Chapter Text
Sumi woke to the sound of feet thumping on the deck above her. Muffled shouts called back and forth, overlapping voices asking for this and that while yelling at someone to get over there, no, there!
She groaned, throwing her arm over her eyes. They were either coming in to port, which would mean she’d slept far too long, or they were preparing to fight off some Monster’s attack, which she really didn’t want to deal with. She argued with herself for a while longer, trying to decide whether or not she could justify just a few more minutes in the gently rocking hammock.
As usual, her conscience won out. As usual, she grumbled about it the entire way as she swung out of her hammock.
Daylight was filtering in from the hatch that led to the upper deck, which lifted her spirits. As awe-inspiring as the view had been at night, she’d been anxiously awaiting actually being able to see something. The other hammocks were all empty, so it seemed she’d been alone in oversleeping.
She stomped up the stairs to a bustling ship, aviators climbing the rigging and making dozens of myriad adjustments that she didn’t understand the slightest bit of. She caught sight of Hikoshi near the helm, silently watching the work beside the captain with her crutch tucked disdainfully under her arm. Souta was by the helm as well, though he was looking off the side of the ship at something down below.
Sumi weaved her way over to them, doing her best to stay out of the way as aviators dashed every which way. Souta heard her approach and waved her over.
“How’s your head feeling?” He asked, characteristic cheer fully restored following the previous night’s brutal beatdown.
“Fine, as long as I don't try and take my helmet off. Got a nasty dent that’s keeping it pinned on.”
“Yowch. Better on than off, I guess.” He returned to his gazing over the side. “Take a look down there.”
Sumi leaned over the side, following his pointing finger. Well, she did after a moment. She had to get her breath back first.
In the night the forest had receded, giving way to lush grasslands that stretched in every direction. Sumi had never left the jungle before, so she knew her perspective was likely skewed, but the trees that grew here seemed impossibly sparse and short. They grew in loose clumps, hardly a branch overlapping, leaving the majority of the space to be taken up by only tall grass and occasional bushes. Intermittent rivers twisted their way across the land, carving small hills that nonetheless paled next to the dramatic plateaus and waterfalls she was accustomed to.
The world seemed to swim beneath her while she sailed over it, ‘dizzying heights’ revealing itself to be a surprisingly literal euphemism. She realized that she wasn’t even sure if the trees were small, or if she was just so far away that she couldn’t judge their size.
She turned her gaze away, looking farther afield. She could see so far. Before she’d left the village the farthest thing she’d ever looked at had been the other side of the tree wall, a few hundred yards away.
Now she felt as if the entire planet was on display beneath her. She noticed the peculiar tint that the horizon’s edge began to take, the grasslands growing bluer and fading away in the distance. If the effect hadn’t been present in every direction she would have assumed that the grass really was blue in the distance, but it wouldn’t have made sense for them to be in the dead center of an island of green. She could only assume it was some illusion of the height they were at, a trick of the eyes. Did being in a blue sky really make everything else look bluer, like she were looking through stained glass?
She finally managed to force her focus back onto what Souta had called her over for in the first place. A crowd of brown lumps was meandering through the grasslands, perhaps a few dozen of them in a vague circle. They were heading towards a river at a plodding pace, and the Listless would easily overtake them in a few minutes.
Souta handed her his spyglass with his usual cautions for her to be careful with it, and not to drop it. She wondered how long it would be before he trusted her with the shoddy tool more than he did with deadly weapons.
She extended the spyglass, centering it on the distant shapes. To her surprise, she recognized them from Souta’s notes. Apceros. An armored quadruped that traveled in herds for mutual defense. She could see the distinctive tail emerging from their shelled backs, ending in a spiked mace. The smallest of them traveled in the center of the herd, chewing heaping mouthfuls of the grass that had been trampled by their elders ahead of them. She didn’t think the young would have been tall enough to see over the grass if they had been on their own.
The adults were significantly larger. Their backs were large enough to hold a room of her old house, and each of the spikes on their tail could skewer her through three times over. They had spikes protruding from their cheeks and laterally outward from the middle sides of their shells, presumably to prevent a predator from flipping them to gain easy access to their soft underbellies.
