Chapter 35: 35
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Rigel was briskly awoken by a powerful heaving cough. He tried to open his eyes but was met with fierce resistance; there had been some stray pieces of ash that must have snuck in. The bloated swelling discomforted Rigel, but he elected to ignore it for now.
He soon noticed that he was floating on his back in the middle of an ash-covered basin. The glade was no longer- there was only burnt stumps and stray branches poking out of the water in a radius of a few hundred feet.
Rigel groaned and rolled over to his stomach, standing up in the process. Through his bloated eyes, he could only make out the outlines of the remainders of the plant life, but had a clear idea of the picture he was viewing.
"Hahaha," he cackled while coughing. "Can't kill me~~ Can't kill me~~ I'm unkillable; so try your best!" he started to sing with a very hoarse voice.
After his moment of elation, Rigel started to seriously inspect his own condition.
"One busted shoulder, one wounded shoulder, 2 near-blind eyes, one set of afflicted lungs, various gashes, cuts, and bruises. All in all, I'm doing pretty well, considering the amount of wood that was burning. I wonder how flammable that stuff is for it to spread so fast." Rigel started talking to himself about various things to work out the kinks and roughness of his voice.
After getting it mostly settled, Rigel started to cautiously crawl in an arbitrary direction. He was wary of any stray pieces of wood suddenly impaling him, so he took his time to probe in front of himself with a long stick he found by crawling atop of. It was about 3 to 4 feet long.
Rigel and his partner worked hard together to safely traverse the ruined section of the swamp. The water was blighted, the trees abolished, and the wildlife was butchered. In his journey, Rigel found the corpses of 4 different creatures, with 2 unique species between them. 3 of the bodies were of some relatively large, yellow and orange pythons.
Rigel took a corpse of one of these specimens and stretched it out, measuring it with a rough estimate of about 20 feet long. Amazed, he took a mental note to look out for alive ones, as snakes had a tendency to thrive well in water.
The other type of beast he found was also a snake, but this one was far smaller, being maybe a total of 3 feet long. It had an intricate spiral pattern consisting of interwoven brown lines of varying shades and colorations. Rigel couldn't consider the snake an anaconda, python, or boa, for he knew too little of herpetology to accurately designate it a genus.
Rigel also figured that, most likely, the snake was none of the above, for its head shape was quite peculiar. It had a jagged mouth and nose, that, from above, looked like a triangle it was so pointed.
Rigel felt a profound sense of wonder at the beauty of this fantasy world at this moment. He was currently at least hundreds, if not thousands, of feet underground wading through a swamp that he burned down a few hours ago, all the while discovering new species of snakes that most certainly never even existed in his previous world.
Earth? What is this derisory Earth? The world that Rigel was currently in had everything that he needed or wanted! Boundless opportunities awaited over this here horizon. Mana, magic, beasts, mages, runes; all were better than anything that Earth could ever provide. Earth left Rigel for dead. In fact, it did kill him. It ruined him.
Rigel clenched his fists and scowled, his eyes turning red and blotchiness pervading around them.
What was Earth, indeed.
"Sigh, I can barely remember what Earth was anymore. It's such a small part of my life, now," Rigel confided passionately to his stick companion. "You see, Stickly, I am actually not from this world, believe it or not. I know, I know, hard to imagine little ol' me being an alien, but it's the truth, ya know? I even have a quest from God to rule a kingdom with my mighty fist! How about you, Stickly? What's your backstory?"
Needless to say, the inanimate object did not reply.
"Stickly, you're killing me!" Rigel whined. "C'mon, man. Speak to me. You know you can trust me, right?"
Rigel participated in meandering with Stickly for the better part of his meandering around the swamp, still finding nothing of interest.
"Stickly," he finally said while stopping. "I miss Eureka. I hope we find her soon, don't you?"
"..." the stick faithfully replied.
"Thanks, buddy." Rigel nodded and took another step forward.
