Chapter 442: No Mistakes
Chapter 442: No Mistakes
Bruce did not say his wife’s name. He did not say the name of his sister or his mother figure. He did not say what realm he was currently anchored to. Kael did not press.
Theron did not even seem to notice the gaps; to Theron, Bruce was a kindly older stranger who had saved his life, and that was enough.
By the time the conversation circled back to food, Bruce was on his fourth slab. He had not realized he had eaten that much. Theron was on his fifth, which Kael was now openly mocking him for. Kael was on his; Bruce had lost count; and was finally slowing down. The second deer was nearly finished. The third had not been touched. The two carcass-piles of cooked meat and uncooked meat at the edge of the hollow were significant.
"We have," Bruce said, looking at them, "much more meat than we can carry."
"That’s what the Guild exchange is for," Kael said. "Sell what we can’t eat."
"Ok.." Bruce said from the side
"Sell it raw? Or sell it cooked?" Theron said from the side...
Both Kael and Bruce gave him a look..
"Don’t look at me like that I know little about these, I lived in a mundane world before I died, one can sell both cooked and raw..."
Bruce sighed and replied; "Probably raw. The exchange buys parts. Cooked food sells separately at; somewhere, probably; food stalls, taverns, I don’t know. We’ll learn that part later. Raw is the easy sell, since there’ll be other uses apart from food."
Kael said with a nod. "We’ll take the third one whole. And as much off the first two as we can manage. Leave the rest. Other hunters will find it."
"Or beasts will," Kael said. "Don’t kid yourself. Anything we leave here gets eaten by something bigger before sundown."
"That’s fine. That’s the cycle."
"That’s the cycle," Kael agreed.
---
Theron pushed himself up from the log, stretched, and then froze with his arms half-raised.
"My arm," he said.
Bruce looked.
Theron’s wrenched arm; the one that had been hanging at a bad angle since the hollow had grabbed him in the mist, the one he had been cradling against his chest all morning; had moved. Without him noticing. The position of the elbow looked normal. He was holding both arms above his head, and both arms were working fine.
He lowered them slowly. He flexed his bad hand. He rotated the elbow. He looked, very slightly, on the edge of crying.
"It’s healed," he said. "It just; it healed."
"The meat," Bruce said. "I told you. The meat heals the soul. We were cracked when we sat down. Eating closed our cracks. Your arm was a kind of crack. So it closed too."
"I..." Theron stared at his arm. "I have been hurt for so long today. I forgot what it was like to not be hurt."
"Get used to it," Kael said. He stood up too, brushing crumbs of bark-crust off his front, his glow now full and bright. He looked, Bruce noted, better than he had at any point since they had met; the long fight in the mist had taken something out of him, and this meal had given it back, and then some. "In this realm, being hurt is mostly your soul saying it wants more food. Feed it, it shuts up."
"Most of the time," Bruce added.
"Most of the time," Kael agreed.
Bruce got to his feet too. He felt; and he took a moment to note this, deliberately, because he wanted to remember it; good. Better than he had felt in any moment since the descent began. His soul-body was whole. His core was full. He had eaten well. He had killed cleanly. He had a friend on either side of him. He had, somewhere on him, an F-rank hunter token and the path to ten F-rank soul points cleanly laid out in front of him. He was, in this moment, exactly where he needed to be.
He thought of Sophie, briefly, sitting in the labyrinth beside his still body, and he thought:
’I am all right, Sophie. I am all right.’ He hoped, faintly and uselessly, that some thread of that thought reached her.
He turned his attention back to the work.
"Let’s pack what we can carry," he said. "And then let’s go find another herd."
"Or something bigger," Kael said.
"Smaller is fine for the first day."
"You’re so boring, Writer." Bruce teased.
"I’m so alive."
Kael laughed.
Theron, still flexing his healed arm with quiet wonder, looked up at the two of them and grinned.
The three of them got to work cleaning up the hollow; Kael stripping the rest of the cooked meat into bundles, Bruce hauling the third intact carcass over to where they could lift it together, Theron testing his scythe in the air and finding it solid and full again. The forest around them glowed soft and pale. Somewhere deeper in, another hunting party laughed at something. The dungeon’s slow patient life went on, indifferent to them and inviting them at the same time.
They had eaten their first meal as hunters.
They were ready for the second hunt.
They left the hollow with their arms full.
Kael carried the third deer-thing whole, slung over his broad shoulder. The carcass was lighter than a physical-realm body of the same size, but it was still bulky and awkward, and he balanced it carefully as he moved. Bruce carried two large bundles of cooked meat, tied up in strips of bark Kael had cut off the second deer’s hide. Theron, his arm now fully healed and his scythe back at his side, carried the lighter goods; a few smaller cuts, the cleanest of the bark-plate pieces (which Kael said sold separately as crafting material), and a small bundle of the leaf-tipped antlers, which Bruce had insisted they keep on a hunch that something that pretty would be worth something to someone.
They moved back through the trees the way they had come, slower now under their loads, eyes still careful.
The forest had not noticed them eating. Other small movements continued in the underbrush; the soft chiming sounds of the deer-things grazing somewhere out of sight, the faint rustle of whatever else lived among the glowing leaves. The dungeon went on with its quiet life, indifferent to the three intruders carrying pieces of its inhabitants back toward the portal.
Bruce wanted to test something on the way.
"Wait," he said, when they reached a small clearing roughly halfway between the hollow and the portal. He set his bundles down by the base of a tree. "I want to try a second hunt before we go back."
Kael set the third deer down without argument. "I was going to suggest the same thing. We’re full, we’re rested, we’re strong. We’d be wasting our day going back with one trip."
Theron looked between them, then down at his own arms. "We can carry more?"
"We can hunt more and take more," Bruce said. "The bundles we have are heavy but they’re not the limit of what one trip can hold. If we kill a second herd, butcher what we can, leave the rest, we double our haul. The third deer goes back whole. The fresh kills can be partly cooked, partly raw, depending on what the Guild pays best for. We figure that out when we sell."
"Smart," Kael said. "Boring, but smart."
"I’m going to start charging you when you call me boring."
"You don’t have any soul points to charge in."
"I will soon."
Theron laughed. Kael grinned. The three of them stashed their existing haul carefully at the base of the tree; Kael marking the trunk with a small precise burn that, he said, would not draw the attention of beasts but would help them find the spot again; and then they moved on, hunting properly this time.
The second herd came easier than the first.
Bruce had learned, by now, the pattern of how the deer-things moved through the forest. They preferred the patches of brighter leaf-light. They walked single-file along the soft mossy game-trails that wove between the big pale trunks. They did not run unless they had a reason to. They were, in every sense, fresh and uncomplicated; beasts grown by the realm itself to be exactly what they were.
He spotted the second herd from forty paces out, behind a screen of glowing shrubs, grazing in a small open patch where blue and gold leaves had drifted down onto the moss. Five of them this time. Three adult-sized, two smaller; younger versions, the same delicate shape but the antlers shorter, the bark-plates thinner.
Bruce held up a hand. The three of them slowed.
"Five," Kael whispered. "Two of them are small. Easy."
"The small ones, you take," Bruce said quietly. "They’ll go down in one strike. Theron, you take the adult on the right. I take the two adults on the left. We go on three. No mistakes."
"No mistakes," Theron echoed, scythe sliding into his hand.