Chapter 57

Grud woke up to the feeling of Mita taking care of his morning wood, he had asked her to wake him up at first light and this was one of the best ways to start the day off.

After finishing his business with Mita, he looked around at the total absence of light, "Wow, I think I did too good a job of barricading myself, it is going to be troublesome to get myself out."

After getting Mita to check if the surroundings were clear, Grud pushed through the pile of sticks and vegetation piled thick on top of his shelter.

After he had taken care of his morning business, Grud headed toward the smoke Mita saw again in the distance this morning.

With Mita scouting ahead of him, Grud made his way through the thick forest at a jogging pace. But even at his pace, Grud was forced to make constant detours or stop and hide while a big beast or monster passed by, now was not the time to get injured and forced to rest due to said injury.

The irritating part of this strategy was that sometimes, the beast he was hiding from would pick up his scent and loiter around trying to find Grud, sometimes almost succeeding in doing so.

Before Grud knew it, the sun was getting low and Grud managed to take shelter in a burrow under a huge tree and blocked off the entrance with a bunch of sticks and leaves.

After sending Mita off to check the position of the expedition camp's smoke, the results she came back with were not encouraging.

Instead of getting closer to the expedition, Grud was actually lagging behind. After thinking back on his day of travel, Grud realized he had wasted a lot of time taking detours and hiding.

"We are going to need to travel faster… I don't think we can stop for every beast that can possibly hurt me."

>But it dangerous, many beast, some monsters… is husband Grud sure no other way?<

After going back and forth on the subject for a while, Grud finally compromised to hide from monsters and big beasts. As for anything else that gets in his way, Grud will try to kill or chase away as quickly as possible.

The following day went as planned as he fought a bunch of beasts throughout the day and only had to hide twice. As a rule of thumb, what Grud decided was a big beast was anything half times bigger them himself, and by the end of the day, Grud managed to close the distance to the expedition to a day's travel, which was good progress to Grud.

As the sun started to dip, Grud evicted a family of giant squirrels from a hollowed out hole in a thick tree and settled in for the night. Grud got as comfortable as he could in the cramped hole and did some mental calculations, at his rate of travel, he should be able to reunite with the expedition in two to three days' time. 

And as he finally relaxed, the exhaustion from a whole day of fast jogging crept up on him, he posted Mita to look out for any beast that could climb up to him and possibly a bunch of angry squirrels coming to attack him in the middle of the night.

—

The next day, Grud climbed down from the tree and did some stretches to relieve the aches from cramming himself in that tree's hollow, and as he started his journey, in the corner of his eye, Grud saw the same family of squirrels he evicted last night giving him reproachful looks and chittering angrily at him as they reclaimed their home.

Grud let out a small chuckle and started his long jog.

It was late morning and Grud already killed four beasts that attacked him along the way, that was when Mita flew back to him with a warning and projected what she saw in his mind. What Grud saw was a rabbit, it was no bigger than any other rabbit he had seen before, but there were two major differences from other rabbits.

The first obvious difference was a horn, maybe around five inches, sticking out of its forehead. The second thing Grud noticed was what he saw thur Mita's spirit vision, it was a sight Mita had been sharing with Grud throughout her time scouting for him, it was the vigorous flow of mana going through its body that was centered around a point in its chest, a Monster Core.

A monster, but it was just sitting in the open, munching on grass, and it was so… small. "It may be a monster, but in the end, it is still just a rabbit. I will just kill it and continue, should not even take more than a few seconds, and I will get a Monster Core that I can trade for other stuff"

>Husband Grud, No fight rabbit. Rabbit small but still is monster.<

Despite Mita's warnings, Grud could not take them seriously at the sight of the small creature munching on grass.

After a few minutes of jogging, Grud came up upon the clearing where the rabbit was at. Grud's plan was to make a lot of noise to chase the rabbit monster off, failing that, his plan was to simply kill it.

