Running through the trees with Erul’s legs was less than ideal. The man was competent, but the Zartiga was just better, especially with the last arrow sticking out of its forehead.

  Balor found the limits of his new form rather quickly as he reached mountainous terrain. The Zartiga chased after him effortlessly, and he realized he could never outrun it.

  He had to outsmart it instead.

  As he struggled up a rocky incline, he looked for terrain features that he could exploit. There were crevices among rocks and some cavernous spots that he could hide in, but nothing that could kill the beast that was chasing him.

  Deciding to conserve his energy, he slowed his climb in favor of dodging the creature’s attempts to slash him with its huge claws. Erul would’ve perished in the first attempt, but Balor was infinitely calm and calculated. He leapt the absolute minimum distance required to dodge a clawed swipe, always keeping an eye on the creature’s body for its next movement cues.

  Doing this dance, he baited it around the rocky gaps and between trees, trying to get it to fit into a gap it couldn’t get out of. Around the sixty seventh consecutively successful dodge, he found a perfect trap.

  Zartiga had a head wider than the rest of its body. The creature had evolved for the bite force above all else, and it had jaws to show for it.

  That was going to be its downfall.

  Balor leapt through a gap in the trees, heading toward a crevice in the rocks that he spotted earlier. He calmly deposited himself into the crevice as the Zartiga came bursting through the trees. It poked its head into the crevice, trying to slash and drag him with its front paws.

  There was just enough space to dodge the swipes, but not forever. Having hunted critters for millions of years, the Zartiga didn’t need to invent a new technique to get to him. It did what it always did in these situations. It twisted its head sideways to fit it through the gap, pushing in with the rest of its body.

  It can probably get out the same way. This creature is not mindlessly stupid.

  Balor wasn’t gambling on the rocks to do the killing. He had something else for that.

  He grabbed Erul’s bow, which was shaped very appropriately for the task. While not meant to be used in the way he was going to use it, it had perfectly usable, sharper ends to do what he wanted.

  He picked a momentary gap in the clawed swipes and leapt forth, ending up close enough to feel the Zartiga’s rancid breath. The creature’s eyes tracked and probed him, pupils widening as he dashed.

  Using the rock surface on either side as launch surfaces, Balor dashed at the creature’s face with the bow. He used all of Erul’s strength to drive it straight into the nearest eyeball.

  Erul would’ve perished before the bow could even touch the creature, but Balor had analyzed the creature down to its micro movements during their engagement and knew the perfect moment to do it. He could also unleash the full potential of Erul’s body with no inhibitions or doubts.

  He drove the bow straight into the creature’s eye, straight into its brain, and lifted it once. The Zartiga only had a moment to try to pull its head out of the crevice. It died before it could swipe again. The other eye rolled backward,s and the body stilled as if struck by lightning.

  Balor pulled his forearm out of the creature’s leaking eye. He stepped back to let Erul’s body recover some energy. The frame was weak, and he felt weak at the knees once the rush dissipated from his body.

  He rubbed his blood-drenched forearm on the rags that he was wearing, but stopped when he noticed something odd.

  The Zartiga’s blood had a faint purple sheen to it. It was more viscous and carried strange glittering particles.

  This cannot be natural evolution.

  He felt pulses of energy flash up his forearm when he rubbed his bloodied fingers together. This blood itself had some force. It was interacting with the magics of the ghost serpent. The particles mixed in the blood were concentrated bits of stellar core soul matter.

  Balor looked around suspiciously.

  Have I already been detected?

  Suddenly, the Zartiga’s other eye opened. It leaked purple flares of soul energy and transformed into a wholly different kind of eye—one with the galaxy reflected upon it in a complex pattern. It stared at him through a vertical pupil, unmistakably of a serpent.

  Balor stilled, quickly changing his demeanor to exactly what Erul’s would’ve been if this happened. He shrank to his knees, cowering in fear. This was no doubt the eye of the ghost serpent. He had to maintain his disguise.

  The dead Zartiga parted its wet mouth and spoke in a sharp, malevolent voice. “No one has defeated a Zartiga in this way before,” the ghost serpent said in the guise of the Dark Lord that Erul feared above all else.

  Balor had made a mistake. The Zartiga had been drastically altered by the ghost serpent as part of his Dark Lord enterprise. These creatures were part of their plan to apply pressure on the population—in this case, it was meant to make the woods more perilous, to deny the resources.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Balor knew what the ghost serpent was trying to understand. An ordinary hunter had just stabbed one of its subjects dead with a bow. It had a low statistical chance of ever happening and was instantly suspicious.

  From the ghost serpent’s perspective, this hunter had something other hunters didn’t. That was exactly what a serpent was meant to look for in any population, making sure such lineages continued. For all he knew, this could’ve been the purpose of this whole Dark Lord plan: to pressure the population enough for some individual to evolve out of it with better instincts, talents, or magics.

  Balor made sure to look as pathetic and weak as possible, groveling on his knees while breaking into sobs and tears.

  “Chance, maybe…” the ghost serpent mumbled as the transformed serpent eye collapsed back to the Zartiga’s dead eye.

  That was close.

  Once the ghost serpent vanished, Balor maintained his role perfectly in case they were watching from other eyes that he couldn’t see. He knew he would have done exactly as the Dark Lord in this situation.