She snapped the telescope closed, handing it back to Souta, who reverently slipped it into the only armored pocket on his belt. “Those are Apceros. I remember your notes on them.”
“Got it in one, Sumi. A pretty good size herd of them, too, migrating to warmer weather now that summer’s coming up on its end. Captain Hikosen, care to elaborate on your request?”
Sumi jumped, having forgotten that they were right near the Captain’s wheel, and that he and Hikoshi had been there the entire time.
“Our ship has experienced significant damage as a result of our contract to bring you two to Narrowstrait. While the Guild’s standard insurance will cover the repairs, they will not cover the lost revenue incurred while we await the work’s completion. I asked of your teacher that he descend to Hunt some of the creatures below, to help offset these losses. He responded that any unplanned Hunt would have to be approved by both Hunters aboard the ship, and so I await your answer.”
Captain Hikosen was being oddly formal, even for him. Now that she thought of it, he’d hardly spoken to them at all since leaving the tavern, aside from the occasional order. She wondered what had caused the change, but not enough to interrupt or change the topic.
“Didn’t you have to throw, like, literally everything overboard just to get this ship off the ground? I can’t imagine you could carry the weight of one of an entire Apceros.”
Hikoshi piped up unprompted before Captain Hikosen could respond. He tightened his lips to a thin line, but let her speak.
“We couldn’t carry the whole thing, just the more worthwhile parts. I got a bit overzealous with the tossing stuff earlier, because Souta seemed so panicked. Wanted to get in the air fast, you know.”
“Which I appreciate, by the way.” Souta said with a nod to her. She smiled back. Captain Hikosen picked up the thread of conversation.
“Yes, a more precise accounting of our load earlier this morning confirmed we have some free tonnage to work with. As we have spent the night and morning without rations for the crew, I also intended to allow my sailors to descend in groups after the Hunt to allow them some well-earned meals. A single Apceros should be more than enough to fuel their morale until we reach Narrowstrait. Do you find these plans amenable?”
Sumi looked to Souta, who gave his usual response, an ambivalent ‘your-call’ shrug. She looked down at the Apceros herd, considering. They weren’t true Monsters, so they should be able to handle them without much danger, even if they’d be the biggest animal she’d Hunted since the Great Jagras.
“Sure. Your crew bought me enough food at the tavern, it’s only fair I pay them back. Souta and I can bag you an Apceros.”
A cheer went up from the deckhands behind her, the entire crew somehow managing to have overheard the conversation while continuing in their calamitous work. Their abilities of communication without any cohesion continued to baffle her.
When none of the crew changed what they were doing, she realized that they’d already begun the process of descending. It was touching that they’d already developed enough faith in her to believe she’d make the ‘right’ decision, but it was a little bit nerve wracking.
When Souta had taught her about symbiosis he’d listed Hunters and civilians as one of his many examples, citing the mutual benefit and dependency they had for one another. She’d understood the comparison intellectually, but actually being a part of it felt odd. She was barely a Hunter, yet the entire crew had been throwing their weight behind her, feeding and aiding her in exchange for the protection she supposedly provided. She could only hope her inexperience didn’t lead them to disaster, like sheep following a blind shepherd off a cliff.
They dropped about a mile ahead of the Apceros’ path, Sumi and Souta lowered down on ropes that ended in large metal spikes. Souta hopped just before he landed, driving his straight into the ground to anchor it in place. Sumi tried the same, but only drove it a quarter of the way in. She had to bounce on it a few more times to properly set it.
The wind drew the lines tighter above them while the Listless continued to drift, until they finally snapped taut. Sumi watched the anchors for a while until she was sure they would hold, though Hikoshi had assured her the wind was gentle today.
Sumi walked over to Souta, following his anchor line with her eyes. She was too short to see over the tall grass, though he was easily a head above it when he stood on his tiptoes. She purposefully ignored that fact.
Together they set off for the Apceros herd, chatting strategy as they went. There were several problems to solve that Sumi could see already. The Apceros’ shell was too hard for either of their weapons to pierce, at least not without a problematically cruel amount of repeated blows, and the herd was fiercely protective of one another, instinctually driven to defend one another. They would have to find a way to separate an individual from the herd first, then find some way to get it to expose its underside.
