10 – Bear hunting

The forest was dark and sinister now that Mateus was paying attention to all the little noises that he could hear. Every rustle of a leaf, every bird taking flight from a branch had him turn his head to look at the source of the noise, scanning carefully every inch of space he could see with his machine eyes.

The night was not a problem; he could see in the dark pretty well now. It felt like when he was under the effect of night vision spells, back when he still trained with the other heroes. They never gave him such a spell to use in the battlefield, but during the training they used it plenty of times, while under the careful scrutiny of the royal guards. They had to be perfect, there, even more so than in actual battle.

In battle, in fact, it was he who was in charge of supporting the rest of the party with group spells. He could still remember the last one he cast, right before he died. He had casted a group strength and haste spell on the other four, so that they could escape the blast radius of the magic bomb.

He noticed his mind was wandering on its own. He was, after all, in no real danger, at least according to what he knew about his nanite body. He was in a much better position that he was, say, back at the cavern where he only had a little blob of silvery fluid as his own body.

And yet, the forest triggered that primal sense of fear that was deeply rooted in his mind, much like in any human’s mind. His fake glands contributed for a non-existent, simulated electrochemistry in his brain that turned the dial up to eleven. He felt the world slow down, quite literally, because the clock was ticking so slow it seemed not to even move at all.

Computer confirmed it. He had, in his irrational fear, accessed all the computing power he had in order to slow down the perception of time. His foot impacted the ground in slow motion, reverberating in an extremely low pitch before he decided to go back to normal time. The few motes of dust that rose from the impact sped up, and the sound waves compressed until the normal pitch of the world was restored.

He looked around. There were many noises, but not the one he was looking for. He kept walking in the general direction from where he remembered the beast’s noise was coming from. One step after the other, but now the sound of his own steps was drowning the eerie silence of the night.

A growl. A roar.

There, in the distance. He could feel it, it was close. He could hear it, the noise loud enough to not be drowned by the forest’s maw, to survive through layers of foliage and wet dew. Mateus ran, his feet flying like the wind, his body hitting branches and leaves alike.

A yelp. A little, small scream in a high pitch. The closer he got, the more he could hear. And the faster he ran.

Mateus felt his feet gain even more speed. He sped through the thick underbrush, barreling through the vegetation without caring about anything else but what was happening a few hundred meters away from him. The muffled cries came intermixed with yells and pants, followed by the rustle of leaves and the stomping of a large mass chasing whoever was trying to run away.

Mateus was close now. Very close. Just another bush.

He moved the branches away.

The small figure of a child, barely a streak of blur in the dark, shot through his vision.

Barely behind the kid, a huge beast, dark against the sky. It stood on its two hind legs, and was about to swipe a clawed paw at the defenseless small figure. He was too close; he wasn’t going to make it. The beast would reach him, and he would die.

Mateus lunged forwards, and jumped in-between the kid and the claws. They split the air, hissing with dangerous energy, and two red, glowing eyes could be seen behind them. Observing their prey get slaughtered.

The attack was powerful, an enormous amount of force behind that swipe of claws. They split the metallic tissues apart, tearing and opening and separating them as they cut through. A few nanites began to fall on the ground, destroyed, in a shower of silvery ash. Mateus hardened the parts of his body where the claws were going through, and after a few centimeters, the attack lost all its energy and stopped. I should have fashioned a shield of nanites instead of using my body. He thought. He shook his head; the beast was still here.

The hit, coming from above his right shoulder, was so strong that it managed to plant his feet a few millimeters into the soil. Meanwhile, from behind him, the noise of leaves and branches snapping told him that the kid was running away from here. He wanted to chase him. He wanted to go after him.

A growl, a wet snarl that sent spit and hot air into his face told him that he needed to deal with the beast first, instead.

With his hand, he gripped the paw that was still stuck into his shoulder and twisted it away. He applied all the force he could with his fingers, and twisted again until he could hear the bones breaking and the ligaments giving way.

The beast roared in pain. Only now could Mateus make up the dark brown fur, the large snout, the short furry ears. But he didn’t care. He stopped the incoming other paw with his free hand, his whole arm a solid piece of steel now that he had the time to properly react. He then used it to bash its head, and the metal rang with the vibrations of each impact.

He returned his arm to normal, so that he could move it again. He lifted the beast with his two hands up in the air, and slammed it against a tree.

The trunk groaned under the heavy strain. The tree shook and a few brown leaves, the few that were left of this deciduous tree in winter, fell to the ground. Where the animal landed, it shattered branches and peeled the bark away with its back. It rolled on its side and, swaying, struggled to all fours and tried to reach Mateus again.

Mateus jumped in the air. The force in his legs created a small depression in the ground, propelling him upwards and from the apex of his parabola he looked down at the animal a couple meters below him. His face hosted a slight, fleeting grin, while he prepared to land onto its spine with his knee, putting all the force he had behind this attack.

His knee impacted the spine, and the nanites arranged themselves so that the impact area would be small and precise. Deadly. It severed the spinal chord right under where the hit struck true and, with a wet crunch of broken tissues, the rest of the animal went limp.

Barely its head and front paws could move now. But Mateus didn’t have time to finish the kill, he needed to go after the kid before he could get lost in the forest again.

He tried to run, but immediately stumbled and almost fell. There was something like a rope that connected him with the unmoving body of the animal he had just brutalized. He looked down at his foot, and saw a thin line of nanites, glimmering in the night with their silvery thread that was almost invisible but quite resistant. The thread of metal went from him all the way to under the beast, kept in tension by his attempts at running away.

He groaned.

“Computer, come on! I’m not going to let you consume that! Let me go!” he pleaded.

The answer was clear. Computer’s intentions were clear.

“No! You told me yourself, I can’t keep this form if I become too massive. And I need to stay as a human!”

The text was like a chorus, like a chant from the deep. Like a desire of a beast.

“Grow what? What do you want?”

“Grow how? What are you—”

He looked at the dead beast. It looked like a bear, but larger, more impressive.

“Wait.” He didn’t think he should know what a bear even was. “Wait, I see! You want to grow your knowledge?”

“Scan it. Scan it but don’t assimilate it.”

He felt the nanites change behavior. They invaded all of the beast, which was now laying lifeless on the forest floor. They took it apart, disassembled it, reassembled it again. Then, in the end, they retracted. And now Mateus knew of the oversized bear like he knew himself.

With his feet now free to move, he took off in a hurry, going after the runaway kid.