lukeoutbelow | Do not be afraid of light

Do not be afraid of light

They smelled the battlefield long before they saw it. The apprentices and little Sisters who hadn't been on this kind of excursion before covered their noses and exclaimed. Vena didn't. As the child of a camp follower she would know to expect this, but her tread slowed and she looked repeatedly at Sister Lashan, especially as the sound of incredible numbers of crows cawing grew louder.

"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.

It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.

She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.

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"That's it? Don't lie." He doesn't believe her. Any age past twenty something all merged into some nebulous gradient of Old in his head. She was on the latter end of Old, though she could still move around and fight, so that puts her a good couple of steps before the eventual state of every person, which was Corpsehood.

The crude explanation, on the other hand, seems to finally hammer the idea of a bayot in. He blinks a few times in puzzlement. Guts realizes he can't imagine what a baby Lashan would look like. She could have emerged fully formed and seventy-one, riding around on horses with her throaty voice, and that seemed to sit right in his head.

"Huh." Is his immediate response. He finds the peculiar tale rather easy to accept, even if he didn't relate. Lashan had shown him an undeserved amount of kindness, which weighed heavier than whatever it is she had under her clothes. Mercenaries weren't supposed to pry into each other's pasts, anyway.

"Sounds like a rough way to grow up."

Now she does laugh at him. His isn't an uncommon perspective, especially from someone who didn't have elders of every age around to compare, but it's funny. "What are you, sixteen?"

The world of being outside of the simple coin-flip that's how so many housefolk think of gender can get a lot more complicated than she's letting on but she should stick to one revelation at a time. She'll give Guts this, he doesn't get derailed into thinking a whole lot about what's in Lashan's pants, which is just one of those perils of reading minds that she's learned to live with.

Lashan shrugs and tries offering an opportunity to change the subject. "Aah, I had a good youth all in all. Harder than my little Sisters in the enclave, I think. We were nomads always moving our herds and flocks about. If she was a Plains girl Vena would've trained a horse already and be working on her sling and spear, so she could keep wolves off. There's a bit more excitement in that than in a remote compound, even without the inter-Clan raiding."

She can sense... some of the wildlife ahead is cautious, just as the birds and beasts near the two riders are made more cautious by the presence of humans and horses. Her immediate thought is another Mind-seeker who can shield themselves, but it might not be so, Lashan's not close enough to be sure without closing her eyes and focusing on the world. There's nothing to see or hear yet, but she straightens in the saddle and takes her strung bow from its leather holster.

He really doesn't want to think very hard about whats under Lashan's anything, and the change of topic is welcomed. Besides, he earnestly wanted to ask her why she gave up freedom on the Plains to babysit a bunch of girls in a compound (and the errant boy, apparently). Freedom out in the open was much more alluring than being stuck in some village.

The question his caught in his throat when he sees her reaching for her bow, and he silently takes the hint to focus ahead. Body tensed, senses alert, his eyes dart back up the dirt trail, seeing nothing in the trees but hearing the weak gurgle of slow river water. He could see the twinkle of the moving water catching rays of light. It appears they were practically at their destination, but something was off. All the birds had gone quiet.

He scours the underbrush for hints of any human movement, left hand at Lashan's scabbard in case he needed to draw.

As they come closer a paler shape shows between the trees and through the underbrush that grows thicker near the water. It's a riverboat, tied up to a snag. Lashan hisses faintly between her teeth and moves her head like a hound scenting the air. Thistle lowers his head and puts his ears back; the less experienced Safflower may react more as she picks up on the tension in the air.

It's easier for Lashan, suspicious and practiced as she is, to detect shielded people somewhere like this than it would be in a city. It's rare and very difficult to become invisible to normal senses, so even when shields keep her from hearing someone's mind the animals and people around them know they are there, and wild animals are markedly aware of humans and create a space in a way other people in a crowd usually don't. She's not up to the kind of multitasking it takes to use animal senses and piece together what they see, but she knows they see something.

