Chapter 11

They were unconscious for three whole days and when they woke up their entire bodies were bruised and they felt like every bone in their body was broken.

Dragon weakly opened his eyes, trying to observe the surroundings, but his sight was blurry and he couldn’t really discern anything.

The only thing he noticed was that they were no longer surrounded by snow, rocks and dead trees. Even more importantly, the fog was gone, together with the mysterious black shadows inside of it. He and his brothers were lying on a grassy ground, directly in front of him even blossomed a flower.

‘What…the hell?!’ Dragon thought and tried to sit up. After the third try, his tattered and aching body finally sat up and his blurry vision cleared up.

They were inside of a valley, roughly as big as a football field of his old world.

He turned around towards his brothers, who also struggled to get up.

“You look…horrible!” Turtle said with a pained voice as he looked towards Dragon: “Heh…but we did it…we are alive!”

Dragon grinned at him and nodded his head.

“All of us don’t really look good right now, but…haha we did it!!” Hawk said with a little unbelieving, but triumphant voice.

“Look who’s here….Mr. Obvious strikes again..” Turtle said with a mocking tone.

“Oi, fuck you too…didn’t you say the same just now?!” Hawk said enraged and his eyes turned into slits as he looked at Turtle.

“So what if I did? Aren’t you just imitating me then? How courageous…heh!” Turtle said and his mocking gaze intensified.

“Grrr..eat, just you wait…I will get you back for this…I promise you...I have the memory of an elephant!! I never forget!...hah just you wait when it comes to training…no mercy for the fatty!” Hawk said with a deep growling in his young voice, trembling with rage.

“OI- WHO’S A FATTY?!” Turtle was directly enraged as well and tried to move towards Hawk to hit him, which ended only in him pitifully falling to the ground with a dull sound.

“Hah! See you are the fat-..” Hawk started laughing as he was disrupted by Dragon:

“ENOUGH! Why do the both of you always act like you are small kids?! Can’t you act more like your age?!” he asked angered.

“Well, technically we are only five or six years old…” Snake said slowly, seemingly deep into his own thoughts. Suddenly something hit his forehead and a sharp pain spread through his head as Dragon, who was sitting next to him, had flicked him with his finger.

He looked up and almost fell backwards as he saw the murderous gaze Dragon was watching him with.

“I’m just say-…” he said quietly but immediately he was flicked again and gasped in pain.

“There are some more important things to discuss right now…keep your bullshit for later. First of all I want to say something about the strange fog we encountered back there!” Dragon said and pointed towards the entrance of the valley, which was now behind them. Some clouds of fog were drifting around and in front of the entrance, but something seemed to block the fog from coming into this area. “I think that it is something similar to a Fata Morgana in the deserts of the earth, a hallucination. I have no other explanation for the strange things that happened in there and, most importantly, for the strange black shadows.” He continued and looked at his brothers who were nodding their heads in approval.

“Next thing is this valley. As soon as we are recovered enough to walk around we have to search this valley for possible dangerous things! Even though I have a feeling that this place is save, its still better to be extra careful. Until then we should try to observe the valley from here. And no more bullshit for now, understood?!” Dragon said and the last sentence was voiced in a sharp tone towards Turtle, Hawk and Snake, who were acting like they didn’t know what he was talking about and avoided his sharp gaze.

“These trees are strange…” Tiger suddenly said and pointed towards a small forest in the back of the valley.

The others, too, looked towards the forest and discovered what Tiger thought was strange. The trunks of the tree were perfectly white, without any impurities or scratches, at least out of this distance. The next strange things were the leaves of the trees, which looked oddly thick and were blood red. There were roughly thirty to forty thin, but high trees standing there, with thousands of the strange leaves. The forest somewhat looked like a group of holy beings, bathed in blood, which gave Dragon a spooky feeling.

“You are right…those trees are strange as hell...literally!” Turtle said and frowned. Dragon looked another time at the trees and then decided to try to stand up.

“Tiger…lets help each other stand up…” Dragon said and looked towards his silent brother. Tiger understood and together, while leaning against each other, they stood up. Snake and Hawk did the same thing and helped Turtle afterwards.

Suddenly Dragon lifted his hand:

“Do you hear that?!” he asked and the others became silent instantly, trying to hear something.

And really, there was a distant sound of splashing water. All of them abruptly realized that they were almost dying of thirst.

“Lets go towards that sound, support each other” Dragon said and he and Tiger stepped towards the sound both heavily leaning against each other. The other three followed slightly slower.