Humans had a depressing and poor appearance. Knot had arrived at that nameless "village", if one can call a conglomeration of five or seven houses a village, a week after he left the old forest.
After that first battle in the darkness of the forest, he had traveled one more day and night and Knot had realized that he was almost out of the forest. When on the third day he saw and fought with much more demons than he could have imagined the day before, which let him know that he was already at the outer edge of the forest, where the ancient magic that rejected demons was much weaker, or "almost non-existent" he thought. Knot had gotten up at sunrise, with about five hours of long sleep. He was still full of demon blood, but luckily much of it had fallen on his cloak, so he decided to just clean the sword. That morning he began his walk after having collected all the bells and in less than an hour he found another demon, but this one was not like the blind demon. Knot was able to see it from a distance, without engaging in combat; if he had learned anything from years of practice hunting wolves, it was that one should never be reckless. One should always observe and analyze one's enemy before even thinking about fighting him. That demon was more or less the same as the blind demon, but this one was not a quadruped, it had six legs, smaller but thicker. This demon did not have a long neck, but rather a neck more like a wolf with a pointed head where it could observe a pair of eyes, some jaws and a black nose like that of dogs. Knot observed how that demon was chasing a fawn, which had probably become very separated from its mother, and to his surprise, that demon ran with a lightning bolt, and a few seconds it took the demon to catch its prey and devour it right there.
Knot then decided to get away from the demon, he had to prepare himself first before fighting such a beast, or at least that was his intention, when another demon saw him and immediately attacked. He reacted quickly and managed to dodge the demon when it came out and avoided the demon's grip by rolling on the ground, and before he could prepare to attack again, Knot jumped on it, which was moving erratically, trying to throw it to the ground and began to stick his sword into the demon's head, again and again until it stopped moving and fell to the ground. The demon had a stronger body than the blind man, with stronger muscles covered with black hair.
Knot got up and couldn't catch his breath when he turned around and saw how the other demon that had finished his appetizer jumped up to attack him, which didn't manage to react in time. He fell to the ground and the demon fell on top of him, which extended its legs and embraced him, burying its claws in his back to prevent him from escaping. The beast tried to eat him and had lost his sword, but luckily he had several knives tied in his chest, took out one and began to stick it under his head, managed to pierce until the knife appeared above his head.
He had fought two demons in less than a few minutes, making last night's experience a simple game. And these were not the only ones he fought that day, a few hours later he met three more demons just like them. He killed one of them by surprising him from behind, and with another one he managed to make him run behind him and hit a tree, which he took advantage of to stick a knife in his head, and the last one he killed when he was apparently sleeping, something strange Knot believed, that demons had such animal behavior.
Near the sunset, he managed to get out of the forest and found himself in a plain of land with no apparent limit. That night he had to fight again against four other blind demons which he killed in the same way as the first one, which caused him to think that perhaps those demons were not so dangerous, if it is true that they could kill you at any time while you were sleeping and that a battle against them was decided with a single blow, but apart from that, they were mostly clumsy and he even noticed that they did not react when Knot approached them, it took them a few seconds to perceive their movement.
The following days were more or less the same, I had already fought with probably more than a dozen blind demons and about fifteen of the others. Knot had decided to give them names to make it easier to differentiate them. I call the blind ones "Silencers", because they always silently attacked sleeping prey at night, and I call the six-legged demons "Runners", because of their great speed and because it seemed that when they didn't hunt, they ran continuously without an apparent direction. Some days he had spent hours without seeing a single demon and others he had even encountered herds of several dozen runners that seemed to be hunting or simply running. With only a few days of observation, Knot understood that runners tend to stay in packs, like wolves, while the silenced ones always hunt alone. He had also killed a couple of demons that looked like giant lizards and had a scaly, hard body as if covered in stone, with a long tail that ended in a ball with sharp formations. They had very hard skin, but fortunately they were not very fast, what was dangerous was their tails, which were so strong that they could break rocks, but they also had weak skin on their necks which did not make them so difficult to kill, those demons he decided to call "Rock Lizards". And on one occasion he found some strange balls of black hair, with long black legs, which were hidden among the rocks, were apparently harmless, since they never attacked him. He decided to leave them alone for fear that they had a different mechanism of attack. He called them "Balls of Death", because of the little knowledge he had of them.
Now he was in town, after a difficult week, Knot thought that perhaps he would be able to rest and eat something. He had found himself without rations at the fifth ode, had packed little, just a few vegetable sandwiches, some dried wolf meat, a few octopus tentacles of earth and enough water for several days. Unfortunately he thought he would have time to hunt some animal, perhaps a deer or a lizard, but the only animal he had seen all week was the Cervantine killed by the corridor. So he had to do something dangerous. He decided to take the body of one of the runners he had killed and cut it up so he could cook it at the fire. He was not sure if a demon could be eaten, in the village they had never tried it, so no one he knew knew was dangerous, so he decided to cook it until it was almost like charcoal, in case they had any poison in their blood. Luckily, that demon was edible, unfortunately it tasted just like it smelled, not like a wet animal or blood, but like a spicy condiment, something that Knot detested.
