Before the Ducalursus could move again, I gained some distance and observed it carefully to see what it would do next.
Not only had it been poisoned by the ghost grass, it had now been stabbed deep in the heart.
It seemed to still be breathing, but blood was gushing from both its mouth and the hole in its chest. It had taken so much damage that I wouldn’t have been surprised if it died in mere seconds.
I assumed that all I had to do now was wait for it to keel over. But, as if to prove me wrong, the beast took one step, then another, as it advanced toward me.
It wasn’t dead yet, but it sure was close.
I’d been so sure that all it needed was one final blow to finish it off, and yet...
I’m taking you to the grave with me.
I could practically feel the Ducalursus saying that as it composed itself, despite the enormous pain it must have been in.
My brain was screaming at me to get away, but my body wouldn’t listen. The Ducalursus was walking at an incredibly slow pace, but for some reason, it felt like it was moving at lightning speed.
The beast closed in on me, struggling as if it were eking out the last of its life. The moment that it entered my range, it lifted its left paw to make a heavy swing at me.
It was at this point that I felt the closest I had ever felt to death.
I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, my spit in my throat, and the waterfall of sweat running down my back.
It’s over.
The second that thought crossed my mind, though, the Ducalursus’s paw froze in the air. Unable to support the weight of its arm any longer, it tumbled over backward.
And then, the Ducalursus took its last breath.
I felt like I’d forgotten how to breathe. I bent over, putting my hands on my knees, and gasped oxygen into my lungs again and again.
I’d thought I was dead for sure, but I’d somehow managed to survive.
I was desperate to get out of here as soon as possible. Unfortunately, my body felt as heavy as a barge. I wasn’t even in a state to walk.
Unable to move, I just plopped down next to the Ducalursus’s corpse and prayed with every fiber of my being that nothing else would come and attack me. Then I just sat there, focusing on resting as I healed up.
Thankfully, a short break from moving around was all I needed to mostly recover from the pain, and before long, I’d healed enough to manage walking again.
My muscles were incredibly sore from straining them, but fortunately, I hadn’t sustained any serious wounds. Even the arm that I’d shoved into the Ducalursus’s mouth had escaped with only a small scrape from its teeth.
Considering that I hadn’t seen the deadly beast’s onslaught coming at all, I felt like I’d actually made all the right choices to survive the encounter. That was probably why I’d taken a miraculously bare minimum amount of damage.
I’d somehow managed to overcome the beast, but it didn’t leave me with a great feeling that it had come out of seemingly nowhere and hadn’t even left me with the chance to escape.
It was clearly a formidable foe. I had a feeling that if I’d fought it ten times, I probably would have lost nine of those times.
A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of how it had kept pursuing me even after being weakened by poison and stabbed in the chest. I knew the trauma of this experience was bound to revive my phobia of the forest that I’d just overcome.
I mean, how do I know there was only one of those things in these woods? I thought.
It seemed unlikely that there were dozens of them, but now that I knew there’d been at least one, it seemed only prudent to assume there might be more.
If that beast has buddies, then they’ll probably come looking for it once they realize it isn’t coming home.
That was the thought that popped up in my head as I forced my body, which was still throbbing in pain, to move away from the monster’s corpse. I slowly began making my way back toward my shelter.
Once I’d safely returned, I immediately began packing up my things and preparing to leave the woods.
I plucked a bunch of random medicinal herbs to eat and coat my wounds with their juices, trying to speed up my recovery in any way I could as I packed all of the dried poisonous plant samples into my backpack.
Thanks to the toll that my fierce fight with the Ducalursus had taken, my sword was completely broken now. I was basically weaponless, so I had to get out of the woods as quickly as possible.
I hurriedly got all my things together and left the shelter, heading toward the spring as always.
Fortunately, I made it there without getting lost, but I didn’t stop to wash myself off like I usually did. Instead, I continued through the woods until I’d reached the road, and headed straight back to Realzahd.
I knew I shouldn’t go home covered in sweat like this, but honestly, I had much bigger problems. This was no time to be thinking about hygiene and posterity.
In any case, as soon as I made it out of the forest, my panic finally began to die down.
I never wanted to go back to Patia Forest again if I could help it, but I knew I’d have to if I wanted to keep getting stronger.
As I trudged down the highway back to Realzahd, it felt like a million thoughts were racing through my mind.
Even as the terror of my experience in the woods gnawed at me, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but flash back to an image of Claus swinging his sword at me.
The more I felt like I wanted to run away, the stronger that image became. I thought back to how my parents had callously disowned me, and to how Claus had sneered and literally tried to kill me.
If I wanted to get my revenge, I had no choice but to keep getting stronger—and the key to that was the poisonous plants in Patia Forest.
As far as I knew, there was nowhere else with performance-enhancing poisonous plants that was located as close to Realzahd.
There was a good chance that there were more Ducalursi in Patia Forest, but I couldn’t afford to stop visiting just to avoid them.
I needed to get stronger quickly so I could take one down—through my own raw power, rather than on sheer luck and some quick thinking—if one ever tried to attack me again.
I didn’t want to risk everything on that ghost grass strategy again.
If I tried, the Ducalursus might just chomp right down on my arm next time. And even if I could get the grass in its mouth again, there wouldn’t be any point if it managed to spit it out.
The only way to kill one for sure was to face it head-on.
I couldn’t dispel the panic that clung to me, but I was already strategizing how to face my next Ducalursus encounter. As I continued down the road to Realzahd, I played out different scenarios again and again in my head.
All the brainstorming managed to calm me down eventually, and I was able to switch gears and start thinking about how Ralph and Hester were doing.
Did they manage in the capital okay? I wondered.
I was a little worried that they might have just run off with my money, but my bigger concern was whether their negotiations with Vlad had gone well.
A look at the map suggested that a trip to the capital from Realzahd ought to take about half a day on foot. As long as they hadn’t encountered any trouble, I figured they were probably back by now.
As I continued to Realzahd, I found myself looking forward to hearing how things had gone.