Getting a shot underneath it would likely be the hardest part. She knew she’d gotten stronger since becoming a Hunter, and Souta was likely a good bit stronger than her, but neither of them were going to be flipping a several ton animal on its side any time soon.
“Are they faster than us?” Sumi asked.
“No, not really. If they get in a panic they might be able to sprint nearly as fast as we can jog, but they couldn’t keep that pace up for long. That’s the price they pay for all that armor.”
“Well, what if I just run underneath one, then? You wouldn’t have room to draw your bow, but I could gut one easily enough from beneath, even if I was on hands and knees.”
Souta tilted his head with pursed lips, nodding. “Yeah, you could. I see two ways that works out, though. Either you get stomped to death straight away, or you manage to get a good few cuts in, lethal ones, which would be followed up by a half-dozen tons of Apceros collapsing on top of you.”
“Huh.” Sumi tapped a finger on her leg armor. “Point taken.”
They tossed ideas back and forth as they forged their way through the grass, heading to intercept the Apceros herd. Souta said Apceros didn’t really deviate from their path often when migrating, only adjusting their path to avoid an obstacle or seek out some particular shelter or source of food. Apparently, in the days before compasses and high-quality maps had been commonplace, they’d been used by travelers as guides. Even now their uncannily straight paths were used as landmarks during the migration season.
“Do predators ever exploit that predictability, then? It wouldn’t be hard to set up an ambush if you know exactly where they’re going.”
“I suppose some Monsters might, but they’re still Apceros, aren’t they? They don’t have great eyesight and their sense of smell isn’t exceptional, so you can hide from them easily enough without fancy plans. The hard part is getting past their defenses.”
They continued their strategy chat as they walked. Oddly enough, the grass was shrinking in height as they approached the river. Sumi was used to open water being a beacon for lush growth, but that didn’t seem to be happening here for some reason.
The river was old, clearly. The banks that surrounded it were steep, requiring her to hop down from edge to ledge like a lizard. They walked along the thin muddy strip that the river’s ebbing had exposed for a while, deciding on a final strategy.
It felt good to be meandering through the wild with Souta, chatting casually about a lower-stakes Hunt. It felt like what being a Hunter should be, in an ideal world. Doing something important and worthwhile, but not critical, with no lives on the line. She wished every Hunt could be like this.
They crawled up the embankment to the shallow grass, which now only came up to Sumi’s thighs. The Apceros were approaching from a distance, some few hundred yards away. She could pick out the turtle-shell patterning on their backs now, the signature armor growing in raised plates. Their tails swung lazily from side to side with their gait, mace-like spikes intimidating even at a distance. It seemed the leaders of the herd were the largest, and they lowered their heads to graze only seldomly. Sumi pulled out her notebook while they approached, dipping her brush to begin taking notes.
Apceros Herd Observations, Fifth of Autumn.
It consists of some thirty Apceros, a fifth or sixth of which seem to be juveniles. The largest members of the herd travel at the front of the pack, rarely eating, while those on the sides and back constantly graze. The herd seems to decrease in size along the perimeter, with the smallest adults at the back. It is unclear whether this is defensive or evidence of hierarchy. What is clear is that the juveniles travel in the center of the herd to be well protected from any attacks, as their diminutive clubs wouldn’t pose much of a threat to a predator. Fortunately for them, we do not intend to bag ourselves a juvenile.
Sumi slipped her notebook back away, pressing a disposable sheet between the pages to make sure the ink didn’t smear. She’d heard there was such a thing as quick-drying ink. She’d have to pick some up in Narrowstrait, if there was any to be found.
They put their plan into action when the Apceros were about a hundred yards from the riverbank. True to Souta’s words, their senses were abysmal. Sumi had done little more than crouch in the grass as she approached and gone entirely unnoticed by the herd. She supposed they didn’t need to be particularly perceptive when most of their threats would necessarily be building-sized.