  He squeezed under the Zartiga and pushed himself out of the crevice, making sure to cry, sob, and whimper the whole time. He had to act like a coward who got too lucky, and he played the role with all the prerequisite knowledge from Erul.

  After stumbling out of there on wobbly legs, he fell into a soft patch of dry leaves and pretended to faint. That was the best way to get the ghost serpent’s attention away from him: by being too boring to watch.

  Hours later, after dark, Balor made out of the forest with nothing but Erul’s blood-drenched rags. He found cleared pathways and headed towards the lights in the distance, heading back to the village. The hominids there had set up walls with wooden logs and had the early infrastructure fit for a first civilization. They had the knowledge of building with materials available to them, and with each individual specializing in roles, they had dwellings safe and insulated from the elements.

  He drew attention in the state because he came back right away. An older man wearing leather armor came running with a spear and immediately exploded with questions as he neared the gate.

  “Erul! You fool! Where have you been?!”

  Balor let Erul’s mouth do the talking with his thoughts, inferring exactly what the man would’ve said.

  “I was attacked in the forest! A Zartiga!” he said, extending his bloodied arms to convey the size. “Barely made it alive!”

  “Alive?!” the older man scoffed. “You look halfway dead to me. Are you wounded?!”

  I shouldn’t tell him what I did. It draws unnecessary attention.

  “Not my blood, I managed to wound it to get away.”

  “Y-you what? A Zartiga? with your bow?”

  “Yes, but I lost everything when I ran away,” Balor said, looking at the other men who were approaching him. Everyone wore some form of leather armor, had a jagged old spear, and mostly the same complexion as Erul—dark hair, dark green eyes, and pointed ears.

  They all started talking at once, and the first older man repeated what he told them.

  “Shame! That was a fine bow you had!” one of the younger men slapped his shoulder. “No matter, you came back in one piece.”

  “Zartiga been getting too close these days,” said one of the bigger men. “We’re going to have nothing left to eat in these forests…”

  Food pressure. As I thought.

  “Curse the dark one!” the old man said sternly, raising his straightened palm at the sky. “All that passed through these gates today were rabbits and some fish. What I’d do for a good roast of pig, or deer, eh!”

  “Indeed, I wonder what you can do, Jaro. Maybe you could try hunting for them like Erul?” a tall man said with a laugh. Erul knew this man; it was etched in his memories. A childhood spent together with his oldest brother. His name was Tarsel.

  “Shut your mouth, Tar!” the old man yelled indignantly. “You know damn well why we need more people at the gates!”

  “No need to fight!” Balor said, interrupting the two.

  “The last time the dark one took four young’uns! four!. The way I see it, choice’s between eating bread and rabbit, or explaining to mothers why their babes disappeared!” Jaro continued. “I guess we’ll eat bread and cursed rabbits!”

  The man was clearly displeased with his food situation. It seemed the ghost serpent was targeting the young ones to increase the pressure. They could also be easy targets. Even now, he saw several youngsters gathered around the gates watching curiously.

  For primates, rearing and nurturing their young was something that they inherently had in their blood drive.

  Balor’s species developed that much later in their civilization. Life as a young serpent in their first civilization was a ruthless competition. His ancestors lay hundreds of eggs per brood, and only a fraction of them ever made it out of the breeding grounds. This was one of the first filter steps to select the strongest.

  This pressure vector of targeting the young wouldn’t have worked for a species that didn’t value its young. The ghost serpent was trying to reinforce something into the primate blood drive.

  Isn’t this too early to be meddling with these things?

  If the hominids that he met so far were a good sample of the total population, their current level of civilization didn’t allow them to be malleable. They were still concerned with daily survival at a fundamental level. More refined civilizational parameters were necessary to encode complex things into a sapient blood drive. The individuals needed better language and communication bandwidth, better ideas to communicate, culture, religion, belief systems, and more connected societies.

  These people were centuries, maybe millennia away from being malleable enough for direct manipulations to produce tangible results. That usually took several iterations of civilizations. The ghost serpent was trying to do everything in the first one.

  “Come, let’s get you clean. Tomorrow, just stick to rabbits. No deer’s worth dying for, Erul,” Tarsel said, pushing Balor towards the village.

  Balor had a question to ask that he couldn’t find an answer to in Erul’s memories. There was no trace that the thought even occurred to the man. “Has anyone tried to kill the Dark Lord?” he asked bluntly.

  Tarsel clutched his spear and stared at him wide-eyed. “Did you hit your head?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “I mean, someone has to have tried somewhere?” he asked again, more casually this time.

  “No one’s ever going to kill the Dark Lord! That’s not possible,” Tarsel said as they passed a long queue of people standing before the butcher who only had a few chopped rabbits to barter.

  “Are you sure?” Balor asked.

  “I’m sure,” Tarsel said sternly.

  That was too docile for a population under pressure. It was impossible that nobody ever tried to kill the enemy that was bothering them. It could simply be that Erul had never heard about it, but considering how established the Dark Lord was in the continent, there was no way he never heard about it once. The ghost serpent had been playing this common enemy role for about a century already.

  Tarsel’s vehement refusal of the notion of killing the Dark Lord was odd. It almost seemed like a social taboo to even think, much less speak out loud.

  They’re this terrified, or is it something else?

  Depending on what he’d experienced so far, it seemed to be both at the same time. This was a terrified population of primates for sure. That didn’t explain their complete lack of knowledge about something that definitely had to have happened at least once by now.

  Strange.