I fear no man. But this mana thing… it frightens me.
Unattributed saying
The team’s exit from Valetta was as uneventful as their entrance. They stopped at the gates to check with the half-bored guard posted there before heading out.
“Going to Anasta? You missed a wagon, there was a farmer heading there this morning.”
“Oh? Who was it?”
“Some guy I’ve seen regularly… Jacob Donnall? Something like that, I think.”
“Hey, that was your brother, Peter. He would have given us a lift,” Laura said.
“Yea, but we still had to finish getting paid,” Johanna grumbled.
“Home isn’t that far anyway. We’ll be there by this evening,” Peter half-apologized.
“Don’t know for you all, but getting there on a carriage would be better,” Laura replied.
“Anything to watch for?” Tom asked the guards.
“Not much. A few sightings of lone Canids, but that’s south near the Idaho road, not eastward. Unless they are roaming around.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Peter said drily.
The guard laughed, then returned to his half-seat, designed to keep him upright without tiring his legs. Johanna adjusted her near-empty backpack, waved at the guard, and started down the road, followed by the rest. The road would split in about a mile, and they’d veer east, toward Anasta.
Peter’s right. With that big breakfast, we’ll skip lunch and arrive just in time before evening.
They quickly arrived at the road split toward the south and headed eastward and into the forest. The road between Valetta and the eastern farming villages was kept cleared and well kept, heavily packed ground and stones filling potholes that let all kinds of chariots across the eastern highway move smoothly, which meant foot travelers found it easy going. Repair gangs were working every spring on the local infrastructure, helping to make Valetta a strong and rich city.
Which, of course, meant that the price of living there was high if you weren’t careful, but that’s what salvaging was good for. Besides, it wasn’t as if there was long-term room in Anasta for Johanna, Peter, and their prospective life partners.
As they were heading into the woods, she spotted a silhouette on the other road, coming up from the south. Someone on a horse, presumably the mail or some special courier maybe. Johanna had spent most of her life without seeing any of the half-legendary beasts. There simply weren’t enough around, not since the Fall and whatever made them hard to breed, according to her old schoolmistress.
Places like Anasta didn’t have the room to host horses, and given the difficulty of having a herd, nobody was going to risk letting them stay in a pasture outdoors, at the mercy of a predator. Of course, a city like Valetta, or any major city, would have no difficulty having a dedicated area for a string of horses inside their barrier and thus keep a few horses for use in special tasks, like mail deliveries. But for farmers like Peter’s brother, teams of draft oxen were the way to go. Slower, but reliable.
Shortly thereafter, they came out of the forest into a cleared area that hadn’t quite gone back to woods yet. To the side, maybe three hundred yards from the road proper, the now-familiar burned logs of the Poole farmhouse still pointed upward.
The ruins dated back from a few years before Johanna’s birth. She’d asked about it the first time her father had brought her to Valetta for selling batches of cantaloupes. Some fool had apparently thought the lack of recent beast attacks meant you could set up a farm by yourself “like the Ancients did”.
Then his family had paid the price, and the abandoned buildings caught fire a few years later. Right there was a good lesson about the importance of proper settlements, Johanna’s father told his daughter.
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There was no sign of trouble until it stumbled upon them. The group was walking along the road, half between forest and the last fallow fields, abandoned decades ago and turning back to the wilderness but not yet encroached by real trees.
And then, the first Lepus bounded out of the treeline.
At home, a young Johanna had always loved the little rabbits in their hutches, fed with straw and leftover vegetables. Of course, they were headed for the stew pot one day, and every farmhouse had some, using the pelts for winter clothing’s fur and keeping the meat for holidays and special occasions. But she could pet the soft little ones and loved them.
The rabbit that came out of the forest was not a soft little pet.
The rabbit was a 7-foot-long, 300-pound rabbit-shaped monster. With a feet-long blunt horn in the middle of its skull.