She was close enough to hear their snuffling breaths and smell their odd musk before one of the herd finally noticed her. While taking a languid bite of grass its head suddenly reared up, a startled bellow sounding from its throat.
Sumi leapt up, shouting loudly and smashing her sword into her shield. The entire herd reacted with bellows of their own, dropping into low stances and bringing their tails high into the air, arching towards Sumi. Beneath the cacophony Sumi could hear the terrified high-pitched trumpets of the juveniles, who were sprinting to hide beneath the nearest adult.
The herd quickly collapsed into a defensive perimeter, shell spikes and clubs facing Sumi in a wall of living barbs. Now came the hard part.
Sumi took off at a run, yelling her challenge. The Apceros held their wall with the poise of professional soldiers, their only response little more than a shifting of their stance, preparation to swing.
Sumi didn’t have experience with Apceros, but the tools they had to face her were simple, and that made them predictable.
The second she came into range the closest Apceros slammed its tail down, a spiked club larger than her torso flying through the air at her fast enough to whistle.
She dove to one side, rolling back into her sprint in a single smooth motion. The next Apceros swung, and now she was too close to dodge in time. She ran to the side, meeting the swing with the point of her Tigrex-enhanced shield.
She felt the shock reverberate through the shield, down her gauntlet, into her armor and out through her feet. The grass was flattened around her a couple yards, her gear distributing the force of the blow as best it could. What it couldn’t absorb was still enough to force her to her knees, grunting in exertion.
The Apceros’ tail rebounded into the air, allowing her to launch forward again. In a few more strides she’d be close enough to touch one.
She aimed for the center of the Apceros’ body, dropping into a slide. They could easily crush her with a stomp, but when they were in such close proximity to one another they’d have no room to move enough to hit her. She could slide underneath before it could disentangle itself and gain access to the unprotected inner circle.
The Apceros, however, seemed to be aware of this. As soon as she slipped into her slide its two closest legs collapsed, driving its spiked back into the dirt at an angle. The few foot gap disappeared behind an impenetrable shell.
Sumi’s foot thudded into the shell, forcing her to a stop. A shadow flicked past her, and she knew the club was coming. She did the only thing she could.
Sumi kicked off with her other leg, throwing herself up and onto the back of the Apceros. She felt the woosh-thud of a lethal impact impaling the ground behind her as she clawed her way upward.
The Apceros reared, trying to throw her off as it bleated in panic. Sumi nearly lost her footing, but the multi-ton animal couldn’t do much more than shake its back like a geriatric wet dog. She dropped to a knee and held on, mind flying a mile a minute as she tried to find some way to salvage the plan.
She didn’t get the time to think. The Apceros’ carefully maintained perimeter shattered to pieces around her as the animals fought between their instincts to face the threat and maintain the wall. Little ones scattered in all directions, drawing off several of the herd that charged after them.
The largest of the herd, one of the ones she’d seen at the front, didn’t scatter. It headed directly for Sumi in a bizarre sideways skipping run, tail lashing furiously. Sumi thought about throwing herself off her current ride, but couldn’t see anywhere to land that wasn’t going to end up with her smashed by a club or trampled.
The large Apceros reached her in seconds, trumpeting in furious rage. Its club tail shot downward with all the force of a lightning bolt, faster by far than anything she’d seen so far.
She didn’t have time to think, much less time to dodge. All she did was let go of her hold, letting the Apceros’ thrashing throw her away.
The spiked club struck where she’d been a millisecond before, the shell of the afflicted Apceros cracking thunderously.
She landed elsewhere on its back just as her ride’s legs gave out, its bulk hitting the ground hard enough to throw up a cloud of dust. The large Apceros’ club lifted away, one long spike stained red. The segment of plated shell had shattered, exposing a pink and red fleshy mess.
The large Apceros looked at the wound, sniffing while glancing between its packmate’s wound and Sumi. She dropped into a cautious crouch, ready to dodge again, but it was unnecessary. The Apceros huffed loudly and came to some inscrutable decision, slowly retreating sideways. Its beady eyes watched Sumi carefully all the while.
She saw Souta running towards her in the distance, an arrow knocked to his bow. She gave him a proud wave, calling him over. The plan had failed, but the Hunt was successful.