Either there's a whole band of trained Gifted here - here in lands technically under the purview of the Holy See, which suppresses those traditions and forces them underground as the Sisterhood's are - or one stronger person, probably qualifying as a mage, has prepared several others for an encounter with people who rely on mindreading. Neither is good. Lashan leans back, signalling Thistle to stop, and waits and listens.

The restless hoof at the ground is familiar to him, ears pinned cautiously, an uncertain snort through wide nostrils. The nervous anticipation of animals before combat. Guts' hand remains steady on the reins, vigilant but unerring and calm. He had none of the magic insights Lashan did, but he had a good instinct for when something was wrong, and the empty glade felt off.

When his eyes catch nothing but the boat bobbing lazily in the water, he decides to dismount.

"I'm getting a closer look." he says, leading Safflower out of Thistle's way where the path fanned out. With the thick tree roots and big rocks by the riverbank, being on horseback wasn't going to help him much. His pride wouldn't allow him to consider hiding behind Lashan.

He scans the ground for hints of footprints or signs of struggle, finding a few trails from where the boatmen (or women?) had disembarked from the water. He approaches the boat to look for clues the mud and the creaking wooden planks.

Good, Lashan doesn't want him hiding behind her. His armor's heavier and he's freakishly strong, he can absolutely go first. As Guts starts ahead, remembering how he is in a melee, she tells him, "I'll fire a singing arrow in a minute. Don't be surprised."

That arrow's perforated bulb-shaped ceramic head making it immediately distinct at a touch. Lashan takes a deep breath and sets aside some more ordinary arrows from her quiver first, reciting the blessing and feeling the tug of her energy sinking away into them. She can close with a mage but it'll be better if she can just shoot them. That done she sights with the singing arrow and with shifts of her weight and legs gets Thistle to step forwards into a better position. There's a trick to using these properly and part of it is trajectory.

There are absolutely footprints in the mud, some of them quite deep. People have been carrying some curious kegs out of that boat and setting them up on shore, but it's a bit too well-appointed to be a proper smugglers' boat. There is the a campfire smell, and the general sense of having people right close by, just out of sight.

Lashan looses her arrow. As the air rushes through the holes in the bulbous arrowhead it doesn't so much sing as keen, an uncanny high note that gets higher as it flies closer and lower as it gets further away. In response there are thumps and yelps along the lines of "What was that!" A man who'd been concealed by a bush actually stands up and takes his helmet off to peer in the direction the sound had gone.

Guts’ demeanor changes as he spins towards a man’s voice to his left. His mind focuses in on that target, all the distractions of the woods blacked out by the urge to kill.

Safflower’s front hooves bounce off the ground, inadvertently drawing the man’s attention as she kicks up dirt. A short, agitated neigh from deep within her chest answers his baffled question of: ’A horse?’ And the dawning realization that he’d been discovered. He curses under his breath.

In that moment, Guts had vanished from the boat and moved a few paces behind him, sword drawn. The visor was slid over his face, his eyes peering out from the steel rim like sinister black wells.

A twig cracks beneath his boot, giving him away a pace or two early. Guts clenches his teeth at his mistake, a flash of white in the muddy green, but leaps forward to make his move.

It’s over after a brief struggle. The pommel of Lashan’s sword is slammed down on the man’s skull. With a grunt of pain and his opponent dazed, Guts moves to grapple. He was a little shorter than his enemy, but the difference wasn’t so great that he couldn’t leverage their weights to slam him on his back.

Knees pin the armored body to the ground, the sword edge is held a hair’s width away from skin and all the delicate blood vessels in the throat.

“Scream, and I’ll cut your head off.” the boy hisses out, and the crazed look in his eyes seems to freeze whatever panicked words were waiting in the throat beneath his sword.

Lashan leaves Guts to that, he seems like he has it under control.

