NOVEL WEB Chapter 26
The Dire Bear is a huge bear that on average is 1.5x the height of a grown man to its shoulders when the Dire Bear is on all fours. The Dire Bear is like most bears except for its size and the two relatively small tusks growing out the sides of its snout. The Dire Bear mainly attacks with large powerful swipes, its claws are almost twice the length of a man’s hand. So powerful are its strikes, that they are known to fell small trees and smash rocks with a single swipe.
“The Dire Bear will be released into the forest as an extra challenge to hide from. Hunting is not just the simple act of killing your prey, it is also having the skills to survive.”
When Grud saw the Dire Bear, not only did he see it for the danger that it was, he saw it for the power he could receive from such a powerful beast.
When Crig looked like he was done with his speech and about to move on to the next part, Grud raised his hand for Crig’s attention.
“Yes young hunter, you have a question?” Crig said upon recognizing Grud.
“What happens if we hunt the Dire Bear?” Grud’s question was met with silence at first, then laughter from Crig, the other contestants, and even the audience.
After getting the laughter out of his system, Crig said “Ah, the bravery of youth. The only reason we managed to capture this Dier Bear, and without any casualty might I add, was because we managed to bait it with meat that had sleeping poison in it, then captured it. If we had to capture it alive while it was not affected by the sleep poison, it would take the lives of quite a few hunters, and the Dier Bear would be a lot more injured.”
After shaking his head, Crig said in jest more than anything “Well, if anyone manages to hunt the Dire Bear, I suppose they win the competition.” This was followed by laughter from everyone else, little did they know that Grud did not pick up on the joke and made it his objective to hunt the Dire Bear. For Glory and Power.
As the Dire Bear was being prepared to be released, more than twenty hunters with extra long spears formed up around the cage which made the Dire Bear growl out in anger.
The cage was opened facing the forest and five long spears reached into the cage to saw away the bindings on its legs and muzzle.
When three of its limbs were free, the Dire Bear did not bother to wait for its muzzle or last limb to be free and with a great heave, snapped the last rope binging one of its hind legs.
It ran out of the cage a few paces and turned around to face its captors. Using its sharp claws, it ripped away the bindings that held its muzzle shut and roared in fury at the line of hunters that were pointing long spears in its direction while making loud noises and jabbing the spear at it and forcing it back.
After a few more roars and growls while swiping at the spears, the Dire Bear decided that this confrontation with so many of these small creatures with pointy sticks was not worth it and fled into the forest.
As the Dire Bear fled thru the forest, the people watching it go could see the canopy of some trees shake as the Dire Bear bashed thru the forest while running.
Now, all there was left to do was to wait for the headstart time to run out before the final Great Hunt began.
—
“It ran further than I thought.” Grud said to himself as he ran thru the forest, leaving his competitors in his dust.
While he was running, he was sniffing the air, following the dangerous scent of the Dire Bear, it was the scent of an apex predator that other beasts in the area avoided.
As he was following the scent, Grud ran past some of the painted prey targets, even a Tusk Pig and some Tuk Tuks, but ignored them outright to concentrate on his current target.
It took around half an hour of Grud sprinting full speed before the scent of his target became a lot stronger, which made him slow his pace to start stalking his target while sticking to the cover of trees and bushes.
After a few minutes of stalking, Grud finally laid eyes on his target. When Grud focused on the scene, he saw that the Dire Bear’s head was deep in the guts of one of the painted Tusk Pigs that were released earlier.
‘Good, it is distracted with food. All I need to do is use my great strength to throw my spear in its neck and wait for it to bleed out, easy.’
With this simple plan in mind, Grud circled around the Dire Bear to find a location that would give him a good angle to throw his spear while making sure he was not upwind of the Dire Bear.
After getting into a position and range he was confident with, Grud waited for the Dire Bear to finish swallowing its current mouth full of Tusk Pig and shove its head back in for more food.
Just as the Dire Bear slid its head into the Tusk Pig’s guts to get another bite, Grud popped up from cover, took aim, and threw his spear, hitting right in the side of the Dire Bear’s neck.
The sudden attack caused the Dire Bear to let out of roar while jerking its head up, sending the carcass of the Tusk Pig flying a few feet in the air away from it.
As the Dire Bear turned to look at its assailant, Grud managed to get a side view of his spear that was embedded into the Dire Bear, which made him visibly pale.
The spear given to him by Dhuk was sticking out its neck, but only three-quarters of the spearhead made it past its hide and into its thick neck muscles and was nowhere near piercing anything important behind the layers of muscles.
Seeing this, Grud could only say one thing while grabbing his axe from his waist strap “Shiiiitt….”
