Chapter 5: Basten’s tricks and the Fatal Vorpal Force!

The hunter found his angle and prepared to strike. Carefully and without a sound, he took his lance off his back and gripped its long handle with his hands. The body and point of the lance looked like they were caked with earth, masking the shine of metal. It was actually an obscuring enchantment, rather than mere dirt.

The Nortrieln hunter’s lance is a weapon of which there are many variations. The most common however is a long pole that ends in a point, a guard built for bracing against a shoulder or waist. The grip is often longer than that of a two handed greatsword. Frequently the pole has a subtle bladed edge, though at that point one has to wonder if it can really be considered a lance.

For hunters that have not grown strong enough, it is a cumbersome thing, good for one fierce charge in hopes of slaying one’s prey, though frequently lances are useful for building a temporary shelter around, for transporting a whole carcass or whatever use the hunter can find for it. It wasn’t odd for many hunters to have things built into or enchantments laid into a lance that had nothing to do with combat. Naturally a lance is extremely valuable to a hunter who rides upon some other being.

The lengths of the lances could get truly absurd as the thicker the hide of the prey the longer a lance would need to be for a single hit kill.

It would be rare that a minotaur would not have the strength to use a regular sized hunting lance. Curiously the lance the minotaur had was not larger than what a regular strong humanoid could use. Usually a hunter that was a minotaur would wield a far larger lance.

The minotaur took a strange breath that seemed to take no air. He was in a shadow almost right under the feasting basten. He thrust out the lance and a moment after, muscles on his arms twisting like serpents and a worrying crack coming from his bones! There was a terrifying amount of force in that thrust, but that force travelled along the lance and sank into the weapon. The lance was going straight for the basten’s right ear! If it hit, it would pierce the brain, and send fatal force throughout the body!

The basten however had been waiting for this moment, secretly aware of the hunter all the while, and just as the hunter began his thrust, and it threw the squealing boar it had been tormenting in the path of the deadly blow while flinging itself out of the way.

The lance pierced the boar and the unfortunate animal shuddered once and then the deathstrike took hold. The physical force of the lance was not that fatal, what was fatal was the force that had been dispersed throughout the boar’s body. This was vorpal force! Power converted into wounding essence! Bane of regeneration and healing!

For physical martial combatants, this vorpal force changed a deadly blow into a killing blow! In Kigan there were even creatures that could survive having their head cut off, so naturally to kill such dangerous things, transforming physical force into vorpal force was useful. With it one could even wound spirits! However, not all beings have the right affinities or nature to transform force to vorpal force or even create it.

The basten did not waste a moment of time, and its tail slammed against the ground even as the hunter began to move, realising he had failed. The basten acted even before the vorpal force had killed the boar!

The tail did not slam at where the hunter was, but rather at something else. The hunter let out a bellow as some skeletal remains of the basten’s previous meals burst from the ground and the claws of long dead beings raked him. It was not a fatal blow and the hunter rolled back from the crude trap.

Trusting his instincts the hunter pulled up the shadows like a sheet as the basten followed the trap up with a flurry of whipping strikes with its tail. The fur of a basten is bladed, but instead of cutting, the fiend’s tail just splashed in and out of the shadow as if going into water.

The hunter did not counter-attack. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t. Converting physical force to vorpal was not something that was to be done lightly. Though there are exceptions, most techniques for the conversion have a heavy cost.

The hunter did not have the power to strike again, and to attempt to use vorpal force again would have been the same as cutting off his own arms. No, he had to gain some time, recover his strength make and opening and slay the basten!

Only someone of a much higher power could instil vorpal force in all of their attacks!

The basten swept a few of its paws on the ground again. The hunter flung himself away as teeth and fangs shot out from the ground towards his back. This was the basten’s feeding ground, how could it not have numerous traps set up?

The hunter wrapped a shadow around his body like a cloak and flitted around the basten. The cunning fiend expended several more traps, but quickly stopped once it realised the minotaur was evading all of them and using shadow to protect against the rest.

The basten flipped up a mass of skeletons with its tail and quite promptly, ran away!

It had clearly decided that while it wanted to eat the minotaur, the hunter was far too troublesome to deal with. The basten didn’t realise that the hunter was actually at his limits. A few more strikes and his shadowcloak would have been undone.

The hunter snuffed in irritation, but he pierced through the debris the basten had sent his way and chased after it. He kicked off of the ygg trees to try and catch up, shadow still wrapped around his body.

The basten broke branches and flung them behind at the hunter, but the hunter just pierced through them and drew closer.

It abruptly looped around a ygg and tossed itself and several branches at the hunter. The hunter tried to dodge but the basten tore into him and the shadow he wore was torn off. The hunter quickly put a ygg between him and the fiend. His body shuddered from having the the shadow forcibly torn, his heartflame quivered, but then steadied.

He swung his lance out, intending to bat the basten away, but the lance just met air.

He quickly looked around and spotted it, the fiend had fled again!

Letting out a low bovine roar he pulled at the shadows again and strung them between two mighty yggs, then he charged in the opposite direction to the basten. The hunter was shot out from this makeshift slingshot and sped toward the basten.

The fiend glanced behind it and then let out a yowl of dismay. It sped up and began twisting through the yggs, trying to lose the hunter, but the minotaur put a hand inside the guard of his lance and pulled out a shadow.

He used this like a grappling hook and line. Thus he kept up with the basten.

They went like this for a while, hunter and predator turned prey.

The basten stopped once more. It was stopped before it began to exhaust its stamina. The fiend sensed that the hunter could keep chasing and that it couldn’t leave him behind. The basten was also getting close to areas of Sool Forest it wasn’t familiar with and there were many creatures far more dangerous than itself.

The hunter also stopped.

The two circled each other.

The hunter stopped again.

“Come, strike me fiend!” the hunter yelled.

The hunter made an opening in his own defence.

The basten was not as cunning as it could have been and took the bait, rushing forwards.

The hunter braced himself and at the last moment, thrust out, his muscles twisting like tormented serpents and his bones cracking as if they were shattering into shards, channelling force into the lance, making it a vorpal blow!

A clang resounded throughout the forest.

The hunter’s lance went flying into a ygg, the point bursting through the trunk and the leaves wilting.

Neither the basten or the hunter was dead!

The hunter was tossed along the ground, earth churning as he slid through it.

The basten however had gotten the worst of the exchange. It was thrashing violently on the ground. It had at the last moment, opened its mouth and spat out a bone that it kept inside its body. It was not a bone of something it ate, but rather a shard of some mighty beast’s shinbone, a mighty beast that had been killed by some other, ever stronger being.

The bone had deflected the lance, and had not even suffered a scratch, but the vorpal force still entered into the basten. It was not able to kill the basten, but as inexperienced with dealing with such wounding energies as the basten was, it had to struggle mightily to resist it.

Unfortunately for it, the hunter recovered quicker and taking a longer almost needle-like dagger from his belt, the hunter plunged it into the side of the fiend’s head. The basten shuddered and the vorpal force that it had been battling overtook its body.

The hunter let out a long slow breath that seemed to put out no air.

He was victorious, but he would have no time to rest, as he had to quickly take the corpse away and to the Crimsoneye Lodge before he attracted other predators and scavengers.