The trio rushed along the edge of the forest at a good trot. It was obvious that the kid was running on fumes, but he did not slow down and Viv would not stop him either. They turned into the forest seemingly at random, until Viv noticed that someone had bound a small cloth around a carved trunk. A path that was a little more than a beast trail snaked deep into the forest and they followed it with all haste.

Even during the day, there was something peculiar about the Deadshield Woods. Sounds were dampened and, quickly, Viv thought that she was no longer quite sure where she had come from. The kid did not share her hesitation as he sprinted down and down, his breath raspy and desperate. He only slowed down near a large boulder topped by a tall dead tree.

“Right. Right. Almost there,” he half-choked.

They moved more slowly then, with Marruk taking point. It only took a few minutes for the tall Kark to stop and hold a fist.

“Yes?” Viv whispered.

“A girl. She’s dead.”

The boy took a deep, shuddering breath and let out a single sob. He was trying very hard to keep the tears in.

“Miri is dead but maybe Sar isn’t?”

“Let’s keep going,” Viv said, “we’ll recover the body on our way back.”

A form crashed through the canopy of the nearest tree. Arthur shook her head to clear the brambles and pointed forward and to the side.

“Squee.”

“Let’s go then,” Viv replied.

They ran and Viv tried her best not to look at the tiny form sprawled on the ground, with red blood staining her grey dress. The kid had been brained with a stone.

The forest grew thicker by the moment. Where at the edge, it could have passed for a normal earth forest to anyone without a degree in biology, the trees grew taller and stranger as they ran on. Some of them bore purple or grey leaves. Some bloomed with mesmerizing flowers that shone flamboyantly in the dim light. Viv had to run around ferns and thickets, between moss-covered trunks. They heard screams in the distance.

Viv picked up the boy as he was about to fall and they sprinted. She could only see Arthur’s tail swishing high. The rest of the dragonling was buried in greenery.

Soon, the light grew again and they burst into a clearing.

Viv took in her surroundings. The fall of a giant tree had made a hole in the canopy by taking its smaller siblings with it, and the resulting space was a mess of young sprouts, rotting trunks and low ferns. There was one thing that stood out, so to speak.

It was a monster.

In the instant needed to slow down, Viv noticed four heavy legs, not unlike those of an elephant, supporting a cylindrical body topped with a conic maw filled with serrated, inward teeth. A multitude of limbs emerged from the main body like so many tentacles.

The supporting limbs were brown-grey, but the color of the flesh turned to green the higher one went until the creature looked like an overgrown venus flytrap and pitcher plant slapped together by Frankenstein’s demented cousin. It used one of its tendrils to grab a squealing beastling and Viv noticed that the limb ended in a thick sucker with the same inward-facing talons.

The limb retracted and deposited the smaller monster in the larger’s maw. It closed down with a crunch.

“There! Sar’s there!” the boy wheezed from over Viv’s shoulder. He was pointing at a depression formed by a dip in the land and protected by remnants of the collapsed trunk to form a sort of cavern.

And indeed, Viv saw a tiny pink arm wield a branch to slam a wounded beastling.

“Ok, new plan. We get the boy and fuck off. Marruk, block the thing while I cover you.”

Viv dropped the child she was still holding and followed Marruk. The Kark advanced, leaving her mace in its sheath and taking out a shortsword with a broad blade instead. The monster turned a few tentacles towards them, but the bulk of them were searching the cave. Many of the limbs poked and prodded around. One of them found a small beastling’s leg and grabbed it. The horned creature shrieked and a flurry of other limbs attached themselves to it, tearing off great bands of flesh.

“I think it’s blind,” Viv whispered in Marruk’s ear. The Kark nodded and advanced. Viv moved to the side and tried to get to the kid, but her attempt was short-lived. The monster somehow felt her move and patted around with its many limbs.

Meanwhile, it was ponderously crossing the clearing towards the small cave.