Parts of it had gone as intended, at least. She’d managed to close the distance to the Apceros herd without injury, and she’d managed to get them to scatter. But what she’d been trying to do after that was drive an isolated member towards the river bank, where they’d found an unstable patch of sand. It would have hopefully given out under the Apceros’ weight and dumped it sideways down the gulch, exposing its vulnerable underbelly for Souta to fill with arrows. Sumi hadn’t counted on assistance from the Apceros themselves.
She slid down the Apceros’ shell, landing near its head as Souta approached. She started to talk to him, proud of their kill, until she heard the wheezing breath still being forced out of the Apceros.
Sumi immediately dropped into a crouch, inspecting it closely. Its eyes were open and tracking her, dilated in absolute terror. Flutters of movement raced along its skin, the ghosts of commands that its muscles clearly weren’t obeying. It was trying to stand, to run, to fight, but its body wouldn’t cooperate. It had been paralyzed.
Sumi immediately drew her sword, slamming it into the Apceros’ eye. Its movement didn’t stop immediately, so she gruesomely swirled the blade around, trying to find its brain. After an indeterminately long and agonizing moment, the creature fell still.
Sumi sighed in relief, pulling her sword from its head. She wiped her blade on the grass, cleaning it as best she could before slipping it back into her sheath. She’d have to thoroughly scrub them both, later.
“Sorry about that,” Sumi said to Souta, still out of breath. “Didn’t realize it was still alive. I wasn’t going to let it suffer like that.”
“You did good.” Souta reassured her, patting her shoulder. He reached into his belt and fired off a green flare, the sign for a successful Hunt. The Listless wasn’t far, certainly close enough for them to have been watching the Hunt with telescopes, but Souta was a stickler for procedure. “Let’s see what we can salvage before the buffet crew arrives.”
They set to the task of examining the Apceros corpse, pulling a variety of instruments from their gear. Sumi crawled along its body, taking measurements of various points and calling them out to Souta, who recorded them on scrap paper to properly notate later. Apceros were common, having been Hunted for generations, so there was little scientific value on being so precise in their recordings aside from the practice it provided Sumi.
The shell turned out to be too tough to cut, as expected. She could have used her sword and hacked at the connective tissues to free the entire thing, but they had little use for an armor plate the size of a bedroom floor. The only thing that interested her were the fragments of the shell that had been shattered. Several large chunks were wedged in the wound, the largest of which was the size of her torso.
Sumi yanked the gore-covered piece out of the wound, comparing its size to her breastplate. It fit well, aside from extending outward just a little bit too far on the sides, but was otherwise ideal. It even had a gentle curve, much like her original chestpiece.
She presented it to Souta, asking his opinion on using it as an armor piece.
He rubbed his chin for a moment, looking at it. “I’d say there’s no way for you to attach it to your armor, but that’s more your department than mine. You sure that it’s stronger than the armor you’ve already got, though? That’s a lot of weight to add just for style points, if it isn’t.”
“I’m almost certain it is, but let’s find out.” Sumi suggested, gesturing to the Apceros corpse. When they’d made Sumi’s armor they’d first used Souta’s bow as their benchmark, trying to see if any of their test pieces could bounce one of his arrows. It had turned out that none of them could, steel simply inadequate to deal with the forces involved. They’d finally found a design that could withstand a single shot from his bow, but only when he’d loosed the arrow from the other side of the village clearing.
Souta drew his bow now, standing ten feet away from the Apceros corpse. He pulled the string back to his cheek casually, though Sumi knew from first hand experience how frustratingly difficult the bow was to draw. She wasn’t certain if she could have managed it even now.
Souta loosed the arrow, which hissed toward the Apceros shell. With a loud crack! it bounced off the shell, spinning away to fall into the dirt.
“Looks good to me. It might get more brittle over time, since it’s not connected to anything living, but I didn’t even scratch the shell. It’s got to be better than your current armor, at least.”
Sumi nodded her agreement, picking up the piece of fragmented armor. She crawled back onto the shell, digging through the wound for more shell fragments. She found only a few other pieces large enough to be usable, though she wasn’t quite sure what she’d do with them.
