“Run, Soji!” The bear demon grabbed his big axe and ran away, pulling the human boy by his hand. Three of those lizards had approached them without being noticed, and now sped towards them. Kumari and Soji were isolated from the village, and found themselves running alone to the woods.
The boy couldn’t keep up with the noble, so Kumari stopped to lift the boy in his arms. At that moment, he saw that the village was under the attack of something big. Something really big. “Father!”
“Sir!” Soji yelled, desperate, seeing that Kumari was standing still as the lizards approached quickly.
The noble started running again. He needed to get Soji to safety before going back to help his father. He ran until he found a solid tree that hadn’t been chopped down yet, and lifted Soji to highest branch in his reach.
“Stay there!”, he ordered, and the boy nodded, crying.
Then Kumari turned around to face the monsters, which arrived faster than he expected. The biggest of the three crawled with great speed toward him, trying to bite his legs, but Kumari raised his heavy axe and swung it down with all of his strength, crushing the monster’s skull. The noble stepped back when a second monster approached, but was taken by surprise when it jumped on him. The lizard knocked him down and fell over him, constraining Kumari against the ground beneath its weight.
The young noble used his axe to defend himself, but got the tool’s hilt stuck between the monster’s sharp teeth. The lizard shook its head vigorously until it crushed the wooden hilt with its bite. Thinking quickly, Kumari pushed the monster’s head upwards and used what was left of the axe to hit its neck, killing it with repeated strikes of the blade.
With great effort, he pushed the corpse away, only to find himself being attacked by the third lizard. The monster almost got Kumari’s head into its mouth, but he held it open with his bare hands. The lizard forced back until it closed its bite, and the bear demon almost lost his fingers to it. Without thinking, he grappled with the monster, holding its head with his arms and the rest of its body with his legs. The two rolled on the ground in a desperate and grotesque fight, as Kumari felt the lizard’s claws slashing his body repeatedly. Then, growling with the herculean effort, he twisted the lizard’s neck in an unnatural angle, making it crack violently. The monster stopped fighting back.
Soji climbed down the tree as Kumari got rid of another corpse, panting.
“My lord! Are you alright?!”
“Yes, Soji”, he answered, trying to calm the boy down. His clothes and skin were fiercely torn by the lizard’s claws, and he suffered cuts on his hands, but other than that he was fine. “The village…”, he mumbled, suddenly remembering.
Soji looked at Kumari, wide-eyed, as he remembered, too. Then, he was lifted from the ground again by the young bear demon, which ran all the way back, already expecting the worse.
