Cyra’s eagerness dimmed and worry crept over her. “Is that—?”
“Unlikely, but it can happen,” Stern said. “The positive is that we can gather as much of the dead as we want and sell the parts off in a city. That’s where the majority of a Walker’s money comes from.”
Cyra exhaled slowly, her worry receding. “You believe we can do this?”
“With Pawly beside us, yeah,” Stern said. “Bunnicorns have a tendency to focus on whatever is near them. As long as we give Pawly some room to work with, it’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“Should grab a sack from the general store when we leave, too. That’ll make it easier to bundle up the sellable items, and I don’t want to put them in my bag. Are you good with doing these two?”
“Yes.”
Stern touched both quests, accepting them. “Okay, we’re good to go.”
Cyra blinked, as she had full knowledge of the quests in her brain now. “Oh, because you’re the crew leader, I have them, too.”
“It registered for the crew,” Stern nodded. “Clothes, general store, and then on the road again.”
“Yes,” Cyra said, her eagerness returning in full.
When they got to the clothier, the shopkeeper was sitting behind her counter with their clothing bundled and waiting. “Morning to you both,” she greeted them. “Here you are— yours and hers.”
Stern pulled his bag off and got his clothing packed in. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for the business,” the clothier smiled. “Glad to see you’re already using them,” she added to Cyra.
“I’m very happy to have them. They’re much warmer than my previous clothing.” Cyra had her bag on the ground and was stuffing the bigger bundle of clothing into it. “The other set is very comfortable, as well.”
“Always nice to hear that my work is appreciated. Off to Darkstone?”
“Got to get her the third dungeon,” Stern said.
“Safe runs to you both,” the woman said. “Are you doing a delivery quest?”
“No, we’re going out to thin down the bunnicorns,” Stern said as he got his pack back on. “Need to swing by the general store to get a sack. Figure we’ll end up with some skins to sell.”
“Oh, one moment,” the woman said, getting up.
Cyra needed a bit of help with her bag, and by the time they’d finished, the woman had returned.
“Here you go,” she said, holding out a folded burlap sack. “Consider it an extra.”
“I won’t say no,” Stern said, accepting it from her. “Why?”
“Well, I’m not a Walker anymore, but I remember the early runs and quests. Some of the simple things can make a big difference.”
“Thank you!” Cyra said, smiling brightly.
“Thank you,” Stern added a second later. “Have a good day.”
“You, too,” the woman replied.
Stepping outside, Stern had Cyra turn around for him and he tied the folded sack to the outside of her bag. Once it was secure, Stern dismissed Pawly as he normally did for the boring parts of a trip. They no longer needed to hit the general store, as he’d gotten food when he’d gotten Cyra her bag, so they were ready.
“And we’re good,” Stern grinned. “Let’s go.”
“Will we find them close to the city?”
“No. There’ll be trails heading into the woods a few hours outside of the walls. We’ll follow one of them, but even then, we’re unlikely to see any dangerous mobs for the first day.”
“Mobs? You’ve used that term before a few times. You mean the monsters, right? I’m understanding the word correctly?”
“It’s a dadism,” Stern said, “and yeah, it means the monsters.”
“But mobs?” Cyra asked, puzzled.
“Monsters have a tendency to group up when they attack,” Stern said, “mobbing the crew with numbers. At least, that’s what I always thought it meant. I never asked him to explain it. If I did that when he used a dadism, I’d probably still be listening to him explain things.”
Cyra giggled. “He uses so many of them?”
“Yeah. My parents are like that. Even when it wasn’t Dad, I still called it a dadism.”
Cyra’s smile faded a little and sadness touched her. “It must’ve been nice...”
“It was. I can’t imagine growing up without them,” Stern said as he walked alongside her. “You’ll probably meet them, eventually.”
“Really?” Cyra asked, her emotions twisting into a complex mess.
Stern didn’t respond as he tried to parse through her emotions, but he couldn’t do it quickly and Cyra was obviously waiting for a reply. “Of course. Unless you’d rather not?”
“No!” Cyra blurted, her emotions surging with mostly embarrassment. “I mean... I’d like to, but do you want me to? I’m just a beggar, and you—”
“The only thing they will care about is who you are. You, the person,” Stern said, cutting her off. “None of us has any say on who our parents are or how we were raised. They’ll love you, Cyra. Trust me.”
Joy, pure and unadulterated, surged from Cyra as she walked beside him. It dimmed a little, but stuck. “I do trust you, Stern. My savior, friend, and crew leader... How could I do anything but trust you?”
Stern gave her a smile, but he’d felt a sudden undercurrent to her joy. He couldn’t place it, as it was mostly hidden by the overriding emotion.
