forum The Hunt

Started June 18, 2019 by @PrettyLittlePyro

tune

Asawin jumped a little when Danny appeared.
“First off—“ he started “—don’t appear out of nowhere again. Second thing, thanks for killing whoever was in the woods. Third, we were at a bar when the other person, who was also a magic user, got caught so I kinda helped with out… even though it didn’t look like he needed it. Lastly, I don’t know where he is” he addressed each question Danny proposed individual.

Hosea stepped into the dim light and looked at the woman. He was holding his dagger out of sight in his cloak, knowing that his response was more than likely to annoy this lady. "Let me make one thing, perfectly clear," his words were slow and low sounding. "Young lady, there is no one in this town, or the next town, or the big city a few miles out. There is no one that could kill me. And there is noway for you to make it look like I died. I don't play dead, and you can not kill me. Is that completely and totally crystal clear?" he stepped forward until he was only a few feet from her. He was talking as if he were spelling out each word to a child. "And as for the rain-soaked alleyway, if you have ever been in some of the places I have, you would know that this is like a living in royalty. Give me one reason, one really good reason, why I should help the girl that just had and entire room of people almost get killed attacking me. One reason, why I shouldn't just break your neck right now and disappear like nothing happened," his voice was dangerously low and threatening now. His one good eye, looked like it was glowing, dark blue, dimly.

"Good God, man! I just need something to take back!" Guinevere shouted. "I'll even take your stupid eyepatch if I have to! I just need something to physically hand to my client so that they think I've done my job correctly! After that, I was hoping you could help me with a freaking war that is going on in my home! That's the whole reason I'm here! It's a yes-or-no question! Do you want to support the side of many magic users trying to prevent humans, dragons, and wyverns from tearing apart the entire continent?

Hosea moved his cloak out of the way revealing that he was holding his dagger in his hand. Then he sheathed it and walked past her. "No," he said over his shoulder. "I am not out here to fight another war for someone. I am here to learn more about healing. Find someone else. I'm done fighting."

"Was that so hard?" Guinevere asked. Deciding to end this conversation, she decided to move on and try to find that one who originally took off with Hosea in tow. Stopping short of storming off, she slowly turned back to Hosea who was already walking away.

"If you're not going to give me something, can you at least tell me where that guy who grabbed you went, please?"

Hosea glanced back at her for a moment, then sighed. He could see that she was trying to help out other people, and he, unfortunately, wasn't the type to leave someone who needed help. "I don't know where he went, but I saw where he was going," he explained, walking back over to her. "I can go with you to the spot where I lost sight of him and then I can track him from there," he decided. Then he started walking towards the edge of town. "Come on."

"To be honest, you could just point me in his general direction," Guinevere said as she began walking beside him. "I apologize for bothering you earlier.

"Don't apologize," Hosea didn't look at her. His hood hide his face, as they walked. "And I am headed in that direction anyway, so I may as well." He wasn't going to say anything in regards to the war. He'd seen enough war in his life time already. And likely when he got back home he would see more. That unfortunately was his life, and it didn't seem to matter where he went. "My name is Hosea. Hosea Williams." Technically a lie, in a sense that it wasn't his real name, but it was the name he'd used for most of his life so he went with it.

"Guinevere," she returned.

Hosea took them to the edge of the trees and stopped. "I saw him heading towards the mountain, on the other side of the forest. I don't know where he went after that, but I can track him if need be." Tracking had been one of the things he'd been trained to do from a young age. He'd mastered it, and almost no one could hide from him for a long time.

"Pfft. The other guy got caught? That's surprising." Danny says, chuckling. "So what's the plan from here? I don't really have anywhere else to go, so I'll just go along with you."
He puts his Scythe away in a swirl of pitch-black smoke, then the smoke moves to surround him and when it disappears the cloak is gone. Instead of the cloak, he has a plain white shirt and a pair of plain jeans with a belt. He runs his fingers through his hair to fix it and looks expectingly at Asa.

