The creature looked away from Azriel to the soldiers quickly surrounding it. They quickly encircled the monster as the senior soldier on horseback shouted, “There is a river nearby. Don’t you dare let it touch you till we get back.”

As soon as he yelled this, the senior soldier took off into the forest with a group of horsemen following close behind him.

Pulling his head back inside, Azriel hurriedly moved to the door, trying to wriggle the handle open. It was locked.

“Shit!” Azriel snarled.

All three children were on full alert, terrified, and too afraid to speak or move. Their panicked faces looked to Azriel to see what he would do. What could he do?

Azriel sensed the monster had already decimated five of the armed soldiers. He had to get out, but he was trapped behind a damnable locked door.

Suddenly, he heard the screams of children near the cabin that Klaus was in, causing his left eye to nervously twitch on his otherwise calm inexpressive visage.

He could’ve tried smashing the door down, but he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to succeed in doing so. Kicking over the table, he began pacing back and forth, formulating ideas in his head on how to get out.

Noticing the newfound space inside the cabin, Azriel realized what he had to do.

Grabbing the table and leaning it up against the front wall, he limberly climbed the side of it and kicked off with a double-jump. Curling up into a ball, he spun five and a half rotations through the air before concentrating all of his combined force and momentum into a powerful kick aimed right at the loose lock while double-jumping on the moment of impact to add extra energy into the kick.

The door burst open, smashing violently against the outer wall as Azriel landed flat on his feet outside the coach.

Turning back for only a moment, he looked the children in the eyes and demanded, “If anyone asks, you helped me break the door down with this,” as he threw inside a long skinny log from the firewood strapped to the back of the stagecoach.

Without any further deliberations, Azriel burst forward into an expeditious sprint, quickly reaching the location of the struggle.

Ten corpses laid splayed out across the greyed, dead soil, their faces having already lost the colorful warmth of life. The men still standing had formed a defensive shield wall, seemingly afraid to get close to the monster.

The monster had a miasma perspiring from the shiny slippery mucous that viscously dripped down its rotten surface. Its exposed veins and arteries pulsated as they pumped dark liquid up and down its figure.

Azriel watched as the mucous dripping down its body wilted and killed the grass beneath it and figured that was its hallmark skill: the excreted bile that killed whatever it touched.

Grabbing the heaviest stone he could throw, Azriel shotput the boulder sending it arcing through the air, smashing into the back of its skull, the humanoid one.

Its horse legs wobbled as its human torso slouched forward, momentarily having lost balance. The fact of what had happened to the rider half having an effect on the horse half confirmed that it was, indeed, one singular being and not two.

Trying to seize the moment, the soldiers slashed and stabbed the beast with their swords and spears. However, enough of the mucousy substance got on the soldiers that some turned grey as they fell over dead on the spot.

The effect of the vile substance was undoubtedly potent. Azriel considered whether his Toxin Resilience made him immune to its effects, but he wasn’t willing to risk finding out if he didn’t have to. Luckily, he didn’t have to.

The monster recovered its bearing, as did the rider portion of its body, now sitting—or standing, depending on your perspective—back into an upright position. From there, it howled a blood-curdling noise as it lifted its long arms to batter down the remaining soldiers.

Azriel could tell this monster was many times more powerful than the wendigo he killed when he was six, not to mention that if it got enough of itself on Azriel, it might very well kill him nigh-instantly, as it had the other soldiers.

“Fuck it,” Azriel muttered, grabbing a smaller rock and chucking it at the skinless monster, mimicking what the kids would do to taunt each other back in Hildenfreide, shouting, “Hey stupid-head!”

The monster turned to look at Azriel, seeing the boy mooning him as he childishly chanted, “Nana nana boo-boo. You can’t touch this!” Then pulling his pants back up, he turned back to face the monster while sticking out his tongue and flipping him off.

The monster gritted its teeth and screamed as it charged after Azriel at high speed.

Azriel dodged and weaved through the trees to slow the monster’s approach, but even running at an inhuman fifty mile-per-hour, the monster was much faster, quickly catching up to him.

