Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 36: Chapter 36 — Aftermath of the Blow

The impact came before the fear had time to finish forming.

Arlen registered the strike less as a single moment and more as a violent fragmentation of moments — the ground leaving his feet, the world tilting sideways, a pressure against his ribs that should have crushed something vital and instead simply drove the air from his lungs in one brutal exhale. He struck a tree hard enough to hear it crack somewhere beside him and slid to the earth in a heap, ears ringing, vision swimming with dark spots that refused to clear.

He didn’t lose consciousness, though for several long seconds he wished he had. Every part of him screamed in some register too overwhelming to properly parse into individual pain, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, he felt the familiar warmth of Enduring Vitality straining against damage that should have been well beyond anything it could compensate for.

Still alive, he thought, distant and strange, as if observing the fact from somewhere outside his own body. Shouldn’t be. Still alive.

He forced his eyes open, the world swimming back into focus in disjointed pieces — torchlight scattered wildly across the forest floor, the massive furrow of destruction stretching away into darkness, and Ilvera, crumpled a short distance off, terribly still.

”Ilvera—” His voice came out as barely more than a rasp, pain flaring white-hot through his chest with the effort.

She didn’t answer. But he saw, with a relief so sharp it was almost its own kind of pain, the faint rise and fall of her chest. Alive. Barely, but alive.

The creature had not pressed its advantage.

Arlen understood this only distantly, through the fog of his own battered senses, but some part of him registered the strangeness of it even then — the massive shape had withdrawn several yards back into the deeper shadow, pale eyes still visible, still watching, but no longer closing the distance the way it had a moment before. It simply stood there, vast and terrible and inexplicably patient, as though it had already decided something Arlen couldn’t begin to guess at.

Shouts erupted through the trees, closer now, torches bobbing wildly as Petra’s group closed the final distance at a dead run. Arlen tried to push himself upright and found his arms wouldn’t fully cooperate, a fresh wave of pain rolling through his side that suggested at least one rib had suffered considerably worse than a bruise.

”Don’t move!” Petra’s voice, sharp with alarm, cutting through the chaos as she skidded to a halt several yards away, her hands already weaving through the beginning motions of a spell. Yorin was beside her an instant later, weapon drawn, eyes fixed on the massive shape still looming at the edge of the torchlight.

The creature’s pale gaze shifted toward the newly arrived group, and for one suspended, terrible moment nobody moved at all — predator and prey caught in some silent calculation Arlen had no way to interpret.

Then, with a slow, deliberate motion that felt almost more unsettling than an outright charge would have, the creature turned and withdrew fully into the darkness, vast branches splintering somewhere in its wake as it moved, the sound of its passage fading with unnatural swiftness until the forest had swallowed it entirely.

Nobody spoke for several long seconds after it had gone.

”It’s not pursuing,” Yorin said finally, weapon still raised, eyes still fixed on the empty darkness. ”It had them both. It could have finished this. It didn’t.”

”Later,” Petra said, already moving toward Arlen, her focus narrowing entirely to the immediate crisis in front of her. She knelt beside him, hands glowing faintly with healing magic as she assessed the damage with quick, practiced efficiency. ”Ribs, at least two, maybe more. Internal bruising, possibly worse — I need you still, Arlen, do you understand me?”

”Ilvera,” he managed, the name costing him more breath than he had to spare.

”Being seen to.” Petra’s voice remained steady, professional, though something tight beneath it suggested the reassurance wasn’t entirely certain yet. ”Focus on yourself. I need you conscious and answering me, not worrying about anyone else right now.”

He obeyed, mostly because his body offered him little choice in the matter, lying still while Petra’s magic worked through him in waves of strange, prickling warmth, knitting damage he could feel but not properly see. The pain didn’t vanish, but it dulled enough that his mind began, slowly, to clear.

Elsewhere in the small clearing, a cluster of adventurers had gathered around Ilvera, low urgent voices exchanging information Arlen couldn’t quite follow from where he lay. He caught fragments — stable, barely, needs Aria properly, can’t wait for morning — enough to understand that whatever had happened to her was serious, though not yet, mercifully, final.

”You’re fortunate,” Petra told him quietly, once the worst of the immediate danger had been addressed. ”Whatever hit you should have killed you outright. I don’t understand how you’re not dead.”

Arlen managed only a faint, pained shake of his head, the effort of forming actual words beyond him for the moment. ”Don’t know,” he mumbled, only half-lucid. ”Just... didn’t.”

Petra studied him a moment longer, clearly unsatisfied but unwilling to press an injured man further tonight. ”We’ll discuss it properly once you’re stable,” she said, filing the matter away rather than dropping it — Arlen could see that much even through the haze of pain.

Yorin returned to their small cluster a few minutes later, his expression grim. ”No sign of it beyond the tree line. Whatever that was, it’s gone for now.” He glanced toward Arlen, something unreadable in his gaze. ”You’re the first person tonight who’s actually seen it up close and lived to describe anything about it. Lyra’s going to want a full account, the moment you’re stable enough to give one.”

Arlen thought of the massive shape looming over him, the pale, ancient eyes, the strange sound that hadn’t been a roar at all — something closer, impossibly, to a word he hadn’t understood.

”I don’t know what it was,” he said quietly. ”I don’t think I have the words for it.”

”Try anyway,” Yorin said, not unkindly. ”Whatever you saw might matter more than you realize.”

Arlen lay still under the last of Petra’s healing work, the forest around them settling into an uneasy, watchful quiet once more, and found himself turning over, again and again, the singular, unanswerable question that had followed him back from the very edge of his own death.

It could have killed us both. It didn’t. Why?

He didn’t have an answer. Neither, he suspected, watching the grim, uncertain faces of the veteran adventurers around him, did anyone else — and that absence of an answer, more than the pain still radiating through his battered ribs, was what finally settled cold and lasting into his chest as the response party began, carefully and urgently, the difficult work of getting both him and Ilvera back to safety.