He decided to shift the topic, “What do you know about bunnicorns?”
“The rabbits with the horns, right?”
“That’s them.”
“They taste just like rabbit,” she said. “They’re low-grade monsters for the most part, though I’ve heard stories of evolved ones.”
“There are evolved ones,” Stern nodded, “but what do you know about the basic ones?”
“Not a lot.”
“Okay, let me tell you what I know, so you’ll have an idea about them,” Stern said. “First off, they tend to live alongside normal rabbits. The reason for that is…”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Stern stayed on the barely visible path through the forest. Cyra trailed him, her eyes constantly looking for anything that might be a threat. Ahead of them somewhere, Pawly prowled through the underbrush. She’d been more than happy to be the hunter for them.
Stern had to stop from chuckling as he recalled waking up. Pawly, in her enlarged size, had been between him and Cyra, sleeping on his blanket and under Cyra’s. Cyra had had her arm over Pawly, her head resting against the large cat’s back.
His musing was cut short when Pawly growled. Stopping dead, he waited to hear something else. Another growl came a few seconds later, along with the sound of undergrowth being trampled.
Moving forward again, Stern called out. “Pawly? You good?”
Seconds ticked by in silence before Pawly appeared on the trail a hundred feet ahead of them. She dropped something on the ground, then slid back out of sight. When Stern reached it, he saw a bunnicorn with a deformed skull.
“She hit it hard,” Stern grunted as he knelt down by the body.
“Goddess...” Cyra breathed out. “You’re going to skin it, right?”
“Yup,” Stern said as he grabbed the carcass and stood up. “Bring me the board attached to the outside of my pack. We’ll butcher it quickly. We’ll be using the bags and sacks to keep the pieces separated.”
“Okay,” Cyra said, taking a deep breath. “Show me how? If we can both do it, we’ll be twice as efficient.”
“Okay, but don’t feel bad if you can’t manage it,” Stern said.
~*~*~
It took him a little longer than normal as he walked Cyra through the process. Cyra was a little green, but nodded along. As he was finishing, Pawly brought a second carcass to him.
“Thank you, Pawly. Feel free to bring back the ones you kill for now,” Stern told her before pointing to the scraps from the first butchered bunnicorn. “You can have those, too.”
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Pawly scarfed the bits he motioned to, then loped off into the undergrowth.
“Can I try this one?” Cyra asked.
“Sure. I’ll get a fire going. We might as well cook the usable meat. I have a feeling Pawly will keep bringing us more for a bit.”
“Should we just camp here for the night, then?” Cyra asked.
Stern looked at the sun, then shrugged. “Yeah, might as well. We don’t have a timetable, after all. Looks like we’re having rabbit tonight. I’ll make a stew since we have time for it to cook, and I’ll get the camp set up. If you have questions about what you’re doing, ask.”
“Okay.”
Cyra asked him twice about how to do some small things. He knelt beside her, explaining and motioning how without doing it himself. She was quick to understand both times and was able to complete the bunnicorn just as Pawly came back with a third.
“Pawly, we’ll be camping here, so bring in as many as you can for the next few hours,” Stern told his friend. “We’ll have the offal for you from each one. Eat what you want and we’ll bury the rest.”
Pawly chuffed, gobbled down the offering, and went back out into the woods.
“Can I do this one, too?”
“Go ahead, Cyra. I’m still getting camp set.”
Cyra did the next few bunnicorns as Stern got camp settled. The only problem Stern found was that they didn’t have water easily at hand besides what they’d brought for drinking, meaning he had to just grill the meat in a pan instead of cooking a stew.
“Cyra, did you want to do the cooking or the gutting?” Stern asked.
“I’ll stick with this, if it’s okay?”
“That’s fine.” He looked over at her and let out a soft chuckle.
“What?”
“A story my father told me,” Stern said. “His first trip hunting with a lykian. Funnily enough, it was a rabbit lykian like you, and they were hunting these same beasts. He didn’t know how lykians viewed the animals, so he was on edge wondering if the other guy was going to get angry with him.”
“Why? These are monsters.”
“He didn’t understand,” Stern said, trying to gloss over that part of the story. “Anyway, they set up camp for the night and he steps away from camp to start skinning the bunnicorns. The lykian finds him and asks why he’s doing it hundreds of yards away from the camp.”
Cyra paused to look his way, clearly puzzled.
“Dad explained that he didn’t want to offend him, and the lykian started laughing. He goes on to tell Dad that he prefers bunnicorn meat. Later that night, the guy cooks up the meat, and both Mom and Dad agreed that it was delicious.”
“You laughed because we’re doing the same thing?”
