(Two Months after Chapter 11)

It was a normal day for little bunny foo-foo, who was hopping through the forest, though the hornbun was by no means picking up the field mice and bopping them on their heads. And, while that may have at first seemed like a good thing, IT WAS NOT.

Something terrible had made the forest its killing fields as of late, and this little bunny was not merrily hopping around, oh no. It was running. Running because the devil himself was on his heels.

Well, the devil herself was on its heels. The monster had already sent it scurrying from one location to another for over a day now, and it was beyond tired. What was worse, the monster was not alone. There was a second monster out there, and the two monsters were seemingly in cahoots with each other.

Neither strayed into the other’s way, and neither targeted any creature that the other was after, and so the forest near the meadow had become a place of massacre and slaughter, with two tyrants holding court over a land of blood, fear, and pain.

By running away from the female humanoid monster and into this area, this little hornbun knew that it was essentially signing its own death certificate, but that didn’t matter. It had no intention of being swallowed alive and whole, and it would rather go out with a fight than fall to poison and go with a whimper.

And so it ran, rather unintentionally, into the face of the second monster, who took one look at it and broke its neck with a swing of its paw, dashing the little knockoff jackalope’s brains on the forest floor before picking up the dead critter and ripping it apart with its teeth.

…

(Five Minutes after Chapter 11)

Lyrhea finally got down from her high and felt rather silly about her experience. She had no idea that she would feel her own mind essentially devolve like that, nor that she would find the whole thing so enjoyable.

The more snake-like side of her was still yelling at her to go and find more things to stuff into her mouth, but she was marginally able to keep her higher mental functions in control for now, though the beast within was still there just below the surface. She finally noticed the screen that had popped up once she had consumed the live hornbun, and saw that the counter had indeed gone up by one.

“So…. Nine more kills before I get… something….”

She wasn’t holding her breath that she would get anything of value out of this whole arrangement, especially since her new lot in life had been such a mixed bag. Still, a ‘starter kit’ would be nice…. Hopefully.

“It would be just my luck for it to include nothing but skimpy underwear, an altered profile picture for ‘solidarity’ with my plight, and a bottle of prayers and well-wishes.” she said mockingly. “Though maybe prayers might actually be of some merit now….” She looked around and then up to the sky. “Now would be as good a time as any to validate that assumption. Just saying.”

The sky, and whatever beings were up in it, though, were deaf to her words. Hers and many, many others.

“Well, since I know I can take one ‘hornbun’…” Lyrhea said as she shifted her gaze to the undergrowth. “Maybe I should hunt some more?”

She licked her fingernails and let her forked tongue extend, drawing it back across each nail one by one before switching hands and doing the same to the other set. She then lowered her posture and set to hunting.

…

(Weeks after the previous segment of this chapter)

He was smarter than those stupid other kids and those dumb adults. He was smart, and he was brave, and he would make sure they all knew that by going out and finding the thing that was scaring all of the other kids.

Whatever this thing was, it couldn’t scare him. No, no it couldn’t. He didn’t wet the bed even once in his life, and he never had nightmares like the other kids and even smelly grownups did.

That was proof that he was brave, and that he was destined to be a hero! His dad had read him stories about other heroes, and he was sure that he was one of them.

Sure, he wasn’t invincible like that one guy in blue and red, nor was he really, really fast like the Red Guy who was really fast, but he just had to live a bit longer, and then he would be, and then he’d show them!

He carried his sword with him into the forest, and while it was made of wood, it was really, really strong, and it was heavy, so he could use it like a sword. Besides, he had seen his dad swing the sword he used around a lot, so he knew how to fight.

He walked deeper into the woods, taking no care as to his movements, because he was just that cool. However, he later thought that maybe he should have, as he ran into a gathering of hornbuns.

All at once, the hornbuns started attacking him, and because he didn’t get a Class yet he was getting hurt really bad. He was getting scared! And then, one of them hit him really, really hard, and he couldn’t help but start crying.

It wasn’t his fault that he cried! He wasn’t weak! He was just-…

The extra attacks didn’t come, though he didn’t notice it until he finally stopped crying. He looked up through his puffy eyes and saw something that scared him.

All of the hornbuns were no longer looking at him. They were looking at something behind him, and they were too scared to move.

He wanted to stop himself, but he couldn’t help it, and he looked up and behind himself.

He had been sitting injured with his back to the trunk of a tree, and now he could see a person was clinging upside down to that tree, its fingers gripping the tree as its toes did the same. It looked almost like a picture of that one insect-guy hero his dad had shown him that one time, but the person was… different.

She was scary. She looked like she had the features of a snake... and snakes were really scary and dangerous! He was glad that the monster-person wasn’t looking at him, instead looking at the hornbuns. He wanted to get up and run away, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t because he was scared, of course, because he wasn’t!

“Thanks for bringing me all this food, kid.” the snake-monster-person said. It was strange. He thought all snakes hissed when they said their ‘s’ sounds. The monster-snake-person then crawled off the tree and took a position between him and the frozen hornbuns and began to move very fast through them.

He couldn’t tell what was going on, but each hornbun fell over shortly after the monster-snake-person moved past them, and soon only he was left. The monster-snake-person lifted one of the hornbuns by its leg and then shot him a glare.

“Get out of here, kid. Now. Before I lose control and kill you.”

He was stunned for a while before the monster-snake-person picked up a small rock and threw it into his forehead, which made him get up and run away.

“Look both ways before crossing the street!” the monster=snake-person yelled at him as he bravely ran away. “Practice ‘Stranger Danger’! Don’t do drugs; you might poop a sponge! Now.. let’s get to eating...”