The Galecat moves fast, too fast for me to see it clearly but I can pick out that it's moved somewhere off to the right, probably thinking to go up the ridge from that side and then pounce on me from behind.

I can’t let that happen.

I need open space between me and the beast so I can aim and fire freely at the damn thing if I want any chance of putting it down.

This idea dominates my thoughts, and as it occupies my mind alongside the sound of the fast pumping blood in my ears I now notice something else that my ears are picking up, the sound of water.

The Waterfall!

Looking just across the way, I can see the waterfall coming down into the pool below. The current is substantial, but the water doesn't look too deep or too fast to knock me off my feet the moment I step into it. Plus, it looks like there are some rocks sticking out near the edge that I might just be able to stand on, the best vantage point I can hope for when the Galecat finds me.

I move fast. I scurry through the bush and vegetation with no concern for the noise I make or the scratches I get, only focused on getting to that waterfall and finding a position to ready myself for the fight.

My heart is beating hard and a cold perspiration is leaking all over my skin as I move, however I’m not panicking though, to my own credit. I’m moving fast in a straight and bruntful line and am only moments away as long as I keep up this heartracing pace.

In what I hope is enough time.

I make it to the water's edge and don’t hesitate to rush right into it. In the water upto my shins, cold and powerful, I spot a protruding rock on the cliff’s edge. One that will do nicely for what I know may be my final stand. So I wade further through the fast moving waters, looking all around me, watchful for any and all signs of movement. It’s only when I climb up onto the rock while peering down into the pool of water below, pull out an arrow for my bow, turn around to look back and…

…there it is.

By the Source it's fast! It took me a maximum of two hectic minutes to get here and in that same amount of time it must have travelled miles to come around the ridge to get up here and meet me.

I aim and ready my bow at its fierce feline face, forcing myself not to blink as I examine its fangs on full display below its staring harsh pink eye on the left side of its face next to the right side covered in blood, still wet from its now newly empty eye socket.

It's… hesitating? Why? I’ve read about Galecats. They’re completely vicious. They don’t hesitate at all whenever they meet weaker prey. And despite the wound I’ve inflicted on it it should sense my manalessness and know that I am weaker prey, and so have no misgivings about ripping me to pieces.

The Galecat… I can see its eyes, I mean eye, and it’s…not just looking at me… it looks like it's also looking at…

The Water!

Of course! It’s a cat. Cat’s hate water. Maybe especially in this feline’s case as its wind affinity making it light and agile will clash with the river it has to cross to get to me. Once it steps into the water it will have to surrender a lot of its advantages to try and get its revenge.

We meet eyes over the water. It studies me and the rapids before it while also weighing up the bow and arrow in my hands. I can see the comprehension in its eye that even if it doesn’t know what or how the strange weapon works, it knows it's what caused the injury to it.

In this impasse, my arms beginning to burn, I likewise study it and the weighing of emotions and misgivings churning within its own thoughts. The water, me, the weapon in my hand, its pain, the anger from being crippled by this weak little thing, the gall of it, the insult…

The look in its eye slowly becomes clear, its decision is made.

It wades into the water.

Time crawls forward as we both feel out what the other may do. It moves slowly, carefully, and I match its movements with my bow aimed in readiness for its pounce.

It cements its eye on me as it moves through the water, closer and closer, weighing up between how near it can approach under the hindrance of the water while at the same time being ready for whatever it is my strange weapon will do.

I’m likewise fixing my eye on it as well as it grows closer, preparing myself for the only shot I know I can get off within this overture before the end of our confrontation, trying to figure out how close the beast needs to be for my arrow to have enough power to pierce through its hide with the force needed to end its life.

It comes closer, inch by inch.

My arms start hurting, more and more.

Our eyes meet, testing each other out with our own resolve to survive this duel and kill the other. And when we are only just metres away from each other…

My foot! It slips! Only the tiniest bit on the slippery stone that I’ve been standing on in all this time.

My eyes turn away- just for an instant!

The Galecat pounces.

I look back up, and see death. Its sharp claws before my face being followed by a terrifying maw right behind it, the savage visage only a milliseconds distance away.

