It was just silent enough, as not five minutes later, he heard a snuffling sound in the distance.
So close to the safe zone!
He crept closer and peeked out from behind the tree that was concealing the creature from him.
Some fifty feet distant, a boar-like creature was digging into the roots of an emerald-green, faintly glowing plant, crunching away at them and grunting loudly enough to cover the sound of his approach.
Boar-like because it didn’t have tusks, but instead a wicked horn jutting out the front.
More like, a pygmy rhino, I guess.
It was faced to the side, and its ribcage was perfectly perpendicular to him.
Not gonna get a better shot than this, Jeb thought, slowly and carefully pulling out his crossbow from where it hung on his waist. He brought it up tight against his shoulder and aimed at the creature, where he expected the vital organs to be.
Just behind the shoulders. A couple years of his childhood spent shooting at foam cutouts of deer were not wasted.
He gave his aim a tiny bit of vertical height, and squeezed the trigger. The yellow fletching streaked across the distance between the two of them and lodged itself deep in the vital zone right behind the shoulder.
Nice!
Fun Fact: The wild Krusker can live for hours with a hole in its lungs.
What the-
“EEEEEE!” the magical pygmy rhino gave a squeal that echoed through the forest before turning to fix Jeb’s dumbstruck face with a pair of furious beady eyes.
“Shit.” Jeb didn’t waste any time reloading the crossbow, tossing it aside in favor of the bigger of the two spears he’d brought, putting it in front of him and putting his foot down on it, driving the wood into the earth, crouching down behind it to keep the spear low and present a smaller target.
Jeb assumed that was the proper boar-hunting posture.
The spear itself was big and gaudy, like it had been taken from someone’s drawing of a spear. It looked like it belonged in an anime convention, but it was solid enough. He’d placed it over a couple rocks and jumped on the shaft several times in full armor to make sure it wasn’t a flimsy dowel covered in paper-mache.
It was solid, didn’t even budge.
So you can imagine Jeb’s surprise when the head of the spear jammed deep into the creature’s chest before snapping off.
“BWA!” was about all the words Jeb could get out before the shaft of the broken spear caught the creature in the chest and sent it squealing up and over his head like a pole-vaulter.
Most of the way over his head.
The creature must have out-weighed him by a substantial margin, because halfway through its epic flight over his head, the shaft snapped again, dropping the creature directly on top of him.
Jeb was instantly crushed to the ground, feeling like he’d just had a disagreement with a linebacker.
The creature squealed and kicked out, one of its hooves crunching his ankle.
“Gah!” Jeb screamed as he rolled out from underneath the creature’s mass, fumbling for his shield and short sword, diving toward them. His right leg crumbled out from under him in a wash of pain, but his left leg picked up the slack, propelling him forward.
He grabbed both his shield and sword and managed to put his back against a tree moments before the creature charged him again.
He interposed his shield between himself and the – what was it called? – krusker, intercepting the sharpened point of the creature’s goring horn.
His shield splintered alarmingly as the horn pierced several inches through the wood, his back was shoved against the tree with enough force to knock the wind out of him.
“Die, you fucker!” Jeb shouted, reaching over the shield with his short sword and stabbing desperately at the creature’s eyes and neck, its horn wiggling in the space between his arm and the shield, bruising his forearm.
He couldn’t quite see what he hit, but after a handful of wrist-shaking impacts against solid bone, his sword slipped deep into something, and the krusker’s squeals went up an octave, it’s thrashing intensifying.
He felt another wave of pain and a ripping sensation from his right leg as the krusker’s hooves scrabbled against the ground, desperately trying to shove its horn through him.
A couple seconds later, the beast went limp, collapsing on top of his lower body.
“Gah!” Jeb grunted as he tried to lever the creature off of him, finally bracing his shoulders against the ground as best he could to finally roll the thing away from his legs.
What he saw chilled him to the bone.
His left leg was trampled thoroughly, but the reinforced leather pants had managed to keep it intact. His right foot on the other hand…that was about two feet further away from his ankle than it should have been, torn off by the creature’s hooves.
“Oh god, oh god,” Jeb panted as the itching pain in his leg began to come into focus.
Squirt! In front of his eyes, a jet of crimson blood shot out of the stump and into the green forest floor.
Shit!
Through the haze of endorphins, Jeb realized that a severed limb was a great way to bleed to death. He’d seen it a couple times, even.
“Oh god, oh, god,” Jeb chanted, tugging off the rope he’d used to secure his makeshift sheath and wrapping it around his right calf, right above the wound. People tend to wax religious when in shock. That or call for their mothers. One or the other.
***
Jeb woke up, cold as a witch’s tit and shivering violently. He peered through groggy eyes at the safe zone.
He was sitting with his back against the mossy oak in the
