God of Trash

The years passed. The ‘weapon intent’ Straw spoke of was no easy skill to learn, nor was he in any way an easy person to learn from. He ran the both of them ragged day in and day out. Sometimes with a makeshift weapon, sometimes with his fists, he chased them down and pushed them to their limits.

Training took many forms. Some days, they faced Straw and practiced strikes, repeating them over and over, or held a stance for hours until their muscles ached and sweat poured down their bodies. Some days, he walked around them, offering pointers and adjusting their form. Some days, the days that Rhys both dreaded and eagerly awaited, he and Bast would awaken, or jolt from their meditation, to find themselves alone in their camp, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Even his precious potions and hard-won gold would be gone. They’d have to pick up whatever they could find, a broken bone, a sturdy stick, even a rock, and hunt Straw, while Straw hunted them.

As for hunting, there were a great many beasts in the forest around them. Some even qualified as monsters, with mana flowing in their veins and spells of their own. At first, the monsters were horrifyingly powerful, unkillable and terrible, that had to be avoided at all costs, but as time wore on, they became less fearful. Bast was the first to strike one down. He dropped from a tree and brained a magic squirrel-beast with gold fur with a stone. The thing squealed and struggled until Rhys ran over and ended its suffering with a quick slash of his broken sword. To his surprise, Rhys felt little. It was only a beast, after all. Seeing its blood flow triggered no emotion in him except for hunger, and distant curiosity about that gold fur.

Its meat was full of mana, and eating it helped both him and Bast advance in a way that absorbing ordinary mana didn’t. After that, the free-for-all on hunting beasts began. Whenever they had a rare moment of free time, they set off into the woods. Bast preferred chasing them down with his own strength, while Rhys favored traps, often built with the scraps of the beasts they’d killed before. However they got it done, they hunted beast after beast, ate them whole, and reaped the benefits.

Straw didn’t stop them from hunting. In fact, he encouraged it… in that it was the one time the two of them would have a break from his brutal training. Every other waking hour was spent getting beaten to the very limits of their endurance, fighting nonstop with Straw and each other.

Their life progressed in this quiet way, slowly growing stronger, gaining skills. They wandered the land, keeping away from towns and other people. Neither Rhys nor Bast brought up going to town, but then, neither of them were too interested in it. Rhys was determined to get stronger, whether he had talent or not, while Bast simply liked keeping the company of few. And so it went, on and on.

Rhys sat in a tree, waiting. He watched the snare down below, holding his breath. A boar wandered ever closer, snuffling in the grass for the source of its favorite berries, placed right ahead of it inside the snare.

One step at a time. Silently, Rhys drew to his feet, raising from a crouch to a sit. His body responded easily. After all this time in the forest, he was built of lithe muscle, a far cry from the skin-and-bones of yesteryear.

The boar hesitated. Inches before the trap, it raised its head and sniffed the air instead of the ground. Its beady eyes snapped up and locked onto Rhys, and its tail raised high in alarm.

Shit! Rhys leaped out of the tree, drawing the stub of a sword he still carried. The boar squealed and ran, but he caught ahold of the bristles on its back. It dragged him, hooves biting into the dirt. A red aura glowed around it, its eyes glowed red, and it sped up, rocketing away, Rhys barely clinging to its back.

Rhys dragged himself closer. He drew back the sword to strike its neck.

The boar threw itself to the side, slamming Rhys into a tree. Rhys let out a huff. For a split second, his grip loosened.