Luckily, that mossy feast had left me brimming with mana, and the beast-me didn’t hesitate. The magic worked faster than I could think, closing the gash with a speed that left me breathless.
?Roar!?
Naturally, the young mossbear wasn't as thrilled about it as I was.
Quite something to be proud of, actually. I went into this fight thinking it would just be me getting beat over and over and over again. Yet somehow, I turned out to be not as pathetic as I thought.
'Time to learn.'
It was one thing to be able to buff my regeneration and control the poison in my full beast form, where a lot of things came to me naturally, as opposed to outside of it. If I wanted to be the one in charge and not a slave to my beast, I needed to master what it knew. As such, I steeled myself to pay close attention to the way I controlled my apple-scented poison and treated my wounds in this form.
Of course, some things came a lot easier to me.
- 4th glyph carved on Pounce (?)
And it wasn't the only weave I got another glyph on.
- 11th glyph engraved on Equilibrium (?)
Not the fault of the Lattice and the notification tingling in my skull, but a breath later, the young mossbear managed to tangle both of my front paws into moss shoots. Down I went, face-first into the dirt. Before I knew it, the mossbear had crashed into me, pinning me down with its weight.
For one thing, I didn’t expect to fight back so fiercely in that position, but I did. Every free limb of mine tore and scratched. I even let my tail’s poison loose. Another thing - its hind legs straddling my head made it clear this one wasn’t male. No balls. Not that I was disappointed. It just didn't feel right attacking my opponent's private parts, male or female, let alone putting them between my teeth.
I did bite down, though.
After all, I had no such reservations about the groin. One of the weak spots, and if luck tilted my way, I might even tear through an artery. Luck didn’t - as always.
When my lungs started burning under the crushing weight of my chest and my vision blurred, Esu put an end to the fight. No stalemate to soften the pain - this was my loss. Yet despite that, my tail swayed behind me, a comical sight given it was the last part of my body getting covered in moss.
The defeat stung, but the battle wasn’t wasted. I had learned much, not only about my skills and weaves, but about myself - about who I was and who I wasn't.
A slave, yet not one.
Human, but so much more.
It was so liberating - so relieving - simply too much to hold in. Before I knew it, I found myself wailing under a layer of healing moss. What ran down my cheeks were not tears of pain as the bones were snapping back together, but of happiness. I may have left the cursed cellar weeks ago, but it wasn't until now that I truly freed myself. For the first time, I saw it clearly: all this time, I had been a prisoner to the way I saw myself. Shackled. Slave. Bound to a fate I didn’t ask for.
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I was looking all around for those to blame but me.
That didn't mean I started to love this world. No, far from it! I still hated it for what it had done to me. I hated that deranged asshole Dungreen, hated the thought-fuddlers even more, the Fae? Damn them all. Yet, strange as it may sound, I guess that I found hating myself less. Instead of a half-beast slave, I could finally see… me.
'Korra. I was Korra Grey.'
My wailing moment didn't last long, though. As before, Esu’s healing was swift. Before I knew it, the moss had pulled back, leaving no trace of my wounds. In its place, little balls of fluffy lettuce moss appeared, and I pounced on them eagerly. Instead of dreading the next fight, I actually looked forward to it.
"Eh... if you're that hungry, girl, then I have better things in my storage than that..." The voice ringing in my head hit like a hammer, sending a jolt through me. It was him. My human. Alive! And from the look of him, he hadn’t even been touched - his armor still gleamed, not a scratch on it.
"Y-You won?" Not the brightest thing to ask. That much was obvious - he wouldn't be here if he had lost.
"Someone is happy to see me," my human chuckled, eyeing my wagging tail. Did it bother me? Not anymore. "We'll see how long that attitude lasts. The men and women I have trained received no ease from me, and, as my apprentice, expect none at all."
"I don't remember agreeing to be one."
He plopped down on one of the massive roots crossing the clearing, laughing like it was the best joke. "Got a sharp tongue, huh? I like it. But if my teaching rubs you wrong, take it up with the big guy."
I was pretty sure that if I brought up doubts about the human's ability to teach me anything, Esu would understand. There were plenty of them out there, shifters who could have taught me more than him. Unlike them, though, this one… he came to my rescue when he didn't have to, was stronger than any human I had so far met, couldn't seem to care less about the problems life brought, and above all, there was this gut feeling I had. And no, not the beast-me's hunger for a strong mate. It was something else, a sense that this was a human I could trust. He had enough experience to rely on - kind of like Esu.
"N-No, I'm okay with that," I said after looking at the lord of these woods lying on the edge of the clearing, watching. "I'll be your apprentice."
"And I your mentor," said my human, scratching the back of his head. "Now that we've cleared that up, tell me, how are you doing, girl?"
Well, aside from him getting on my nerves calling me a girl, surprisingly good. "I fought twice, lost only once. You?"
"I don't remember this being a competition, girl," he returned my previous remark with a smirk.
"Ha ha! That isn't what I..."
"Don't get your tail in a twist, I know. You did well, by the way. Better than I thought. Interested to see how you did it."
"You're going to watch?"
"Why wouldn't I? Great way to see what you're made of."
A few snide remarks came to my tongue, but I swallowed them all. He wasn’t wrong. What you could see of one, what the Big Runes were showing you, was hardly what the person in question actually was. I knew that very well.
"Wish I could see your fight. Did you…?" I asked, while biting into another ball of moss.
"... slay the adult? Nah, some say I'm crazy to delve into Fallen's Cry alone, but I'm not that crazy, girl. No, we fought, I won, the mother mossbear healed us both. And let me tell you, no fight is as glorious as the one telling about it will make it sound."
My escape from the cellar, how I made that Cognizant bitch run away, and my other triumphs come to mind, none of which was anything to brag about. It was messy, disgusting, and painful. "I know. Still..." It would've been something to see him take on that beast, see his full strength in action.
"Don't fret, girl," he grinned. "Unless one of us dies, we're in this for the long haul. So... enjoy your "meal" and show me what you got."