Asa’s wings retracted back into… his spine.
“No no, the other dude just went his own way” he scratched his neck a little before…
“Yeah… I also don’t know where to go. Once those hunters become lazy, there’s nothing very interesting we can do”

Hosea came to a stop at one point, his head went up and he seemed to be listening to something. Then he pulled himself into a nearby tree, and began looking around. An odd way to track someone, but he looked like he knew what he was doing. "Do you hear that?" he asked at one point glancing down at Guinevere. Silence set in. Absolutely nothing made a sound.

Guinevere listened, heard nothing, but reached for the handle of her sword anyway. She lowered herself into a battle-stance, feet spread apart and shoulders down, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.

"Something is watching us," Hosea's voice was low and threatening. "It has been for a while now. I just don't know where from."

A low rumble built within the huntress' throat, something akin to growl-singing that was popular with the youth in the Empire of Prominence. However, instead of a song, Guinevere snarled out a phrase in Dragontongue.

"Who is watching us?"

The dialect was one that her husband, Gawain, knew from birth and taught to his wife when they were first dating, but it was an ancient form of the more modern Draconic (as Hebrew is to Yiddish or Old English is to modern-day English).

Hosea looked at her for a moment and was quiet. "I don't know," he replied to her. He understood some of what she had said, not all of it. He'd caught the words who and watching, and sort of pieced together what she'd said. "Let's keep moving and hope whatever is following is something friendly."

Her guard dropped and her jaw hung open.

“Wait, holy shit, you understood that?”

Before she could continue, something heavy dropped on top of Guinevere, pressing her body into the dirt and leaves, causing her to lose grip of her sword.

Asawin turned when his right wing twitched a little due to the softest of sound vibrations.
“The hell was that?” He said softly, more to himself than anyone else.

Hosea whipped around, his dagger in hand already, and he was already in his fighting stance. Something landed in front of him and swung at him with incredible speed. Purely on reaction to the unexpected attack, time came to a complete stop and jumped back. "Nice try buddy," he said taking a few steps back and forth. His attacker looked very surprised at the fact that Hosea had been in one spot and was suddenly in another.

As soon as the shape was off of Guinevere's back, she pushed herself up with her arms. Spitting out a clump of wet leaves, she rumbled in Dragontongue "Oh, you did NOT just ruin my makeup!" Her face merely had a few dirt smudges, but the huntress stood and grabbed her sword. Water that ran off of the blade became tinged with purple poison, the green grass underneath curling and smoking when the poison touched it. The poison didn't affect her thanks to her husband, but it certainly did a number anything unfortunate enough to come into contact with the blade.

"Let's dance!"

Hosea looked at their opponents. One, two… He took several more steps around the figure in front of him. Three in the tree behind me. He dipped under an attack and continued his assessment. Four coming up on Guinevere. Five and six to the left of me, and seven and eight, to my right. Greeaaat.

The bushes and trees behind Guinevere rustled, and four figures leaped out with blades in their hands. Planting her feet, she swung her Greatsword in a mighty crescent, cleaving the first and second ones cleanly in half, slicing the third one in the abdomen, and leaving a deep gash in the side of the fourth. The poison worked fast, the third barely having time to collect his entrails before expiring and the fourth falling to his knees to cough up a heavy gout of blood.

As those four lay dead or dying, Guinevere raced to Hosea's side to back him up.

Hosea flinched when Guinevere came back to back with him, but he didn't pull away. He wouldn't say anything, but he'd had a bad past with a woman and a poisoned sword. He was distracted by the sight of a symbol on one of their attackers. He recognized it immediately. "Shit, it would be these guys wouldn't it," he grumbled. "These guys are some magic hunters that I ran into a few towns over. I pissed them off when I got away from them. Four times. And according to their leader, I'm the only one to ever have gotten away from them even once. I didn't believe them. Apparently they were butt-hurt enough to have to chase me down again. Their mistake." He looked around the clearing at the different people there. There he is. He spotted who he was looking for. Time slowed and he walked between the people surrounding them and stood directly in front of their leader. Then he let time return to normal.

Danny noticed the slight twitch in his wing but didn't notice anything different himself. The powers of Death didn't give him heightened senses, and his human senses weren't the best too.
"Well," Danny says, confused. "I don't know, so maybe you could tell me."