by Logan Jacobs
However, she didn’t have to.
I launched forward as fast as my feet would take me, flipped my sword around so it was facing down, and raised it above my head. The second I was within striking distance of the gargamor, I desperately searched for the closest chink in its armor. There, just above the spot where his hind leg met his body, was a spot where the scales had flaked away to reveal the rough, bloody skin underneath.
So, I unleashed a battle cry as I stabbed my sword directly into the weak spot.
The gargamor shrieked in agony as my blade pierced his flesh and stabbed through his body. A spray of dark blood shot out of the wound when I removed the seaglass sword, and then I quickly found the next weak spot.
Another cry of pain, and another spray of blood.
The gargoyle cat had had enough of my shit. He flung Lezan off to the side, and the Coonag woman screamed as she crashed into the bushes and out of sight. Then my opponent was back on his feet. Blood was now pouring out of both his wounds, but his face was still filled with a desperate hatred.
He snarled and snapped his deadly jaws at me, and I was only inches away from being disemboweled by the beast’s fangs.
I took a stab at the bastard’s eye socket, but that was a huge mistake. The gargamor jerked its head to the side, opened its maw, and then grabbed the blade of my seaglass sword with its slimy lips. The beast threw its head backward, and my blade twirled up helplessly into the sky and then stabbed into the ground about fifty feet away.
Oh, shit.
I drew my fucking dagger, but I didn’t know how much good that was going to do. Its blade was smaller than the Gargamor’s smallest tooth, and I didn’t even know if it was long enough to pierce through the creature’s thick hide.
Still, it was better than going down without a fight.
So, I yelled as I slashed the dagger across the Gargamor’s face, and it pulled back with a yelp.
The gargoyle-cat shook its head angrily, and I saw my dagger had left a long, gnarly scar down the entirety of its face. Its right eye was sliced in half vertically, and a mixture of blood and gore leaked out of the blinded orbital.
Of course, this only pissed the beast off even more.
I ducked down just as one of his scaly paws swiped past my head, and while I was still crouched, I stabbed my dagger upward, straight into the creature’s arm, and twisted vigorously. The next thing I knew, there was a powerful thump against my right side, and I felt a jolt of pain as I was tossed across the clearing like a ragdoll.
My body rolled across the ground for a solid ten seconds before I caught myself and slowly rose to my feet. The gargamor’s blow had left a giant bruise all up my right side, but the scales on my body had kept me from being eviscerated.
Still, I didn’t want to test my luck much longer. I needed to kill this thing before he wore me down to the point of exhaustion.
“Ben!” Lezan called out as she ambled out of the brush. “Are you alright?”
The gargamor’s ears lifted up as if he’d heard her cries, but he didn’t even acknowledge that Lezan was there. He’d identified me as the most pressing threat, which meant he had one goal on his mind, and one goal only.
He wanted to feast on my innards.
“Go for the spots without scales!” I responded to my partner as the beast bolted toward me. “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier!”
I dashed off to the right in the hopes that I could evade the gargamor for even the slightest bit longer, but I quickly realized it was too fast for me. I had to think on my toes, or else I was cat food.
Without even thinking, I stopped in place, spun around, and held my ground.
This was either going to be really damn cool, or really fucking stupid. At least if it was the second one, my embarrassment wouldn’t last for long.
I took aim at the incoming beast’s remaining eye, pulled back my dagger, and prayed this was going to work. Then, just when it got to be a few feet from my position, I stabbed the dagger forward and heard a wet shlucking sound.
The gargamor’s massive body crashed into me, and I was thrown down to the ground as we both rolled across the landscape violently. The creature yipped and snarled as we tumbled, but then he finally came to a rest on top of me.
My attack had worked, and the creature was now fully blind. However, that wasn’t going to do me much good when our faces were literally two feet away from each other.
The gargamor’s hot breath stank of its last kill, and spittles of nasty drool splattered onto my face as it snarled. From this angle, I could see there was another small patch of missing scales on the underside of the beast’s neck, a few inches to the left. If this was anything like a creature from my world, that was where the jugular was.
Unfortunately, I was in no position to go for the kill. The creature had me pinned down, and soon it was going to snap my head off like a dandelion.
Suddenly, Lezan’s voice boomed through the clearing. Or, more specifically, it was a series of sounds the Coonag woman made. She mixed her battle cry in with whoops, grunts, howls, and snarls, and the newly-blinded gargamor went into a panic.
It jumped off me and looked around frantically as it tried to identify any of the sounds. The creature was breathing heavily as it growled and roared at the unknown animal it couldn’t see, and then it began to swat randomly at the air.
I rolled out from underneath the beast, sprang to my feet, and rushed over to my fallen seaglass sword. Then I yanked it out from the ground and headed back into battle.
Lezan ran in a large circle around the battlefield and continued to make her noises while she did so.
The gargamor tried to pinpoint her location with his hearing, but all he could do was lurch back and forth in vain.
Now was the time to strike.
So, I ran over and ducked underneath the beast’s flailing arms, and then I came up about a foot away from his neck. In one swift motion, I lunged forward, lifted my blade, and jabbed it into the weak point on his throat.
