Hajin ran while the thing behind him tore through the underbrush, and branches snapped shut at his back with every stride it took.
'Of all the times,' he thought through burning lungs, 'a monster comes for me on the second day I have not eaten.'
He threw himself sideways as antlers ripped through the space his chest had been, purple drool swinging off the jaw in strings.
Two bright Shards turned in slow circles above the antlers, which meant the animal outranked him twice over and had no reason at all to be this far down the valley.
"You are lost," he said between breaths, hauling himself around a thick trunk, "so go be lost somewhere else."
He caught a low branch and pulled himself up as the monster struck below, so cracks opened through the bark under both of his hands.
'Barely a one-Shard adventurer,' he thought while the trunk shuddered, 'and anyone else at my rank would have this thing skinned already.'
"That is my tree," he said down through the leaves, tightening his grip as the whole crown swayed, "find your own."
The deer put its skull through the trunk a third time.
The tree leaned, then the whole crown of it started to go over.
Hajin jumped, hit the ground rolling, came up running while the monster wasted a few seconds fighting clear of the fallen branches.
'If the summoning worked even once,' he thought while his legs burned, 'I could put something else in front of it and walk home.'
The awakening crystal had named him a summoner at sixteen, though every attempt since then had produced a headache with nothing standing in front of him.
Without a working ability he could not train his core or climb past the bottom rank, which was the entire reason the Flint family had cut him loose three years ago.
'No Great Family keeps a talentless bastard on the ledger,' he thought while the deer closed the gap behind him.
He reached another low-branched tree and swung onto a limb that held, while below him the monster circled to scrape both antlers along the scarred bark.
He was proof of the patriarch's affair with a servant, and a house that sold its reputation could not keep a walking receipt.
They stripped the name off him, dropped him in a border slum and told him never to claim the blood again.
The elder had not raised his voice once while doing it, which sat worse in him than open hatred ever had.
He jumped for the next canopy on instinct while the memory ran itself out, which was how he missed the moment the deer stopped chasing him.
A roar hit the tree ahead of him and split the trunk sideways, so his reaching foot closed on nothing at all.
The ground took his back and his shoulder together.
The antlers scooped him up before he could roll, then threw him aside like cut brush.
His spine met another trunk, something shifted inside his chest, and blood came up into his mouth.
He stared through blurred vision while his ribs went on screaming at him, blood running off his chin onto the leaves.
'This is unfair,' he thought as the monster came closer, 'nineteen years of this and I have not done a single thing to anyone.'
The Flints had thrown him out, the guilds had laughed him off their boards, and last winter had him eating scraps from behind an inn while the snow came down on the alley.
Crying had never once changed what was standing in front of him.
"Haaah, goddammit," he said, getting a hand under himself while the other closed on the sword at his hip.
The slum guild sold cheap iron blades to one-Shard kids who could scrape together the coin, and this one carried a dented edge from three years of training dummies without ever once being drawn at something that could hit back.
He pulled it free and planted his feet, the blade shaking in his grip, most of that shaking coming from hunger rather than from fear.
'Something in there is broken,' he thought, pressing the side where his ribs ground against each other, 'and I would like to go home and sleep for a week.'
The deer set its feet and dropped the antlers at him again, an approach that had already worked twice that morning.
"I have never killed a monster before," he said, showing the deer his teeth, "so there is a first time for everything."
He went first, which surprised him more than it surprised the animal.
They closed the gap at the same time, then he dove left at the last moment, one antler tip caught his shoulder, and the whole arm went numb from the joint downward.
Rolling through it, he came up swinging at the back legs, where the blade bit into flesh before it jarred to a stop on bone.
The deer screamed and kicked sideways, the hoof finding the broken side of his ribs, so the pain took his vision out for a full second.
'That was stupid,' he thought, getting both hands onto the grip because the left arm would not hold weight, 'you cannot trade hits with a two-Shard and expect to keep walking.'
"Fine," he said through his teeth, spitting a mouthful of blood into the leaves, "you get one more."
The deer turned to face him again and let its mouth fall open, the jaw going wider than a jaw should.
A roar built somewhere down in the throat, and Hajin ran straight at it instead of away.
The sound hit his chest, his skin went through a ripple, something popped deep in both ears, though his legs kept moving under him without asking first.
He closed the last of the distance and drove the sword up into the open mouth with both hands, through the roof of the jaw, into the skull.
The roar collapsed into a wet gargle.
The deer thrashed, slammed its antlers into his side and threw him off his feet, so the sword tore out of his hands.
His sword stayed lodged where he had put it.
He landed on his back and watched the legs go out from under the animal.
Blood came out of the mouth while the two Shards above the antlers went dim one after the other.
It went over sideways with a heavy sound and did not move again.
He stared at the body for a long while, breathing in the shallow gasps his ribs allowed him, bleeding from his shoulder, from his ears and from somewhere along his side he could not see.
"Two Shards," he said to the corpse, watching the last light go out of it, "and I am the one still breathing."
Then he started laughing, which came out broken and wet, each one rattling the ribs until it turned into a cough.
"Haah, that is enough of that," he muttered, pressing a hand flat against his ribs, "laughing might be the thing that actually kills me."
The sensible move was to cut the core out and carry it back to the guild, but neither of his arms voted for that plan.
"I need somewhere to sit down before I bleed out next to this thing," he said to nobody in particular, wiping his chin with the back of his wrist.
A golden light opened up in front of his face, so he flinched back and cracked his head against the trunk behind him.
"Fuck, I cannot catch a break today," he said, rubbing the back of his head while his eyes stayed on the floating panel.
"Am I hallucinating from the blood loss?" he asked, reaching toward the light and stopping when text came into it, "because that would be the most reasonable thing to happen to me all day."
[Conditions met]
[System activating...]
"Conditions met," he said, scratching his head while the letters held steady in the air, "and what exactly is a system?"
[ Soul Energy: 0 ]
[ Scanning host... ]
[ Host identified: Hajin ]
[ Bond initiating... ]