Shades of Blue

The Long Trek

There's a place we used to go...

Before the Sword and the Beasts and the Calamity...

Do you remember it...do you remember me...

If you don't...I can show you...

I'll show you everything I can...whatever you want to see...

I'll do anything...anything to help...

A bokoblin screeched far below him, and a rock struck the wall an inch from his head just a second later. He jumped to the side, clinging to the wall a few feet lower than he had been before, and turned enough to glare furiously at the bokoblin now dancing happily on the ground. It had the nerve to stick its tongue out at him as it noticed he was staring, before snuffling about for another rock to throw at his head. Sighing heavily, Link began to climb sideways and out of the view of the stupid beast. Hopefully, once it lost sight of him, it would forget he had ever been there.

It usually worked that way. Bokoblins were not very smart.

Then again, this was about the third time he had been spotted just this morning by the grubby little things. It was a sign of his fatigue more than anything else. Besides, this area was crawling with every color of bokoblin, swarms of them camped out in their skull caves and waiting for anything they could shoot at to happen past. He had managed to sneak past a good number of them, but there were so many in his path that he couldn't avoid conflict entirely. Thankfully, he was a good enough shot that situations like this weren't a problem.

He was just lazy.

But, no time for laziness now. He wasn't about to take a rock to the head just because he wanted to save a few arrows and his own climbing progress. Once this stupid little thing was out of his way, he could make up that progress much faster than he had taken it the first time.

As the bokoblin gave another high squeal (which likely meant he had found another rock to chuck at Link's head) he pushed hard off the wall, turning in the air to face away from the wall. Time seemed to slow, until every breath felt like a minute, every foot of lost altitude a mile. In the next second, he had the bow off his back and an arrow nocked. In the same way that he had somehow managed to redirect the bokoblin's attack on the Great Plateau, he found himself moving on instinct, aiming and loosing the arrow in the next breath. Quickly replacing the bow at his back, he opened his paraglider and caught his descent.

The arrow hit the bokoblin in the eye, launching it backward before it evaporated in a cloud of rancid purple smoke. Link's feet hit the ground a second later. He scooped up the discarded horn and scanned it into the Sheikah Slate before turning away.

Now, he could climb the Tower in peace.

Lanayru's Tower was by far the most...annoying he had encountered so far. He had grabbed up the Dueling Peaks and Hateno Towers without so much as a second thought, but this one was guarded by monsters on all sides. And they weren't just little bokoblins, but the larger (and slightly smarter) moblins, and the far too intelligent lizalfos, which he hated purely based on the fact that they took too long to defeat and he was bone tired by the time he had reached the top of the hill the Tower rose from. So he had tried to avoid conflict as much as he could for the sake of his own energy, dodging around monsters and crawling around on his knees rather than launching in gung-ho with his cheap sword and weak bow.

Of course, he didn't particularly mind getting in some shooting practice. Even with the mediocre bow he had dug up in Hateno, he was a damn good shot, and he enjoyed vaulting off of things to shoot midair perhaps more than was healthy for someone dependent on a scrap of wood and cloth to save him from becoming a Hero-pancake.