Ok, Viv thought, Ok, change of plan.

A fleshy liana finally touched and latched on Marruk’s shield. The Kark calmly pulled it back and swiped the thing off with her blade. Red blood spurted from the wound and the creature let out a strange, whistling sound.

“Kid, you’d better come to us quick!” she yelled instead.

That did it, for the monster at least. Several tendrils whipped out her way as she ducked behind Marruk’s form. The limbs were fast.

“Net.”

A mass of criss-crossing ‘purge’ spells whipped out around Viv and met the charging limbs. The shadowy wires won, but the spell failed after too many were spent.

“Hurry up!”

Viv cast one, large purge at the creature’s torso but it barely penetrated. There was too much mana in the thing. She would need a lot of power to reach the innards, and the time to set it up. Time that they didn’t have.

Then her ‘client’ started to run across the clearing to fetch his friend. Marruk took a step forward and swung and swiped, meeting the questing tendrils with a fury that Viv had never seen in the stoic woman. The shield crashed down into another limb, cracking it. Viv helped by whipping overcharged purge spells around the Kark to cover her flanks. Several times, a tendril found Marruk’s leather armor and started to pull, but the Kark planted her feet on the ground and stood upright long enough for Viv to sever the attacking appendage. They started to fall back under the onslaught.

Viv reached a state of focus that she had already experienced on earth, but only during firefights. It was not that the world slowed down, but more like any distraction or parasitic thought disappeared. The ground was soon littered with discarded limbs. The monster still tried to slap them around with half-mutilated ones, even without the teeth at the end, but Marruk was like a rock against the tide. The thing beat uselessly against her shield. It was always where it was needed, angled here and there with an economy of motion born from expertise. At the same time, Marruk’s other arm lashed out like a viper with quick and devastating sweeps.

But they were in trouble.

The creature was turning and moving towards them at the same time. A fresh contingent of tentacles joined the fray while the reduced distance meant that farther up ones were now in range. Viv diverted her attention for one instant to see the two boys stumbling towards them. The rescued one was bleeding profusely from his flank. He was pale and sweaty, and her employer was shorter and younger. It was going to be a close call.

Or not.

“Give me three seconds,” Viv bellowed. Marruk redoubled her effort but her leg got caught as Viv was pooling colorless mana in her hand.

A white flash blurred and Arthur bit the thing off. The limber dragonette jumped back instantly.

Viv was done.

She gathered air, shield, and still runes and pushed them together. A transparent half-circle formed over their heads. It was quite large.

“Sound shield.”

One of Varska’s staple spells. It blocked all sounds by preventing the air from moving it across.

The tendrils went through without problem, and yet there was something different about the monster. It stopped its slow trudge through the undergrowth and showed some signs of agitation.

“Back, back,” Viv ordered and Marruk ran to her. They plodded through the ferns to the pair of struggling kids and Viv pushed them down. She removed a blood-soaked hand from the older kid’s wound and winced at the sight. The shirt was gone, as was a lot of skin and tissue. He had been flayed by the tendril.

He was dying quickly.

Viv grabbed for one of her side pockets and took out a thick glass vial with a greenish liquid inside. She removed the stopper with her teeth and shoved the bottleneck between the wounded boy’s blue lips. The kid swallowed, more by surprise than anything else, then took a deep, shaky breath.

The wound sealed before their very eyes. Concentrated life mana regrew skin and muscle at visible speed. Both little twerps looked on in wonder.

“Mending potion…” the smaller kid said.

Viv returned her attention to the monster. It was slowly trampling its way to them.

“Can probably smell us.”

They were now farther into the clearing, with the monster blocking the way out. They had their backs against the rotting trunk.

“We can probably scale our way over the trunk or that rock on the side,” Marruk said. She was breathing deeply but appeared unharmed.

Viv checked and thought that it might be doable.

But also maybe risky.

“I got a better idea. Give me a sec.”