Drawing a fresh, ordinary arrow back, she sees two others reacting to the singing arrow and makes her judgement. This isn't a boat associated with the smugglers the Enclave has dealings with, she doesn't recognize these men, they're armed and armored like people who have some funding, she can't touch their minds. That's all she needs to decide they should die. She shifts her aim, correcting for drift and the peculiarities of the bow, and the bowstring whaps hard against her armguard as she looses, nocks and draws and sights, looses again.

Lashan doesn't practice as obsessively as the boy - she has actual things she has to do - but she still makes sure to keep her hand in at the archery range, afoot or on horseback, trying to keep old skills from degrading. The first arrow finds the eye of the man who'd been building up a small fire; he collapses, smothering it. The second doesn't quite hit where she wanted, with a target who's considerably further away and moving and who she had less time to sight on. That arrow takes him through the throat. He goes to his knees clutching at it and gurgling, taking longer to die. She doesn't spare him another glance, looking for more targets and any other movement with a tight intensity. Are there only three men?

In the woods, out of sight, another horse answers Safflower's neigh.

Two down. The arrows are nearly silent, but the men's screams of pain ring in his ears. Guess alerting them wouldn't be a problem anymore.

"Want to join your friends? Or do you want to tell me where you came from?" he raises the blade off the hair's edge of his neck.

'You rotten brat-,' the man spits at his visor as he uses the brief opportunity to slip an arm free. The two struggle in the dirt. It appears less like a coordinated fight and more like two animals twisting their bodies around each other, one desperate to escape further and the other trying to keep his catch pinned long enough to tire out his victim.

The size of the blade works against Guts so close, and he is forced to half-sword to maneuver it around each other's limbs. A knife slipped from his enemy's belt, the blade flashing sparks on steel, edge briefly tasting flesh. It ends up knocked a few feet out of grasp with a good elbow from his gauntlet. Blunt metal strikes skin.

In the end, once the dust settles, said brat finds himself still on top, collecting a few cuts and deepening bruises for the trouble. His knees are braced against the ground, his arms pressing down against the weakening struggle of the man's crossed forearms beneath. A wrong slip could send the longsword's tip plunging deeply into his neck.

'Wait - ' the man wheezes out, spitting blood from his mouth where it painted his nose and lips, freshly stricken by blunt metal. The yellowish white teeth were painted red.

'To hell with this.' he coughs out, the man - mercenary or otherwise - appears to be second-guessing whether he wants to die for his cause. 'Ain't worth the damn money like this.'

The pressure lets up between the two of them as Guts slowly sits straight. He doesn't keep his eyes off either hand, grip on the sword tense and ready to spring to action. He was coated with a fresh layer of sweat.

"Smart move." he says, eyes black in the shadow. It appears that he would be honoring the promise to talk.

The intruder lets out a sigh of relief, letting his trembling arms finally rest. Once he catches his breath, he opens his mouth to speak again, but his words appear be caught in his throat.

'It.. He...' The man's eyes go bug-wide as his words turn to wheezing gasps like a fish breathing air. There's an unnatural gurgle up his throat that Guts couldn't help but compare to a plague victim in a late stages of their disease. The gasps turn into violent coughs, the man's hands grasping at his own throat in futility.

Guts looks down in alarm, leaning back as a glob of dark blood erupts from the man's mouth. The coagulated mass ruptures and coats his jaw and neck in black-red fluids, settling into a wet halo in the dirt around his head. His eyes were rolled back into their sockets, but the rest of the body rapidly slackens beneath his weight. Just like that, he was dead.

"What the hell...?" Guts stands to his feet, disturbed. He'd seen many ways men could die by the sword, but never like that. His blade hadn't nicked any major arteries or veins, he was sure of it!

Lashan feels the men she's shot become more 'real' as they die, their minds appearing to her other senses just in time to lose coherence and slip past her grasp. That'd be the shielding spell going, but she can pick up on some other magic in there too, hazing out to nothing. Just what that is, or at least, one thing, becomes more clear after Guts wrestles his prey down. She doesn't approach immediately, scouring the camp with an eye to Thistle and an ear to the woods. The horse's ears and nose are keener than her own. What she's afraid of is that all this is a diversion and the Enclave is going to be attacked. They'll have to contact her if a force shows up in their fields and that will be faster if there's light.

