The tongues of the three magical dogs flopped out of their mouths. Their eyes which were too big to be considered normal, stared at Roy with unblinking intensity.
For a moment, the ex-gas-station-employee was rendered speechless.
In all honesty, he had thought the Tinderbox was going to be an Elemental artefact. Akin to Mustang's powers from Full Metal Alchemist. But apparently, it was a summoning tool. Quite a weird one at that.
Roy looked at the Tinderbox in his hand and wondered if he could keep summoning more and more dogs.
In the end, he could sweep the world with infinite dogs.
An infinite amount of dogs would even beat the sun right? Roy joked in his mind, remembering an old meme, but then, a thought came into his head.
Would the eyes of the dogs get larger and larger? It was worth an experiment. So, feeling curious, Roy struck the flint and steel once again. Nothing happened. The spark flew and disappeared into the air.
The three dogs tilted their heads, wondering what their owner was doing.
Roy looked at the dogs and huffed.
"So... what can you do?"
"""Wooff!!"""
"...figures." He stood up from the ground and pocketed the Tinderbox. He wasn't sure if putting the box into the inventory would dispel the dogs, but he would test it later.
Before making extensive use of them, he had to be sure, was it the Tinderbox that was magical, or the dogs themselves were also magic?
The system description seemed to imply the former but you never know.
"Um. Can you find the nearest civilization and take me there?" Roy issued a simply command.
Instantly, the three dogs' eyes gleamed. And then they moved.
In an instant, the largest of the dogs swept its huge body behind Roy and in a single motion, dashed between his legs and hoisted him up on his back.
"Whoa!" Roy let out a yelp of surprise before he stabalized himself. A gust of wind hit his face then, and before he knew it the surroundings were rushing past him. The trees that pressed close seemed to run behind him with increasingly fast speed.
He grabbed a fistful of the dog's fur, watching as the other two trailed on the sides. The dogs moved like creatures possessed, swerving through the trees, avoiding every single bushes, the finger like projections of the tree branches and the giant trunks that rose from the ground.
Unknowingly, Roy began to smile.
The trees continued to rush past, and eventually, Roy heard something.
Its came from the far left, but it was enough to draw his attention.
It was the sound of screams and yelling.
"Wait." He said. "Take me in that direction." The dogs instantly changed their course.
As the sounds began to draw closer, Roy could faintly make out what was happening.
A battle.
A small bead of sweat appeared on Roy's face as he considered turning back.
A battle. Since he had transmigrated, his was most probably a world with some sort of magical undertone. And since that was he came, there were bound to be dangerous individuals and beasts, right?
He gulped. The phantom heat inside his body gave him some confidence but that was only that.
Some confidence.
Not a whole lot.
He had only just transmigrated here. Rushing into danger was stupid. He hadn't verified the power of the tree dogs, nor had he figured out just how much output he could get through his Heavenly Flame.
Besides... was there any reason to help anyone?
"Aaaarghhh!" Another scream cut through the forest, accompanied by a bestial roar.
Roy's heart suddenly tightened.
That roar... it was akin to the bleating of a pig.
Just as he thought that, dogs he was on broke through the tree line.
...
The life of a soldier was a hard one. Rodrik had served in the City Watch of the Asuran Capital for 6 years. He was an practitioner of the Water God Style, an intermediate swordsman while also having practiced Sword God style to the Beginner rank. Two years ago, he had received a serious injury to his right arm. While the healers had done their best, it had too late to fix it back. There was a permanent muscle debilitation in his forearm, effectively making all his skills redundant.
He would never hold a sword again.
Or so it was said as he was relieved of his duties with a handful of coins and sent on his merry way.
Rodrik had travelled back to his home town, a quaint little town on the border of the Fittoa region. His town was on the edge of the woods, where mana gave rise to monsters. And so, there was always a need for guards. Despite his injury, Rodrik hadn't given up.
Through sheer will and determination, he had rekindled his talents and managed to get his skill back. An entire year of back breaking hard work was what it took to adjust the Water God style to work with his injury. From then, he joined the guards.
Every month for so they would venture deeper into the woods, eliminating large groups of Monsters that may have formed.
This time... there was a problem.
"Aaaarghhh!" A bone shaking scream ran through his ears. Rodrik gritted his teeth as his legs pushed him forward. Before him stood a behemoth of muscle.
It was a monster encased in brown fur with two large tusks jutting out of its mouth. It stood on its hind legs, four arms hanging in thr air, standing at a gigantic 10 feet in height and bleated like a pig.
Behind it stood another one of the same species.
Terminate Boars.
Two of them.
Accompanied by a pack of assault dogs.
Rodrik ignored the taste of iron in his mouth and swung his sword in a wide horizontal arc. The blade rended the flesh of the monster, before a fist slammed right into the ground where he had stood moments ago.
Rodrik jumped off the ground and his sword struck one of the Boar's four shoulders. As he landed, he sliced through two attack dogs.
