Fighting off the urge to faint with pure will, his mind repeatedly blurred before awakening again to a world of pain.Īito dropped the ax and sat to rest. The piece of wood cracked, hardly holding out against Aito's gritting teeth. Like a plague, pain spread to his body, intensifying with each passing micro-second that felt like hours to him.
His skin and flesh burnt, bubbled, smoked. The acrid smell of charred human meat entered his nostrils. Then, he placed a piece of wood in his mouth, bit hard, and with a swift motion removed the dagger to cauterize the wound. He laid his ax on it and waited until it glowed red. "Thanks, dad."Īito opened his inventory, took out dried coconut fibers, wood, two flints, and started a fire. "Don't let it define yourself." He muttered, his courage slightly rising with each word spoken, gluing back his still fragile sanity. Because courage stems from fear, and in it lays the potential to overcome your limits."Ī child couldn't understand the meaning behind those words, but who could blame him? Only later on did Aito figure out that meant 'to overcome oneself, to go beyond one's own limits'. "Fear defines your limits, but don't let it define yourself.
He couldn't recall.īut what he did remember, however, was that his father had given him a hug filled with warmth and parental love before saying those words: Somehow, his father had sensed it, or he had kept an eye on him. Cold sweat had poured down his back, and, like now, fear overwhelmed him. Paralyzed, his vital fluid dripping down his wound, he found himself thinking back to when he was a small, feeble boy in his room.īack then he had had a nightmare. And most of all, the fear of being unable to atone for his sin. Aito assumed it would just get worse by the passing days, and that demoralized him.Īdded to it was one month of loneliness that had gnawed at his sanity, breaking down his mental defenses that… finally… crumbled.Ī primal feeling seized him: FEAR. The past month had relatively been easy to survive, and he had never sustained any kind of life-threatening injury. With the adrenaline from the fight dying down, the pain from his gaping wound progressively amplified, and the fact that he might die struck him like a truck. "Damn monkey," Aito said, dropping the weapon. Panicked and choking on its own blood, the ax monkey frenetically moved around, desperately clawed on air before drawing its last breath. Before Aito's last enemy could reach him, he quickly took a step back, grabbed the spear with two hands, and impaled the ax monkey. The dagger monkey violently hit the ground, never to move again. He waited until they got close enough, aimed for the dagger monkey, and flung his ax. It alarmed the two remaining monkeys, who eyed Aito viciously before running, weapons in hand, towards him. Taking advantage of their diverted attention, Aito brought down his ax on the spear monkey before they regained their focus and split its skull in half, then grabbed the spear. "I need to take care of those apes." He said with rising killing intent. However, he needed to treat this wound, and fast. So he gritted his teeth through the pain and left it there. No medical knowledge was needed to guess that removing it will cause the blood to pour out and kill him in a matter of minutes.
'Bastards,' Aito thought, eyeing the dagger stuck in his lower rib. His 'colleagues' jovially replied in kind. The dagger monkey retreated backward and expressed his enthusiasm by puffing his chest as if to say "See? I did it!". However, he felt a stinging pain in his right lower rib. He shifted his waist to avoid a spear thrust and luckily blocked a strike with his iron ax. He rapidly turned and barely had time to see something that never happened before: the evol monkeys attacking simultaneously. A tingling feeling crept up his spine as if signaling him of an imminent death threat.
Aito dodged aside, stepped on his enemy's tail, and brutally sent it flying with a kick.