physique sculpted perfectly, holding great hidden strength all throughout it. My tendons taut, yet unbelievably flexible, having been pushed past anything even the greatest contortionist or yogi ever back on Earth ever experienced. My reflexes faultless, fast and completely in sync with my mind and body. Every movement, no matter how random or complex, from a dodge or duck can flow into any other, allowing me to remain always completely coordinated.

I have tested and proved this to myself over the years with my hunts and my regular farmwork and am completely familiar and confident in my physical prowess.

Plus, all those Baptisms carried with them some attack techniques as well and so with regards to fighting, though I have little experience, I have the technique and refinement of over sixty years of martial artist training contained within the perfect form of a young man in the peak of his life.

Needless to say, I am only lacking in the experience area to otherwise be considered a high performance killing machine.

This strength and skill is what I relied on as I travelled through the forest for days on end, finding birds and small game for supper alongside whatever else I scavenged on the way.

But none of it was what I was looking for, none of it what I needed.

So I kept searching, seeing parts of the forest that would have amazed me at any other time with their colour and vivaciousness but now stirred nothing, lacking the trace of the unconquerable beast that I desperately needed.

Until…

Almost three weeks after I had left the farm in search of blood…

I came across it.

Prey!

***************************************************************************************************************

Hidden atop a mossy boulder surrounded by shrubs and other leafy vegetation, I am staring down at a pool of water that has a waterfall coming down the side of a rocky wall at its back.

At the water’s edge, lapping up water with its dark green tongue as its light grey coat jostles lightly in the slight breeze moving over the water, is a beast.

A magical beast to be exact. What I recognise to be what is called a Galecat. Something that should no longer be around here but what must have appeared due to Corps’ recent decimation and therefore reduced ability in the decades afterwards to ensure the eradication of the surrounding magical fauna.

Galecats are solitary predators. At the lower end of the totem pole with regards to all other magical beast species, usually having the strength of around a high level Initiate.

What they lack in strength though, they make up for in cunning and viciousness. Always scouting out and avoiding any stronger predators while always massacring and slaughtering with perverse delight any creature they come across that they find lesser than themselves.

It's beautiful… and it's perfect.

Galecuts have a wind affinity mana, making them very fast and very nimble, and can therefore roam over any terrain with great ease in almost an instant.

The only reason I am still alive at the moment is that my location and hiding skills are obscuring its observational ones for the moment and so it hasn’t noticed me. But that won’t be happening for long.

Quietly, with smooth and practised movement that elicits no sound, I draw out an arrow, lay it upon the bowstring of my bow, raise it up, aim… and begin to pull back.

I pull back the arrow glacially, no sound is made I ensure as I aim at one of the Galecat’s big round eyes. My arrows, though sharp, are not made of mana rich materials and so will not likely pierce the Galecat’s pelt, hence my target.

I know I can make the shot. I’ve done thousands just like it many times before, but staring down at my unawares target, I’m now beginning to think about what will happen after the arrow lands.

Either the beast will be dead, or it won’t be, and then I’ll be dead.

The thought gives me pause as in only this moment do I try to puzzle out why I’m actually doing any of this. Because of anger yes, but what else? The reemerged guilt, the regret, the failure?

It’s all of those things I acknowledge, but it’s something deeper I know, something that I now discover as my arms begin to burn as I face my unsolved emotions.

I need a win.

I need victory. After such a monumental loss, such a complete error and failure, I need to get something right. I need to overcome something, defeat something, prove that through all that time I spent, all my efforts, I had done something worthwhile.

I need to kill this cat, or die trying.

I release…

TWANG.

“AARRGGHHH!!!”

The Galecat bursts back as its left eye explodes, screaming in great pain. I instantly have another arrow aimed on the bowstring, but it's moving about too erratically to have any chance of getting a clear aim at any of its weak points.

Watching it as it now overcomes its shock, it next somehow gets a grasp on the arrow in its head with its paws… and immediately yanks it out, punctured eyeball and all.

So surprised by this aware and resolute act that I didn’t even notice how I moved my foot… nudging a small pebble… that then rolled forward…. down off the boulder I’m perched on.

The pebble roles forward, comes off the edge, and…

“…plop.”

The Galecut instantly turns to the noise, looks up, and meets my two eyes with its now one.

I should be feeling fear. I should be feeling panic. But I have been a hunter and predator myself for years now.

And I welcome the challenge.

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty…” I taunt.

It snarls back its answer..