God Mage - D.W. Jackson Page 0,22
The smell of their metal armor made his nose itch, and their deep vices annoyed his sensitive ears.
Shifting his weight onto his back legs, Jin jumped from the ground to a limb more than ten feet in the air with little trouble. The sound from his jump alerted one of the soldiers who looked to the spot Jin had just left a moment before.
Jin watched curiously as two of the solders searched the area he had watched them from. When one of the men looked up and into his large, golden eyes, he stumbled backward and fell onto his companion, letting out a loud scream. Jin turned his head slightly, watching the men below as they rushed around pointing toward him. One of the men picked up a bow, pointed it in his direction, and let loose an arrow that raced toward him.
Almost lazily, Jin jumped from the tree limb into the middle of the camp seconds before the arrow would have found its mark. The powerful muscles in the large cat’s legs twitched when one of the solders charged at him, and with one large paw, Jin ripped through the man’s metal armor with his sharp claws nearly splitting the man in two.
The other soldiers took an involuntary step back as their comrade was ripped apart. Jin paced around the dead man then looked at the other men who gripped the hilts of their swords nervously before pouncing among them. It only took moments for the small encampment of soldiers to be destroyed by the massive animal. Once they were all dead, Jin didn’t move on, he walked from body to body smelling each corpse until he found something that caught his nose and using his massive jaws ripped into the dead man’s torso ripping out large chunks of meat.
As Bren watched the large cat, he started to understand why his father never felt comfortable in the presence of such a creature. It was truly hard to believe that the large cat was the same gentle man he had talked to only that morning.
Bren shook the thoughts from his mind and searched for his other friends among the crowded forest.
He found Faye first, who unlike Jin, worked alongside a group of seven other soldiers. The men she was with intrigued him a bit, as unlike the others, they wore no armor and instead wore tight dark blue clothing. The group moved through the trees as if they were wild animals—easily at home in the treetops as they were on the forest floor. Faye walked below them, her eyes darting to them every few moments. She stopped when they did and only moved when they did.
When they neared a large encampment of soldiers, one of the soldiers dropped from the tree tops and landed a few meters away from Faye and spoke with her briefly. Bren wished that he could hear what was being said, but not even his magic was strong enough to make voices carry that far along the wind. For a moment he tried to enhance his own hearing, but when he did, the sound of the people near him breathing drowned out anything he might glean from the forest below. After giving up trying to hear what was being said, Bren went back to watching the group as they circled around the large camp of more than two dozen Brotherhood soldiers.
Faye had never felt so nervous before in her life. She knew what she was supposed to do, but she had never taken a direct part in a battle before, and the few times she had seen something killed before this trip, was when her grandfather had taken her hunting. She had never taken a liking to those trips and hated the look on the deer’s face when they were dead. To her, it was almost as if their large black eyes asked her why they had to die, and the first time, she still remembered crying late into the night. This time though, she wouldn’t simply be watching, and it wasn’t animals they were hunting.
A shiver ran down Faye’s back when she remembered the small encounter they had when they had first arrived in Northern Kurt. It had happened so fast then, and she had snuck away and cried late into the night afterwards even though she had remained hidden during the whole battle.
She let her magic flow over her body as she nervously gripped the hilt of her small dagger. Once she was sure