The pair was still crawling through the desecrated portion of the swamp, but Rigel could barely make out the picture of a treeline in the distance. He grinned and started taking steps forward with more and more haste, earnestly looking forward to the return of the trees.
Rigel was sick of being half-underwater at any given time. He was starting to feel his skin rot and wanted to get out as soon as possible.
On top of that, Rigel was starving. He had thought of trying to cook the corpses he had found, but was very unsure of how long it had been, exactly, and figured that such corpses would spoil quite quickly in the voracious heat, so he abstained.
Some time passed, about 3 hours, and Rigel was finally closing in on the wooden mass of tentacles. The surrounding area of water was significantly less polluted with ash than the previous section, but had significantly more debris in the form of branches and logs.
Rigel had to be very careful to not accidentally impale himself at this point. Since his eyesight still hadn't recovered, the man found himself spending most of his time on his hands and knees balancing on various logs or hopping in between clusters of sticks that had grouped together into small, loose piles reaching a few feet in diameter.
Some of these sticks were just barely under the water's surface, causing Rigel to almost get jabbed in the stomach, chest, or neck, depending on how deep it was and if he was on a submerged log or not.
Stickly assisted Rigel greatly in this regard, acting as his landmine locator. Rigel felt like he could consider himself indebted to his newfound friend.
After a long journey fraught with peril, Rigel finally made it back to the non-eradicated portion of the swamp. Just as he stepped up onto dry land, he noticed that there was already new, fresh life budding out from the charred wood. He took slight mental note of this, but was overall too exhausted to bring much thought to it.
With Stickly in his off hand, Rigel painstakingly climbed up a menial slope and, once at the top, rolled onto his back and laid down. He slowly felt himself dozing off before, suddenly, he heard a hissing noise come up from below him.
Rigel felt a eerie gaze lock onto him and carefully rolled over to his stomach to look in between the gaps of the vines. Below, he saw the long, coiled figure of one of the yellow and orange pythons he had seen a corpse of earlier. He made a slight gasp at the realization, causing the beast to lock onto him even more fervently.
Rigel sighed slightly and grasped Stickly tighter. His grasp was barely enough to hold Stickly off the ground, but just that much sufficed. He stuck the stick through a hole in the vines and plunged his arm down with it, sticking the end of the stick up against his shoulder.
The snake was about 15 feet beneath him, so the end of the stick was about 10 feet above it. This snake seemed slightly larger than the corpse he bothered to try and measure, so he guessed that it was about 23 to 24 feet long, leaving it plenty of room to strike him with, even that far away.
Rigel tried to control his breathing better and participated in a staring contest with the snake. Both contestants' gazes met the other's with sparks. Both eyed the other as food, nothing more, nothing less.
Suddenly, the python shot up at Rigel in the time that he could blink, with its huge jaws open and fangs extracted.
Rigel barely managed to aim the stick's end at the snake's head. The snake kept up its trajectory and was caught on the side of the mouth by the pointy end, promptly pierced through.
The beast tensed up, body flailing in agony, and ripped Rigel's arm downwards, pulling it out of its socket.
Rigel clenched his teeth and tried to maintain his grip on the makeshift spear, but couldn't manage it. He watched in dejection as it fell down with the snake, still embedded in its mouth.
The beast whipped its head around and flailed like a rabid animal, eventually dislodging the stick and flinging it out and far away.
Rigel growled and launched a fireball at the snake. It smashed into its head, burning its scales and torching an eye out. This further induced the snake's convulsions.
Rigel had to be careful to not catch a stray tail to the face, lest it blinded him. He bided his time until the beast calmed down before jumping down while firing off a fireball. It missed and flew into the water, causing a steam explosion, which luckily grabbed the snake's attention.
While the beast was distracted, Rigel jumped from his perch and landed around its neck, gripping as tightly as his enervated body would allow. After securing himself, he grasped the head and blew a fireball up point-blank.
The resulting explosion caused a blinding light and flung Rigel backwards. Searing agony tormented his hand and, as he was falling off the snake, Rigel took a look at it. It was blown clean off- his right hand was now just a stump.