Knot had lost his cape in a confrontation with a runner. The runner had torn his cape, so he had to break it in half, one half of which he had made into improvised bandages, of which he had several on his arms and chest from mostly superficial wounds and one more or less deep wound on his left calf. The other half he used as a blanket at night.
Unfortunately, in the village he was not received with open arms, although he already knew this would happen. That town seemed to have a small population, a few children, maybe five or seven, a few adults who had come out of their homes to hide their children when they had seen him arrive, and several elderly people. Everyone tried not to look at him and when he approached someone, they would run away, terrified with faces of terror.
He expected this, those people did not run away from him for breaking the taboo of leaving your hometown, on the contrary, they had told him that when someone went astray, be it a child or an old man, the towns and villages always tried to be as hospitable as possible, since anyone could be seen in that situation (and so there would be one more head they could sacrifice in case they were attacked by demons). Knot was rejected because of his appearance.
Knot was a man of sixteen years old, just turned sixteen, but with the quality of being two meters tall (in the village he was the tallest). Besides the pair of scars that went from his forehead to almost his neck, which gave him a more unpleasant appearance. But what really scared them was his skin, he was not like others, the color of his skin was dark, almost black like ebony, something that was strange or rather impossible. In all Varalos there had never been anyone with black skin (or so it was supposed, no one could really be sure), both elves and goblins and humans tended to have white or light skin, sometimes yellowish and sometimes a little dark, but none like his.
Knot was sure he was human and not another species, he was not a goblin, since he did not feel the need to copulate and reproduce constantly and he was sure he was not an elf, so he had to be human. When he was little, he was called "the son of the night" in the village, because they said he could easily hide in the dark, he really didn't mind, he had gotten used to it and rarely had he gone further, he had better things to do than to listen to insults. They even called him a demon, which made him a little more angry. He had once dreamed of leaving the village and finding a world where he was normal, where there were people like him, but those were just dreams as a child.
So he decided to go around the village. He was small, as he assumed most villages would be, and he saw a kind of corral where they kept a couple of sheep, three cows and two lambs, all in one place. He also found a miniature vegetable garden next to one of the houses, where they apparently had potatoes planted, and he saw a few other houses with small vegetable gardens of different vegetables as well. Knot had always wondered how those villages outside the ancient forest managed to survive without the protection of the forest. In the village they said they had magic talismans that could repel demons.
-Bah!, nonsense of the brainless, magic is dead child, it has been dead for more than three hundred years and it will remain dead, even the magic of the forest is dying. -That is what his master had said when Knot asked him about magic.
Even so, He observed some species of stones with "strange symbols" that surrounded the village. He senses that these were the amulets and he would have believed them to be true until he saw how in the center of the village, a child caressed a deer that had entered the village, immediately he saw how behind the deer, there was a runner who was bent over, ready to jump and catch the deer and the child. Knot acted without much thought and ran with all his strength; the demon then jumped and could not have arrived on time, if it were not because he decided almost instinctively to throw his sword to the deer, which was frightened and made to run, causing the child to fall backwards from the fright and making the runner miss by some centimeters his landing on the child.
The runner was confused, which gave Knot enough time to approach and pounce on it with a knife in his hand. He threw five knives, only two of which hit the neck and went through, due to the way the runner was moving. He almost fell when he managed to give a sixth knife, this time in the face and managed to pierce one of the eyes. The runner howled, and fell to the ground. Knot managed to get up, took the knife out of his eye and checked if he was really dead by stabbing him several times in the body. Seeing that he didn't react, he put the knife away and went to pick up his sword.
When Knot looked up, he realized that the whole town had gathered around the scene. There were about thirty people and instead of having faces of joy for having saved the little boy from dying, they looked even more scared than before and soon after they all began to run away and hide in their houses, even the boy had run away.
Knot didn't understand what was happening, he had just killed a demon and saved a child's life.
"I'm so horrible?," Knot thought, perhaps he had been mistaken for a demon again.
-I think you're a little lost -said a voice from behind. Knot turned and saw that the voice came from a wrinkled old man sitting in a rocking chair in front of a small house. The old man could easily have been sixty or seventy years old.
-Why are they running away? -He asked confusedly to the old man who burst out laughing and coughing. Knot frowned.
-You've just entered the territory of a tall demon child, you'd better get inside or you'll soon be in the Valley of Wailing -answered the old man as he invited him into his home.
Knot didn't understand what was going on, but he still decided to accept the old man's invitation.
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