Chapter 12
His body was lighter than ever and he could even jump like a monkey, jumping from one tree to another as easily as walking on the ground if he wanted to do it.
But of course, since his goal was to hunt demonic boars, Blake didn’t do anything flashy that gathered attention, instead, he walked leisurely throughout the forest while keeping his eyes peeled open to search for any visible tracks and his ears sharp to be able to hear anything that was happening around him.
According to Vera, It wasn’t a rare case for the demonic wolves to hunt down the demonic boars for both their souls and their meat, the wolves would release their howls and the boars would squeal, if Blake followed the directions of the sounds, then he would be able to come across them, and it didn’t matter for him which side had won the clash since he would accept either of their souls to level up and finish his quest.
And of course, Blake would definitely use the opportunity to use his new spell, which would be able to show its full prowess if it was used against many opponents. But such a thing was quite rare even for him who had been hunting in the forest for the past six days and he had only seen it happen once with his own eyes.
The more certain way of finding the boars was using another method, and it was the method that Blake was currently using. Having a photographic memory has its own benefits- actually, a lot of benefits. But one of them was that Blake was able to remember his way throughout the forest, which made it almost impossible for him to get lost even without a map.
And another was that he remembered all the places that he had seen before even after only seeing a single glance of them. This means that Blake was able to remember the hotspots where he could find the demonic boars according to his memories for the past six days.
.....
If it was anyone that only had good memories, it would still take them a long time to figure out these hotspots, but for Blake who didn’t only rely on his memory, but also on his logic, Blake was able to determine what things that made the boar go into said places.
He knew for a fact that the demonic boars were omnivores because he had seen them eating a wolf with his own eyes. As much as he believed that such a scene would never happen back in his own world, it was the demon realm and he threw out the common sense that he had back in his own world.
However, there was one food that the boars liked eating the most, and it wasn’t the wolves. Instead, it was a plump, orange-sized red fruit that grows on a certain plant that was scattered everywhere in the forest. And these hotspots where he could often find the demonic boars were filled with clumps of this certain plant growing on them.
And with his memory, Blake was able to memorize each place that had these plants growing on them. With that, Blake only needed to go to each hotspot and he didn’t have to roam around mindlessly in the forest to search for the bear to make the sweet and spicy fried boar that his drop-dead-gorgeous teacher had been addicted to for the past three days.
He was quite surprised when he found out that Vera could literally fit a whole boar in her little body in one sitting and it didn’t seem like she was satisfied yet after eating them. He wouldn’t believe it if anyone told him so if he didn’t see it with his own eyes, but she was indeed capable of doing so and he was curious how much more she could eat. Hence why he planned to bring back two boars today to see whether she could finish two in one sitting.
‘Wait, can I finish cooking that much boar meat in a few hours...?’ Blake thought to himself as he began speeding up a little towards the nearest hotspot.
Blake’s journey in search of the boar wasn’t that long and after going into three hotspots, he finally found the group of boars in the fourth hotspot.
There were four boars not too far away from him, and Blake was currently hiding behind a tree, preparing himself to ambush the boars with his new original spell.
The new spell that he had created was actually a combo spell, consisting of two different spells. And while the first one was 100% his original spell, the second one was rather a spell that someone had tried to create before, but it was useless in the hands of said person and others who tried to use it and nobody had used it ever since, but with his new original spell, Blake was able to make the spell not only viable to use, instead, it became one of the strongest spells in the first demon realm.
Blake then came out of the tree while both his right and left hands were simultaneously drawing the runes of his new spell.
It was a much simpler rune than the ones he draws in his rune formation, or even the basic bind spell using the darkness tendrils, so he could even draw it with his left hand even though he’s not ambidextrous... yet. And it only took him half the time to cast the darkness tendrils spell.
And after only two seconds, Blake had cast the spell four times, aiming each of his spells toward a boar.
And just like the runes that made it, the original spell looked fairly simple. Round, tennis ball-sized balls of darkness appeared in his hands before Blake threw them toward the four boars.
With the size being so small and with enough nether injected into it, the four darkness balls traveled at a speed where even the current Blake would find it difficult to dodge it, let alone the four boars who were suddenly ambushed by him. The four balls quickly hit their bodies without them being able to dodge.
But strangely, after the four balls hit the boars’ bodies, they didn’t explode nor did they do significant damage to the boars, other than feeling a push on their bodies, the boars didn’t feel anything else.
However, little did they know that the balls of darkness were now attached to their bodies, and it was only the first part of Blake’s spell.
The boars were startled for a split second before turning their bodies to see who was responsible for attacking them, and when they saw a single demon with a body smaller than even one of them, they quickly became enraged and pointed their huge and sharp tusks towards Blake.
Looking at the intimidating boars, Blake didn’t feel a slight sense of panic or fear in his heart. He was rather excited as it was the first time that his original combo spell would be making a debut in the demon realm.
With a speed no less slow than when he drew the first runes, Blake once again moved his hand and drew a different rune.
The rune looked similar to the ones that were drawn to cast the darkness tendrils spell, but there were several differences here and there. Each rune in a spell represented something, and a demon could modify those runes by adding or removing certain runes to make their own original spell using said spell as the basic.
And what Blake did was essentially doing the same thing with the darkness tendrils rune.
The darkness tendrils rune consists of several runes, but the most important ones were that it needed to have the rune to summon the darkness tendril, a rune to control the movement of the darkness tendrils, and a rune to pinpoint the location of where the darkness tendrils would first appear.
While Vera had added another rune to make the third rune have a homing property, and made the darkness tendrils able to summon themselves precisely under its enemies, what Blake had done was the complete opposite of Vera.
What Blake had done with the darkness tendrils rune was to completely erase the rune to control the movement of the darkness tendrils and the rune to control the summoning location of the darkness tendrils, and instead, he replaced them with two other darkness tendrils summoning runes. This meant that if the spell were to manifest, there would be hundreds of darkness tendrils that would appear out of the ground randomly.
Such a spell looked amazing as if a garden of darkness tendrils suddenly appeared around you, but the spell was essentially useless since it wasn’t uncontrollable and it could even hit your own ally without guaranteeing you would hit your enemy with it.
However, the moment Blake finished drawing the rune, such a thing never happened.
Instead, the hundreds of darkness tendrils that were supposed to appear randomly on the ground, all had gathered near the boars and they all rushed towards the ball of darkness that was still attached to the boars’ bodies, stabbing the four boars with hundreds of darkness tendrils as the darkness tendrils stabbed through everything that stood on their way towards the ball of darkness that Blake had conjured earlier.
Then after a few seconds, the hundreds of darkness tendrils stopped moving and the four boars also stopped moving, now with their souls floating above their bodies and the darkness tendrils skewered them from the top of their heads at the tip of their tails.
Blake, who was overexerting his nether a little, was now huffing and puffing as he tried to catch his breath.
‘I guess I went a little bit overboard with the amount of nether that I provided into the runes...A hundred darkness tendrils would be enough next time...’ He made a mental note.
“But the spell was definitely successful!” He cheered while raising both of his hands up to the sky.
“ROARRR!!!”
Blake was about to gather the four souls and consume them before storing two of the boars’ bodies that already had their meat somehow tenderized with the darkness tendrils, but he suddenly a thunderous roar in the distance.