As soon as he was done cussing, the Dire Bear let out a furious roar and charged, which shocked and frightened Grud, because it closed the distance to him faster than he thought, ‘Can something that big move that fast?’
As the Dire Bear closed in on him, Grud only had time to duck behind a nearby tree. When the Dire Bear made it to Grud, it rammed the tree, actually making it bend and making the tree produce creaking sounds while the Dire Bear swang its arms around the tree to try and swipe at Grud.
When the Dire Bear rammed the tree, Grud did not expect it to bend and was smacked in the head by the tree trunk, making him stumble backward, which was fortunate for him because the stumble backward made the Dire Bear’s swipe miss Grud.
Grud managed to recover in time to reposition himself to make the tree between him and the Dire Bear.
After a few seconds of both Grud and the Dire Bear playing catch by circling the tree, the Dire Bear was infuriated, it stood up on its hind legs, grabbed the base of the tree trunk, and literally uprooted the tree that was keeping it from the source of its ire.
Seeing this outrageous display of strength, Grud could only stand there slackjawed with his axe in hand, but as the Dire Bear turned to chuck the uprooted tree aside, Grud saw his chance.
While the Dire Bear had its paws occupied with a whole fucking tree, Grud made use of his enhanced reaction, speed and strength to make a running start, jump toward the head of the Dire Bear and swang his stone axe down towards its skull.
“DIEEE!!!” Grud shouted as his stone axe impacted the top of the Dire Bear’s head in a great downward chop…. Only for the stone axe to cut thru its hide and shatter upon impact with its skull.
Grud whose enhanced reaction paired with the adrenaline coursing thru his veins was watching his axe head shatter into pieces in slow motion, while mid-air. So he did not notice that the Dire Bear had already let go of the uprooted tree and had a paw swiping toward him.
The next thing Grud noticed, he was spinning thru the air like a top, only to impact a tree branch and flip backward twice before crashing into the ground, where Grud just lay there.
After laying there for a few seconds, eyes open and wondering what he was doing in the forest laying on his back, then the pain came to him and he remembered about the Dire Bear.
As he tried to shout out in pain, he was stopped as the whole left side of his ribs were in agony. When he struggled to look down, Grud saw that the whole left side of his rib cage was slightly indented and the skin at the impact area was inflamed red with the dark purple of bruising starting to form, from the area of the broken ribs, were deep claw scratches that raked all the way to his right shoulder.
The only reason he was alive at this moment was his dense ribcage deflecting the claws that raked thru his chest muscles.
That was when Grud realized, he had been swatted away like a common bug. No sooner had he realized that when he heard a thump of a heavy weight, when he looked towards the sound, he saw the Dire Bear was back on all fours and took the time to use its paw to swipe away the spear embedded in its neck, then slowly amble towards Grud and was soon on top of him looking down.
It gave Grud a bored look like it was just any other prey, which made Grud’s blood boil, and when the Dire Bear opened its maw and brought its head down to crush his skull, Grud’s right hand flashed forward to embed a stone dagger into the Dire Bear’s left eye and left it there.
As the Dire Bear reeled back in pain and tried to remove the stone dagger from its eye, Grud got to his feet as fast as his injured body would allow and ran around the flailing Dire Bear toward where the Dire Bear extracted his spear.
As Grud grabbed onto his spear, he thought ‘Its body might be too strong for me to pierce without proper force, but its eyes are still as soft as any others.’
When Grud turned around after recovering his spear and saw the Dire Bear was still trying to remove the dagger from its eye, a savage smile crept upon his face.
Grud walked as silently as he could behind the stumbling Dire Bear, grabbed his spear by the butt end for maximum range, and shouted.
“HEY!”
The Dire Bear turned around in shock to see the hateful puny creature it thought had run away, then in a flash, the vision in its remaining eye went dark and a new source of pain from its other eye exploded.
Grud tsked in annoyance as he quickly pulled his spear back and retreated a few steps away from the wildly flailing Dire Bear. Grud looked at his spear and noted to himself, ‘My spearhead is too wide and got caught in its eye socket before I could pierce its brain. This is going to take a while.’
The next few minutes were painful for both Grud and the Dire Bear, it was painful for Grud because any upper body activity, even breathing brought pain from his broken ribs. For the Dire Bear, it was the pain of being systematically broken down.
First, was Grud piercing its nose because it could still tell where Grud was by scent and tried a few blind swipes at Grud, next Grud speared its limbs after it tried to make a run for it and smashed head first into a tree, stunning itself. Finally, Grud went for the throat and heart then waited for it to bleed out.
When he confirmed the Dire Bear was really dead, he slumped to the ground exhausted and in pain.
“I still need to drag this all the way back, hope I can make it back in time.”