User blog:Baluar/God Eater: Rise of the Shadows, chapter 2: Depths

As I close in on the Aragami, the usual adrenaline rush lets itself be felt. Some fools might think that sniping an Aragami from afar is the best feeling there can possibly be.

Said fools are wrong.

Sure, I get no little satisfaction from doing so, but nothing quite beats feeling one's God Arc rend the enemy while you are unseen. Few Aragami ever survive the initial wound. Fewer still manage to escape me.

At the beginning, I could hardly close in to Aragami before they'd notice me. Even with a natural gift for stealth, I was quite clumsy back then, stepping on uneven terrain or crushing little sticks that lied around. But the rare times when I managed to come near undetected, it paid off and allowed me to damage them in ways that would be impossible to pull off if they had noticed me, even if they were little more than powerful blade strikes.

And then I grew practiced. Now I can practically dance behind Aragami - even the flying pests that everyone calls Zygotes - without them noticing anything unusual. The attacks became more elaborate as well, and while initially all I could do amounted to well-placed stabs, that grew to the point I now can build intrincate traps for Aragami and lie in the shadows, waiting for them to come and make one wrong step. One wrong step... and they'll end up rolling downhill and end up inside a hole, a hole in which an armed God Eater awaits, for hours if necessary.

And so they fall victim, one by one. Today, it is a Kongou. Yesterday, a Chi-You. Before it could even acknowledge it had been trapped, the Chi-You found itself armless and headless, dead before it could assimilate the situation.

The Kongou waves its arms as the trap keeps him in his place, and I use the situation to impale it, the sword entering its back and cutting all the way through until its head, where it surfaces and splashes ludicrous amounts of blood. I quickly pull the blade off and then swing it towards the Aragami's right arm, cutting through it as a knife cuts through hot butter... and again causing copious amounts of blood to splatter all over the place. One of them falls on my cheek, a few centimeters below my eye.

However, there's always an unknown element in this business, especially when one is unaffiliated with Fenrir like me, and thus lacks things like intel on the enemy. And today, that element presented itself on another Aragami. One of those I hate the most...

A Hannibal.

The beast quickly prepares one of its strongest attacks, and I barely leave my trap before an enormous spear made of fire destroys everything inside and causes boiling Kongou blood to fly everywhere. One of them lands on my cheek, a few centimeters below my eye, and causes some serious burns. I thank lady Luck mentally; had that landed a few centimeters above, I'd be blind and helpless against some pretty fucking dangerous Aragami.

I know I am outclassed. Even with traps, I can't reliably defeat these monsters. So, discovered and in an open place, I am hopelessly outmatched. And thus, there is only one viable course of action.

Run like the devil.

It's been a few hours running. I crossed ways with a lot of Aragami, but most of them either didn't see me or didn't really care about me enough to attack me. The Hannibal has been out of my sight for a long time, and so I decide to calm down and search for something to hunt. While I am officially unaffiliated with Fenrir (due to a certain incident a long time ago), I still maintain connections with them. Every core I get means something from several hundreds to a few thousands Fc in cash, and despite it all I still need the money to buy food, since eating Aragami is not an option.

Since the Hannibal got my kill (and messed up the core, anyway... huge fiery spears tend to do that), I am now in the need of finding some other core.

Then I spot a weird thing. An Aragami unlike any other. A deep purple Abaddon that radiates a faint light of the same color. And it's there, in the middle of the night, without anything or anyone harming it. Its core might be worth a fortune, and thus I'm pretty much forced to go after it, lest some other God Eater finds it and devours it for one rare material. One rare material. HA! What a waste of resources. Practically its entire body is usable, if you scavenge enough.

However, the Abbadon royally screws up my plan, not by fleeing, but by biting me and somehow poisoning me. I had heard tales of Abbadons actually defending themselves, but until today they were just that. Tales.

Tales might become true. Apparently. And they get you sleepy...

Yes, I am shamelessly pulling shit out of my ass because I don't know how to follow FotH. And yes, I know that's just evil. :V