Rigel, although dejected by the loss of both his hand and faithful companion, felt satisfied in his struggle against the beast just as he slammed hard into the water.
Submerged, Rigel felt a profound calling. The universe itself seemed to want him to fall asleep. He felt extremely compelled to follow this divine calling of his, but suddenly remembered the snake. He didn't know if it was even dead or not, as even if it was, it would possibly rot if he fell asleep now.
Thus, Rigel, with all of his willpower, forced himself to stay awake and breached the water's surface. He haphazardly waltzed over to where the snake was and found nothing. Rigel shook his head and saw some remnant bubbles surfacing from the water and reached down.
The blood-soaked, half-naked man searched around momentarily and found the body of the snake. Rigel groaned and grabbed its head with his one remaining hand and heaved upwards, slipping and falling backwards.
"ARGH! Water, I command thee! Lift this fucker up onto the trees!" he yelled while fueling mana into the surrounding water.
Currents started swaying and water focused around the submerged body of the snake, getting under it and then explosively shooting it up into the vines 15 feet above.
Rigel watched the massive corpse ragdolling upwards with a smile on his face before feeling some rebound from the overuse of spells. He noticed a bit of blood trickling down from his eyes but that was the extent of it, to his relief.
Rigel decidedly clenched his teeth and put his other hand just above his stump and cauterized it with a small heat spell. The anguish was incomprehensible and Rigel felt his vision going black, but just managed to stay conscious by willpower alone.
He spit up some blood and had more trickling down his eyes from the rebound, but felt the effort was worth it.
Rigel decided to go find Stickly before cooking the snake, but after 30 minutes of frantically searching, mournfully gave up on the effort since he was about to fall over at any moment.
"Stickly," he said, voice hoarse, "I'll miss you. Stay safe," and wiped some tears from his eyes.
Climbing up into the canopy, Rigel approached his loot with a dull gleam in his eyes.
"2 more times," he muttered, and used the heat spell to cook a small portion of the snake from the outside. He coughed up some more blood and felt even more lightheaded, but persevered regardless.
"One. More. Time," he groaned painfully and used the same heat spell to incinerate the flesh around one of the beast's fangs.
The resulting nausea caused Rigel to immediately vomit. He just barely turned away from his meal before profusely regurgitating into into the water below. As he did, Rigel noticed that a large volume of the vomit was bloodied.
After finishing up, Rigel wiped his mouth and turned back to the corpse and grasped the freed fang, using it to slice its own scales open and access the glistening meat hidden within.
Rigel voraciously gorged himself on the snake until he was eating completely raw meat, having eaten all of the cooked bits.
Rigel finally decided that it was time to stop and collapsed atop of the corpse, unconscious before he even made contact with it.
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Rigel was briskly awoken by a powerful heaving cough. He tried to open his eyes but was met with fierce resistance; there had been some stray pieces of ash that must have snuck in. The bloated swelling discomforted Rigel, but he elected to ignore it for now.
He soon noticed that he was floating on his back in the middle of an ash-covered basin. The glade was no longer- there was only burnt stumps and stray branches poking out of the water in a radius of a few hundred feet.
Rigel groaned and rolled over to his stomach, standing up in the process. Through his bloated eyes, he could only make out the outlines of the remainders of the plant life, but had a clear idea of the picture he was viewing.
"Hahaha," he cackled while coughing. "Can't kill me~~ Can't kill me~~ I'm unkillable; so try your best!" he started to sing with a very hoarse voice.
After his moment of elation, Rigel started to seriously inspect his own condition.
"One busted shoulder, one wounded shoulder, 2 near-blind eyes, one set of afflicted lungs, various gashes, cuts, and bruises. All in all, I'm doing pretty well, considering the amount of wood that was burning. I wonder how flammable that stuff is for it to spread so fast." Rigel started talking to himself about various things to work out the kinks and roughness of his voice.
