Chapter3

his foot was already reaching for a branch that wasn't there anymore, causing him to fall.

The ground hit him in the back and shoulder, knocking the air out of his lungs in one gasp. Before he could roll, move or even blink, the deer was on him, its antlers scooping under his body and tossing him like he weighed nothing.

His back slammed into a trunk with a crack he felt more than heard, something inside him shifting wrong as his mouth filled with the taste of blood before coughing it out.

He lay there for a second, staring up at the canopy through blurring vision, with his ribs screaming and something wet running down his chin.

'This is so unfair,' he thought, looking at the monster standing in front of him. He was nineteen and had never done anything wrong to anyone but the world kept treating him like a thing to be stepped on.

From the Flints to the guilds that wouldn't take him and now this stupid deer that wouldn't stop chasing, but he wasn't the type to cry about unfairness.

He was never the type to cry about anything, not when they stripped him of the Flint name or when the guild recruiter laughed at his class and not even when he ate scraps from a trash heap last winter.

There was no big reason behind it, he just knew that crying and feeling sorry for himself would not change anything, the world will keep moving forward.

"Haaah, goddammit," he pushed himself up with one hand while the other gripped the sword at his hip.

It was a cheap iron blade that the guild had given every one-Shard adventurer as a starter weapon, dented along the edge from practice against training dummies and never once drawn against a real opponent.

He pulled it free and planted his feet, the blade shaking in his grip because of how tired and hungry he was.

'Did I break a few ribs?' he thought, touching his side where he felt like his ribs were grinding against each other, 'this has been such a bad day, I just want to go home and rest.'

He looked at the deer as it pawed the ground, ready to charge again.

"I've never killed a monster before," he said out loud, smirking at the deer, "but there is a first time for everything right?"