Cursed Bunny(37)

Right before the opponent’s elbow struck, the youth heard the sound of rocks shattering and steel tearing. For some reason, it wasn’t as painful as before.

His opponent’s elbow hit something unbelievably hard. The youth heard the sound of the young man’s elbow joint breaking and his screams.

The youth sprang to his feet. Reaching out with his right arm to attack, he saw that he still had a cuff on his wrist. So he lowered that arm and with his left arm, grabbed his opponent’s neck. The left arm stretching out before him was covered in something hard and glistening, like gray scales, and his hand and fingers looked like they were hewn from rock. That gray hand, looking nothing like a human’s, was now wrapped around the ferocious-looking young man’s neck, and squeezing.

All these things happened in what felt like a strange slowness. His hand holding up his opponent by his neck, the man’s face looked fit to burst, at first turning red, then white, and soon, blue. The youth watched these changes like he were a spectator of the fight.

From the opponent’s side, an old man with white hair jumped into the arena. The bald man also came sprinting. This was the first time the youth had seen the bald man without a smile for him. He couldn’t make out what the voices of the people shouting at him were saying, but following the orders of the bald man, he dropped his opponent.

His fingers, oddly slow, loosened their grip one by one. His opponent, eyes rolled so far back in agony that the youth could see only the whites, whimpered as he collapsed to the ground. The white-haired old man kept shouting as he dragged the opponent out of the arena. Throughout all this, the audience was in a crazed frenzy, unintelligibly screaming.

Alone in the arena now, the youth stood staring at the chaos outside the ring. The bald man came up to him again, grabbed his right hand, and raised his arm up.

A thunderous roar from the crowd was accompanied by a pelting of small, shining objects into the arena. The man was all grins again as he picked up these sparkling pieces while the youth stared down at his own hands.

They were back to being his normal hands. His arm was back to being what it used to be.

But in that moment, he could finally connect the sound of breaking, the bone-shattering pain, and the gray, stony scales that appeared from the triangular scars along his limbs and back and ribs. He couldn’t quite explain what he had understood, but he had a feeling that a very big question of his had just been answered.

The bald man stuffed into his hip pouch the small and sparkling bits and pieces that the people had thrown and still had fistfuls in both hands as he led the youth out of the arena. In no time, the bald man’s people had packed up their things and they were on their way out of the village. Even as they made a run for it, the bald man was all smiles.

At the inn where they arrived after a long day’s journey, they unpacked in their rooms then ate a large, jovial supper. On the luggage rack of their carriage tied outside, the youth dozed on a pile of straw.

Something prodded him awake. The bald man was fastening a chain to the cuff on his right wrist and locking the chain to something above the youth’s head. As the youth tried to get up, the man pressed down on his neck. The youth obediently sat back down.

Holding out a bowl of something, the man said, “Drink.”

The youth lowered his head over the bowl to do so but involuntarily turned away. It was something similar to the green stuff he had drunk that morning but with an extra, sharper smell. The dizzy, nauseating feeling came back to him and he frowned.

“Drink!” The man grabbed his neck and shoved his face into the bowl.

Listlessly, the youth tried to resist with his left arm. All that happened was the chain dangling from his right wrist clanged, an irritating sound. With all his might, the man grabbed the youth’s neck with one hand and tilted the contents of the bowl into his mouth with the other, forcing him to finish it. Spasms rocked the youth and he coughed violently, but like before, half of it had already made it down his esophagus.

The bald man looked down at him expressionlessly as the youth coughed and gagged. “If you hadn’t drunk that medicine before, you would’ve killed that bastard. Understand?”

This change in tone was so abrupt that the youth looked up in wonder.

“You were lucky that little shit didn’t die and we kept our money and got out of there. Think of what would’ve happened if you killed him. You’d be finished. Do you hear me?”

The youth kept looking up at him and didn’t answer. The man’s hand struck the side of the youth’s face, hard.

“You hear me?” he shouted again.

Getting slapped out of nowhere made the youth angry, but he couldn’t move his body. His face flashed red, but all strength had left his limbs.

“Eat everything I give you from now on, right? Don’t throw it up or get clever about it.”

Having spat out these last words, the man, teetering slightly, left the carriage and went back into the inn.

X

Ever since the bald man gave him the mysterious liquid to drink and made him fight men, the youth began to feel worse and worse.

The strong-smelling liquid no longer made him vomit so often, but the dizziness and nausea increased. Suppressing the vomit, he tended to be unsteady on his feet in the arena, making him more vulnerable to the blows that rained down upon him. His body was definitely deteriorating, which meant the speed in which he recovered from the effects of the liquid was slowing down.