Every step: calcuted; every breath: pnned. He felt as though standing straight was a long-forgotten notion. Max paused after reaching the right side of the cave's entrance.
What follows is the most dangerous part of the hunt. Max simply could not afford a direct approach and so he will use the wall to his right to slowly climb—first high up then moving to the side. That's the idea anyway. He looked to the right and up. The ceiling will be the most difficult part. It was far from smooth which suited him just fine although one might as well call it ''velvet'' when compared to the roughness of the cave's sides.
The cave itself was made out of limestone, a prime climbing rock if Max is the arbiter. Where others would see pin rock Max saw hand and footholds, purchase, aretes—thankfully those are not so numerous—, plenty of holds rge enough for both hands, grips, anchorage spots, fingerholds, cruxes, almost rostrum-like spots, ''belvederes'' as he called pces with the best views of the surroundings, rungs, steps, and so on. It's all a matter of perspective, really, he pondered. Maker once told him: ''Each of us sees the world through a sui generis tincture of our eyes. We can't help it how we see it.''
His path will most certainly not be a straight line. Nature made these hidden pathways and Max had to find, follow and respect them.
The climb begins. His pace was that of an incapacitated snail. Any sound, however small, might turn him into a blotch on the wall, quickly followed by falling shimmering dust. Max didn't find this image particurly appealing, his remains scattered in this forgotten pce—behind the skirt of the goddess, as the popur idiom went. That is to say in the middle of exactly nowhere. Max practiced climbing with his weapon and sometimes with even armor on. At this moment strength was not the issue, but patience.
And it was surely tested aplenty after hours of zig-zagging, weaving, curving, then hugging an oblique way upwards, resuming an anfractuous course up, following a devious vertical serpentiform route only he could see or uncover, until finally, finally he almost reached the ceiling. The belvedere spot offered a fantastic view of his surroundings.
Considering the size of the Wraith there wasn't really much chance to lose it and it was really only a question of time before Max locked his two red embers on the target. The beast was sleeping on the cave floor—just as he expected. With the grace and dexterity of a spider, Max continued his climb sideward for some time until his body was almost precisely above that of the giant lizard.
The tiny thought kept reappearing in the back of his mind, sticking to it like a bur that one could never fully remove out of his or her favorite shirt—one loose rock, one audible sound really, is all that separated the blue hunter from becoming an unenviable small pile of crystal dust scattered upon this cave in the middle of nowhere. The Wraith couldn't possibly reach him, he was too high for that, but—as always in life there was that cursed caveat starting with ''but''—there were more than a few sizable rocks near the sleeping monster, and Wraiths are known to have a decent intelligence, greater than that of a dog or pig. It's not entirely unheard of for a creature of its ilk to start throwing boulders, in this case directly at Max, and therein lies the slight problem. He was in no position to dodge. In such a hypothetical his best bet would be to make a long jump down and tail it—with a good chance of being snatched from the air long before his feet even touched the ground.
