Chapter 237

237 Chapter Two Hundred Thirty Seven

“The training was gruesome, Jeremiah. If you had been given the chance, your hands would fall off,” Katie replied with a groan, her mind flashing memories of the week she’d had with the man.

“Hey, I’m not as weak as you might think I am. I could have gone through the training just fine,” Jeremiah tried, puffing out his chest.

“Oh, you have no idea, Jeremiah. He’d definitely put you down before you thought of getting through the very first thing he considered a trial. It was like he was trying to kill me. Considering you don’t have an agility gift, he would have killed you,” she replied with a chuckle.

“Why do I get the feeling he was training you to combat my arr...”

“Would someone first explain to me what’s going on before I decide whether or not the person before me should live or die?” Cole’s voice dangerously cut through the air. Katie turned to see her mate feigning a smile on his face. A terrible attempt...

“Well, to put it simply, this boy here is a spy for the hunters. This information mustn’t get out, but I am telling you so that you don’t kill him,” Katie responded.

“Then can he explain why he shot you with four arrows?” Cole asked, “He nearly killed you, you know.”

“Let me explain that...” Jeremiah asked, stopping Katie’s intervention, “First of all, I apologize for any trouble I have caused you. I had to keep my cover. As some of you might know, I was granted my powers when I saved a certain werewolf from rogues a few years ago. The werewolf I was saving was the king’s brother, Sean.

I hadn’t realized I was saving someone who could handle himself at the moment and he watched as I risked my life to save him from the rogues. I killed the ones I could and could never figure out why the last one simply ran away.

.....

.......

Precisely three years ago...

Moving close to the capital had been the best decision for Jeremiah’s family. What they hadn’t known when they were shifting was that their son was planning to join another branch of the hunters. Jeremiah didn’t tell his ordinary parents everything that happened to him. After all, how could they understand anything he was going through. They were civilians who knew nothing about the hunters and what they went through to attain their gifts from the Man god.

Every time they asked if he was fine or asked that he would take a rest from the tedious training, it only got on his nerves. He’d witnessed the training of many of the hunters and come to know what it was to be a human and work up to the level of a werewolf. The creatures were strong without even training their bodies.

The hunters were even responsible for keeping the civilian werewolves safe as well. Jeremiah knew them well... the civilians were as weak as a human either. It angered him, but he trained diligently... Or at least he’d thought he did... until he met a girl he came to know as Katie Chase. The girl was much younger than he was, but she was said to be at the same level as he was in her training. At the time he met her, she was a small frail creature, however, the skill with which she took down his peers during their training only made her scary.

When the time came that the two of them would do battle, he’d fought her, but she’d been too weak that day. She’d not fought him the same way he’d seen her fighting the rest of his peers, but once he found out the reason for that, his ideals had shattered. His friends, the other junior hunters... They were all doing their best. The hunters that supervised them told them they were doing well and gave extra drills to those that weren’t doing well.

This girl though... She didn’t care about what the adults thought about what she was doing. She trained herself to the ground. She trained until she couldn’t move and even then she tried to get some training in. He’d never said it to her, but her presence suffocated him. She learnt fast and surpassed him with ease even when he tried to keep up with her. When he tried training with her, he’d got so tired that he hated everything about becoming a hunter... but she kept going.

Her ideals... the reasons that drove her to keep this up ate him up even more... ‘What about us, Katie? Aren’t we all trying to achieve the same thing? What makes you feel like you’re different from the rest of us? No, it’s clear to see that you are different from the rest of us, but I don’t see anything special about you. You’re human just like the rest of us. Why then are you able to train so hard?’ the questions slowed him down.

His parents worried about his health and thought that he would get depressed. He withdrew from the hunter program and asked his parents if they would move out of Brigadia. Moving out of Brigadia had allowed him some fresh air... ‘I’ll become a hunter in no time... and return to Brigadia and show you, Katie. Just you wait... It’s no doubt you’ll be a hunter by then though.’

