Zarek continued into the maze, but it wasn't long before he stopped and frowned.
He turned back to see a young man.
Well, calling him a young man was an overstatement. He must have been a freshman, barely 13 or 14 years old, and he was trembling from head to toe as he hurriedly came to a stop behind Zarek.
"What is it, kid?" Zarek asked.
The freshman hurriedly shook his head from side to side, clinging onto a rusted hammer with both hands tightly.
Zarek raised an eyebrow, not quite understanding at first. But when he ignored the freshman and continued, the rustling of grass behind him told him that he was still following.
"Tameron! Come back here!"
The voice of the woman echoed but was muffled by the invisible walls. If they walked any further, the noise would be completely cut out.
If there was anything these endless mazes were good at, it was isolating noise.
As for the woman herself, she was clearly much too scared to even run after them, thinking that they might run into a blood beast at any moment.
Zarek looked back at the freshman again, only for him to freeze once more like they were playing a game of red light, green light.
After the third time, Zarek directly ignored the kid, but his lip curled.
He was too scared to speak, but the kid knew how to make smart decisions.
If all three of them had tried to follow him, he would have told them to scram. But he didn't have the heart in him to kick away a kid, and on top of that, the fact he had come on his own showed him something about the freshman's character.
It wasn't easy to make a choice to go against the mold, especially not as a 13-year-old in the presence of an adult figure like that woman.
The growl of a beast caused Zarek's ear to twitch.
'By this aura, this should be a second image…'
He had given all the Blood Wolves some nomenclature. Second image meant that it was the product of a split from the first image, or in other words, it was two mirror images away from the main beast.
This one was definitely on the stronger side.
However, Zarek only slowed for a moment before he suddenly accelerated.
Tameron rushed after him, keeping his eyes on Zarek's back even as the latter rounded a corner. What the freshman saw after also rounding that corner, though, made him shiver from head to toe.
Zarek's hands were stretching the jaw of a wolf apart, stopping it from biting his head off.
"Hey, kid. Lend me that hammer."
Tameron vigorously shook his head, taking a step back.
Instead of being mad, Zarek laughed uproariously. His booming laughter sounded more like a man with a round belly that had sailed seven seas rather than the laughter of a young man of just 18 years of age.
"Smart. I like it."
Zarek twisted to the side.
The wolf lunged forward, knocking snout-first into the thickness of a tree.
Before it could slip to the invisible wall to form a mirror image, Zarek pivoted to its back and stomped down on its tail hard.
The wolf, which had already been trying to stand from this assault, found itself knocked off balance.
'The Endurance of this one is just so much higher than the others… In that case, we'll need to be a bit more forceful.'
He raised his foot from the wolf's tail and rounded its side while it was still collapsed. His knee drove through its snout again just as it had barely recovered from the first blow.
Blood and teeth flew, but Zarek had already sent a second kick forward.
He couldn't sneak in a gun, and his attempt at blacksmithing a machete had ended… spectacularly. But these weren't the end of his preparations.
The steel-toed boots on his feet, the metallic knee and elbow pads beneath his uniform, and the kevlar gloves on his hands were all the help he needed.
His roundhouse kick collided with the side of the wolf's head, sending it rebounding against the tree once again.
Disoriented and shaken, the wolf swayed, collapsing to the ground.
Zarek raised a foot and drove it right onto its head once again. The sickening crunch of bone echoing as its jaw was snapped and its skull crumbled beneath the pressure.
A deep breath shuddered through Zarek's chest.
'This Godsfall Tear sure is something. Because of all of these mirror images, there's nothing even to be gained with all these kills…'
At that moment, the freshman suddenly rushed up and swung his hammer at the wolf's head. Once, twice, then thrice.
Blood splattered and coated his hands and face, but it wasn't until yet another three strikes that he finally stopped.
He backed up, wiping the blood off his face with a forearm sleeve before hiding behind Zarek again.
Zarek held back his laughter. As funny as the scene was, he watched it all very seriously.
While he had a lot of insults for these people, it wasn't just because he knew more than they did. In his first life, he had seen many such stupid fools, and he had called them out then too.
But he had also seen plenty like this freshman. This was the true underbelly of humanity, not one shrouded by fear, apprehension, and outright stupidity… but one filled with the desire to survive and better themselves.
Without a word, Zarek only looked at the kid for another moment before continuing his trek forward.
He was beginning to move through the maze faster now, getting used to its quirks. What he had mainly noticed was that it was trying to funnel him toward one direction, the place he assumed was the center.
The more he tried to fight against that tide, the more dead ends he would run into. There was only one way forward, and the end of that road would certainly have the original blood beasts waiting.
However, he inevitably ran into humanity's roadblock first.
Some of the underbelly might be made up of those like the freshman. But then there was a much larger, rotting segment that was like this flat-nosed bastard.
"It's you!"