Some of his patients would tell him how during their hunts they sometimes felt strangely attuned, the adrenaline pumping through them allowing them to focus and act faster than they thought was ever possible.

Leith, wind knocked out of him, still bouncing and rolling off the ground after the initial bruising impact against his back, felt fully focused and tuned in, even more so than when he would assist his father at the operating table.

Groaning but trying to ignore the pain shooting through his upper body, he rolled to his feet, scooping up the blade that he had thrown earlier to avoid getting stabbed.

He turned and faced the horde that was now bearing down towards him. The largest stag had its antlers lowered, preparing to impale Leith.

Leith lifted his sword, holding it out in front of him, his heart pounding and the fluttering sensation of fear pervading his chest.

He pivoted and jumped just as the lead monster’s antlers impaled the ground where Leith was standing just before. The fiend continued charging forward without slowing down, raking the ground and forming deep furrows. Leith barely avoided getting skewered by hopping upon the rothound hanging from its antlers.

The other riftfiends were large too, but the lead stag was truly a behemoth, its antlers stretching at least fifteen feet into the air. The rothound that still hung from it like a toy was a perfect platform for Leith to hang on to.

The leading deer-monster raised his head up, forcing Leith to scramble for handholds as the corpse he was sitting on shifted positions. He managed to stick his foot into the junction of two spikes and wrap one arm securely around the corpse, though not before the sharp tip of an antler embedded firmly into his side.

He hissed at the grating pain of bone scratching upon bone as the riftfiend’s antlers scraped his ribs. That’s gonna hurt for a while.

Leith painfully removed himself from the antler, causing blood to drip from his side, and raised the sword he held in his hand, finger resting on the blade, willing it to come to life. The riftcore, located at the base of the blade, streamed chroma up and through the bone that ran along the center of the blade. Leith imagined the weapon gathering heat, the energy condensing and coalescing into the blade itself.

Meanwhile, the riftfiends were slowing down, having lost their target, presuming that their leader had impaled it.

Leith’s sword was eventually glowing red hot, smoking as the riftbeast bone in the blade began burning. He knew very well that he wouldn’t be able to stop the horde from returning to Karya. However, he hoped that he had bought them enough time to escape or hide, and he decided that he would take down the largest threat at the very least.

Leith jumped, using the forest of antlers as leverage and handholds, hurling himself past the horns and down to the back of the neck of the stag. He ignored the bones raking against the skin of his arms and hands, tearing up his clothes and drawing shallow lacerations across his body.

He landed on the massive fiend’s neck, straddling its wide nape with his legs, lifting his red-hot blade into the sky. Then, he thrust it down, piercing through the stag’s skull and straight into its brain.

There he imagined every bit of chroma contained within his blade’s riftcore emanating from the blade, spreading and devouring, heat rushing forth from it like an untamed hose expelling water.

The riftfiend screamed, rearing its head, a cry of pain so guttural and haunting that all the smaller fiends around it jumped away in fear.

Leith watched with an odd sort of detachment as he heard the blood and flesh within the stag’s head boiling, the liquids inside bubbling and trying to escape through the rupture with an almost musical whistle. A sickening scent of cooked meat permeated his nose as the creature crashed to the ground with a thud.

Slowly, blood leaking from a dozen cuts and punctures, Leith rose to his feet, standing atop the bloodied stag. The other fiends stood still, staring at Leith with their dark, beady eyes, wary of the one who killed their leader.

Still, they were riftfiends and they were hungry, so they tossed aside their fears and lowered their heads, preparing to charge.

Leith stood, prepared to die. His heart was beating out of his chest and his entire body was screaming. Terror clouded his mind, yet a small part of him remained coherent, telling him that running would accomplish nothing.

Instead, he stood his ground, ripping the blade out of the fiend’s head. He stood tall atop the stag’s head, holding the smoking sword pointed forward with shaking arms.

He was aware that he would soon die, yet he felt oddly content. Jubilant at emerging victorious over at least one fiend and satisfied that his death may save some lives.

That's when Leith felt a faint buzz in the air, the silent hum of electricity. The feeling he associated with a large leak of chroma when a battery malfunctioned in his home. Seemingly appearing out of nowhere, a figure moving too fast to properly be perceived blurred across Leith’s vision. The front row of the deer-like fiends all collapsed, either decapitated or throats cleaved, spewing geysers of blood.

The blur slowed to a stop in front of the carnage and turned to look at Leith. In front of him stood a man in a draped cloak, holding a sword humming with energy with a second sword sheathed and attached to his hip, his legs emitting a copious amount of steam.

The man looked him up and down, seemingly noting his wounds before turning around to face the monsters again. The rest of the riftfiends took a few steps back, spooked by the deaths of their herd members.

The man crouched, smoke rising from his calves, and held that position, extending his sword to his side. Then, in a blink of an eye he had crossed the distance and appeared in front of the monsters, swinging his glowing blade as he moved.

Leith had never seen violence so beautiful. Crimson blood spurted from corpses as they fell one by one, the man moving in quick blurs, pausing for a tiny moment to switch directions after every few kills. Arcs of blue and white lightning lit up the rapidly darkening sky, and faint wisps of smoke rose from the leaking corpses, faintly illuminated by the light emitting from the man’s blade.

Within the span of a few seconds, every riftfiend had been dispatched, and the man stood over Leith, hurriedly checking his wounds.