When Grud made his way into the clearing, he found the monster rabbit facing his direction with its horn pointing at him. Grud only had a split second to turn his body to the side as his senses screamed danger in his mind.

The only things he experienced were the rabbit disappearing from where it was, and a strong gust of wind going past his chest.

Grud barely managed to snap his head around in the direction of that strong gust of wind, only to see the monster rabbit push off a tree trunk, splintering the bark and some of the wood underneath.

The next thing Grud felt was an impact on his right thigh which was closer to the tree the monster rabbit pushed off from, that impact was followed by a sharp snap of bone breaking and Grud being flipped to the ground.

When Grud looked to his thigh where he felt the impact and snap, he saw the monster rabbit with its horn impaled into the mid-section of his thigh, and said thigh was bent at an angle mid-way through.

As the monster rabbit was squirming and trying to remove its horn from Grud's thigh, Grud immediately snapped his hand out, grabbed the monster rabbit by the neck, and yanked the horn out of his thigh with a pained grunt.

As Grud was calming himself down from the pain of removing the horn from his thigh and having a broken femur, the monster rabbit was held aloft by the neck as it pawed Grud's hand and ineffectually kicked the air with its powerful legs, with each kick, Grud could feel wafts of mana shooting out from every kick.

Grud ended its struggle by clamping his other hand on its head and with a swift twist, broke the monster rabbit's neck.

"By the spirits… I should have listened to Mita, a monster, no matter how small is still a monster." that was when Mita who was keeping a lookout in case anything interfered floated in front of Grud with the biggest "I told you so" look she had ever showed.

"I know, I know, you were right, I was wrong, monster is still monster even if it's small." Mita gave him a mental huff before going back to keep a lookout.

'Well, shit. This is going to delay rejoining the expedition. But, even if the rabbit was a monster, how did it manage to break my leg so easily when some bigger beasts than me could not?'

Little did Grud know that there was a reason the rabbit was so confident to just be lounging around munching grass, all the beasts and monsters in the area that encroached on its territory had died or narrowly avoided death by monster rabbit. In fact, Grud was lucky to get away with just a broken leg, if it was any other normal man, the monster rabbit's charge would have taken the leg clean off like a high-caliber bullet from an anti-material rifle, the only thing that stopped the monster rabbit from doing so was Grud's enhanced bone and muscles that were a few times denser than the average man's.

But now was not the time for pondering on how such a small creature managed to break his leg, now was the time to treat his wounds.

Grud looked around for anything to make a splint for his broken femur but found no straight sticks, but there were some vines around, so after grabbing some of the vines, Grud sacrificed one of his throwing spears by breaking it in half and using it as a splint as he tied the broken throwing spear to the sides of his broken thigh, all the while cursing the monster rabbit, the rabbit that birthed it, all its ancestors ten generations back, and swore vengeance on all rabbit kind.

Now that his leg was taken care of, Grud had to find shelter to rest, after consulting with Mita on suitable locations to rest, he found that there was nowhere nearby that he could go in a timely manner with his injured leg, and climbing trees was out of the question for the same reason.

So Grud had to resort to the good old hole in the ground covered by foliage and hope nothing finds him. Sighing at the long day afraid of him and the delay in his journey, Grud settled for an early lunch and ate the monster rabbit.

While Grud was butchering the rabbit, he noticed how sharp and hard the monster rabbit's horn was and tried to break it off but failed to do so, so he did the next best thing, he destroyed the skull it was attached to.

After salvaging the horn and the Monster Core, Grud scoffed down the monster rabbit's meat and some of its organs, then hurled its bones and entrails as far away from his position in case something came snooping around.

Grud then began to use his spear to dig a hole for himself to lie in and hobble around plucking bunches of leaves to use as bedding and cover to hide his position.

By the time he was done, it was almost mid-afternoon before Grud was able to lay down and cover himself in foliage to rest and recover from his injury.