Chapter 4- More Power
Darkness was no longer consuming him, but it still clung to the edges of his mind like dried blood to torn flesh.
Yuuta’s frog-like eyelids twitched. The first flickers of consciousness stirred like a dying ember, and his thoughts began to claw their way back from the abyss. His breath was shallow, ragged, each inhale like sucking air through a wound. His limbs felt distant, like they belonged to someone else—or something else—and he couldn’t tell if that was better or worse than feeling nothing at all.
Then the sensation came.
It started as a tingle—a faint static crawling just beneath the skin of his mutated body. It slithered through his nerves like ants chewing their way out from the inside. It was maddening. It was itchy. It was burning.
"F...ck," Yuuta groaned, voice hoarse and broken through the unnatural frog vocal cords.
The pain was different now. It wasn’t sharp or immediate like the arrows had been. No, this was deeper. It was cellular. Something inside him—something foreign yet familiar—was knitting his shattered body back together. A strange regenerative force was at work, crawling under his skin and forcing things to fix that probably shouldn’t have been fixable.
He lay there for a while, slumped on the ground like a crushed toad, trembling in the aftermath of death and magic. The rocky earth beneath him was sticky with half-dried blood, some of it his own, some of it pigman. The scent of iron filled his lungs, and the breeze carried the copper tang of carnage across the broken field.
He blinked.
Then again.
Vision blurred... then cleared just enough for him to see the empty spot where one of the five blue orbs had once floated.
Yuuta exhaled, a haggard croak.