I release.

ROOOAAARRR!!!

Twang!

…And we both go over the edge.

***************************************************************************************************************

Dark.

It’s dark and cold. And also…wet. Why am I cold and wet? And this pain in my chest, what is that? It almost feels like… like…

Air!

I need Air!

Underwater. I awake underwater to the watery world that now surrounds me accompanied by the screaming of my lungs demanding oxygen.

My eyes snap open to the blurry darkness all around me, except for the above presence of the sparkles, sparkles of what must be the light from the outside world that shines down from above.

I go to mov…OW! My chest, my arm. They sting something fierce!

My lungs screaming however doesn’t care for any of my other pains, and only continues to grow louder and louder. So I push through the pain and get my legs moving to go up, and up, and up, until…

SPLASH.

Air!

Even with all my pain and disorientation, that gasp of air feels agonisingly wonderful… if only for that one moment. After that however the pain from my chest and arm don’t hesitate to only then really start flaring up.

I push it all aside again however as best I can, to then see in the distance the shoreline of this water body I’m now struggling to stay afloat in. I immediately begin kicking and bobbing my way over to it. Though it takes me a few times longer than it otherwise would have but when I make my way up on the grassy banks at the water's edge can I finally take the moment to think about everything that’s happened.

The Galecat, it pounced at me. I let loose an arrow, I know I did, and the next thing that happened was that we both went over the edge down the waterfall into the pool. I’m here, alive and breathing obviously. But where is the Galecat?

It was only when I stood up on the shore to look around that I got my answer.

Wet, exhausted, hurting, bleeding; I walk over along the shoreline nevertheless to where the Galecat now finds itself.

It's dead. Dead from my arrow. My arrow has come through its mouth and out the other side of its head, causing blood to leak as it now lays there half ashore half in the water limp and lifeless.

…What a fluke.

The sight before me is making me feel something, but I haven’t the time or inclination to care about whatever that feeling is.

The Galecat is dead. I won. And that’s all that matters.

The next thing I do is strip off my shirt and upper garments to see what is causing me so much pain after having looked over my fallen foe. To no surprise, it's the last present the Galecat gave me in exchange for its life, claw marks, gauged out of my chest and over my arm.

The marks are deep, deep to scar seriously, but they're not life threatening. I go to my pack, still tied to my waist after everything, and remove some wet bandages, some alcohol and some antiseptic. I strain the bandages first as best I can before applying pretreatment and then wrapping all of my wounds up with the still damp bandages.

From there, I pick up the Galecat that, though big, is light from its inherent wind nature. I sling it over my shoulders and without fuss start making my way back to my campsite from the previous day, before anything else contentious happens.

The beast is wearing me down as I travel through the forest, but there’s no way I’m leaving the Galecat’s body there to rot.

It's a magical beast! Meaning, its meat is a mana rich resource, a resource that no one other than a Warrior or Sorcerer would usually ever get the chance to savour. No chance in hell I’m leaving it there for some other lucky scavenger to pick at in my place.

It’s a priceless delicacy. I killed it, it’s mine. And tonight, it's dinner.

It was a few hours before I made it back to my camp. The walk back to the campsite was tough, no exaggerating it. But over two hundred years of tough living had made me tough in turn, so I had no problem overcoming the ordeal and ended up making it to the camp before nightfall.

Once there I dropped off the Galecat’s corpse, stripped out of my clothes, lit a fire, checked my wounds again, put on some spare clothes I had stashed away, hung my old clothes by the fire to dry out…and then got started on dinner.

I had been killing and skinning my livestock for years and had further broadened my skills through the small game I had hunted and cooked ever since I had started developing my archery, so I knew what had to be done when butchering an animal.

The first two parts were the easiest, drain whatever little blood that was left and then simply remove the pelt after that. With the rest of the animal though, I had to be a little bit more particular.

What I was dealing with was no ordinary carcass after all, it was a magical beast. Every part of it is a treasure worth bucket loads of coins for those who aren’t part of the Coalitions Associations. And even for them, unless they killed it themselves the meat would still cost a pretty penny.