Thistle makes a displeased noise in his chest and shakes his big head, making his tack click, as the smell of the man Guts caught enters his sensitive nostrils. He still carries Lashan closer so she can see and click her tongue as she recognizes what's happened. In stories told to scare Plains children, breaking blood-oath always means catching fire or exploding. In reality the expenditure of magic energy it takes to lay an oath that did that is extravagant, something hardly anyone would commit.

She tells the lightly battered boy, "Bad contract. If anyone ever hires you and wants a drop of your blood for it - probably to press a bloody thumbprint on something - you ought to refuse. It needs a kind of consent to work."

Blood-oaths are a more immediate cousin of what Vena tried with him on the stable roof. There is no inherent compulsion to most oaths and promises. They're just words, the only rules about them are in peoples' heads. A mage can change that. Lashan has put people under blood-oath, in her desperate past. She doesn't like this evidence that someone - Heshain? - knows the technique.

"You good? Think there'll be more action before we're done."

Guts whips his head to Lashan, the sword gripped tightly in his hand.

"What the hell...?" he repeats. "What's that supposed to mean? What happened to him?"

The viscera and blood of the battlefield was something he was used to. This smelled of something entirely unnatural, something foreign and that shouldn't be. It disturbed him the same way seeing the dead rise would, while at the same time second-guessing if he'd just hallucinated the whole thing. A heated fight to the death was exactly the place where superstitions are born, and he liked to think of himself as being fairly grounded. Maybe he had nicked an artery and missed it in the scuffle.

The immediate shock of the death shakes off when he catches more noise on their periphery. No time to dwell on it. There might be more men for them to kill. He lowers his head, peering around Thistle to catch a glimpse of what was approaching them from Safflower's rear. The mare was pawing the ground restlessly, throwing her head with agitation.

Edited 2022-08-12 06:37 (UTC)

"He got sworn to secrecy and when he tried to break that, it killed him. Either he didn't know what would happen or he didn't believe it," Lashan says, just managing to hold back something to the effect of it's pretentious of him but Heshain has people call him 'the wizard' for a reason. The boy's view of how the world works obviously doesn't include magic, but if she just refuses to answer he'll see that, too. "You notice how sour he smells now? Break a blood-oath and your blood either goes acidic or hot."

Usually hot, in stories told on the Plains, probably because explosions or flames or at least steam are more graphic.

Looking at the boat and the ground around it, it appears that something heavy was loaded onto a cart and hauled away recently enough that the mud at the bottom of the wheel gouges is still dark. Out past Safflower there are human shouts and the voices of upset horses, metal jingling on metal, and the creaking of wood and wheels. And the hoarse, huffing voice of a different animal, protesting.

Putting arrow to string again, Lashan peels her lips back from her teeth in a grimace and calls for the horse to come away. Behind Safflower, several plate-armored men, some on the backs of sweating horses, become visible. They're using hooked poles attached to the chains and cuffs on a shaggy, ambling mass to steer it, yelling as it tries to change course or swipe at them.

It's a lean, unhealthy-looking bear, but a bear with dark, irregular growths emerging from the fur of its face and head and neck and back like twisted oddly-placed horns and spikes. Talismans flutter from cords attached to some of them, talismans the men and horses also wear. Normally, a bear prefers to avoid people and attacks if startled by someone or defending cubs or hungry. Normally.

Lashan shoots, not the bear or the men, but one of the horses in front. Already upset, it bucks its rider off and bolts, prompting the other horses to jerk and shrill out as the men struggle to keep the beast on course, a task that she makes harder for them by hitting another horse in its unarmored shoulder. The bear doesn't seem to be able to outright attack them but no one wants to be close to it. The men are no longer advancing forwards.

"Boy," she tells Guts, "The smart thing to do would be to get ahorse and run. I'm not equipped for bear." She'd want a different bow, different arrows, spears, several more people. And Lashan thinks the men prodding the bear aren't going to join in when they finally get it to charge, but she doesn't know.

