First encounter with a long necked creature
2120 Words
Xerxes made an unprecedented visit inside the portal after the day he stayed up all night just to write everything he saw while doing the last commission. ‘We have already mapped everything around here. Except for the places beyond the boundaries that Yusaf said not to ventured in alone without elf guides since it is really dangerous. But as far as I can see and remember, the land where we found Samantha’s father is a part of America, and the last few commissions we ran belongs to Japan, England, Australia and France. I have yet to see my own country, Philippines. Thought there are things that does not make sense because, there seems to be no sea separating the land and we just traveled one or two kilometers apart each country.’ He says to himself as he ponders over it while walking.
‘Is that even possible? Wait- should I even question that to begin with? I am reincarnated, something that is not even believed in earth to be possible and yet I am here. Then one thing is certain here, anything is possible. I’ll just need to figure out why the lands interconnected to each other maybe I can find a clue as to what causes for the humans of earth to die off like that when we are already so advanced in technology.’ He then continues to the safest lands that they have ventured in to find some clues.
A hour later and Xerxes arrives at the boundary of Australia and France looking for clues. ‘That looks like a place where water ones flowed.’ He approaches a huge barren field and inspects the land, he tries to dig it out and see if it really is sand but the weeds and other kinds of debris is covering the surface. “Freaking hell- how many layers of leaves are in here?” he says to himself as he continues to dig.
And half an hour later, he successfully bore a hole on the ground but to his disappointment. The land that he spend his time digging in is part of a football field after seeing a fake plastic grass that sometimes people used in their lawns. “F- this is unbelievable. I spet my entire time for this useless piece of sh*t.” he says to himself as he violently throws away the hand shovel that he made in preparation for this day. He sits on the ground he dug and still pissed of his findings. Then all of the sudden he hears the sound of water flowing, he follows where he heard the sound and press his ear on the ground and his eyes widen that the water must have gone underground.
He looked for his shovel and tries to clear the ground where he hears the water flowing but to his surprise he sees a pipe and then realize that maybe there are other tribes of human as well. ‘If they are intelligent enough to use this kind of thing then they might be people I can reason with but if they turn out to be like the scums that I saw for the first time then I think I will need to -!” in the corner of one of Xerxes’ eyes, he saw a figure of a man walking towards him covered with mud.
He immediately draws his knife and gun and points it towards the human. “That’s as far as you go. If you move in a little more, I will kill you.” He says with a cold tone as the human freezes and seemed to have understood him. ‘Now this is great, I don’t know how many there are but he understands my speech. This is problematic, if he turns out to be a member of a cannibal tribe as well I’m dead.’ He thinks to himself and starts to interrogate the person.
“What are you doing here? Are you stalking me?” Xerxes ask them man but he did not say a word stare at him while holding a sword, the man seems to be weary of Xerxes’ gun as he switch his glance to Xerxes weapons. ‘Looks like he is familiar of my gun. Is it the reason why he is not answering my questions?’ Xerxes thinks to himself when all of the sudden he remembers the water pipe on the ground. “Are you the guy on duty in maintaining that the pipe is working properly?” Xerxes ask and in that moment, the man nods his head.
Xerxes could not make up if he is a man or still a kid since his face is covered with mud as well as his entire body. He moves in the direction of the where the sunlight shines from so that he can see whether there are people trying to ambush him from behind while focusing his attention to the human behind him.
TOOOOGS! TOOOOGS! TOOOOGS! TOOOOGS!
Heavy footsteps of a large creature reach their ears as the ground slowly shakes more violently with every step, both Xerxes and the native looks at the direction where the sound is coming from but to their surprise, a creature with a long neck as tall as a small building towering above them from the trees. ‘What the hell is that thing? Is that a creature native in this parts?’ Xerxes thinks to himself as he only move his eyes to look at the native before him who does not dare to move a muscle. The creature disregards the native and only looks at Xerxes, inspecting his body and hears his beating heart. It’s eyes then slants as it recognize Xerxes as prey.
After Xerxes realize that his not moving tactic failed, he plunge his knife to the monster’s eyes and it screech in pain, giving Xerxes time to run away as far as possible. And the native just stood there motionless as the creature trudge around him and fortunately avoided getting stomped to death but as the creature turns to chase Xerxes, it’s tail is about to hit the native but seeing that it would be the end of him once he gets hit by the massive tail, he swings his sowrd as strong as he could and manage to cut the creature’s tail with a clean cut.
CREEEEEEEE!