“But differently,” Stern chuckled. “That was before I was born, but he told me the story when we went out hunting. My family always goes hunting at least once a year. They wanted to get us ready to be Walkers if we decided to do that, and to give us time together as a family.”
Cyra went back to gutting the bunnicorn on the cutting board. “Am I doing it alright?”
“You’re fast on the uptake. You learned it quicker than my sisters did. A couple of them refuse to gut anything we hunt. I don’t know if they’ll be Walkers because of that, though they might join Rescue Squad and try to avoid the other quests.”
“You have a lot of siblings?” Cyra asked.
Stern’s hands stopped and he exhaled slowly. “Uh... yeah. I’m the eldest. The next oldest still has another year before they go to the academy, if they even want to. Our parents always said we could do anything we wanted, that none of us had to become Walkers.”
“But you did?”
“Yeah. I hoped that by climbing the ranks and joining Rescue Squad, maybe…” He trailed off, letting his childhood wish go unspoken.
“Maybe people will accept you,” Cyra finished after a minute.
“Silly, huh?”
“No, no it’s not. But is it only to be accepted?”
“Not anymore. Hasn’t been for years. I want people to have the chance to live again.”
“Is there a story there?” Cyra asked softly.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Your voice dips when you get somber. At least, it does to me.”
“My parents and their friends have all died at least once in a dungeon. They always took months off afterward... it always reminded them of how fragile being a Walker is. I… loved those times, because they were home longer than normal. Or... I did until the one time only Dad made it home. It took him six months to put together the right people to go in with him. He had to use all of his runs on that dungeon to pull his crew back out.”
Cyra blinked, looking at him with wide eyes. “He was the only one left of his crew?”
“One of six,” Stern said softly, looking into the fire, unseeing. “We came that close to them all being gone. That was before the Rescue Squad started. I was four or five when that happened.”
“Oh...” Cyra whispered, thinking of how close he came to ending up like her. “Your grandparents would have had to take care of you, then.”
“No grandparents,” Stern said without thinking.
“Oh.”
“Sorry,” Stern coughed. “How’s the bunnicorn coming?”
Seeing his awkward attempt to change the topic, Cyra let it happen. “Almost done.”
“I’ll be pulling the first pieces of meat out of the pan in a moment. Can you grab the plates? We can have an early dinner this way, and I can use the plates to let the meat cool for packing.”
“Of course.”
~*~*~
Pawly stopped bringing them carcasses as the sun dipped below the horizon, and Stern thanked her. She purred and settled into the tent, curling up on the bedding.
“How will we sleep now?” Cyra giggled as she looked into the tent.
“I’ll shrink her down when we get ready for bed. The blankets will be warm this way.”
“Oh. Thank you, Pawly.”
A chuff came from the large cat.
“I have a question, and it might be stupid,” Cyra said. “I’ve heard of Rescue Squad and I know they’re the ones dedicated to pulling souls out of dungeons, but how do you qualify for them?”
“It’s not qualifying,” Stern said as he kept cooking. “It’s more a willingness to give up your dungeon runs to them if they need you. They have you sign a contract specifying what dungeons you’re willing to run to pick up souls from. The pay is generous— a lot of the higher Walkers sell off loot and give the coins to them to keep them funded.”
“Really?”
“They know what it’s like to die in a dungeon. None of them make it to that level without doing it at least once,” Stern said. “They’re also flagged for retrieval if others go in. The pay for pulling their souls is generous.”
“Ah, so it’s not just goodwill, then?”
“Mostly goodwill, but with benefits, as Dad says.”
“So we can sign up with them?”
“I’m going to, but the official lowest they go to is copper, hence why so few get pulled out before then.”
“But isn’t that when it would help the most?” Cyra said.
“That’s what the head of Rescue Squad argues for,” Stern shrugged. “If they paid like normal for all the souls of the tin dungeons— not even lead, just down to tin— they would be fundless in less than a day and only a fraction of the souls would be pulled out. That’s why the Walkers have the insurance set up. That way, you can pay for your retrieval. It covers all the way down, but no one can cover the cost until tin at the earliest, normally.”
“Unless someone with a big heart saves you,” Cyra said softly.
“I will never regret that decision,” Stern said.
A pulse of happiness came from Cyra. “I’ll be done shortly.”
“That’ll give me the last of the meat to cook.”
Cyra bit her lip, then asked, “Did you never know your gra
ndparents?”
Caught off-guard by her question, Stern replied, “No.”
“Yet you felt for mine. Was it just because of your… perk?”
“Not entirely. I do want to help as much as possible, too. Her love and sorrow were palpable to me, and I remembered why I wanted to save souls. Besides, she asked.”
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