She can't be serious. is this first thought that comes to mind. Magic wasn't real, was it?

Guts has little time to dwell on the matter when more men - allies, probably? - come into view, and dragged a wretch of a creature. He could barely recognize it as a bear, between its messed up face and skinny limbs and missing patches of fur. He'd seem mangey street dogs that looked less miserable.

"What, and let that thing run off and wander around?" he responds, voice low. "Looks like we got lucky. Found 'em before they could find us. "

He hadn't retreated the first time they'd met, why would he start now? Maybe the last fight had simply been insufficient, and he wanted an excuse to properly use that sword in his hands. His fingers tighten around the hilt with anticipation.

Regardless, he slips back into the cover of the green, inching closer towards to get a better look. The flat of the greatsword rests impatiently on his pauldron as the scene devolves to chaos. Maybe the lot would kill each other and leave them nothing to finish off.

Maybe she can phrase it as alchemical, or something, and he'll be satisfied. No time for that now. Thistle snorts under her, pawing the ground with a forehoof, as Lashan gets a lucky arrow into a visor slit. The man might have lived if he didn't claw at his face and wrench the arrowhead back out of his flesh. His scream and flailing gets her more serious attention.

"Why did I think you would say that?" she asks, and does not give a useless order. Of course Guts thinks he can take a bear. He could be right, plainly the Fighter Herself left Her hand on him for long minutes when he first drew breath. Maybe she can make something of this. Lashan snorts, not taking her eyes off the enemy. "Your choice! Try not to die, my girl would be sad. I can take the humans. With this bow unless I'm tremendously lucky all I'll do to a bear is annoy it." Unless she uses magic, and if she has its attention that will be very difficult. Bears are fast. She is absolutely not going to take a shortsword to it.

Yes, yes, there's several men and they're in heavier armor. And Lashan's bow is relatively small, as it has to be to not be hopelessly unwieldy on horseback. It doesn't have the power and range of a really good longbow, to punch through plate from a distance. But it's also heavily curved, which gives it more power than a straight-limbed bow of this size, and was made with her not-entirely-faded strength in mind.

She abandons the boy to his stealthy approach and sends Thistle off at a canter, trying to circle the enemy and taking shots of opportunity. Between trying to manage the bear and their horses and keeping track of her, it will be a wonder if they can spare any attention for Guts.

Between the chaos of the bear and wooden shafts of arrows being buried in exposed throats, it’s easy to miss the figure of the boy slipping from bush to bush. A glint of metal here and there could easily be the glare of the stream or another fellow merc.

A few spare needles of pine fall on a man’s helmet, drawing his attention behind and around. A momentary distraction that could be lethal under Lashan’s bow, if she had the opportunity. The man doesn’t think to look up.

Pines were tougher to climb than squat oaks, especially with one hand occupied by a sword, but this one had branches thick enough to scrape by on. Guts ignores the remaining men - he wouldn’t have trouble with them in this chaos. Crouched over the branch, he’s careful to avoid jostling more pine needles out of place.

He waits for the wretched creature to back up underneath him, quiet and still, dropping down the moment its shoulders cross the thin evergreen twigs. From above, he aims the point of the sword at the back of its head, aiming to run it all the way through with some aid from gravity.

More people have been trickling onto the scene, including one who has some level of authority judging by the way he's shouting at the rest. He's more prepared than they are too, bringing up a shield to anticipate Lashan, who's always inclined to shoot the officers. The men pull together, abandon the immediate vicinity of the bear, and allow their arrow-bait horses to make a break for it, meaning they can focus their full attention on the big Plainswoman who's their most immediate threat. It's probably fine. Don't worry about it.

Meanwhile the bear shakes itself off - chains and charms rattle - and without anyone to stop it, it claws off its muzzle, revealing a snout rubbed mostly hairless, with raw pink patches showing. Head moving in stereotyped side to side sweeps it turns in place and sneezes. It's huffing and growling with restless agitation.