The creature screech yet again and now it turns around only to see it’s tail cut down and sees the native’s sword covered in blood, it then turns to attack the native who is frozen by the fear of the creature. The native surely has no experience in dealing with the creature but Xerxes sees this as an opportunity. ‘If I want to learn more about how this world became as it is, I will need to have connections inside.’ Xerxes finds a long rusty metal pole and drags it with him and bash one of the creature’s feet to distract it.
BING!
The creature then stops and turns to Xerxes only to have it’s left eye claimed by the rusty metal pole that Xerxes used to bury inside the creature’s other eye. ‘How is he able to move even before that giant?’ the native thinks to himself as Xerxes tries to grab his knife where the flint is. ‘Freaking stop moving!’ he yells inside his mind when all of the sudden, a sword sticks on the ground in front of him and the native recovers from his fear of the creature and the two stares at each other in confusion. “Why did you hand that over?” Xerxes ask him while scratching his head. “Oh- I thought you need something sharp since you were trying so hard to take your knife back.”
Before the two can exchange more words to each other, the rampaging creature turns around and struck them unconsciously with the remaining half of it’s tail.
WHAPAK! THUD!
The two gets thrown in to the tree with some branches piercing both humans on the sides. “ARGGG!” the both groan as the branch breaks and they fell to the ground. ‘Sh*t! I did not see this coming.’ The creature then smell their blood and turns to them, it first attacks the native but thankfully Xerxes is a little closer to the creature but somehow he is able to mask his blood because he did not pull the branch out unlike the native, which is why he became the prime target of the creature.
SHHHHK!
Xerxes grabs his knife from the creature’s eye and he smiles as he tries to ignite his gun but to his surprise, the flint is wet with the creature’s blood. ‘What the hell?’ he thinks to himself as he immediately wipes the blood from the flint and immediately ignites his weapon and points it in the creature’s injured eye before it grabs a bite of the native. “Thank you very much you bastard!”
BANG!
The creature fell right in front of the native who almost peed himself in fear while Xerxes on the other hand drops to the ground in exhaustion. ‘Sh- what a huge ass branch.’ He thinks to himself and turns to the native who also looked like life has been sucked away from him. “You okay there?” Xerxes ask as he stands up and sees that the native is bleeding non stop. “Why did you have to pull that branch out? Its common knowledge not to pull something that pierces you. That way you will not die of blood loss.” Xerxes said as he rummage his knapsack and finds the cloth that he readies if he ever get injured.
He patched the native’s wound before wrapping his wound with the cloth. “Feeling better now?” the native nods his head and turns to his wound. “Don’t worry, as long as I don’t pull it out I’m still fine but not for long though.” He says. “Thanks for helping and saving me.” The native said as Xerxes think nothing of it. “It was give and take but thankfully we survived. In any case, is this monster edible?” Xerxes ask and checks the meat and is surprised to see that the after the layer of thick fat lies lean meat after cutting a part of it. “I think that creature is edible. My people eat all kinds of creatures.” The native said.
“Does your people also eat people?” Xerxes ask and the native glares at him. “We are not that kind of people, we avoid to do that even if we starve to death.” The native said as he remembers someone saying the same thing. ‘Old man.’ Xerxes then apologizes for asking something rude but the native disregards what he says. “It’s okay. People should be wary of people here and we are not exempted. There are people that eats other people after all, especially those people in the middle of the waters.” He said and Xerxes agrees.
“Yeah- we should but the problem is that I don’t belong in this place. I live in another world. I came here through the portal.” His words shocked the native but before he can surprise him more by him being from another world, he takes out the trinket that the old man gave him which shocks the native even more. “This belongs to the old man that I rescued in the same land in the middle of water. I eradicated their tribe but the old man died right after the rescue so we buried him there. He did not tell me what this trinket will do and just handed it to me.” Xerxes said as the native man reaches out to the trinket slowly but then pulls back his arm before he can touch it as tears slowly flows from his eyes.
After a few minutes the tribesmen of the native arrived and saw the dead creature. Xerxes sees this and also sees the sun setting in a few hours. “Then I will go back and visit this place again. You can take the creature. That should at least feed your entire tribe.” Xerxes left in a hurry before he gets caught up in something troublesome and hurries before the sun sets.
He sprinted back to the portal only half an hour and returns back home where he collapse in front of the shop and Rupert finds him breathing heavily and immediately brings him to the nearest doctor after calling Ramirez silently.
- Writer