After getting it mostly settled, Rigel started to cautiously crawl in an arbitrary direction. He was wary of any stray pieces of wood suddenly impaling him, so he took his time to probe in front of himself with a long stick he found by crawling atop of. It was about 3 to 4 feet long.
Rigel and his partner worked hard together to safely traverse the ruined section of the swamp. The water was blighted, the trees abolished, and the wildlife was butchered. In his journey, Rigel found the corpses of 4 different creatures, with 2 unique species between them. 3 of the bodies were of some relatively large, yellow and orange pythons.
Rigel took a corpse of one of these specimens and stretched it out, measuring it with a rough estimate of about 20 feet long. Amazed, he took a mental note to look out for alive ones, as snakes had a tendency to thrive well in water.
The other type of beast he found was also a snake, but this one was far smaller, being maybe a total of 3 feet long. It had an intricate spiral pattern consisting of interwoven brown lines of varying shades and colorations. Rigel couldn't consider the snake an anaconda, python, or boa, for he knew too little of herpetology to accurately designate it a genus.
Rigel also figured that, most likely, the snake was none of the above, for its head shape was quite peculiar. It had a jagged mouth and nose, that, from above, looked like a triangle it was so pointed.
Rigel felt a profound sense of wonder at the beauty of this fantasy world at this moment. He was currently at least hundreds, if not thousands, of feet underground wading through a swamp that he burned down a few hours ago, all the while discovering new species of snakes that most certainly never even existed in his previous world.
Earth? What is this derisory Earth? The world that Rigel was currently in had everything that he needed or wanted! Boundless opportunities awaited over this here horizon. Mana, magic, beasts, mages, runes; all were better than anything that Earth could ever provide. Earth left Rigel for dead. In fact, it did kill him. It ruined him.
Rigel clenched his fists and scowled, his eyes turning red and blotchiness pervading around them.
What was Earth, indeed.
"Sigh, I can barely remember what Earth was anymore. It's such a small part of my life, now," Rigel confided passionately to his stick companion. "You see, Stickly, I am actually not from this world, believe it or not. I know, I know, hard to imagine little ol' me being an alien, but it's the truth, ya know? I even have a quest from God to rule a kingdom with my mighty fist! How about you, Stickly? What's your backstory?"
Needless to say, the inanimate object did not reply.
"Stickly, you're killing me!" Rigel whined. "C'mon, man. Speak to me. You know you can trust me, right?"
Rigel participated in meandering with Stickly for the better part of his meandering around the swamp, still finding nothing of interest.
"Stickly," he finally said while stopping. "I miss Eureka. I hope we find her soon, don't you?"
"..." the stick faithfully replied.
"Thanks, buddy." Rigel nodded and took another step forward.
The pair was still crawling through the desecrated portion of the swamp, but Rigel could barely make out the picture of a treeline in the distance. He grinned and started taking steps forward with more and more haste, earnestly looking forward to the return of the trees.
Rigel was sick of being half-underwater at any given time. He was starting to feel his skin rot and wanted to get out as soon as possible.
On top of that, Rigel was starving. He had thought of trying to cook the corpses he had found, but was very unsure of how long it had been, exactly, and figured that such corpses would spoil quite quickly in the voracious heat, so he abstained.
Some time passed, about 3 hours, and Rigel was finally closing in on the wooden mass of tentacles. The surrounding area of water was significantly less polluted with ash than the previous section, but had significantly more debris in the form of branches and logs.
Rigel had to be very careful to not accidentally impale himself at this point. Since his eyesight still hadn't recovered, the man found himself spending most of his time on his hands and knees balancing on various logs or hopping in between clusters of sticks that had grouped together into small, loose piles reaching a few feet in diameter.
Some of these sticks were just barely under the water's surface, causing Rigel to almost get jabbed in the stomach, chest, or neck, depending on how deep it was and if he was on a submerged log or not.
Stickly assisted Rigel greatly in this regard, acting as his landmine locator. Rigel felt like he could consider himself indebted to his newfound friend.
