Need (Sister Lashan) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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lukeoutbelow2022-06-10 02:56 pm
hasapoint) wrote in lukeoutbelow2022-06-10 02:56 pm
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.
"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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"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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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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.
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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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"Its pelt won't be good for much either, patchy as it is," she says with real regret. Not that she'd want to take the kind of time they'd need to skin a bear out here in the wet night with, still, enemies. "Maybe we can get the head or a paw... Hah, if you were clans this would make you a man."
She is tired, that the thought slips out without her vetting it. She can see how it got there, from the bit about the skin. In the enclave Lashan still has what's left of the hide, the tusks and teeth and bone-beads from the grand old boar she'd hunted and worn in a long-ago ceremony. Certainly she still carries the ink in her skin. That's the last strong, purely sweet memory she has of that time. She snorts like a horse and clears the old pain, regains some of her distance. "You got anything broken? I don't want to stay out here any longer than I have to."
The gore drains gradually from the blade of her longsword, the metal showing pale and bright between rivulets running to the tip. The hilt, unfortunately, acts like any other hilt in this situation and is not washed clean by rain and gravity. Galli, trying desperately to not get chewed out anymore, has let the leads slack and the animal's body slump back down. She takes Lashan's words as a cue to climb on it - she is a fraction of its size, if she curled up she'd be about as big as its head - and start cutting industriously with a curved knife.
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He gingerly presses his fingers into his side. It felt bruised as all hell, but his breathing felt fine. The armor probably saved him from breaking any ribs. He's fairly certain his chest will look completely purple once he takes the plate off. It's a sobering thought.
There'd never been any real threshhold between boy and man, now that she mentioned it. There was just the burden of staying alive that got easier as time went on and leveled his strength with that of his enemy's. For all intents and purposes, he already considered himself one.
But despite playing aloof, even Guts would find a claw or a fang to be a pretty cool keepsake. He gives the bear's paw a brief look, shivering slightly in the rain.
"Where'd the rest of the soldiers go?"
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It will break Lashan’s heart if she thinks too long about how Vena and Guts and so many of the others passing through the enclave and out in the world haven’t had that. They just go from less power to more, at best. Guts is better off than a lot of the others, as terrible as that thought is, because he can be on his own and that's better for him than being used by evil guardians. Better not to think of it, Lashan knows. She peers out into the rain, silvered by her lantern. A bit of the ozone scent is still detectable under the coppery reek of all this blood, and something acrid and burnt.
“They got hit by lightning. It’s attracted to metal and they were on a rise,” she says shortly. Which is all completely true. There are still flickers of lightning and murmurs of thunder still going, all further away. “All the more reason to get gone. Even you can’t fight a storm, my buck.”
Galli has determined that taking the head would be too difficult so she’s pried the jaws open and cut into the gums, then started hammering with the hilt of the knife to loosen teeth, her head down. Thud! Thud! Crack!
Lashan lets out a breath and holds out her sword. Her joins are burning in a slow mutiny. "You're in better shape than me. If you wanna cut off a forepaw..."
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Once he's out of range of Safflower, his footsteps are a lot less steady than they were before the fight, but he manages to make it to Lashan to grab the sword and plop down on his knees near the bear's patchy forearm. He'll make something useful out of it, he tells himself, sitting there in the mud. The lighter blade works to cut tough tendons and cartilege. Sure. Something useful.
As he works he notes that the bear's paw was massive, much larger than his hand. And the claws were easily as long as his fingers. A set of proper knives that nature gave this thing. If it had connected properly with his body, he'd be long cold and dead. And for what?
He pauses, staring stiffly, before continuing. The wrist bone makes a cracking sound as he hammers down lightly with the pommel of the sword. Now they have some teeth and a paw. Lashan gets a miserable little side eye to indicate he was done, now properly soaked to his own bones.
"Let's get out of here already."
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With a pouch full of yellowed teeth Galli starts for her pony, turns back, and hauls on the knife buried in the bear's eye socket. It's harder than drawing the sword out of its chest, she has to brace with a foot on its face and strain. When it finally pulls free she reels back to the point of almost falling into the puddle. She cleans the knife off on her cloak, though that's so blood-splattered that it's basically a symbolic gesture, before she gets back to her horse.
The ride back isn't good. Without a solid road to follow Lashan refuses to risk the horses by getting them to speed up, and as puddles form they become more wary and reluctant. Horses can't tell how deep a puddle is and stepping in a hole can mean a broken leg. Galli ends up slogging ahead with a stick and a woebegone set to her shoulders to reassure them, which does mean getting back to a fast walk. The light of the witchfire lantern shines cold and bright, mostly illuminating falling water coming down in such sheets that it's not immediately evident when they leave the trees.