Unfortunately most of the blood had drained out already so I had very little left to store in my waterskin when draining it, a loss leaving me feeling frustrated as even the animal's blood was a wasted treasure in of itself.

So, very carefully, with great attention to detail, I began butchering and separating all the different organs and sections of the Galecat’s body into separate pieces, putting them all down on the pelt I had laid out beside me. The pieces of meat just looked like…meat to me. But I knew if anyone other than me were here right now in front of the meat market at my hands they would feel and possibly see a small glimmer of mana coming off all the cuts.

But that’s just another thing to add on the pile of things I can’t do without mana.

So, that now sorted, I picked up a cat leg, pierced it through with an arrow, hung it over the fire, and watched eagerly as I waited for it to cook.

The smell cooking off it was fantastic. It stimulated my tastebuds to the degree that drool was leaking out of my mouth despite my best efforts to stop it.

When I deemed the leg cooked all the way through and ready, I took it off the fire, held it up to my mouth, inhaled the succulent scent of it, and took a bite.

…Sublime.

The flavour was absolutely sublime.

I had long gotten used to the food here in Calzyn which was already pretty fantastic, but this was a whole other level of deliciousness I had never even dreamed of. I didn't know that anything could even taste this good.

Within no time at all, the entire leg down to the bone and the bone marrow included was gone down the hatch, leaving only a bare sad looking leg bone left now in front of me.

I chucked it back over with the rest of meat, the idea of carving it up and the rest of the skeleton into arrowheads is already being formulated in my head. A weapon I may need for the future if this dead Galecat is only the first sign of a magical beast resurgence, one that my land is directly in the way of.

But the future huh? What will my future be now? I… I don’t know.

Strangely, with a now uncertain future gnawing at my thoughts, I felt like performing a Baptism.

I hadn’t done a single one since I had left the farm, my emotions too awry to face keeping up my routine. But before that I had spent every single night before going through the motions of one technique or other… when I was still determined to find the right one.

…Why not? They may not have given me mana as I had hoped but they have made me ridiculously athletic, and if I want to maintain this godly level of fitness then I should probably keep practising them regularly.

So, after my dinner had settled for a bit, I got up, moved over to a flat enough bit of ground nearby, got into a stance, and began.

In honour of my defeated foe, I decided to perform a wind affinity technique in memory of the Galecat that now partially remained in my stomach. It seemed the appropriate thing for me, the winner, to do.

The moves involved were wide and willowing and made me shift about as if a leaf dancing in the wind in a way. I actually remember that when I attempted this one for the very first time tha-

I crashed to the ground.

“...”

“...”

“…What the fuck was that?” I whispered, not in any way expecting an answer, but it was just what one did when the completely unexpected happened.

It…It was probably just a twitch in my muscles from working so hard today. I’m still injured after all and who knows what I might have brushed against or been scraped by in all the madness that I went through. Let’s… Let’s just try again.

I got up and settled into a stance again, but this time instead I tried out a different wind affinity Baptism… just to move some different muscles.

Moving my body again, my movements were quick and fast as I spun in and out, moving at a quick pace in a kind of cyclical dance, sort of like a tornado as I made my way through the moves. I kept the rhythm up and began to fall into the trance I always fell into when…

…It happened again.

But this time instead of pulling away from the feeling, I leaned into it, sank into it, and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go.

My body… feels different than usual, and as I delve into the sensation I notice that what my body is now doing unconsciously… is changing. I’m no longer doing the Baptism I was doing at the beginning. Now I’m… I don’t know what I’m doing.

My movements… are mutating. Pulling in moves from different Baptisms, adding them, or even fusing them altogether into ways I had never done or experienced before.

I move faster and smoother and the moves become stranger and more intricate as I keep delving deeper and deeper until I approach what I recognise is the opening crescendo that comes every time before the flicker of mana at the end.

But this time… it’s not a flicker.

This time…It’s a flash!

Without warning I’m thrown from my trance and back to the ground again, just the same as many years ago. Once more thrown to the ground in a jumble of sweaty limbs splayed in all sorts of directions.

…What…What… WHAT?!