After a long journey fraught with peril, Rigel finally made it back to the non-eradicated portion of the swamp. Just as he stepped up onto dry land, he noticed that there was already new, fresh life budding out from the charred wood. He took slight mental note of this, but was overall too exhausted to bring much thought to it.
With Stickly in his off hand, Rigel painstakingly climbed up a menial slope and, once at the top, rolled onto his back and laid down. He slowly felt himself dozing off before, suddenly, he heard a hissing noise come up from below him.
Rigel felt a eerie gaze lock onto him and carefully rolled over to his stomach to look in between the gaps of the vines. Below, he saw the long, coiled figure of one of the yellow and orange pythons he had seen a corpse of earlier. He made a slight gasp at the realization, causing the beast to lock onto him even more fervently.
Rigel sighed slightly and grasped Stickly tighter. His grasp was barely enough to hold Stickly off the ground, but just that much sufficed. He stuck the stick through a hole in the vines and plunged his arm down with it, sticking the end of the stick up against his shoulder.
The snake was about 15 feet beneath him, so the end of the stick was about 10 feet above it. This snake seemed slightly larger than the corpse he bothered to try and measure, so he guessed that it was about 23 to 24 feet long, leaving it plenty of room to strike him with, even that far away.
Rigel tried to control his breathing better and participated in a staring contest with the snake. Both contestants' gazes met the other's with sparks. Both eyed the other as food, nothing more, nothing less.
Suddenly, the python shot up at Rigel in the time that he could blink, with its huge jaws open and fangs extracted.
Rigel barely managed to aim the stick's end at the snake's head. The snake kept up its trajectory and was caught on the side of the mouth by the pointy end, promptly pierced through.
The beast tensed up, body flailing in agony, and ripped Rigel's arm downwards, pulling it out of its socket.
Rigel clenched his teeth and tried to maintain his grip on the makeshift spear, but couldn't manage it. He watched in dejection as it fell down with the snake, still embedded in its mouth.
The beast whipped its head around and flailed like a rabid animal, eventually dislodging the stick and flinging it out and far away.
Rigel growled and launched a fireball at the snake. It smashed into its head, burning its scales and torching an eye out. This further induced the snake's convulsions.
Rigel had to be careful to not catch a stray tail to the face, lest it blinded him. He bided his time until the beast calmed down before jumping down while firing off a fireball. It missed and flew into the water, causing a steam explosion, which luckily grabbed the snake's attention.
While the beast was distracted, Rigel jumped from his perch and landed around its neck, gripping as tightly as his enervated body would allow. After securing himself, he grasped the head and blew a fireball up point-blank.
The resulting explosion caused a blinding light and flung Rigel backwards. Searing agony tormented his hand and, as he was falling off the snake, Rigel took a look at it. It was blown clean off- his right hand was now just a stump.
Rigel, although dejected by the loss of both his hand and faithful companion, felt satisfied in his struggle against the beast just as he slammed hard into the water.
Submerged, Rigel felt a profound calling. The universe itself seemed to want him to fall asleep. He felt extremely compelled to follow this divine calling of his, but suddenly remembered the snake. He didn't know if it was even dead or not, as even if it was, it would possibly rot if he fell asleep now.
Thus, Rigel, with all of his willpower, forced himself to stay awake and breached the water's surface. He haphazardly waltzed over to where the snake was and found nothing. Rigel shook his head and saw some remnant bubbles surfacing from the water and reached down.
The blood-soaked, half-naked man searched around momentarily and found the body of the snake. Rigel groaned and grabbed its head with his one remaining hand and heaved upwards, slipping and falling backwards.
"ARGH! Water, I command thee! Lift this fucker up onto the trees!" he yelled while fueling mana into the surrounding water.
Currents started swaying and water focused around the submerged body of the snake, getting under it and then explosively shooting it up into the vines 15 feet above.
Rigel watched the massive corpse ragdolling upwards with a smile on his face before feeling some rebound from the overuse of spells. He noticed a bit of blood trickling down from his eyes but that was the extent of it, to his relief.