His savior wore a brimmed hat, covering medium-length brown hair. His clothing seemed to be that of a typical hunter, save for a cape that flowed dramatically from his shoulders. He seemed young, perhaps in his thirties at the latest.

Leith, who had been watching in an awed stupor, snapped out of it and told the man, “I’m fine! Go to the town, there’s some fiends there too!”

The man looked at him, eyebrow cocked dubiously, “You’re bleeding all over.”

Leith looked down at himself. His clothes were in fact frighteningly bloodied and torn. The man reached for him, probably intending to sit him down and tend to his wounds but Leith smacked his hands away.

“Seriously, I’m fine. I don’t have any fatal injuries,” Leith said, making sure his voice was calm and confident. “I’m trained as a doctor, I can treat myself just fine. But the citizens in the town can’t defend themselves because all of our hunters are gone– they’ll die if you don’t go.”
The man stared at him, clearly dubious. It was quite obvious that Leith wasn’t doing okay. Despite that, he backed up and slowly nodded. “Alright, I’ll head to town. Lily will be here soon– there’s a rucksack attached to her with a bunch of stuff in it, including bandages. Patch yourself up and ride her into town, okay? If you can’t move, just stay here and tell Lily to go get me.” With that, the man turned, crouched, and shot off towards the town, trailing steam behind him.

Leith sighed, repressing the urge to just lay down and bleed out. The pain emanating through his body was immense, but he forced himself to trudge forward, looking for a patch of grass that wasn’t doused with monster blood.

He was glad that the man actually listened to him and decided to go save the town. If the man had decided to save Leith and let the town's members die in his stead, Leith would have never been able to forgive himself.

What the man hadn’t noticed was that Leith had jammed his fingers into the hole in his side, closing the wound and preventing himself from bleeding out. He gingerly sat down and removed his fingers. Blood leaked out… but it didn’t gush which meant he probably didn’t knick an artery. With a sigh of relief, he bundled up the shreds of his shirt and began applying pressure to the wound, quelling its bleeding.

Leith allowed himself a shaky but triumphant smile, feeling that he had managed to truly do his best for Karya. He wasn’t sure that it was enough, and he was certain that any jubilation he felt now would surely fade if he later found out that someone had died. But for the moment, at least, Leith was happy to have done what he could and he was proud of having killed something so ferocious and powerful all by his lonesome.

Lily had quickly become Leith’s favorite riftbeast. Rothounds were friendly and playful, but they were admittedly kind of stupid. Lily the horse-monster-thing was a regal creature, fur obsidian black with a riftcore so massive that the stone in her chest was clearly visible from the outside.

The horse had brought medical supplies, so Leith was able to successfully patch himself up. Sure, the puncture in his side would have to be properly disinfected and redressed, but he was alive.

He patted Lily the horse-beast on the neck as she rode, moving slowly and steadily so that Leith’s wounds wouldn’t exacerbate too much. He also took the liberty to drink water out of the man’s satchel, as well as feed Lily some sugar cubes, which she seemed to be quite happy about.

Before long, they had arrived in Karya. Leith directed Lily all the way to his home, where he ran into the man who had saved them carrying injured citizens into the infirmary. Leith hobbled in as fast as he could to see his mother operating on a patient while Hani was administering drugs at her discretion. Both of them looked up at Leith, relieved smiles on their faces. Leith grinned back. He felt an invisible pressure lift from his shoulders and heart.

They were alive. All was well.

Leith quickly ran to the basin, washed and disinfected his hands, and rushed to help his mother, promising her that he wasn’t as badly injured as he looked.

An hour later, they were finally done and Leith’s mother was treating him instead. “Oh my… this wound isn’t shallow at all!” She looked up at Leith aghast. “Lay down right now! Hani! Get me some of that antibiotic cream… yes the red one, and clean bandages!”

Leith’s mother fussed over him for a while, patching him up and wrapping up every wound in his body from the puncture in his side all the way to the tiny scratches on his hands and face. He couldn’t help but feel exceptionally guilty as she frantically moved around the room, grabbing medications and bandages and treating him in a panicked rush. Hani was standing silently next to her, watching Leith with scared eyes.

“Really Ma, I’m doing okay. The wound in my side is pretty bad, yes, but I think it’ll heal up just fine.”

“Yes, but I need to make sure. I need to… no this can’t be like last time. I– wait for me Leith, I need to go get a clotting agent and some other–”

Leith didn’t get to hear the rest as she ran off towards the apothecary. He sadly watched after her quickly retreating form, furious at himself for coming back so injured. He was keenly aware of the fear she held about losing her children. How she was worried that even the slightest injury could lead to an irreversible infection or her paranoia that something went wrong when Leith wasn’t home for too long. After her daughter had died, she had been filled with this irrational fear that could never be assuaged. Leith understood his mom’s pain and worries, so he felt horribly guilty about making her worry about him.

Leith knew she blamed herself for his sister’s death during the last attack… but she wouldn’t listen to Leith when he told her it wasn’t her fault.

It was his fault, after all.

After she was done, she sighed, sat down next to Leith on the operating table and hugged him tightly. Leith hugged her back, choking back sobs of his own as his mother cried on his shoulder.

“I thought you had died, Leith. I thought… I didn’t want to lose you too. I…”

“It's okay Ma, I’m here. You don’t have to cry.”