The creature screamed in agony when my sword pierced his hide, but the scream soon became a gurgle when I yanked the blade out of his neck. Just as I suspected, I must have hit its jugular, because nearly a gallon of bright red blood sprayed out of the fresh wound and soaked the ground at my feet.
The gargamor lashed out in one final, dying attempt to save itself, but it was far too late.
I simply stepped to the side as the claws missed me by a mile, and then I sheathed my sword as I watched the gargoyle-cat crumple to the ground. Within a matter of seconds, the beast went silent and completely bled out in the middle of the clearing.
“That was amazing!” Lezan exclaimed as she wrapped her arms around me from behind and picked me up into a bear hug.
“I’m not sure ‘amazing’ is the word I’d use,” I chuckled darkly. “That thing nearly took both our heads off.”
“I know.” The Coonag woman shuddered. “I can’t wait until we get to hunt another one. Maybe one that is at full strength? Or a whole pack? You are very clever and strong, Ben. I’m happy you are my mate and we came to your island. This is much more fun than my own home.”
This woman was certifiably insane. That, or she had a death wish. Either way, it’s what made her so endearing and bold. Which, in turn, made her sexy as fuck.
“There are a bunch more of those things up in the mountain,” I explained as Lezan set me down. “That’s why we created these boar feeders down here. Gargamors usually don’t come down this far, but it looked like that one got lost from his pride and had to scavenge for food on his own. Poor guy.”
“Ben,” Lezan mused and raised an eyebrow, “that thing was just trying to kill us.”
“It’s an animal,” I retorted with a smile. “It was just doing what it’s been programmed to do by nature. You of all people should understand that, with your… urges, and all.”
The Coonag woman grinned, probably because she knew exactly what I was talking about, but her mind q
uickly wandered back to the task at hand.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked as she prodded the dead gargamor with her foot. “Is this something we can eat, too?”
Honestly, that wasn’t even a thought that had crossed my mind. I imagined it would be tough to clean one of those animals because of all the rock-hard scales, but I also supposed its meat would be just as good as any other jungle creature.
I still had my hesitations, though. There was no way Lezan and I could carry two boars and this giant beast back to the village on our own. Also, this gargamor was obviously frail, starving, and potentially rabid, so I didn’t trust eating its meat one bit.
“In theory, yes.” I nodded. “But this guy here seemed pretty sick. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try and eat the flesh of this particular gargamor.”
“Fine.” The multicolor-haired woman sighed as she walked over to one of the dead boars. “But if we don’t get a move on it, the flesh of these animals might not last very long, either.”
I went over to the second boar, the one that the gargamor had killed, and wrapped it in our hunting hammock before I picked it up by its hind legs. The animal was fairly heavy, but that only meant it would make for an even better feast.
I slung the boar over my shoulder, and Lezan did the same with the other.
Then we headed off back toward the village.
The rest of my women would be over the moon to see we’d killed not one, but two boars, and I didn’t want to keep them waiting.
Chapter Eight
Lezan and I sauntered through the forest under the cover of the dense canopy of green. The boar slung over my shoulder seemed to be much heavier than the ones I’d typically caught in the wild, and I assumed it was a result of our practiced baiting.
For a brief moment, I wondered if it would be possible to farm these things. That was how we ended up with domesticated pigs in my world, right? The pigs from farms were always fatter and meatier than their wild counterparts, and we seemed to already have a food source in place they enjoyed.
However, the idea flitted away almost as quickly as it had arisen. With all the crazy predators that hung around in this jungle, making an entire farm dedicated to boars would just be asking for trouble. At the very least, we’d have to pull four or five dragonkin women away from their regular positions to act as guards, and even then I wasn’t sure if that would be enough.
Maybe after my little civilization had grown a bit bigger.
Then again, a single gargamor was one thing, but if an entire pride saw we had fresh meat, ripe for the taking? I wasn’t sure even our whole army would be able to fend them off.
Then there was the smell. Pig farms were some of the stinkiest, nastiest places I could remember from back home, and they did terrible things to the environment around them. The last thing we needed was literal pig shit polluting our waters.
Not to mention, all of the women on this island seemed to enjoy the act of hunting, and I really didn’t want to take that away from them.
“So, where are we taking these beasts, anyway?” Lezan grunted as she readjusted the hammock over her shoulder. “Straight to the cooking woman?”
“Not yet,” I explained. “We have to clean our kill first. I think Hali would stab me with my own seaglass dagger if I ever brought her the whole boar, guts and skin and all. She’s a chef, not a butcher.”
Lezan lifted an eyebrow at me and shook her head. “I don’t know what either of those things are.”
“Right,” I chuckled as I remembered the Coonag way of dining, “you guys eat your food raw. Gordon Ramsey definitely wouldn’t approve.”
It was a clever joke, even if Lezan had no idea what the fuck I was talking about.
The woman with the multicolored hair followed me for a few more minutes until we finally came to the alcove I’d been looking for. The thing looked just like it had the last time I’d been here with Mira and the dragonkin twins Darya and Zarya, and I grinned at the sight.
