Aaron heard the scream before he saw what was causing it.
He came through the trees fast and found a wolf the size of a small car mid-leap above a kid who was on the ground with a knife in both shaking hands and his eyes squeezed shut waiting for something that was about to be very bad.
Aaron threw both daggers.
The wolf's head separated from its body cleanly and landed on the kid's chest and the kid opened his eyes and screamed louder than he had been screaming before which Aaron hadn't thought was possible.
Aaron walked over and picked up both daggers and looked at the kid on the ground.
Fluffy striped tail. Round ears with white markings, eyes wide and masked and currently staring at Aaron like he couldn't decide which was worse, the dead wolf or the human standing over him.
The kid scrambled up onto one knee and immediately fell back down. His leg was bleeding badly, dark and steady, and his face went white from the pain of trying to stand on it.
"Human," the kid said. Then he grabbed his knife and pointed it at Aaron with both hands shaking. "I'm not scared of you."
Aaron looked at the knife. At the shaking hands. At the leg bleeding into the dirt.
"I just cut a wolf's head off for you," Aaron said. "Put the knife down kid."
"I'm not a kid," the kid said immediately, deeply offended. "I'm ten years old. And my name is Kobol."
"So you're a panda Kobol," Aaron said.
Kobol made a face that was simultaneously annoyed and completely undermined by the fact that he then passed out from blood loss.
Aaron caught him before he hit the ground.
Kobol woke up with his leg wrapped and Aaron sitting against a tree looking at his screen.
[ Notification! ]
[Stage : 4th Stage Adapted Player –– Level 2]
[Essence Stones : 847]
[Skill Slot : EMPTY]
*Empty slot*, Aaron thought. *I've been sitting on an empty skill slot and haven't noticed.*
He filed it away for later.
"Who are you mister," Kobol said from the ground. Kobol stared at Aaron with the suspiciously. "How is a human here in this place. Are you a Demon Lord?"
Aaron looked at him.
"I'm a human," Aaron said.
"You don't look like the humans in the stories," Kobol said.
"What do the humans in the stories look like."
Kobol thought about it. "Scared," he said.
Aaron almost smiled. "Where's your home Kobol."
Kobol's face changed. The bravery went somewhere and something else came through that was harder to look at.
"It got destroyed," he said quietly. "The beasts attacked the village and I ran into the forest and I don't know what happened to my parents or my sister I just ran and I didn't––" His voice broke on the last word and he stopped and pressed his mouth together and looked at the ground.
Aaron looked at him for a moment.
"Show me where the village is," Aaron said.
The village of Karkos was still burning in places when they arrived.
Magic beasts moving between the broken buildings. The demihumans who were left hiding in the wreckage of their homes watching the beasts move through what used to be their streets.
Kobol grabbed the back of Aaron's jacket and held on.
Aaron reached.
The Mountain King rose from the shadow at his feet and Kobol made a sound that was equal parts terrified and amazed and stone met flesh and the beasts folded one after another until the streets of Karkos went quiet.
"You can summon a beast," Kobol said, watching from behind Aaron's arm. "How. That's amazing mister."
"Don't call me mister," Aaron said.
"What do I call you."
"Aaron."
"Aaron," Kobol repeated seriously like he was filing it away. "That's a human name."
"Yes."
More beasts came from the east side, more than Aaron had expected. He summoned the rest. The shadows rose from the ground around the village one by one and Kobol made a completely different sound, somewhere between a gasp and complete silence, and the beasts of Karkos found themselves suddenly outnumbered by things considerably more dangerous than themselves.
The village went quiet.
Aaron used Shadow Dominion on the bodies. The shadows rose from the corpses and Kobol stepped back watching them come up from the ground, his face somewhere between scared and fascinated and unable to pick one.
"They were beasts," Kobol said slowly. "And now they're yours."
"Yes," Aaron said.
"How."
"Later," Aaron said. "Where's your house."
Kobol's mother was hiding in the back room of what was left of their house with her daughter pressed against her and a broken piece of furniture held across the door.
She heard Kobol's voice and the door came open fast and she grabbed him and held on and cried in the way people cried when they had been certain they had lost something and found it anyway.
Kobol's sister had a deep cut across her back from a beast that had caught her while she was getting the younger ones out. She was sitting upright trying not to show how much it hurt and doing a bad job of it.
Aaron opened his inventory and checked. One healing potion. He looked at the essence stone count and opened the shop and bought two more. They appeared in his hand.
He placed one at the sister's lips. The color came back into her face fast. She looked at Aaron with wide eyes.
"Kobol said you saved him from a wolf," she said.
"The wolf's head landed on him," Aaron said. "He screamed a lot."
"I did not scream a lot," Kobol said from his mother's arms.
"You screamed a lot," Aaron said.
The sister looked at him for a moment. Then something in her face shifted to something more serious.
"Where's father," Kobol said suddenly, looking around the room.
His mother held him tighter and didn't say anything.
Kobol understood. Aaron watched him understand and watched him press his face into his mother's shoulder and make no sound at all which was worse than any sound would have been.
Aaron looked away and gave them the moment.
After a while he asked the sister quietly about the mountain. About the boss at its center. About what the beasts in this forest answered to.
She told him there was something living at the peak. That many hunters from the village had tried to reach it over the years. That none of them came back the same and most didn't come back at all.
*That's the dungeon boss*, Aaron thought. *That's what I came here for.*
He stood up.
Kobol was outside when Aaron came out, sitting next to the Mountain King's shadow and looking up at it with the expression of someone who had decided that being terrified and being fascinated were the same feeling and had committed to both.
"You're leaving," Kobol said.
"Yes," Aaron said.
"When are you coming back."
Aaron looked at him. At the striped tail and the round ears and the knife still in his hand from earlier that he hadn't put down once.
"I don't know kid," Aaron said.
"I'm not a—"
"I know," Aaron said.
He summoned ten of the intermediate level beasts he had extracted from the village fight and positioned them around the perimeter of Karkos with the strongest one at the center as the leader.
"They'll stay here," Aaron said to the sister. "Nothing comes through without going through them first."
She looked at the beasts surrounding the village and then at Aaron and said "thank you" in the voice of someone who meant it completely.
The Mountain King's shadow dissolved back into the ground and Kobol watched it go with a look on his face like he was watching something he wasn't ready to say goodbye to yet.
Aaron turned toward the mountain.
"Bye Kobol," he said without turning back.
"Bye Aaron," Kobol said quietly.
Aaron walked into the trees and didn't look back because if he looked back he was going to stand there longer than he had time for.