The monster was still plodding hesitantly around. Viv noted in passing that it grabbed the cut tentacles whenever it could find them, and shoved them down its maw. It was self-recycling or something.

Marruk could most likely climb the difficult terrain. It was pretty much a safe bet.

But Viv was absolutely certain that she could kill the thing. It was clearly an ambush predator, and its ambush had failed.

A mage was its most powerful when given time to act, and she had bought them twenty seconds or so before the lumbering form would even get close to her. It was five more than she needed. A sphere of pure black rotated above her right shoulder, glyphs forming around it. Viv altered the spell a little bit by making the range shorter and the projectile larger. That was difficult but she managed. Adrenaline gave her wings.

The spell took a third of her reserves. The mana sang through her mind and conduit in its eagerness to be used, leaving her giddy. As soon as she was ready, Viv kneeled and moved to the side to search for the perfect angle.

“Arty.”

Casting powerful spells was something that she would never get fed up with. It was so… intuitive. Elegant. Her creation drove through two trunk-like legs in an instant, right at the joint. In silence.

It left behind a gaping wound vomiting lymph and blood.

Viv winced at the trilling whistle the creature emitted as it slowly toppled to the side like a falling tree. Its main body crashed against the cavern with a loud thump. Shards of wood and earth went up in the air and a musty smell soon filled Viv’s nose. The monster whistled piteously. It was bleeding out.

Marruk and the kids stared wide-eyed at the fallen beast. Viv searched for Arthur and found her sitting on her butt, tailed curved around her, both hands grabbing a tendril. She was eating it like an otter eats a fish.

“We should go before the smell attracts other stuff,” Viv said. The others didn’t have to be asked twice. They moved around the fallen giant towards the legs. Viv considered finishing it off with a blight spell but decided against it. She was almost dry, and there could be other things around. They left the clearing in a hurry.

Viv only stopped on the way back to recover the body of the little girl. Both kids were subdued, with the older one crying in silence. Viv didn’t think that she would ever grow used to dead children. There was something inherently wrong about it.

They wrapped her head with her brother’s shirt to mask the wound. The return trip was bitter.

As soon as they were out, Viv turned to her ‘employer’.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Arlom, mam.”

“I would like my payment now.”

Viv emptied the purse in her hand and pocketed the iron bits and the two stones.

“Deal done.”

“I know how much a mending potion costs, miss witch. I know that you helped us for nuthin.”

“Well, yeah maybe. But keep it to yourself. I don’t want everyone to know that I have a soft heart.”

“I won’t tell.”

They split up.

Viv said nothing as they walked back to the house.

//A wise ruler sometimes shows acts of kindness, Your Grace.

//It has been shown to improve the people’s morale.

//Well done.

“Well, we saved one out of two.”

“It was a good thing,” Marruk said. “Humans here give up too easily. In the steppes, we lose kids as well, but we always look for two days before stopping. It gives us all hope. It makes us believe that someone will try to come. They might be too late to save us, but they will come. They will care.”

“Or children could stay out of the forest so we don’t have to pick up bodies,” Viv spat.

//Children will travel and play.

//Especially where they are forbidden to go.

//The forest hides many treasures, and the survivors will carry the lesson they learn to the next generation.

//I was also informed that starvation is a powerful motivator.

“They’re not starving.”

“But they are hungry,” Marruk said.

There was nothing to add. Viv had done what she could and that was it. She would not shed crocodile tears for a person she did not know, but she still felt some measure of empathy for her and the family she had left behind. They arrived soon after. Viv unlocked her door and frowned.

“Hey, is there something buried here? I could have sworn that this flower bed was lower,” she said.

“It’s probably nothing. I was digging around there recently,” Marruk said hurriedly.

“Were you?”

“Yes. Haha. This very morning.”

“Well, alright then.”

Viv’s house, half an hour before.

Kelto the mercenary grabbed the cork between two yellow teeth and tore it away. Ethanol vapor made his eyes burn.

He was done.