The creature lifted its long-armed claws to slice Azriel across the back. However, as it did, a split second before impact, Azriel dodged under the blow and scaled a pine tree, quickly swinging from branch to branch and out of the monster’s reach.

Reaching the top, Azriel looked down at the frustrated monster huff and puff with dissatisfaction.

“Hey, stupid-head, whatcha gonna do now?”

The monster roared as it circled the base of the tree, thinking about how to get to its prey.

After a minute, having calmed down, the monster decided to try to cut the tree down with its claws.

It wailed on the tree, but with each slice, each swing of its long powerful limbs, the next was progressively weaker and weaker than the last. Eventually, it couldn’t even gather the strength, or the will, to lift its arms.

Azriel hopped down the side of the tree, landing beside the abomination while quipping, “Try looking where you’re standing next time.”

The monster gurgled as it toppled over on its side, having lost the will to stand. Lying atop a faintly-glowing white magic circle with a six-pointed star, one that Azriel had placed at the base of the tree while dodging the creature.

Once the skinless monster eventually stopped moving, Azriel deactivated the magic circles watching as it quickly disintegrated into particles and vanished into the ether.

Grabbing a leaf off the ground, Azriel held it below the dripping filmized layer of quickly coagulating substance and waited as a bit of it drooled off onto the leaf, like thick molasses, watching and waiting.

After a few seconds, he knew the substance had lost its effect. The leaf did not wilt or turn grey; it remained unaffected.

“So, this is the true potential of Spirit-death Trap,” Azriel muttered as he backed away from the wretched lump of meat before him.

Azriel had used his skill Spirit-death Trap before while hunting regular animals and even a few minor monsters here and there, but he never was put in a situation where it was his best choice, let alone one integral to winning.

At its best moments, Spirit-death Trap was Azriel’s least helpful skill, but most of the time, it was just plain awful. It, practically, made every situation harder to handle because it could take up to two whole minutes of a creature standing on it before its spirit died.

Spirit-death Trap was a skill Azriel had inherited from his father’s side of the family. It was a sustained skill that took a lot of focus to maintain activation, and it was highly noticeable to any creature that paid attention and had the intelligence to avoid it, especially when it was dark as its faint glow became more pronounced in the darkness. On top of this, when Azriel had once tried covering it with leaves, he found that it dramatically slowed the speed at which it killed creatures’ souls, making it practically worthless as far as booby-trapping went.

One nice thing about it, however, was that—like every other skill—it had no harmful effects on its user. Much like how the monster’s deadly miasma didn’t kill itself or how a flame-magic user could hold the fire they created in their bare hands, Azriel could stand atop the circle without fearing spirit death.

Azriel climbed up the slashed tree and began waiting for the eventual soldiers’ arrival while mentally reciting a made-up story about how he hid in the tree and thought the creature was waiting for him to come down.

A few more minutes passed when men on horseback charged through the dense trees while shouting, “Charge!”

Deftly maneuvering through forestry in winding, well-coordinated movements, each horseman tossed a pale of water onto the slumped-over monster causing it to steam, sizzle, and melt to the bone until only a skeleton remained.

Once the assault ended, their horses slowed to a stop. One of them, having noticed Azriel, called out, “Boy, are you okay up there?”

Azriel nodded his head while trying terribly to fake a fearful look.

The most important looking of the soldiers, the senior soldier, rode up alongside the tree, and called out, “The creature is dead. It’s safe to come down now.”

Azriel silently nodded once more, considering how the average person would climb down a tree, opting to climb down it as if it were like a ladder.

“This is how people normally climb, right?” he pondered.

Once nearing the bottom, the man helped Azriel climb atop his horse as he and the rest of his forces turned to head back to the stagecoaches.

After a few seconds of riding in silence, the man spoke, “So, what exactly happened back there?”

Azriel was slightly nervous and a bit apprehensive about speaking, taking a few seconds before saying, “I was chased by the monster into the forest, and I just barely managed to escape it. I think it was waiting for me to come down so it could—”

“‘Waiting,’ you say?” the soldier asked. “But if you ask me, I’d assume its soul died, right Azriel?”