Rigel decidedly clenched his teeth and put his other hand just above his stump and cauterized it with a small heat spell. The anguish was incomprehensible and Rigel felt his vision going black, but just managed to stay conscious by willpower alone.
He spit up some blood and had more trickling down his eyes from the rebound, but felt the effort was worth it.
Rigel decided to go find Stickly before cooking the snake, but after 30 minutes of frantically searching, mournfully gave up on the effort since he was about to fall over at any moment.
"Stickly," he said, voice hoarse, "I'll miss you. Stay safe," and wiped some tears from his eyes.
Climbing up into the canopy, Rigel approached his loot with a dull gleam in his eyes.
"2 more times," he muttered, and used the heat spell to cook a small portion of the snake from the outside. He coughed up some more blood and felt even more lightheaded, but persevered regardless.
"One. More. Time," he groaned painfully and used the same heat spell to incinerate the flesh around one of the beast's fangs.
The resulting nausea caused Rigel to immediately vomit. He just barely turned away from his meal before profusely regurgitating into into the water below. As he did, Rigel noticed that a large volume of the vomit was bloodied.
After finishing up, Rigel wiped his mouth and turned back to the corpse and grasped the freed fang, using it to slice its own scales open and access the glistening meat hidden within.
Rigel voraciously gorged himself on the snake until he was eating completely raw meat, having eaten all of the cooked bits.
Rigel finally decided that it was time to stop and collapsed atop of the corpse, unconscious before he even made contact with it.
Rigel was briskly awoken by a powerful heaving cough. He tried to open his eyes but was met with fierce resistance; there had been some stray pieces of ash that must have snuck in. The bloated swelling discomforted Rigel, but he elected to ignore it for now.He soon noticed that he was floating on his back in the middle of an ash-covered basin. The glade was no longer- there was only burnt stumps and stray branches poking out of the water in a radius of a few hundred feet.Rigel groaned and rolled over to his stomach, standing up in the process. Through his bloated eyes, he could only make out the outlines of the remainders of the plant life, but had a clear idea of the picture he was viewing."Hahaha," he cackled while coughing. "Can't kill me~~ Can't kill me~~ I'm unkillable; so try your best!" he started to sing with a very hoarse voice.After his moment of elation, Rigel started to seriously inspect his own condition."One busted shoulder, one wounded shoulder, 2 near-blind eyes, one set of afflicted lungs, various gashes, cuts, and bruises. All in all, I'm doing pretty well, considering the amount of wood that was burning. I wonder how flammable that stuff is for it to spread so fast." Rigel started talking to himself about various things to work out the kinks and roughness of his voice.After getting it mostly settled, Rigel started to cautiously crawl in an arbitrary direction. He was wary of any stray pieces of wood suddenly impaling him, so he took his time to probe in front of himself with a long stick he found by crawling atop of. It was about 3 to 4 feet long.Rigel and his partner worked hard together to safely traverse the ruined section of the swamp. The water was blighted, the trees abolished, and the wildlife was butchered. In his journey, Rigel found the corpses of 4 different creatures, with 2 unique species between them. 3 of the bodies were of some relatively large, yellow and orange pythons.Rigel took a corpse of one of these specimens and stretched it out, measuring it with a rough estimate of about 20 feet long. Amazed, he took a mental note to look out for alive ones, as snakes had a tendency to thrive well in water.The other type of beast he found was also a snake, but this one was far smaller, being maybe a total of 3 feet long. It had an intricate spiral pattern consisting of interwoven brown lines of varying shades and colorations. Rigel couldn't consider the snake an anaconda, python, or boa, for he knew too little of herpetology to accurately designate it a genus.Rigel also figured that, most likely, the snake was none of the above, for its head shape was quite peculiar. It had a jagged mouth and nose, that, from above, looked like a triangle it was so pointed.Rigel felt a profound sense of wonder at the beauty of this fantasy world at this moment. He was currently at least hundreds, if not thousands, of feet underground wading through a swamp that he burned down a few hours ago, all the while discovering new species of snakes that most certainly