He was fucking done.

Two months was all it had taken. The witch had accepted the contracts he had delayed in order to push the prices up. His failed attempt to bring her to heel had failed spectacularly, and his men had deserted one by one. The death of the last loyalists had been the nail in the coffin. Now, only he remained, with his cloak turned ratty and his purse hollow. He scratched his cheek and the stubble here creaked under the friction.

That bitch was going to pay.

He would be gone by dawn to try his luck through the forest. Sometimes, lone travelers successfully passed through by dodging the most dangerous creatures. He was not staying a minute longer in this shithole.

But before that, he was going to burn down her turf, because fuck her.

Kelto plunged a grimy piece of hanky down the bottle and waited for the cloth to absorb the alcohol. He snapped his fingers together and a small flame appeared. He made to light the improvised incendiary device.

And failed.

Someone had grabbed his hand. Kelto’s bloodshot eyes traveled along a black armor, up to a pallid face with slitted eyes. A bald head.

“I… I… I…”

“Hellow,” the half-man calmly stated, “this is my house.”

“Mo — monster!”

The inhuman being nodded wisely, in a ‘I see how it is’ fashion. There was a flash of something, and Kelto was now staring at his headless body from a strange angle.

Things followed their normal course. The two boys, Sar and Arlom, made their way back to the lower district where poorer people lived. There were a lot of tears in the tightly-knit community, but finally the kids were asked what had happened, especially Sar who had a great expanse of pale skin on his belly. Arlom said that he was supposed to stay quiet but Sar had made no such promise and explained everything in great detail, including how the witch had charged in to save him, then slain the beast with a single, mighty spell.

The villagers were incredulous at first, but a group of armed men and women led by Arlom found the cadaver of the monster already being nibbled on by a few birds. They alerted the city’s scouts who, in turn, secured and covered the site while the village worked tirelessly to turn the remains into usable goods. Monster meat was both delicious and nourishing, and there were even rumors that it helped expecting women to give birth to mages. Certainly, the city would not let go of such a boon.

Columns of people transferred stacks of meat, skin, and bone for soup stock to the city’s warehouse long into the night. Everyone who pitched in was given something to bring home, with several months of supply granted to the bereaved family. It was late when a pair of burly scouts knocked on Viv’s door and dropped several baskets of meaty goodies before saluting her and leaving in silence.

“You know,” Viv said later as everyone chewed on skewers around their communal table, “we haven’t heard about that group of annoying mercenaries who came to provoke us. They sort of disappeared.”

The rest of the group kept masticating pensively.

“I was expecting them to try something,” she insisted.

“Maybe your reaction caught them on the wrong foot?” Marruk suggested.

“Yeah, perhaps you are right. Still…”

“Squee.”

//You may underestimate our ability to scare off your foes, Your Grace.

//Not only are you a powerful witch, but you also have many friends.

//To provoke you is to provoke your network of allies.

//They must have figured it out.

“Maybe. I think Farren mentioned that the entire group had stopped taking jobs. They just don’t hang around as they used to.”

“Mercenary work is dangerous work,” Irao said.

Everyone turned to him, since he had pretty much just used his entire word quota for the month.

The Hadal human shrugged.

“They could have run afoul of a monster during one of their tasks. It is a common end for those who follow that path.”

“Hmm. You may be right. Nevermind. I’ll just forget about them then.”

“Yes, let’s just forget about those. Haha. They probably won’t turn up again,” Marruk assured.

Viv thought that maybe there was something fishy going on, but her plate was full with training and the coming expedition and she could not be arsed to look for disappearing rivals.

“Alright, fine. Please excuse me,” she said, and stood up to attend to a natural need.

Marruk leaned towards Irao.

“Kelto?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Did you burn the body?”

“No need, what I kill stays dead.”

“Alright.”

“Squee.”

The three who could still eat split the remaining green, slightly crunchy skewers and focused very hard on looking inconspicuous.