Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 55
Nenneke felt as though he had been trapped inside a long dream.
He dreamed he had returned to his home in Cidaris, to the days before the royal house had fallen into turmoil, before the Temerian Restoration army had arrived.
The air there did not reek of rotting corpses and houses burned down to blackened frames. It carried the scent of flowers from the town beds, and the smell of sea fish cooking in roadside taverns.
People were not tense there. They did not eye every stranger with twitching suspicion, and they did not ... starve to the point of gnawing on the bodies of their own kind.
The air there held the right dampness, the right warmth. It was nothing like Velen, all swamps and miasma, like some vast pit of rotting mud.
Nenneke began to miss everything about his homeland before war had touched it.
“Wake up, filth.”
Then, suddenly, the dream changed.
He found himself running through a forest without destination or reason.
He did not know why he was running. He only felt a terror like teeth grinding and blood being sucked from the bone, bursting outward from the depths of his marrow.
Behind him came the heavy pounding of footsteps, thud, thud, thud, fast and urgent.
Even in the dream, Nenneke found it absurd.
Running through woods in heavy armor? Chasing me?
What are you, some kind of leshen?
No matter. It’s only a dream. Dreams don’t have to make sense, don’t have to make sense...
Only a dream...
“I said wake up, filth!”
In his haze, Nenneke had the sense that someone was moving in front of him, while his own view was pinned flat to the ground.
Then he felt his wrist being stepped on.
The sensation dragged him back into reality. He opened his eyes in confusion and looked at the wrist pinned beneath the boot.
That part was not so bad, because the other man meant only to hold it down, not to stomp it to splinters.
But pinning his wrist ... for what?
A faint crackling hiss sounded beside his ear.
It was the sound of meat searing over high heat, fat bursting under flame.
Nenneke’s blurred gaze snapped into focus, and quickly turned to terror.
“Aaaahhh!”
His hand! His hand!
His hand was being pressed into a heap of embers that still held fire!
It had been their campfire. Not long ago it had held a greased human arm over the flames.
Nenneke’s body, which had lain flat on the ground, arched up in an instant under the pain.
He went madly rigid, trying to yank his wrist free, but the boot fitted with steel greaves might as well have been nailed in place.
It did not move so much as a hair.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?! Who are you? Help! Plague take it, help!”
Lannor tilted his head slightly and watched the man underfoot writhe like a maggot.
Then, slowly, he pressed down with his boot and dragged the man’s wrist away from the edge of the coals.
Nenneke got a brief gasp of relief from the uninterrupted agony of burning flesh.
By now his face had gone bloodless, and fat drops of sweat were rolling from his scalp.
Instinctively, he looked wildly around. But the sight of the place all but shattered what little reason he had left.
Tears of terror and snot burst out together. His lips trembled as though he were freezing.
“Aaaahhh!”
All seven men from the camp had been gathered here in this clearing.
The three hacked down on the spot needed no explanation. But those who had turned and fled had been remade into different grotesque shapes.
One was kneeling on the ground, both hands reaching for his own head, but that head had already turned black and charred like coal.
Its blackened mouth gaped wide. Nenneke could almost imagine the desperate screaming that face had been caught in.
Another had a neck swollen far beyond anything natural, his whole skin webbed with blood and turned blue-black...
The confusion of being dragged from a dream, the panic and shock of sudden pain, and now the scene before his eyes.
Nenneke turned his head with a trembling jerk and looked at the man pinning his wrist.
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