Kain gazed at the dead creature with glassy eyes. A pool of blood with a bluish-violet color began to gather around the thing’s forehead, staining the already blue ground. At the same time, a trickle of reddish-blue blood began to flow from a scratch on Kain’s dazed face. The warm flow began to drip from his face, in the way his sweat did, snapped him back to reality. His hand wiped a bit of blood from his face and, upon seeing that his blood still ran red, Kain began to chuckle.
‘Heh heh… So I’m still human after all… At least I still have that going for me.’
His heart still beat red blood, and he was still human. Those were the only things that he could comfort himself with now. Or at least that was what Kain felt. He finally sat down to take a breather from the insanity that he just felt. He breathed in and out for a while, trying to calm his mind. Once calm, Kain looked at the strange creature he had just come to blows with. Upon further inspection, there were many things that stood out as completely nonsensical to Kain. The most glaring was the… let’s say unique skull shape. To Kain, it really looked like a stereotypical goblin head: bulging eyes, long nose and snout, long pointy ears, and completely bald head. It was confirmed once more by Kain that the eyes of the thing were cloudy and dark, looking like orbs of navy blue gas trapped in a glass orb lodged into the thing’s eye sockets. While the head may have looked like a goblin, the rest of the body followed a different design, mainly one of a gorilla. It had a greenish blue hue to its skin that made it fit in well with the trees it presumably lived in. The arms were incredibly muscular and its hands were even more so. The torso was standard in most ways; it simply lacked hair, which was not an issue because of how it seemed that there was no difference in temperature anywhere. As well as the lack of hair, the creature also had very thick bones and what felt like plated ribs that left no gap open for puncture wounds to reach the internal organs. Combined with the abnormally thick skin and strong bones left it nearly invincible to slashing or piercing attacks without inordinate force to back it up. Its legs were nothing special however, as they were standard gorilla legs with properties shared from the rest of the body, which is to say, strong skin and strong bones.
A uniquely strange discovery that left Kain blinking in confusion was the lack of any reproductive organs, a discovery made on accident. In the standard location for such things was a thick area of skin that focused on protecting the legs. Kain simply stood there gaping at the biological anomaly, in his mind anyway, that lay in front of him. He wondered how it even existed if there were no males or females to give birth to it. He eventually shook himself off and thought of another way of increasing his survival chances.
‘So this thing has a body that is essentially biological armor that is nearly impervious to slashing and piercing attacks. I think that I may as well make use of its corpse. I’m sure that’s what it would have wanted.’
While chuckling to himself about the poor fortune of this odd goblin-gorilla hybrid, Kain began to make a plan. Although there were few skills his parents could afford to teach Kain due to their time needed to work and their general lack of any unique skills themselves, Uncle Trunks had actually taught Kain some skills that could be useful in survival situations. Of them, his favorite were the talents to skin and butcher an animal as well as making decent clothing from the hides. While Kain never learned to tan hides before, he had learned that using skin and hides could work in a pinch, even if it was not leather. Therefore, Kain began to work on skinning the creature and making use of its skin. The results ended up being quite poor. Dea could hardly cut through the hide of the creature and Kain ended up having to hack the skin off. It turned out that the flesh of the creature was actually the same color as its blood: bluish-violet. Once the skin was hacked off with the grace and finesse of a drunken bull in a hockey rink, Kain began to stitch it. The hide was full of holes due to the lack of familiarity in skinning, and the thread used was pieces of long grass, so the end product was fated to look like utter trash. In spite of fate, however, Kain managed to make a poncho that covered his upper torso and middle chest which also draped over his arms. Kain felt pleased with the result.
‘I expected this to be a waste of time, but I was able to make it to the dizzying heights of being basically functional.’
The poncho was quite ugly, and it was essentially useless against weather conditions like heat or cold, but it could stop scrapes, bruises, and most cuts. As well as that, the material was flexible, meaning that any stabs would simply bend the poncho inwards and not tear. Combining these benefits with the fact that it could protect against the sun, if there was one, it was safe to say that the poncho was usable. After the poncho was made, Kain looked at the skinned body of the creature on the ground and saw the oddly colored meat that lay exposed to the elements. As if on cue, his stomach began to growl. He had just realized that in all of his time here, he had not eaten a thing. He had gone through many hours of walking, a complete evolution for his entire body, more hours of walking, playing with his superpowers or whatever it was, a fight, more playing with his superpowers, another fight with life on the line, and a tailoring session. By now, Kain was hungry, very hungry.
‘I may be hungry, but eating that…? I don’t know if I can do it even now.’
After weighing his options back and forth, Kain decided to eat it so as to not waste as much as possible. So, after collecting sticks and rocks to make a campfire and toying with his strength power enough to find where he could make fire by rubbing sticks together, he finally cut the bluish-violet flesh and stabbed a stick through it to cook. He was surprised that the fire was actually its normal color and not any shade of blue. The meat actually cooked quite fast and almost burned because of it, and by the end Kain had a chunk of bluish-red meat on a stick. For some reason, the violet turned to red in the cooking process; a red tint was not a problem though, as it actually looked more appetizing this way.
After staring into the meat for a bit, Kain took a big bite out of the chunk on the stick. Immediately, the food’s taste spread through his mouth and through his body. It was, simply put, delicious. The taste was also reminiscent of the water that came from the stream up the mountain. The meat was so delicious that he ended up eating the whole chunk on his stick and then some. By the end, the body of the gorilla was stripped clean of anything edible. All that was left was the head, bluish bones , inedible organs, and hacked up pieces of skin from the earlier project.
‘Damn that was good! Also looks like my guess was right, the ribs of that thing are actually like plate armor. Not only that, but it seems just as hard as steel. Good thing I aimed for the head. Actually… he’s not going to need his bones anytime soon, right? I think that they would make an excellent chestpiece.’
In such a manner, Kain found his new project: stealing the bones of the poor creature. Kain never had any experience working with animal bones before, but thankfully the bones of the creature were like a jigsaw puzzle if one wanted to create armor with it. He simply broke the bones off of the spine and sewed them into his poncho by using more long grass. As well as that, the bones were sewn in on the inside of the poncho to make it at least not look terrible. By the end of the second project that day, the poncho sported a more filled look, was heavier, and even rattled a bit when jumping around too quickly, but it also received the stab protection that made the original creature such a presumed force to be reckoned with.
‘I think it’s great. May not look it, but it is really protective. You know what, if I’m making armor out of the corpses of my enemies, I may as well use that thick skull as well.’
After cleaning the skull through tiring efforts and even a trip back to the stream from earlier, the skull looked worthy of being hung up like a trophy. Despite that, Kain took the jaw from the skull and attached the upper skull to his left shoulder to act as a sort of pauldron.
Once the second project was completed, Kain was becoming tired again. He decided to move a bit further out into the forest to find a new place to sleep that was not home to the stripped corpse of that weird monster. He eventually found a small cave that was devoid of any creature, so he leaned up against the wall and fell asleep while hugging Grand.
