Bear-Snake Hybrid

A normal human has a heartrate between 60 - 100, whilst a well-trained athlete can get it down to 40 bpm. A heart rate goes up in training or high-pressure moments. Jake's heart was currently beating at 200 bpm, but he did not have a sliver of blood running through his system. Instead, he had a form of death energy going through his system.

In the skill "shadow form", a black mist would radiate from Jake, making him look like a shadow. Right now, the black mist was not simply seeping out of Jake, instead, it was flooding. It took mere mili-seconds for the entire cave to be filled with this strange gas.

The strange thing was that Jake felt enlightened in this scenario. He could feel the pebbles on the floor, the bear's messy hairy fur, the snake's smooth skin, the poison hanging on the snake's teeth. He could feel the dimensions of the cave to the exact almost as if it were his sixth sense.

Unbeknownst to him, the snake-bear hybrid was having the opposite experience. Its sense of touch felt clouded, it could only see one metre away, its smell seemed dysfunctional, it felt completely foreign in its own home.

Meanwhile, Jake tried to activate "demon form" but was feeling the death energy rejecting the black magic. It was as if they were in a fight when they would encounter each other in the body, and right now there was simply too much death energy in his body for the black magic to contest.

The bear started running towards him.

The second the bear's paws moved, Jake felt it. He was in the same scenario as he was when he had fought for his life. This time throwing the bow would not impact the creature enough to be effective.

The bear took its second step.

The room was filled with black mist and it must affect the bear's senses somehow, Jake thought. If he could dodge this than the bear would have a hard time to sense him which would give him free shots.

The bear was on its fourth step.

Whatever Jake would attempt, he had to do it now. He could feel the snakes body and its position to the exact, he could also sense how the bear was running forward at a fast speed. He only had seconds. Jake did maybe the riskiest thing possible, he jumped.

He jumped backwards intending to keep rolling to forward his momentum. This movement aimed to disposition himself enough to survive the initial burst from the bear. Then he would stand up and run out of the cave. He could feel the blood leaking out from the creatures the main body and knew it was on its last steps. But he knew the old saying, "Corner a dog in a dead-end street and it will turn to bite." Whatever that thing was, this was the moment it would be in its most savage and dangerous form.

As he rolled he did not see a difference in the bear's movement, which meant that it did not realise had changed position. He had bested the beast. The creature kept running towards the direction it had seen the human, fueled by blind rage. Suddenly it stopped and had struck a hard object, it had hit the wall of the cave.

The battle had been decided.

Jake was the winner of this skirmish as he now employed a hit and run tactic, without the creature being able to spot him it was defenceless. Eventually, the creature fell over from bleeding out and Jake noticed a pop up on his vision.

"Hidden skill learned, Ghastly Form"

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Hidden skill: Ghastly form - there is a death energy overload

Side effect: Start generating a black mist from the main body

Side effect: Everything inside the black mist will be felt as if it the skin of the caster.

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As he looked at his skill tree he saw that he had also unlocked "Shadow form". Right now Jake felt a great sense of joy but he also felt exhausted. He put his head against the rocks in the cave, looking at the creature in front of him and falling asleep.

The next day he woke up filled with still exhausted but not tired. He was hungry, ravenously hungry. He felt as if he was starving, which he in practicality was. He had pushed himself quite hard yesterday and was feeling the aftermath of it now. But life was nice to him, as right in front of him lay a big piece of meat.

He only had to cook it now. He went out of the cave to find wood. He felt the cold wind brush up against his cheeks. The sun was rising and he could see a yellow tint on the trees. It was a woody area under the mountain with trees practically everywhere. The trees had green leaves and were of average height. It was truly a perfect summer day. In the distance, he could see a flock of deer eating but he paid them no attention as he tried to locate wood. He saw multiple different flocks of birds in the sky, he thought he saw something larger a bit higher up above the cloud. After a short while, he found firewood. He ran back towards the cave to make his fire.

Now he had his fire going and had to butcher the bear. He did not know how to do it, so he got into his demon form and separated the good looking meat from the... well the rest. He decided to take the two snakeheads and sell them, they were about as large as shoe each but compared to the rest of the body they were easy to carry.

Jake wasted a majority of the meat inside the bear, but he had satisfied his hunger. This whole expedition of sorts had been quite profitable for Jake. The snakeheads would surely sell for a pretty penny and he had learned two new skills. With a hidden skill at that.

He started marching back towards the city feeling victorious.