never even existed in his previous world.Earth? What is this derisory Earth? The world that Rigel was currently in had everything that he needed or wanted! Boundless opportunities awaited over this here horizon. Mana, magic, beasts, mages, runes; all were better than anything that Earth could ever provide. Earth left Rigel for dead. In fact, it did kill him. It ruined him.Rigel clenched his fists and scowled, his eyes turning red and blotchiness pervading around them.What was Earth, indeed."Sigh, I can barely remember what Earth was anymore. It's such a small part of my life, now," Rigel confided passionately to his stick companion. "You see, Stickly, I am actually not from this world, believe it or not. I know, I know, hard to imagine little ol' me being an alien, but it's the truth, ya know? I even have a quest from God to rule a kingdom with my mighty fist! How about you, Stickly? What's your backstory?"Needless to say, the inanimate object did not reply."Stickly, you're killing me!" Rigel whined. "C'mon, man. Speak to me. You know you can trust me, right?"Rigel participated in meandering with Stickly for the better part of his meandering around the swamp, still finding nothing of interest."Stickly," he finally said while stopping. "I miss Eureka. I hope we find her soon, don't you?""..." the stick faithfully replied."Thanks, buddy." Rigel nodded and took another step forward.The pair was still crawling through the desecrated portion of the swamp, but Rigel could barely make out the picture of a treeline in the distance. He grinned and started taking steps forward with more and more haste, earnestly looking forward to the return of the trees.Rigel was sick of being half-underwater at any given time. He was starting to feel his skin rot and wanted to get out as soon as possible.On top of that, Rigel was starving. He had thought of trying to cook the corpses he had found, but was very unsure of how long it had been, exactly, and figured that such corpses would spoil quite quickly in the voracious heat, so he abstained.Some time passed, about 3 hours, and Rigel was finally closing in on the wooden mass of tentacles. The surrounding area of water was significantly less polluted with ash than the previous section, but had significantly more debris in the form of branches and logs.Rigel had to be very careful to not accidentally impale himself at this point. Since his eyesight still hadn't recovered, the man found himself spending most of his time on his hands and knees balancing on various logs or hopping in between clusters of sticks that had grouped together into small, loose piles reaching a few feet in diameter.Some of these sticks were just barely under the water's surface, causing Rigel to almost get jabbed in the stomach, chest, or neck, depending on how deep it was and if he was on a submerged log or not.Stickly assisted Rigel greatly in this regard, acting as his landmine locator. Rigel felt like he could consider himself indebted to his newfound friend.After a long journey fraught with peril, Rigel finally made it back to the non-eradicated portion of the swamp. Just as he stepped up onto dry land, he noticed that there was already new, fresh life budding out from the charred wood. He took slight mental note of this, but was overall too exhausted to bring much thought to it.With Stickly in his off hand, Rigel painstakingly climbed up a menial slope and, once at the top, rolled onto his back and laid down. He slowly felt himself dozing off before, suddenly, he heard a hissing noise come up from below him.Rigel felt a eerie gaze lock onto him and carefully rolled over to his stomach to look in between the gaps of the vines. Below, he saw the long, coiled figure of one of the yellow and orange pythons he had seen a corpse of earlier. He made a slight gasp at the realization, causing the beast to lock onto him even more fervently.Rigel sighed slightly and grasped Stickly tighter. His grasp was barely enough to hold Stickly off the ground, but just that much sufficed. He stuck the stick through a hole in the vines and plunged his arm down with it, sticking the end of the stick up against his shoulder.The snake was about 15 feet beneath him, so the end of the stick was about 10 feet above it. This snake seemed slightly larger than the corpse he bothered to try and measure, so he guessed that it was about 23 to 24 feet long, leaving it plenty of room to strike him with, even that far away.Rigel tried to control his breathing better and participated in a staring contest with the snake. Both contestants' gazes met the other's with sparks. Both eyed the other as food, nothing more, nothing less.Suddenly, the python shot up at Rigel in the time that he