As the beast scratched at the door, slowly chipping it away. Ragna took in where he was again. Earlier, when he first woke up, he barely had any time to notice it. The room was actually quite big; it had a closet that he used to block the door to buy a few more precious seconds. But as he was scanning the room, his eyes caught a broom in the corner.
Ragna's eyes locked onto the broom.
It was brittle. One wrong move and it would shatter—and take his hands with it.
But if it worked as he wanted it to, he could get out of this without terrible injuries.
Just before he could go to the broom, the predator finally broke into the room and walked slowly to him. When Ragna was trying to get a good look at what he was facing, he was stopped by something.
It was weird for Ragna; it was as if a hazy barrier had formed, not quite solid, but it was more like a hazy gas. From what he could see, it looked like an experiment. A crude marking labeled it: 002. A human face was sewn onto a lion's body—and the wings made his chest twist with anger. He couldn't understand why at all, but those crow wings sewn onto the creature filled him with anger and sorrow.
Unfortunately, the predator didn't have the same reaction to Ragna as he did to it. It made the first move when it jumped into the range of Ragna and tried to scratch him before Ragna could think.
This sudden movement by 002, as Ragna called him, made Ragna finally break out of his thoughts and quickly move out of the way. Before Ragna could fully get out of the way of the claw, his arm got mangled.
Three deep gashes tore across his arm.
Blood should have spilled.
It didn't.
Ragna barely had time to process his arm. 002's onslaught didn't slow. It even started using its wings in these attacks, trying to wear down Ragna.
Finally, while trying to escape the attacks, he backed up far enough to get to the broom. As brittle as the broom looked from afar, it felt even worse. Ragna knew it could not take more than two attacks from the fierce predator, so he made a plan.
Ragna thought that 002 could have a weak point in either its human face or on top of the back of the predator, where the wings were sewn on. It was not a high chance it was going to work, but anything was better than dying.
As Ragna kept dodging the attacks of 002, he finally got a chance to attack, and he decided to attack the right leg of the predator. When he did so, the broom exploded, and he noticed that in the process of attacking, he was obscured by the darkness surrounding 002 and missed and accidentally hit his stomach. As he struck, the shadows twisted. The broom shattered in his hands as it slammed into the creature's stomach instead of its leg.
Ragna was aiming for the legs of 002 because he wanted to get it off balance in order to attack the top of its back first, but this mistake also worked in Ragna's favor, and he took it well, immediately pulling back his bloody hands and the sharper but broken broomstick.
Using his even more deadly weapon, he stabbed the predator in the eye and made sure to blind the other one by splashing it with his blood. At the moment, Ragna felt strangely empowered, but that was because of two reasons, the first of which was that the 002 was becoming weaker as more and more blood started to pour out from the stomach of the beast.
This surprised Ragna because he knew that the wound inflicted on the beast could not have been so big to bring that much of its blood out. But the second thing that helped Ragna become stronger was the mixture of blood on his hands. He felt it start to be absorbed, as weird as that felt, he became stronger, ever so slightly. Not enough to do anything with it, but it was still a thing.
As he was thinking about all of this, he started climbing on top of the beast in order to cut it down from its back. When he finally reached the top, he grabbed onto a wing with one hand and started to cut it off with the other hand using the broom. 002 started making an ungodly sound that sounded like a yell of a human and a roar of a lion while running around trying to shake off the pest on top of it.
When he finally got the first wing off the beast, his broom shattered, and then he suddenly grabbed the wing. He started cutting the other wing immediately with it. He knew it would cut because he, of all people, knew best how sharp that is. He had cuts on his back and arms to prove it as well.
During the final struggle between the two, the shadows started to rise up higher and higher to cover Ragna. They never could touch him, no matter how close they were. As Ragna quickly figured out, they were only there to block his vision. He started to cut with more and more urgency because he knew if he didn't, something bad was going to happen.
When he started to cut it off, the shaking below him of 002 stopped. Ragna was confused about what must have happened if the beast had just stopped because he could still feel the heartbeat of the beast through its skin. Then suddenly, something pierced Ragna's back. When he looked down at his stomach, all he saw was the tail of a scorpion.
Then he said weakly as blood started pouring out of his mouth, "N-Now *cough* I know what you are," he rasped. "You damn manticore."