Fear The Father

"Brothers of the mine rejoice

Swing, swing, swing with me

Raise your pick and raise your voice

Sing, sing, sing with me." Currently, Adam can be seen and heard singing a particular song as he is using a metal needle to engrave a transmutation circle on his cutlass

It has been a week since he had awoken and set out on his journey, to put his experience up until now simply, it has been nothing but endless boredom

Sure seeing the forest after that wasteland is refreshing, and sure the excitement in visiting a magical world is great that excitement wears out pretty fast

After seeing one and the same sight, of endless greenery and trees, for hours on end Adam decided to sing some songs to kill the boredom, he did that and once that also got boring he decided to do something more productive, mainly engraving his weapons with transmutation circles while singing songs

That begs the question of why is he even engraving his weapons? Well because even though he has over 800 years of alchemical knowledge, he has no experience in using alchemy for anything, especially not fighting, so the best possible solution would be to have a few cards up his sleeves, aka hidden features on his weapons, this lack of experience is also the reason he is engraving the circle with a neede, he tried to make it with alchemy but it didn't work

Now, this all also begs the question, why is he even traveling in the forest when he could be traveling on the road? Well for that we would need to jump 2 days back

- Flashback-

Adam was calmly walking inside of what seems to be a recently deserted village

There were fires lit within homes, the food is served on the tables and the animals have been cared for, yet for some strange reason there are no villagers insight, at least not any alive villagers

As Adam walked he suddenly heard a crunch beneath his foot as he seemed to have stepped on something soft and squishy

'Did I step on shit?' Adam thought as he slowly lifted his leg up and looked downwards, luckily it wasn't shit

He had stepped and splattered the head of a child which seemed to have died while playing in the streets with a ball when it died

In all reality, he felt a small pang of guilt and remorse for what he had done, to just kill innocent people isn't really all that pleasurable, but that quickly went away, even if it isn't pleasurable he will still do it, it just won't leave a good aftertaste in his mouth

This village is one of the places where Adam sacrificed/converted everyone to acquire the Philosopher stone, it is the fourth village so far that Adam has sacrificed, meaning that his Philosopher stone in the making now has 2.746 souls in it, which is not that much considering that he would need about 500.000 to reach the lever of power that Hohenheim or Father has, that is excluding their experience

The way he killed them is simple, during the night he would go around the village with a stick or a hoe and engrave the circle into the ground since the villages were small by morning the circle would be engraved and everyone would have died in their sleep

Of course, there are also exceptions, like this village right here which was a tad too big so Adam didn't manage to complete the circle in time so by the time, the circle was completed everyone was already up and about doing whatever they were supposed to be doing, that's what lead to this current apocalyptic scene

Anyway, Adam was walking around the village to see if there was anything worth collecting, usually, there would be some stuff like money in the home of the village chief and that's where he is headed to right now

But just as the chiefs house came into view Adam heard a bloodcurdling full of pain and agony come from the front of the village

'Oh? Someone survived?' Adam thought as he began to make his way towards the place where the scream seemed to come from, he can't really miss out on another soul now can he, besides that he does have a few questions he wants to ask

It took him about a minute to get from one side to the other side of the village, probably because he walks super fast, and since he arrived Adam saw a young man, probably in his 20s, kneeling and screaming in horror as he bawled his eyes and nose out while looking at the dead bodies

As the man kneeled there screaming in agony, Adam became delighted and a wide smile spread across his face, he may have gotten all of the alchemical knowledge of both Father and Hohenheim but he still easily forgets things and is sora a scatterbrain so he would always forget to ask the villagers for directions and stuff like that before killing them

"W-who are you! Did you do this!?" Immediately when the man saw Adam approach him he became suspicious and on guard, too bad that he was weak and that he couldn't stand up from his kneeling position because of the emotional trauma so he couldn't really do anything to Adam

"I'm Adam, and if by 'this' you mean murdering your whole village then yes it's me who did it." Said Adam as he gestured towards the corpses around him with his hands without changing his facial expression or tone of voice in the slightest

"You bastard! I'll kill you! I won't let you live!" Immediately the guy's eyes turned crimson and he forgot all about his trauma, currently, he only wanted to kill Adam in as gruesome away as possible so he got a boost of strength, stood up and ran towards Adam with his full speed

"That isn't nice, I introduced myself to you yet you respond with such words and you don't introduce yourself back, how rude," Adam said, his words might have sounded friendly if he actually changed his voice or expression while saying them but he just sees no point in doing that, instead he said that sentence in a strangely robotic way

While he was saying that he dodged the man's lunge and instead put his hand on the man's shoulder and forcing him to once again kneel back down