Those collected, she awaited the crew of the Listless. Souta headed back to the ship to escort them to the kill site. Even if it wasn’t as oppressive as the dense jungle she was used to, the tall grass did just as good of a job hiding the approach of a predator.
To her surprise, Souta didn’t return with a carving crew in tow. She watched a dozen of the crew descend the ropes in the distance, then there was nothing for a while. Eventually she watched the anchor lines of the Listless swing around, growing taut in a different direction. The Listless was being hauled towards the kill instead of the other way around.
She stood on tiptoes atop of her kill, shading her eyes. Most of the crew of the Listless had descended to the ground, taking hold of the ropes and hauling them forward. The ship itself was slowly descending, its buoyancy adjusted to a slight negative to make it easier to pull. At least that way they didn’t have to fight the ship’s momentum and the force pulling it skyward.
She was eventually greeted by a group of sweaty but excited aviators. Souta had helped pull the ship over, and he was now busy pounding its anchors into the ground beside the Apceros. The brief stampede had flattened most of the grass in the immediate area, and what was left was stomped clear as the remaining crew aboard the Listless lowered supplies to prepare the Apceros. Within minutes the sight of her kill had been turned into a miniature camp.
She used her sword to peel away the Apceros’ thick skin, which was too tough for the aviator’s knives to cut. Skinning something this big felt less like field prepping and more like renovating a home, she reflected.
The aviators lamented that they didn’t have the free tonnage to haul away the armored shell entirely, which apparently would have sold for quite a solid amount. It could’ve been used to bolster city defenses, as plating on a navy ship, or simply to decorate the home of a wealthy merchant. Instead it would sit in the fields, decomposing into uselessness. Without preservative measures it would be too brittle for use within a week, too soon for them to repair the ship and return to retrieve it.
They had to settle for the (admittedly delicious) meat, some of which was being devoured in an impromptu feast, the rest smoked into rations for future journeys. It wasn’t the same as cash in their pockets, but it would at least ease the budgetary strain on restocking the ship. Some of the aviators managed to peel away a few personal knick-knacks, excited to be so close to a Hunt for the first time and even more excited to have something to show off in a bar to prove it.
Hiksohi eventually made her way down the rope, not content to smell the simmering food from above. Sumi tried to find it in herself to worry about her injured leg, but she moved with such practiced confidence on the ropes that Sumi couldn’t convince herself it was dangerous.
The crew spent the next few hours divvying up the Apceros, using up what they could with limited preparation. It irked Sumi to leave so much of a kill behind, but there was nothing to be done. The scavengers that she’d spotted occasional glimpses of would finish up the rest.
She spent the impromptu midday feast chatting with Souta and Hikoshi, snacking on Apceros meat. It was tough stuff, difficult to chew, but still excellent. Hikoshi had pilfered the captain’s spyglass and watched the whole fight, which she recounted in boisterous detail to both Sumi and the crew.
Obligatory bragging done, they moved onto other topics. Sumi and Souta discussed various ways for her to attach her looted armor to her old pieces, testing various arrangements of the three pieces she had and deciding where they would do the most good.
Hikoshi rattled off question after question, so enthralled by the fight that Souta decided to turn it into an improvised quiz for Sumi. He goaded the other girl into asking after more and more complicated topics, only answering something himself when he was clearly leading her to some new topic he knew Sumi should be familiar with, though she occasionally wasn’t. Sumi tried to find it in herself to be irritated at the study session right after a successful Hunt, but Hikoshi’s enthusiasm was too infectious to let her frustration truly take hold.
It was around two in the afternoon when the aviators finished up their dissection, packing away the supplies with the same efficiency they’d brought them down with. Bundles of smoked meat were raised up by cargo hooks, which then descended to pull up the crew in groups of two. Sumi and Souta were the last ones up, pulling the anchors from the ground and letting themselves be pulled up to the ship as it slowly began to float away.
Sumi watched the ground recede away with a sense of satisfaction warming her. She’d only been away from her village for a short time, but she already knew that she’d made the right choice. She couldn’t wait to arrive in Narrowstrait.