It hadn’t been long after they’d settled in a town outside the capital that the boy had joined the hunter’s agency nearest to his home and continued with his training. However, this time he chose to train as hard as his body could take. Everything was going in his routine plan until he heard it... the sound of a growl deep within the woods.

Jeremiah didn’t know what took over him that evening. A normal human would have run in the opposite direction, but he had done the opposite and run straight into the rogues. As he’d suspected, three rogues had an old man cornered and he ran in front of him, getting defensive immediately. The rogues snapped at the human with the intention of killing him and his training kicked in. They weren’t alphas and he had a hunting knife with him that evening.

At the cost of his life, the boy had battled the rogues and brought two of them down, stabbing inaccurately in all the weak spots that he could remember while staying out of their clutches. When he was done with two of them, dark spots filled his eyes and exhaustion filled his body... ‘No, there was another one left...’

“You’re one brave kid,” the voice of an old man reached his ears right before he passed out.

Jeremiah woke up the next morning in a hospital bed. Seated on a sofa beside him was a man reading newspapers along with his parents who’d fallen asleep on the sofa. The man folded the newspaper and the centre to look beyond at the boy lying in the bed, “You’re awake... That’s good.”

It was only then that the boy noticed the colour of the man’s eyes, “Your highness... Are you okay?”

“What gives you the idea that I wouldn’t be?” the man replied, before folding the newspapers and placing them on a table.

“You’re one brave boy. Are you a junior hunter? I just have to ask?” he asked the boy.

“Yes, I am. I was training in the woods nearby when I heard the rogues growling,” Jeremiah replied. His mind started working for the first time since he’d heard the growls and kicked into his instincts. The rogues hid killed had a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating the royal, “What were those rogues doing there though?”

There seemed to be a spark in the royal’s eyes, “Looks like you’re not as dumb as I’d taken you to be. I would like to ask you something, Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah, at that moment, knew that he wouldn’t be liking whatever would come from the royal’s mouth and the man sensed his reluctance, “I honestly don’t like what’s happening at the moment, but you happened to save the wrong person. As you already know, I was more than capable of handling myself back there. You saved someone that wasn’t in need of being saved... But that act of bravery has also given you a way to redeem yourself both as a hunter and someone that wants to protect humans in need.”

“What are you saying?” Jeremiah asked.

“Don’t you feel it yet?” the man asked, “the power that is coursing through you at the moment. Don’t you feel like you could snap anything with your bare fists if you tried?”

Before the man had said it, Jeremiah hadn’t noticed. Despite his weakened state, he did in fact feel stronger than he’d normally felt. As though it would be something normal to him if he just started bending steel bars, “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh don’t play dumb with me...” the man snapped at him before taking a deep breath, “Honestly, I just need your help. It’s nothing that goes against your beliefs. In fact, you’ll be able to get the hunters even closer to accomplishing their goal. The downfall of the rogue king.”

“You say that like it’s very easy to do,” Jeremiah asked him with an incredulous look on his face.

“Well, it gets easier if you choose to be a spy for the hunters,” the man said to him. A look of fear spread across the boy’s face when he heard the man’s words. He’d never thought of something of the sort. The man before him was asking him to join him in espionage against the most dangerous creature in the history of their world.

“You asking me to walk amongst them without killing them. How am I supposed to do that?” he asked.

“We all have a role to play, Jeremiah. We are not all meant to kill them, you know. What do you say?” he asked him. Sean Sirius, the brother to the king was playing the part of spy and no one knew about it. And here he was asking Jeremiah to take a path into the world of suspicion and potentially gruesome death in case he was discovered.

“How can I trust someone I just met?” he asked him.

'

“You can trust your guts. In my world, trust is not something you can rely on. You can’t tell anyone about anything unless you trust them completely. To be honest with you, finding someone you can trust with anything when you’re a spy is almost impossible. When you do find someone you can trust without a second thought, which I advise is a bad idea, you report to them. That way, your efforts will not be for nothing when you die,” the man said to him.