“You know, it is rather unusual to find a group of flayers,” Devol stated. He thought back to what he had read about them in the past and what Vaust had explained to him that day in the Wailing Woods. “They rarely travel in groups and are loners that prefer to keep to themselves.”
“That is correct,” Asla agreed with a nod. “In smaller areas, if there is more than one flayer and not enough territory to share, they will often battle one another for dominance.”
“It must mean the alpha of this group is very strong,” Jazai deduced. He opened his tome and flipped through the pages. “It is uncommon but not unheard of. There have been flayers so deadly that lesser flayers will go against their instincts and follow it when they have no chance to kill it or defend their turf.”
“We should probably be more concerned, I suppose,” Devol reasoned. “Even a young flayer can be vicious. How strong does one have to be to subjugate others?”
They continued to discuss what they knew of the creatures while they walked. When they were only a couple of hundred yards from the forest, a loud, frightful scream caught their attention. Asla bent forward and revealed her claws as her ears twitched. “Someone is coming.”
“Someone?” Devol asked as he slid his hand to the grip of his sword.
A figure barreled out of the forest and ran toward them in a desperate, frightened dash to get out of the woods. The youngsters stepped aside but the young swordsman reached toward the man as he drew close.
“Excuse me, sir, but what happened in—” There wasn’t a chance to finish his question as the stranger sprinted past them down the road. He uttered another fearful yelp before he raced out of sight. The three friends were baffled and they glanced at one another in confusion before they looked again to the place where the man had vanished around the bend in the path to the town.
The young swordsman had noticed cuts in his clothes and no weapon. There was not a chance anyone would go into these woods without one so he must have lost it.
“Did you…uh, get anything from him, Jazai?” he asked and gestured toward his friend's book.
The boy looked down and nodded quickly. “Yeah, he was easy. Either he didn’t use his anima to protect himself or he was too frightened to care.”
“He can run rather quickly without anima,” Asla remarked as she frowned, her keen gaze fixed on the road where she could now see the stranger in the far distance where the road curved again.
“It looks like his name is Flynn and he is a member of a small hunter’s guild in Malo,” Jazai said, reading the information in his book.
“Malo—that’s a couple of towns over from the village we got the request from,” Devol remarked.
The scholar nodded again. “Yep. From what I can see, they didn’t send the mission to us immediately. The village put up a bounty first to try to deal with it. I guess his guild thought they could claim it if they hurried.”
Asla shifted her gaze to the trees, “Are there others in the forest?”
“There were at the beginning,” Jazai replied and closed his book. “The last passage says he is the only survivor—or as far as he knows, anyway.”
The three teammates turned their attention to the forest again and studied it in silence for a moment. No animal calls or flayer screeches issued from the woods, only the gentle sighs of the wind that threaded through the darkness between the trees.
“So are we sure we don’t want to have a plan before we head in there?” Devol asked.
“I assumed we would simply go in and kill them,” Jazai responded with a nonchalant shrug and his anima flared. “But if you have something a little more detailed, I’m willing to hear you out.”
The swordsman looked at Asla, who mirrored the scholar’s shrug and activated her anima as she and Jazai began to enter the forest. The young swordsman sighed, drew his blade, and brought his anima out as he followed his two friends into the shadowy woods.
He had heard great tales of heroes going to vanquish foul monsters when he was a child. Now that he was a little older, however, it appeared that many of those stories were merely the grand retellings of a typical day in the life of an adventurer.
Chapter Two
As the group pushed deeper into the bowels of the woods, Devol noticed something odd.
“I do not see any animals at all,” he said and peered around him with a frown. “Even in the Wailing Woods, giant rats and things like that lived there.”
“I assume these flayers either devoured or scared off anything else that lived here,” Jazai reasoned. “It explains why livestock has been dragged away from the farms in the area.”
“And people,” Asla added as her ears pointed up. “We are close and I can smell a horrible stench.”
The foul odor had caught the attention of Devol and Jazai as well. They pushed aside the brush ahead of them and entered a cleared area in front of a large den that had been cobbled together from wood, stones, bone, and various other miscellaneous objects. Everything had been combined effectively but somewhat untidily to create a huge cave-like structure.
“What in the world is going on here?” Jazai asked as he opened his majestic. “Flayers don’t make massive dens like this, do they?”
“Not normally,” Asla agreed. She scowled as she looked at fresh blood that stained the grass. “They will either live in hovels or caves found in the areas they claim or make small dens suitable for only their use.”
Devol studied the grotesque home of the flayers and took note of the bones that created the opening. Most seemed to be from animal carcasses, but he noticed several human bones twisted amongst those that formed the entrance. “This seems rather advanced for creatures like flayers.”
“No kidding.” Jazai sounded
