New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 1010: Join The Hunt

A bright blue sky instantly replaced the cave's darkness, with her back in a blanket of

refreshing grass.

She glided her hand on the grass, trying to figure out how she got there and if it was real, only to realize the grass was all too real. Every strand of grass left behind the cold, wet feeling of dew on her hand as the dew finally penetrated her clothes.

Sitting up, Jin-Sil looked at herself, noticing she was still wearing her light leather armour, as if she'd never left that dungeon, with all the blood spatters on it from the harpies before the dungeon itself, flying over her.

Despite the remnants of her dungeon ordeal, everything here exuded a sense of calm. The gentle breeze, so different from the stifling air of the tunnels, was a welcome relief, drying her sweat and the dampness from her clothes.

The wind was neither cold nor hot, blowing just enough to make it appreciable and not a nuisance.

The air carried with it a sweet scent reminiscent of cherry blossoms. Yet, there was no sign of any such tree or flower nearby. The mystery of the smell only added to the surreal nature of Jin-Sil's experience.

Just a vast open plain, forming waves of grass as far as her eyes could see, with the clear blue sky only dotted lightly with puffy white clouds, which almost seemed to drift in the opposite direction from the wind.

"Where am I?" she mumbled to herself.

She could feel all the stress from her life-threatening situation drain away like water in a tub, and serenity set in, even though she should be tense in this situation where she'd been carried away without her knowledge.

Spinning around a few times, hoping to see something other than grass, she failed to catch even a flying bug, bird, or speck of dust out of place in this paradisiac environment.

"I don't have time for this..." Jin-Sil grumbled, realizing that all the time she had been wasting here, her friends might have been getting attacked.

She could easily imagine how tricky a fight would be if they suddenly had to guard her vulnerable body.

She could seldom afford to be wasting that time here, relaxing.

That's when something caught her eye in the distance. A single animal, stark in its misplaced environment, staring at her from a small grassy hill, five hundred meters out in god knew what direction, since there was no sun keeping this place so lit up.

"What the..."

'Join the hunt, child,' a voice resounded in her head, feminine but authoritative.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Jin-Sil snapped her head in every direction again, trying to see where the voice came from, but found nothing. And when she looked forward, the deer was still staring at her, his eyes almost taunting.

"Who the hell are you?" she whisper-shouted, trying to get answers to her questions. 'Join the hunt, and the answers you seek shall be yours,' the voice said in her head again. As the words resounded, the deer suddenly took off in the opposite direction from Jin-Sil, quickly disappearing behind the hill it had been standing on.

"God dammit! I don't have time for this," she cursed, bolting after the animal.

No sooner had she taken two steps that the grassy plains around her suddenly changed; the decor change so fast that Jin-Sil barely noticed it until she almost face-planted into a large tree that now stood before her.

Looking around herself, all she could see were trees as far as her eyes could see, a thick forest surrounding her.

"What the fuck?!" she exclaimed, skidding to a stop and pushing off the tree with her hands. She heard a branch snap to her left, turning her head to see what it was, and there it stood, that damned deer again, almost seeming to snicker at her before bolting away.

"I don't have time for this!" she shouted, raising her hands instinctively, as if her bow should have been in them.

She was about to halt her movement, remembering that aside from her armour, nothing else seemed to have followed her when she felt something's weight in her hands.

Looking down, she saw her bow as if she'd been carrying it this entire time.

"When did... No, I don't have time to question shit," she started saying, only to interrupt herself and continue her movement.

She barely took a second to aim, releasing an arrow she had no idea where it had appeared from, and watching as the arrow trailed the deer.

But right before her shot struck true, the deer suddenly veered left in such an unnatural fashion that Jin-Sil instantly knew she would never have hit it, even if she had shot from point blank.

"What kind of sick joke is this?" she growled, launching into a full sprint.

'Did you think being a part of the hunt was such a simple task, child? You may have been a prospect for it all this time, but you must earn your right to call yourself a child of the hunt,' the voice said, sounding smug and mocking.

Jin-Sil's teeth started gnashing together, and her patience quickly ran thin.

"My friends are in danger; my body might be lying dead in a cavern filled with enemies, and you keep hounding me about this hunt! Do you think this is a game?!" she shouted, anger immediately taking her mind.

As soon as she shouted those words, the decor changed again, going from a dense forest to a muggy swamp, her feet instantly sinking a foot into murky waters, as her boots filled with the water that smelled of stillness and decay.

'Tsk. Tsk. Tsk,' the voice echoed in her head, clicking its tongue in disappointment.

'A true hunter never lets emotion control it. A true hunter stays calm in any situation and controls the environment in which it hunts. You have nothing of a true hunter inside you, aside from your talent with a bow, child.'

Jin-Sil almost felt her temper snap inside her, as she wished for nothing more than to find whoever that voice belonged to and beat the ever-living crap out of them.

About a hundred meters to her left, she heard another cracking branch, and she saw the deer walk around the top of a patch of solid ground, looking at her with a mocking stare.

It bleated at her before hopping off in the swamp behind it.

With her heart thumping in her ears, and her face hotter than the fires of Mount Vesuvius, Jin-

Sil's eyes went sharp.

"Fine. You want me to play your stupid game? I'll play your stupid game," she growled

between her teeth.

"It's on now."