Chapter 323: Hanging Out
Kim only knew darkness. It wasn't anything that she thought about, it was more that's just what she would have used to describe everything that she could feel around her in that moment.
She could feel warmth all around her, but she felt cold, mostly around her head, shoulders and sword arm. She couldn't hear anything, but her ears were ringing. The darkness around her made it so she couldn't see, but she felt like her eyes were staring at a bright light. The space she was in was so confining that she couldn't breathe, yet...
Kim's eyes snapped open, to see actual light. She was surprised to realize that she could breathe. That somehow she wasn't trapped still. Feeling rather relieved, she took a deep breath through her nose and nearly threw up. Not because of anything going down the wrong tube, but rather because of the stench around her
How she had gotten to this point, Kim couldn't say. The last thing she knew was she had been trying to cut her way out of the bear's stomach. She hadn't really expected to get out of there, but she couldn't deny that she was happy to be hanging out of the bear, if only just barely.
If she was to hazard a guess as to what happened, she would have assumed that Jonas had travelled into the world of the shadows to help cut her free, although she wasn't sure how he'd have known where she was in the first place. Yet, regardless of how he knew, since she didn't see anyone around, she knew that it wasn't anyone riding Sonya who had gotten her like this. Otherwise she was confident that they'd still be there. Where, with Jonas, she knew that he might have decided that was enough, since she couldn't say how long it would have taken him to get her to this point.
Regardless of any of that, though, she was pretty sure that getting herself the rest of the way out was solely on her. That she wouldn't be able to count on any assistance to get herself the rest of the way out.
Kim heard a roar as sounds seemed to return to her, but couldn't quite place it. It wasn't a roar of anything she'd heard before, so she couldn't say that she really knew what it was from. Though, other sounds were also entering her awareness, though she couldn't quite identify what any of them were. Just that they seemed to be getting louder. though not from getting closer. Merely like someone was turning up the volume on all the sound that was around her.
As her vision started to focus, letting her know that she was hanging upside down maybe about twenty or thirty feet off the ground, Kim flexed her hand that was hanging out of the bear, but couldn't feel what she expected to. When she realized she wasn't holding her sword anymore, she started to look around. Part of it felt like she was either manipulating someone else's body or that she was in a kind of video game or something. It just didn't feel quite real just yet for her.
Where Kim located her sword wasn't anywhere that would be useful for her. It was on the ground, and the bear had already walked past where it was. By maybe forty or fifty feet. Which also meant that she'd been dangling for maybe a minute when she came to.