A party from the enclave does meet them at that point with a canvas-topped wagon to take them back. There are horse-blankets and a tureen of steaming hot milk. Several burly Sisters have to help Lashan off her horse and get her sodden armor off - by that point, she's looking grey in the face - and one who works in her forge sits her down with a horse-blanket around her shoulders and a mug in her hands, and starts off with "If you get pneumonia off this I'm killing you myself!" By the time they're back to the palisade, light has come back to the old woman's eyes and she's denigrating her striker's power and endurance.
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He winces on his way down from the saddle, guided to the cart by a lone girl staring at the massive bear paw in his hands. The plate armor is removed much quicker than it's mounted to his body, eager as he was to untie all the leather strings and straps. The blood is somewhat cleaned off his skin by the rain, though it remains staining Lashan's shirt. He takes this off, too - both to see the damage and to remove another sopping wet layer off his body. He only needed a glimpse of the ugly purple blotching on his chest to know he was going to be deeply sore for another few days at least.
Guts occupies the corner opposite to Lashan and the others around her, blanket wrapped tight, sipping the warm milk wordlessly. He seemed content to keep the company of his armor, the sheathed sword, and all the unused arrows sitting in their quiver. Still, the gray in her face was worrying.
“How’s the old lady? Didn’t keel over yet, right?” the question is tossed into the air, earning him a dirty look. Cold could easily do in someone her age, he knew.
Luckily, it seemed like she was getting some color back into her cheeks, from what he could glimpse between all the other Sisters.
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"Lashan, why do you think we would just leave them out in the rain? Sit down!" is the wrathful response, but she doesn't actually settle until told the names of the girls who're on that. The old woman, complaining in a mutter, submits to her striker checking her over for injuries, though there's quite a lot less and rather more diluted blood than on Guts.
There's a Healing charm in her longsword, though it's not as refined as the ones she developed more recently. It has some effect in proximity to Guts, as it has for the whole ride, but that feels like another layer of discomfort. Breaks in his skin have mostly scabbed over and now itch. His bruised ribs burn faintly. A bit of some weird twisted spikelike growth from the bear, that had been driven into a gap in his armor and broken off, feels hot and ferociously itchy.
One of the Sisters peels off to look Guts over. She doesn't demand he unwrap so much as check the color in his face - there are more witchlights in lanterns here, and normal lanterns with flame - and see if he's favoring anything, and ask a rather pointed, "Well? Do you up and hide it when you get hurt, or are you actually fine?"
"Damn you Miria, I don't hide it," Lashan complains. "It's arthritis and a levinbolt and too cursed long in the rain. The boy's the one who fought a bear." A third person is checking over Galli, hunkered down in a sullen heap.
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"I'm fine," he replies flatly,"Aside from being stuck in the rain."
Guts was a mirror of Lashan in that way, apparently. He would have said he was fine even if he was in much worse condition, if the previous fight was any indication. As it was, his face was a bit pale from the cold, but not nearly as gray as Lashan had gotten. The blanket had stayed his wet trembling, and he seemed rather attached to it. The cloth concealed much of the beatdown his body received, and he wasn't about to explain how his head still hurt as ferociously as his ribs did.
The uncomfortable itchiness around his leg does get him to notice a shard or two of horn embedded in his thigh. His legs were sparingly armored compared to his upper body, and tended to be nicked with small wounds more often. Thoughtlessly, he sets aside the clay cup (now devoid of warm drink) and fiddles with the things to attempt to pluck them out. They were more thorn than arrow in shape, so he wasn't too worried about bleeding out.
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This does leave Guts with two women peering at him trying to see if he's bleeding out or about to die and a third who decides to just examine the pieces of his armor and Lashan's irreparably stained, sodden shirt and forensically determine that most of the blood probably isn't his. One of the two, suspecting he won't like to be helped, offers him a pair of little bronze tweezers before slipping out of the wagon, into the rain. If anything it's gotten worse out there. The rain appears to be sideways and makes a steady, constant noise against the canvas.
The tweezers will make it easier, but it hurts to pull these things free. The really unfortunate thing about this Healing charm is that the scabs cling to the foreign objects like he's left them for longer than a few hours, and there's more bleeding as those are taken off. It's also kind of satisfying though. The spikes are disgusting, sort of hairy at the non-sharp end.
"Do you want to wash off?" the forensic Sister asks. "Or are you too wet already?" This spurs a small side argument with the other girl about blood in the bathhouse and if this is worse than moon-blood.
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Guts curls up into a ball beneath his blanket once he checks his legs for the fourth or fifth time to make sure there were no more thorns embedded in them. They still itched like a scab as the wounds spilled over slowly with bright red. Hopefully it wasn’t infected from the rancid creature.
He earnestly felt too miserable to say something smart back to the girls, eyes drooping half-shut with weariness. His face looked okay, beyond a few scuffs and the ebbing sharpness in his eyes. The adrenaline of the fight had worn off, leaving him with a rich buffet of burning and aching. A post-fighting drink (a real drink) would do a lot better for him now, he thinks.
“The bath’s for washing the blood off, ain’t it?” He says, not considering the particular Enclave Sister that would have to take care of the aftermath.
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