could blink, with its huge jaws open and fangs extracted.Rigel barely managed to aim the stick's end at the snake's head. The snake kept up its trajectory and was caught on the side of the mouth by the pointy end, promptly pierced through.The beast tensed up, body flailing in agony, and ripped Rigel's arm downwards, pulling it out of its socket.Rigel clenched his teeth and tried to maintain his grip on the makeshift spear, but couldn't manage it. He watched in dejection as it fell down with the snake, still embedded in its mouth.The beast whipped its head around and flailed like a rabid animal, eventually dislodging the stick and flinging it out and far away.Rigel growled and launched a fireball at the snake. It smashed into its head, burning its scales and torching an eye out. This further induced the snake's convulsions.Rigel had to be careful to not catch a stray tail to the face, lest it blinded him. He bided his time until the beast calmed down before jumping down while firing off a fireball. It missed and flew into the water, causing a steam explosion, which luckily grabbed the snake's attention.While the beast was distracted, Rigel jumped from his perch and landed around its neck, gripping as tightly as his enervated body would allow. After securing himself, he grasped the head and blew a fireball up point-blank.The resulting explosion caused a blinding light and flung Rigel backwards. Searing agony tormented his hand and, as he was falling off the snake, Rigel took a look at it. It was blown clean off- his right hand was now just a stump.Rigel, although dejected by the loss of both his hand and faithful companion, felt satisfied in his struggle against the beast just as he slammed hard into the water.Submerged, Rigel felt a profound calling. The universe itself seemed to want him to fall asleep. He felt extremely compelled to follow this divine calling of his, but suddenly remembered the snake. He didn't know if it was even dead or not, as even if it was, it would possibly rot if he fell asleep now.Thus, Rigel, with all of his willpower, forced himself to stay awake and breached the water's surface. He haphazardly waltzed over to where the snake was and found nothing. Rigel shook his head and saw some remnant bubbles surfacing from the water and reached down.The blood-soaked, half-naked man searched around momentarily and found the body of the snake. Rigel groaned and grabbed its head with his one remaining hand and heaved upwards, slipping and falling backwards."ARGH! Water, I command thee! Lift this fucker up onto the trees!" he yelled while fueling mana into the surrounding water.Currents started swaying and water focused around the submerged body of the snake, getting under it and then explosively shooting it up into the vines 15 feet above.Rigel watched the massive corpse ragdolling upwards with a smile on his face before feeling some rebound from the overuse of spells. He noticed a bit of blood trickling down from his eyes but that was the extent of it, to his relief.Rigel decidedly clenched his teeth and put his other hand just above his stump and cauterized it with a small heat spell. The anguish was incomprehensible and Rigel felt his vision going black, but just managed to stay conscious by willpower alone.He spit up some blood and had more trickling down his eyes from the rebound, but felt the effort was worth it.Rigel decided to go find Stickly before cooking the snake, but after 30 minutes of frantically searching, mournfully gave up on the effort since he was about to fall over at any moment."Stickly," he said, voice hoarse, "I'll miss you. Stay safe," and wiped some tears from his eyes.Climbing up into the canopy, Rigel approached his loot with a dull gleam in his eyes."2 more times," he muttered, and used the heat spell to cook a small portion of the snake from the outside. He coughed up some more blood and felt even more lightheaded, but persevered regardless."One. More. Time," he groaned painfully and used the same heat spell to incinerate the flesh around one of the beast's fangs.The resulting nausea caused Rigel to immediately vomit. He just barely turned away from his meal before profusely regurgitating into into the water below. As he did, Rigel noticed that a large volume of the vomit was bloodied.After finishing up, Rigel wiped his mouth and turned back to the corpse and grasped the freed fang, using it to slice its own scales open and access the glistening meat hidden within.Rigel voraciously gorged himself on the snake until he was eating completely raw meat, having eaten all of the cooked bits.Rigel finally decided that it was time to stop and collapsed atop of the corpse, unconscious before he even made contact with it.
