Chapter 74: David And A Handicap?
David didn’t wait for them to reach him.
He moved first.
The closest Iron-Head Hog dropped its massive skull and charged, hooves churning dirt — and David sidestepped, let the horns shear past his ribs, and dragged his blade across the beast’s flank as it passed. Not deep enough to drop it. Just enough to make it bleed.
’Okay. One at a time would’ve been nice.’
The silver-back rabbits came from the flanks like thrown stones, fast and low. He’d learned their rhythm by now — the little tensing of the haunches before they launched. He read the first one, pivoted, and punted it mid-air with his boot. It hit the ground tumbling. He stamped through its skull without breaking stride.
Slash. Dodge. Slash.
He wasn’t thinking about it anymore. His body was doing the math.
But the second Iron-Head Hog was already lining up, head lowered, nostrils flaring red.
David looked at it. Looked at the size of it.
’Yeah. Not doing that head-on.’
He waited until the last possible second — then he dropped, one knee to the dirt, and let the creature barrel over him. Six hundred pounds of muscle passed through the air above his head, close enough that the belly fur dragged across his shoulders.
He came up behind it.
Before it could turn, he drove his blade into the back of its left knee, then its right. The legs folded. The creature let out a sound like a wet cave-in, crashing chest-first into the ground. David stepped onto its back, angled his blade, and pushed it through the base of its neck.
The purple glow that bled from the wound lit the dirt beneath him.
Still, it wasn’t enough— The rabbits were still coming.
He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Two cut past his left side and he spun, catching one across the chest with a backhand slash, missing the second — it raked his calf and he grunted, kept moving. His footwork was sloppy when he was breathing this hard. He knew that. His trainer had told him that a hundred times.
He was paying for it now.
But he was also still standing.
Dodge. Slash. Dodge. Slash.
His reflexes had started buying him things they hadn’t before — a half-second he didn’t used to have, a read he used to miss. Small margins. But out here, small margins were the difference between walking out and becoming something’s dinner.
The last rabbit launched itself directly at his face. He caught it by the ear, mid-air, slammed it into the ground, and put his blade through it.
He straightened up.
Caught his breath.
That was when the third Iron-Head Hog hit him from behind.
No sound. No warning. Just a wall of force that lifted him completely off the ground.
He landed badly, skidded, came to a stop in the dirt. Lay there for a moment with his eyes open and the sky above him tilting slowly.
’...when did—’
He sat up. Coughed. Tasted copper.
He spat blood onto the ground. Pressed his palm flat against the dirt and pushed himself to his feet.
The Iron-Head Hog was turning around. The others — seven of them left, maybe more — had clustered at the edge of the clearing. None of them gave him room to breathe. None of them were walking away.
"Ugh...fuck... well, this just got...*cough*... interesting" David said, to no one.
The hogs allowed him no rest.
With a thunderous roar, an Iron-Head Hog rushed he let it overshoot and took a leg. When a rabbit launched he redirected it. He took a glancing hit to the shoulder from a charging hog that nearly spun him off his feet — stayed upright through pure stubbornness, bit down on the pain, kept moving.
One by one, they fell.
He didn’t celebrate each one. There wasn’t time. The notifications kept stacking up in the corner of his vision like receipts.
[Congratulations! You have slain: Silver-Back Rabbit!]
[Congratulations! You have slain: Iron-Head Hog!]
[Congratulations! You have slain: Silver-Back Rabbit!]
[Congratulations! You have slain: Iron-Head Hog!]
He stopped reading them. Filed them somewhere to look at later.
His breathing had become a problem.
Each exhale cost something now. His legs still worked, but they were sending complaints up the chain of command. His sword arm moved slower on the return stroke than it did on the cut.
He kept going.
The purple glow from each corpse bled into the dirt around him, pooling at his feet in dull violet light — one patch, then another, then another — until the clearing looked like something holy and ruined at the same time.
The last Iron-Head Hog came at him with its skull low and all its remaining weight behind it.
David waited. Breathed. Let the distance close.
Then he stepped inside the horns, buried his blade in the hog’s throat up to the guard, and twisted.
The creature’s charge died mid-stride. Its legs buckled. It went down slowly, like a building choosing which direction to fall, and it took David with it — dragging him to one knee as it collapsed, his blade still locked inside its neck.
A long sound, low and wet.
Then nothing.
He stayed there a moment, kneeling over it, one hand on the hilt. The red had faded from its eyes. He watched them go flat and dull, color draining out until they were just eyes — just glass, just quiet.
[Congratulations! You have slain: Iron-Head Hog!]
The notification hovered at the edge of his vision. He ignored it.
All around him the purple glow was pooling and fading, seeping into the earth like spilled ink.
David stood in the middle of the clearing and breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
His chest heaved with it, each pull of air ragged and heavy, his whole torso working just to keep the rhythm going. Purple blood soaked through his shirt from the collar down — spatter across his chest, a long dark smear down his left side where a hog had clipped him on the pass.
He lifted his forearm — the one patch of skin that had somehow stayed clean — and dragged it across his mouth. Wiped the blood from his lip. His hand came away red anyway.
’Close,’ he thought. ’That was genuinely close.’
His grip on the blade had gone slack without him noticing. He felt it loosen the rest of the way, fingers unhooking one by one.
"Sheath," he said. "Dragon Claw."
The blade dissolved from his hand in a thread of dark light, pulling apart like smoke until it was gone. The weight left his arm all at once and he nearly swayed with it.
Virgin’s Touch passively worked slowly — gradually aiding him. Then the tremor in his thighs settled. Then the weight behind his eyes lifted, degree by degree, until finally his breathing slowed from a ragged pull to something that almost resembled normal.
He exhaled through his nose.
’Okay,’ he thought. ’Okay.’
He straightened up. Ran a hand back through his hair, pushing the damp off his forehead, and looked out at the clearing.
Corpses everywhere. Iron-Head Hogs slumped in the dirt with their legs folded under them. Silver-backs scattered in between like thrown laundry. The purple glow had already started to thin, wisping upward in faint curls of light before disappearing entirely, leaving just the bodies and the quiet.
He’d done all that.
"Not bad," he said, to no one in particular. Then, after a beat — "Actually, how many points did I pull?"
The system responded without ceremony.
[System Points Balance: 1,350]
David stared at it.
"...one thousand three hundred and fifty."
He read it again. Same number.
[Bonus points allocated. Combat difficulty modifier applied. Kill volume registered.]
"Huh."
He stood there a moment longer, just taking it in. The smoke from the dissolved mana was still curling faintly at the edges of the clearing, and he watched it drift upward through the dungeon air.
"Not bad at all."
He was already thinking about the allocation. But it would probably prove to be best if he’d sort it out when he got home, laid flat somewhere that wasn’t a dungeon floor, with something cold to drink and no creatures trying to remove his legs. That was the plan. Home. Points. Sleep.
’Can’t wait,’ he thought, and almost meant it as a joke except he genuinely couldn’t.
He rolled his shoulder — the one the hog had caught — tested the range of motion. Sore. Manageable.
He moved on.
***
The dungeon didn’t give him a straight path to the end. It never did.
More beasts came in clusters — pairs of silver-backs in the narrow corridors, a lone Iron-Head that had somehow wedged itself between two collapsed stone pillars and came out swinging when he got close. He dealt with them. Cleaner each time, his rhythm settling back into something reliable now.
And so, he continued, advancing forward in search of the dungeon boss.