Either it hears something after all or it's coincidence, but the bear rears up onto its hind legs as Guts tries to ambush it, its back glancing against him. Lashan's sword just scores its thick-skinned shoulder. It shuffles backwards - if he doesn't recover quickly it's going to crush him against the trunk of the tree he just climbed.

He missed! Guts is already under the pull of gravity as the bear rears up, slicing steel into its thick shoulder but leaving a wound that's not nearly lethal enough to down such a large beast. He hits the ground with a crunch of gravel, the bear easily towering several feet above his head as the blade is pulled from its diseased flesh.

With a pained roar from its throat, the tormented creature slams back on all fours, turning towards the source of its pain. A quick swipe glances the metal of his helmet - the claws could have easily taken his head if he were unarmored.

The boy squares himself, putting Lashan’s steel between him and certain death. The chaos of the men and Lashan seems to disappear as the lends all his focus on the enemy in front of him. The long claws on its paws, the frothing drool dripping from its fangs. The vicious glint of a tiny animal eye between the hornlike growths. It was more monster than bear to him.

His eyes remain dark and focused ahead, but make no mistake, there was a fear underlying it all. A slight tremble in his grip and in his legs as he thought of what to do next. Gambino taught him where the arteries of a man lie beneath his flesh - but would that work on a beast?

He evades a swipe, weaves between a tree, circles around to get in a better position. As nimble as he was, the angered creature was just as determined to follow and crush him. He takes any opening - recklessly, as was his style - landing a cut by the knee, a slash at the forearm, nothing deep enough.

Dark blood flows down the bear’s great limbs, one leg slightly hindered. Attempting to close in on this weakness, Guts falls prey to a full swipe from the beast connecting square in the chest. The claws rake across his breastplate and sends his smaller body flying, slamming hard against a boulder crowned by roots of a tree.

His vision goes white from the blow, head hitting hard stone, letting out a high grunt of pain. Miraculously, the boy was still clinging onto his sword, but he was too dazed to notice the bear preparing to charge into him. It was all he could do to remember up from down as he shakily attempts to get back up.

The bear bleeds freely, cuts opening like red mouths, but its loose, heavy skin with those layers of fat and fur act as a kind of armor obscuring and protecting the muscles and tendons, the greater blood vessels. Lashan's sword whips out faster than Guts' preferred weapon, with less momentum. It wants a higher level of precision for maximum effect.

The bear's breath is hot and rancid as it bowls forwards, treating Guts like an enemy bear. It's aiming to engulf his forearm, then his face in its bone-crushing jaws.

Instead a knife appears, sprouting from its eye socket with a dull thunk, and Thistle is there rearing up with a shrill whinny, close enough to see his ears flat to his head and the sweat streaming down his flanks, Lashan clamped on his back with one hand grasping her bow and the other outflung. Without any verbal command Thistle jars back to all fours and takes off again, carrying his rider back out of sight through the trees. Hoarsely her voice comes back, "Boy! Stab it!"

The bear's reared up itself to swipe reflexively at the air. It's not human, it doesn't understand what dealt it this injury. It could pounce down with tremendous force.

The evening has gotten much darker in the past few minutes and rain has started. In another moment there will be an intense white light and almost instantaneously a terrible, overwhelmingly loud peal of very close thunder, followed by the stink of ozone. Then the rain will pick up hard.

Guts' world was still swimming when the finishing blow that should have crushed him never came. He doesn't quite process what happened at first, vaguely hearing the whinny of Lashan's horse through the ambient noise. The boy recognizes her voice through the chaos as he shakily stands to his feet.

His arms felt cold with the drops of rain. Looking up, he sees a knife in the bear's eye socket and the futile thrashing of its thick and deadly arms.

Despite his body's complaints, he raises the blade again, eyes fluttering open beneath the rim of his helmet. Teeth clenched, he sees the line of the creature's sternum on its chest between its powerful chest muscles, and angles the sword. As terrifying as the mutant was, it was still mortal. Still a creature of flesh and blood, with a ribcage full of soft and vital organs beneath.