His eyes momentarily scanned the surroundings,
They had been a party of 7. Now, reduced to four. He was the only intermediate swordsman in the party. Two had been rangers and the rest had been beginner rank swordsman.
It was enough to handle monsters that appeared here. They were not very strong most of the time, and even if they were, the party simple won through the strength of numbers.
But not this time.
Two Terminate Boars and a pack of assault dogs. Such a force was enough to be classified as a high C rank, or even a B rank threat. There was no way to win.
He would die right here.
No! Rodrik bit his cheek, using the pain to force him forward. His legs were tired, yet he forced then to move. He was an agent of motion on the battlefield, slashing at the dogs while drawing aggro from one of the boars. The boar slammed all four of its arm into the ground before him, stopping him in his tracks. Instantly, Rodrik spun around and parried a bite from a dog.
He felt the brush of death behind him and in a moment of instinct, he ducked down as a massive fist, one that pulverized the dog in a second passed over his head, missing him by a hair's width.
"We need to retreat!" Rodrik heard someone yell.
It was Pan, his neighbor. He was a ranger. He would not last long, Rodrik told himself. Nobody would if they kept fighting.
However, retreating would mean drawing the monsters back to the town.
Going deeper inwards was also suicide.
He dodged another swipe from the boar before leaping to the side, narrowly missing a dog.
Just then, as he got up to continue fighting, another scream reached his ears.
Jack... Rodrik realized with horror. And as if on queue, the other terminate Boar turned around, clutching a still warm leg in one of its hand, chewing lightly on it as if it were a snack.
Rodrik felt his blood run cold.
"Fuck..." he muttered, gripping his sword tighter. "I hadn't even confessed my feelings to Gina yet... just my luck."
The two Terminate Boars advanced towards him.
Just when he had prepared to suicide charge to at least take one down, something happened.
An object broke through the tree line. Something enormous. Something alive. Whatever it was, it was fast. And following it, two more objects of similar size dashed out from the tree line.
Wham!
One of the blurs smashed right into the Terminate boar before him. The monster let out a pig like squel. Rodrik's eyes shrank into needles and he leapt to the side, narrowly dodging an attack from the one behind him. As he stood back up, he took a short look at the thing that had come out of the trees.
There, entangled with the Terminate boar in a gory dance of blood and viscera was... a dog. It had hazel brown fur and gigantic eyes. Its teeth dug into the Terminate Boar's skin, ripping apart its neck and chewing on its wind pipe.
"**********" Rodrik heard a voice from behind him, followed by another pig like squel.
He turned.
Mounted atop another giant dog, one who had even larger eyes than the other two, was a man. He wore clothing of strange origin and had short brown hair. He had a small, lean frame and his jawline was quite apparently, though combined with the sloght cave of his cheeks, it gave off the impression that the man was somewhat malnourished.
The man's mouth opened again and he spoke something. Its was a foreign language, not one he recognized.
Before Rodik could say anything, a large thud rang out amid the barking sound of the assault dogs.
The stranger turned. The other terminate boar had slammed the stranger's dog to the side, smashing it right through a gigantic tree. The boar was injured. One of its legs had been torn clean off and blood gushed out in waves.
A blur of brown rang last him. It the dog with the middle sized eyes. It rushed at the remaining Terminate Boar, mouth still bleeding from the fresh kill and bit into one of its arms. With a wild, terribly strong jerk, the arm was ripped off.
The boar let out a squel.
Rodrik might have felt bad for the boar, if it weren't for the comrades he had lost.
Instead, a feeling relief surged through him. His eyes and mouths trembled as he looked upon the stranger who say atop the largest of the three dogs.
The dog which had been thrown through the trees came running back, barely any trace of injury on it. A shimmer ran over its fur, perhaps a kind of protective magic.
The assault dogs were rapidly taken care of. Soon the combined force of Two Terminate Boars and a pack of assault dogs was almost entirely crushed by two of the three dogs of this stranger.
"W-who are you?" Rodrik asked with a trembling voice. The exhaustion seemed to have finally caught up to him. His knees buckled under his own weight, yet he stopped himself from falling at the last moment.
The man raised a brow at his question.
"**************"
Again, he spoke in a language he could not recognize.
Rodrik looked at the rest of his team members.
Pan was still alive. And so was Jack. The rest were dead.
Turning back towards the stranger, Rodrik felt warmness flow down from his eyes and over his cheeks. He clenched his jaw, forcing his hiccups back down and knelt onto the ground.
With no way to communicate, Rodrik used the deepest form of gratitude he knew. One that could be understood without a single word spoke.
"Thank you..." he planted his head onto the ground in a deep bow.
Watching him, Pan and Jack also limped along and bowed down on the ground.
Watching the three men he had saved, the stranger, which was clearly Roy was at a loss for words.
What do I do now?
...
...