At the center of the alcove was an upside down “L” made out of two large logs, with several stakes in the ground a few feet from the bottom. It was a makeshift construction made by Mira and her brother years ago, one that was designed specifically for cleaning the animals they hunted, and at the top sat Mira’s seashell, the shovel we’d use to dig the offal hole.
It had become common practice for me to never leave the village without some heavy-duty rope, which was practically a necessity for hunting. So, I gently sat the hammock down on the ground, opened it up, and went to work tying the knot that would hold the boar in place while we worked on it.
Finally, once the hangman’s knot was up and ready to go, I slid both of the boar’s hind legs into its loop. Then I let it rest on the ground and motioned for Lezan to come and help.
“What are we doing to it?” she asked as she ran over and grabbed the rope behind me.
“We’re going to bleed and gut it,” I explained. “It’ll make the thing a million times lighter, and that way we won’t be taking back anything useless.”
“What do you mean ‘useless?’” Lezan teased. “The guts are the best part of the whole animal!”
I’d never thought of that before. The dragonkin and deer women had no use for the guts and offal of the animals we hunted, but now that we had a few dozen wild Coonag women to feed? Maybe gutting the animal would be counterproductive. Then again, if we didn’t gut the thing, it had the potential of growing all sorts of bacteria and rotting.
And if that happened, the whole hunt would be for nothing.
So, we proceeded as originally intended, and Lezan and I tugged back on the rope and hauled the boar up into the air. Then I tied it off on one of the stakes, snatched the large seashell from the top of the post, and tossed it up into the air once before I offered it to Lezan.
“Would you like to do the honors?” I smiled and nodded to the dirt underneath the hanging pig.
“Sure.” The Coonag woman shrugged as she plucked the shell from my hands. “But it’s a good waste of guts, if you ask me.”
“Tell you what?” I mused. “Maybe if you do a good job, I’ll let you take the heart as a snack.”
“As if I need your permission.” Lezan winked, and then she got to work.
I watched as the beautiful wild woman got down on to her knees and began to scoop up piles of dirt with the shell, and her ringed tail flicked back and forth with contentment as she dug until a hole about three feet deep sat before her.
Once she was done, I motioned for her to stand up. Then I slit the beast’s neck ear-to-ear with my pink stone dagger and stepped back as warm, gooey blood poured out of its arteries and down into the pit. Within minutes, the whole thing was drained, so I held my dagger up just underneath the boar’s genitals, and then I dragged it down the length of the animal’s body. Its skin and muscle opened like an unzipping fly, which then sent a bunch of its innards splatting down into the pit. I had to apply a bit more pressure when I got to the beast’s sternum, but I cut through it quickly with a sharp crunch. The rest of its chest cavity was emptied into the offal hole, so I got to work on the neck, and once I was finished, we filled in the pit and brought the body down from its hanging position.
I sewed up the stomach of the boar with a needle made of shell and some string, and then we wrapped it back up in the hammock we’d brought it in.
“How is this going to work?” Lezan questioned as she looked down at the shell in her hand. “We have two animals, but only one place we can dig a pit?”
I walked over to the log structure, placed my hand against the end of the “L,” and gave it a firm push. As I did so, the pole rotated at its base, and I rotated it to the left about forty-five degrees.
“See?” I gestured to the space underneath the pole. “This structure was built so it could be rotated, probably to avoid this exact problem.”
The two of us repeated our actions with the other boar, and within no time it was completely cleaned and ready to go. The
n we covered up our tracks, placed the sea shell back atop the “L,” and headed back to the village with our prizes in tow.
When we finally arrived back at the main village, I saw all five of my children running around on the shore, and they were chasing each other and riding atop the baby water dragons.
George and Nixie were both out in the water as they made googly eyes and held each other lovingly with their long necks. Meanwhile, Talise, Ainsley, Sela, Careen, and several of the Coonag women stood around on the beach as they chatted and watched the children play.
However, it apparently wasn’t enough for Jira and Malak to be passive observers. Both of the beautiful racoon women pranced around the beach as they played with the smaller children, and they were currently locked in a splash fight with my twins and the two baby dragons, which was a fight they were no way going to win.
“Did somebody order some fresh boar?” I called out as Lezan and I approached our friends.
Talise and Careens’ eyes lit up with excitement when they saw us coming, and they both ran over to greet us, with Nadir hot on their heels.
“Thank the gods!” Talise gasped. “I woke up this morning and saw you were gone, but I had no idea where you went.”
“At first we thought you might have just been visiting the queen, but when we noticed Lezan was gone, too…” Careen trailed off as she brushed her pink pixie bangs out of her face.
“I wasn’t worried.” Nadir shrugged. “Lezan is always wandering off doing her own thing, especially before the sun comes out and we are all still sleeping. I just assumed she was out exploring her new home. Or mating with Ben again.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive,” she winked before she plopped the hammock down onto the sand. “Now, who’s ready for lunch?”
The Coonag women licked their lips happily as they stared at the bloody bag before them, but the dragonkin women and Ainsley looked confused beyond belief.