Chapter 443: Hunting
Chapter 443: Hunting
The herd had not noticed them yet.
WHOOSH!
Bruce shaped his ink, quickly, smoothly, the talent answering him faster than it had this morning, now that he had eaten, and a dozen bullets formed in the air around his hand. Kael’s hands were already heating. Theron set his scythe forward, knees bent, ready to run.
Then with a casual wave of his hand, Bruce fired.
WHOOSH!
His bullets streaked across the clearing and struck both of his targets at almost the same instant, six bullets per adult, hitting the chest and throat areas where the bark-plates were thinnest. The two deer-things buckled before they even registered the threat. Their long necks bent. They folded down onto the moss in slow, almost graceful collapses.
Kael’s fireballs hit the two smaller deer simultaneously. The younger creatures had thinner bark-plates and less mass, and the fireballs, controlled, contained, the same precise technique he had used cooking, broke them apart before they had a chance to react. The flames cleared in a few seconds, leaving the two bodies on the ground.
The fifth deer, Theron’s, lifted its head at the sound of the others falling.
It saw the three hunters at the edge of the clearing. It turned to bolt. Its slim legs gathered under it, the same way the deer in the first hunt had turned to flee.
Theron was on it before it finished the turn.
He had been faster the first time than Bruce had expected. He was faster this time. The young man crossed the open ground at a sprint, scythe already in motion, and his swing came in at a tighter, more practiced arc than this morning’s first kill, the difference of someone who had now done this once before, with a healed arm and a full soul. The scythe took the deer at the base of the neck cleanly. The creature dropped without a second sound.
Bruce felt the wash of essence land in him before Theron had even straightened up.
It came as a doubled warmth this time, two kills in quick succession from his end, and the energy spread through his soul-body in the same gentle, automatic way as before. His core, already full from eating, did not have room to fill, exactly. Instead the new essence settled into him as a small dense weight, sitting alongside what he had already taken in. He felt his soul-body grow a small step firmer in a way that had nothing to do with fullness. He was, very faintly, more stronger than he had been a moment ago.
He looked at his hand. The glow was the same. But the underlying substance of the soul-body, the thing that the glow was the surface of, felt slightly denser. As if he had compressed.
Kael was looking at his own hand with the same focused attention.
"Yeah," Kael murmured. "That’s the part that adds up. Each kill is a sip. Sip enough sips and eventually you’ve drunk a glass. Glass after glass after glass, that’s how you climb."
"How many beasts to F-rank peak?" Theron asked, walking back to them.
"No idea. Depends on the soul, depends on the talent, depends on the beasts. But, a lot. Many, many. We’re not getting close to E in one day. That’s fine. We have one day to get our first ten points. The climb is the long game. The points are the short game. We focus on the points."
Bruce was already looking at the five new carcasses. "Speaking of points. We should butcher quickly. We don’t have time for a full cook."
"Cold storage at the Guild," Kael said. "They buy raw at a discount but they buy it. We strip what’s easy, legs, flanks, leave the rest. Take the antlers. Take the bark-plates if any of them came off clean."
With that they moved.
The butchering went faster than Bruce had expected.
Bruce simply crafted a knife for both him and Kael with his soul talent...
The two of them worked the carcasses while Theron, who admitted he had never butchered anything, watched and asked questions. Kael answered them with the same teaching tone he had used for the fire-cooking. Always cut along the bark-plates’ natural seams.
The meat under here is the best cut, save those for the Guild. Don’t bother with the lower belly, it’s mostly hide. Pop the antlers off at the base, hold the branch close to the skull and twist, they come off clean.
Bruce listened too. He did not need to ask the questions, surgery was butchery’s quieter cousin, and he had cut into bodies for years, but the specifics of this anatomy were new.
Soul-flesh did not bleed. It did not have the deep sticky textures of physical-realm meat. The cuts were cleaner, drier, glowing faintly under the knife.
The cores, small dense pearls that sat just behind the breastbone of each deer, came out easily once Bruce found the right pocket of muscle around them.
Five cores. Bruce held them up in his palm. They glowed soft and pale, the size of grapes, warm to the touch. Each one was a concentrated piece of the deer’s life-essence, the part Kael had said could be eaten directly for a much bigger boost than the meat.
"We don’t eat them now," Bruce said. "Right?"
"Right. Save them. We’re full. Eating a core on a full soul is wasteful, most of the energy gets pushed back out because there’s no room. But one needs great control of soul energy to take those. You eat cores you can handle, when you’re hungry and have time to absorb and deal with the energy, not on the run."
"And we can sell them"
"Yes we can. Cores sell for the best price at the exchange. They’re what most hunters bring back. The Guild grades them. F-rank cores from F-rank beasts get an F-rank price, better cores get more. Five F-rank cores,"
Kael did some quick math. "Should be worth a few points each. Probably enough alone to clear your ten-point first-day bar."
"Then let’s get them back."
They worked through the rest with focus. Kael did the bulk of the cutting. Bruce sorted what came off into piles by category, prime cuts, secondary cuts, hides, antlers, cores. Theron, his arm strong again, did the carrying-and-stacking, moving the cut meat onto a flat slab of bark they had peeled off one of the larger trunks to use as a tray.
By the time they were done, they had a small but valuable haul: the third deer from the first hunt (whole), plus five legs from the new herd, four flanks, three intact hides, six bark-plate sections, the five new cores, and the bundle of leaf-tipped antlers they had been keeping.
It was more than three pairs of hands could carry without help.
Kael solved that with characteristic confidence. He took off his outer coat, spread it on the ground, and showed Theron how to fold it into a long carrying-cradle.
Bruce crafted his himself, Kael while also using his talent to strengthen and support Kael’s. The two improvised slings, slung between two people each, took most of the weight off their arms. The third deer Kael still carried solo, since he was the strongest of them.
The walk back to the portal was slow but steady.
They came out of the portal at the same square they had entered through, blinking in the warmer gold light of Xiltra. The bored guard at the post looked up, took in the three of them, Kael with a whole carcass over his shoulder, Bruce and Theron with the heavy bark-and-coat slings between them, and let out a small surprised grunt.
"First-day haul?" he asked.
"First-day haul," Bruce confirmed.
"That’s a good first day. Most of you newcomers come back with one little thing." The guard nodded toward the broader street. "Guild exchange is back the way you came, but go in through the side door, second door on the left as you approach the building, the big main entrance is for incoming registrants and contracts. Side door is for selling. They’ll weigh you in."
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me. Sell well." The guard returned to leaning on his stool.
They went.
The walk back through the streets was, in its own way, the strangest part of the day so far.
Bruce had been so focused on getting into the dungeon that he had not really seen Xiltra on the way out. Now, walking back through it loaded with the parts of three deer, he had time to look. The streets were less alien than he had first thought. Stripped of the strangeness of the glowing souls and the pale soul-stone walls, the bones of the city were the bones of any working city he had ever lived in. Streets sized for foot traffic.
Carts moving on small floating discs of light. Shops at the ground level, residences above. Stalls clustered near the busier intersections. People hurrying, lingering, talking, eating, working.