The man obviously tried to trash around and break free from Adam's grasp but that was impossible, Adam is just so much stronger than the man so he did more damage to himself than Adam with the struggling

"Now listen closely, I will ask questions and you will answer them if you lie or don't answer correctly then the pain will follow." Adam slowly whispered into the guy's ear as he took out his cutlass and pointed it at the back of the guy's hand

"F.u.c.k you! I won't be answering-" The guy, of course, wouldn't be cooperative with Adam and Adam expected that he just hoped that this could be resolved with talking since it takes less time and energy to talk things out than to torture the answers out of his mouth

Since Adam didn't feel like having his eardrums pierced by the man's yelling and screaming his lungs out Adam put a hand over the guy's mouth before plunging the cutlass into his hand

To make a long story short the guy was quite a bit more resilient than Adam thought, he went thru the teeth and nail pulling and he lost both of his eyes before he finally talked, of course, there are also a few broken bones, cuts, and bruises mixed in as well, and he was only willing to talk when Adam threatened to carve his balls

After that what Adam asked the man were just some rudimentary questions like what is the shortest way to the exam? Where are the neighboring villages? How rich are those villages? And other simple stuff like than, and eventually when the man ran out of his uses Adam used alchemy to take his soul

The man answered all of those questions and even gave Adam a map of the surrounding areas since he was apparently a carrier who was bringing the news of the recently destroyed villages to the other villages and that when Adam murdered his village he was just returning home, Adam didn't really care for that sob story of his but he listened to it anyway, that's just how bored he was

In truth, the guy had quite poor luck, if he had arrived an hour later Adam would not have found him and if he arrived an hour earlier he would have died a painless death without witnessing the destruction of his village, indeed what poor luck

The map and by the words of that guy indicated that the fastest way to the exam would be via a road that leads south of the village and around the woods, but the second fastest way, which would also bring Adam to many more villages since it cuts directly to a more populated area is thru the woods

And that's why Adam is traveling thru the woods right now

As this is a forset it's not really all that straight and that's the reason it takes longer to go thru the forest than the road, besides that you could get attacked by wild animals, also since it's a first it has many bumps and rocks which often send the cart flying like what is happening right now

"F.u.c.k!" That immediately pissed Adam off, he has been trying to engrave this piece of *them* circle into the cutlass for the whole day and every single god damn time, just when he was about to finish it, just when a little tiny line was all that stood between completion and failure a bump in the ground would send the cart flying completely destroying Adam's hard work

Seriously who put those bumps there!? Are they trying to make it so that Adam does not succeed? Well yes actually, the Author put it there so that Adam wouldn't succeed and instead he would take his frustrations out on mother nature, you'll find out why in the next chapter

As luck would have it when Adam exited out of the cart a delicious-looking wild boar was just there passively grazing on Adam's left side minding its own business as the cart was passing it by

Deciding that this would be a good stress relief Adam decided to hunt and kill the boar without alchemy, so he took his spear and cutlasses and ran after the boar without regard for the consequences

The boar immediately spotted Adam since it's not that hard to spot a 203 cm man with muscles bigger than bodybuilders running at you with the speed of a top, multiple medals winning cyclist who competes in competitions regarding speed and not endurance, in simpler terms, Adam can run at around 65 km/h while the boar runs at around 35 km/h

So the wild chase began, it didn't actually last that long, only 15 minutes at most and that was mainly due to the boar having a head start and with it knowing the terrain better than Adam, but once Adam adjusted to the terrain it was dead meat, honestly, even if Adam had the same speed and he couldn't adjust to the terrain he would still catch up to the pig, Adam can sustain his top speed for much longer than the pig can so it would eventually get exhausted

"Finally got you, you slippery bastard!" Adam said as he jumps out of the bushes and plunges his spear into the boar's forehead, killing the poor beast which was by this point exhausted beyond belief

At this point, Adam is hungry from all the running and he hadn't eaten in the carriage so it's only logical that he would be hungry, an upgraded body coms with upgraded upkeep costs

Adam was naturally curious about the taste of a wild boar so he decided that instead of returning back to the carriage to eat or eat the boar at the carriage he will eat it right here right now

If he remembers correctly a person first needs to drain the blood from the body which was easy for Adam, he used alchemy to extract the blood out of the boar's body

Next Adam gutted the boar, which didn't turn out that bad since he watched a few Youtube videos in the past about how to gut and skin an animal, even if it's only a video and Adam has ni experience it is still better than nothing

"Who would have thought I'd run into another human here." Just when Adam was halfway done with skinning the boar from behind him he heard someone talking to him

He turned around to see who was the person that snuck up to him only for him to remain astounded for a second as his brain short-circuited

'No f.u.c.k.i.n.g way.'