Head throbbing, limbs aching, he thrusts the sword upwards as the bear's great bulk falls on him, impaling the full length of steel entirely into its chest. His legs crumple beneath the weight, disappearing beneath the monster with a shout (of pain? of surprise? a bit of both). His fate was impossible to discern, but the massive creature would soon be in the throes of its own death as blood begins to spill liberally from the wound and pool widely into the damp earth.

The bear is still an animal, despite everything done to it. The same drives exploited to make it ready to fight now urge it to save itself and run. It falls to all fours in the rain, making a deep fretful lowing sound and trying to scramble away. Too late. The sword buried to the hilt in its body twists and after a few increasingly uncertain steps, the blood running into the dark earth, its strength goes. It collapses, wheezing with the strain, and starts to bleed out.

Lashan doesn't come back immediately. She just had to finish her preparations and call lightning on the knot of armored men and has to check that they're dead or at least not present threats and any intact survivors are too scattered and disoriented to be an immediate threat. Lightning and metal armor are a lethal combination but she can't just take that for granted when it's so hard to rely on her usual methods of monitoring people. It's made more difficult by the darkness and the pelting rain and the need to reassure her horse. A storm had been on its way, and calling down sky-lightning has hastened it and made it rage harder, the usual price. She ends up creating a globe of witchfire to hover overhead, illuminating the sheeting water as much as the landscape. When someone moves into the circle of the light, she almost shoots them.

She returns after the bear has heaved its last breath, with a cowed wet-rat of a hunter girl splashing alongside at her stirrup, an equally drenched shaggy pony following her with its head down. Troublemaking Galli is maybe seventeen and caught between resentment and shame. Lashan, her head pounding in tandem with her protesting joints and making it harder to pinpoint important details, mutters, "Gods damn it."

Commandeering the girl to help her out of the saddle, Lashan groans as her feet hit the ground. The Fighter's blessings are great but her body is an increasingly flawed vessel for them, and she can see darkness encroaching on her vision in a way that has nothing to do with rain and night. The twenty pounds of leather armor feel like lead. But she can't stop and rest now. "Damn it boy. You're alive... Where are you?"

After the wind is knocked out of him, Guts is inundated by the sensation of being drenched. Sticky, hot blood mixed with cold and slippery earth. He'd been dragged for a bit, clinging desperately to that sword, getting mud and rocks and grass wedged between the steel plates and tightly woven leather straps before the massive bulk slumps on him and pins his body there.

He struggles with little success. No way. No way in hell was he going to die under an over-sized corpse after nearly getting his head cleaved off. The pallid, sickened flesh of the creature's belly wriggles furiously as he manages to get a hand free. Clawing half-successfully at the ground, he manages to pull his head out from beneath the bear, gasping desperately for a clean breath. It was getting too difficult to keep his grip on the ground with the rain pouring down, and he slips.

His entire arm and head are drenched in deep red, like some odd thing re-emerging from the afterbirth of the fight. Once proper air manages to half-fill his lungs again, he slumps for a moment in the mud, letting the rain fall on him, seeing double of his hand just a foot or so away from his face.

"Shit..." he wheezes out, trying to regain some energy. Well, he was alive.

Edited 2022-09-19 06:06 (UTC)

Galli shrinks back against Thistle's side and the horses both snort and stamp as the body heaves and what looks like red organs emerge from under it. Lashan's put the witchfire globe into a lantern from her saddlebags. She holds it up as she limps stiff-legged closer. The bright moonlike light shows the rain just starting to loosen the thick layer of mud and gore liberally coating Guts.

"Hunh. Do you always end up under your kills?" she asks, though there's a certain less-arch quality to her voice too. Lashan doesn't want to sound too impressed or relieved. "Or is that just battlefields and big animals? Never mind. Here, can you grab a lead and let a horse pull you out? I'd need a lever to lift this poor brute."

