"I dusted off my hands. Next problem: Logistics."
I drew the bone knife at my hip and attempted to slice through the beast's hide.
Chink.
The edge dulled on impact. The hide was essentially natural Kevlar.
I let out another breath. No viable resources to harvest this time. My fingers wrapped around the embedded crystal on its neck. A foreign current seeped into my flesh—a resonance of rage—but the flow was shallow. Pitiful.
The glow died out. The warmth vanished, leaving behind a husk of clear glass no more valuable than the dirt it rested on.
The journey continued. Slowly, the forest began to shed its verdant skin. Green foliage gave way to charred, skeletal trunks. The earth turned ashen, coarse, and unnervingly hot. The acrid stench of sulfur stung my nostrils.
I paused at the edge of a crater lake. Kneeling by the shore, I began to wash the dried blood from my hands.
A silent ripple breached the surface. Five meters out, a pair of yellow, reptilian eyes broke through the dark water. A primeval crocodile, at least six meters long, armored in scales like rusted iron. It stared at me, calculating: Is this prey?
I stopped washing my hands. I stared back.
Within the quiet confines of my mind, I didn't perceive it as a living being. I saw it purely as an amalgamation of meat, sinew, and bone. I visualized a surgical blade slicing through its corneas and extracting its vital organs. There was no anger. Only the sterile, clinical calm of a butcher.
Pure, unfiltered killing intent.
The atmosphere shifted. The air grew dense. The reptile registered the signal. An innate alarm system screamed from its primitive brain. This was not prey. This was death condensed into a human silhouette.
The crocodile's pupils constricted. Slowly, it retreated, sinking back into the abyssal depths.
"Wise choice," I murmured.
An hour later, I found it.
It was no village; it was a fortress.
Ten-meter-high walls of solid granite intersected the valley. The architecture was unabashedly brutalist. There were no elegant carvings, no delicate aesthetics like the ones found in elven territory. It was nothing but colossal blocks of stone, laid down with ruthless mathematical precision.
"Function over aesthetics. I liked it."