Safflower has returned also and also doesn't like the smell of blood and ozone, snorting and laying her ears back. Not protesting as Lashan goes to pull rope from her saddlebags, the mare lowers her head to sniff her rider, what's exposed of him, with careful distaste. Rain drips off her big muzzle.

The mare seems willing enough. Assuming Guts will take the help even if he grumbles about it, Lashan ties rope to her saddle and makes a loop at the other end before lowering it to him. If she gets down on the ground at this point, getting her off it again will be complicated.

He doesn't grumble, lying motionless on the ground as Safflower sniffs the blood and offal on his helmet. When offered, he simply grasps at the blurry rope-like object in front of him and hangs on as best he can.

"The sword - " he gasps out, unable to think of a clever reply. He let go of Lashan's blade at some point after the bear's death, and the lack of weapon in his hand was the loudest signal blaring his brain. When Safflower helps tug his body out from under the mutated bulk of the beast, it hurts his joints. Being compressed between metal and a ton of meat was a terrible endeavor, as much as it protected all his vital parts. He manages to eventually be squeezed out onto the muddy floor.

He slowly gets up on his knees and hands, taking in deeper breaths and spitting out the blood that managed to get into his mouth. The top-half of his borrowed clothes were dyed a deep black-red, undisturbed by the rain. When he looks up, he sees Safflower's familiar tan forelegs pawing the mud. He can't help but smile a bit, even if its hidden under his visor.

Edited 2022-09-19 19:27 (UTC)

"Never mind that," Lashan says. She would like to protest about him losing track of it, that sword is very important to her, but is old enough to put things in perspective. It's not like it's lost lost, anyway.

Lashan gets Galli to tie leads connecting two of the bear's paws to Thistle and the pony and with a little prompting all three horses pull, shifting the bulk of the dead animal and Guts under it. It's fresh enough to still be warm and limp, so trying to get it turned over even more of a trial than its weight alone would make it. The horses' hooves, churning, splash the women to the waist and themselves to the bellies with bloody mud.

Safflower stops and turns back when the pulling gets easier and sniffs Guts some more, snorting and shaking her head with equine disapproval at the stink. As he starts to get his breath back and pick himself up a bit Lashan determines that he's not under death's shadow and she can try and retrieve her old companion. She steps around him, ankle deep in the dark puddle, to where the bear's chest is exposed at a weird angle. Its fore and hind leg are flung wider than they would have gone in life, the joints slowly giving way under the relentless pulling. She bends painfully to root around with her free hand until she finds the hilt of her longsword embedded into the bear's body, hidden by clumps of filthy hair.

The sword pulls free with ease, enchanted not to stick. With it comes a gout of chunky viscera tumbling into the pool of blood collecting under the bear. Lashan steps back, wary of getting trapped under it herself, and straightens even more painfully to look at the boy with an odd expression on her face.

Guts curses more loudly now that there was proper air in his chest, and unfastens the helmet to slip it vigorously off his head. Without the metal obscuring his face, it was easier to see the absolutely miserable expression. Between the rain and the helmet, his black hair was plastered neatly to his skull, free of all the disgusting viscera coating everything below his eyes in blood.

When he feels a nose daring to sniff his comparitively unspoiled hair, he guesses Safflower was waiting behind him. Even without the blood, the ride and the fight would have left him quite sweaty with exertion. Rain wouldn't fix it. It was just in the process of turning him into a larger wet rat. He gets a glimpse of Galli nestled in between the two larger animals, frowning.

He's pensive, uncertain of how pissed he should be that he almost died searching for this shivering girl. A stranger. With no promise that he'd get his proper sword back. He could almost hear the admonishment in his head from every rough voice that had taught him better about surviving in the world. He gets to his feet, unsteadily at first, but his steps become more confident once he finds Safflower as a nice, steady support to lean against. No use dwelling on it.

"I wouldn't eat any of that thing's meat if I were you." he says to Lashan."Thing's obviously got some kinda disease."

It pained him to say that. How did they have so many hunters and no game meat to show for it?

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