Lepus might not be a predator, but they were hell on fields. Oh, they liked those fields, vegetables, grain, straw and all, and their horn was perfectly shaped to dig up potatoes or anything else by tearing the roots. And Lepuses ate a lot, compared to normal rabbits. They also saw people as competition for all that nice food and were not afraid to go against them if necessary. After five-year-old Johanna had seen a Lepus pack rampaging before her brother grabbed her and brought her safely behind Anasta’s walls, she’d stopped petting the little rabbits.
The first Lepus glared at them as if it was annoyed at meeting them, and then the second one bounded next to it. And the third one.
Johanna and the rest backed slightly away, trying not to provoke the pack. Lepus was theoretically a mainly nocturnal species, like their normal counterparts, and finding some out mid-day was not a good sign, she thought.
“Just our luck,” Tom commented drily.
“How many of those are there???” Laura blurted.
Johanna shushed her, not looking away from the growing pack.
“Huge colony,” she whispered, trying not to rile the beasts.
The lead Lepus was glaring at the group, but not moving much. Two larger ones came out, making the total she could count to about nine, with none of the beasts looking very young, although she obviously wasn’t an expert in wild beasts from the uninhabitable highlands.
“What are they doing here?” Laura asked back.
“Probably the usual for Lepuses. Too many north,” Johanna answered.
“Or worse, running from a major mutated predator from the Mana pockets there,” Peter added.
“Thanks for the idea,” Laura whispered back.
The lead Lepus seemed to look back and forth at the team’s location, and Johanna froze. Then the other large beast emitted a shrill sound.
“Fuck,” Tom just had time to say before the colony started to charge.
Fleeing was out of the question. Lepus might not be as good a sprinter as its tiny counterpart given the extra mass, but turning away from that horn of theirs was a sure way to get ripped apart. Johanna ducked, drawing her trusty hunting knife, before she remembered and turned her left hand upward, flame exploding out of her palm. The Lepus aiming at her startled at the explosion of heat and tried to dodge away, and she shoved her flaming palm to his face, causing the beast to shrill loudly from the burning. The Lepus shook its head frenetically from the torch-searing heat, causing her to lose grip on its muzzle. The beast jumped back immediately, keening loudly.
From her peripheral vision, Johanna noticed Peter dodging another charging Lepus, using his knife to slice at the beast’s flank and cause it to falter in its course. Tom had charged another of the beasts, using both fist and knife on the head, as the Lepus broke its course as well.
But there were more beasts running around, and Johanna had no choice when she spotted one bounding toward Laura from the side, but to rush it instead of pursuing her former opponent, her flaming hand raised in front of her. The frenzied Lepus flinched at the last moment, and she ran her flame across its side, causing it to scream loudly his lagomorphic pain.
And one of the larger Lepus and one of its smaller brethren jumped her from her left side. She barely had time to turn around and she saw the horn being lowered. She tried to back away, and the bony spearpoint ripped her jacket open, and she felt her ribs break. The beast raised back its head, and Johanna’s eyes only saw the red streak of her blood covering the skull spike. Her flame guttered, then vanished, concentration gone as she fell backward, her legs buckling.
“JO!” she distantly heard Laura scream.
The horn jerked away as Tom impacted the beast. But Johanna was finding it hard to focus as darkness encroached her vision. She felt a hand reach for her from outside her shrinking focus.
And then, she felt bones shifting… knitting themselves in her torso. She opened her eyes wide, looking at Laura who was similarly googly-eyed, gasping in surprise. The shock, the physical one, receded abruptly, leaving only a brief phantom echo of pain. She also thought for an instant that she’d seen weird lights flickering around Laura’s hand as she jerked back from having done… whatever she’d just done.
She pushed herself up and spotted Tom trying to hammer with the back of his knife at one Lepus, the skull sending crunching noises with each blow, while another rabbit was trying to get to him from the right. She rose, flame sprouting back immediately, and jumped on the incoming beast, bringing the bright flame down on its eyes, causing the Lepus to shrill in pain.
Then, without realizing what happened, it was over. She had sort of blanked for some seconds, possibly, and there were corpses strewn around, stabbed, mangled, and burned for some.
Tom was holding her, looking at her torso. She realized she was more or less exposed and tried to wrap herself back in the jacket, but he held fast. Then he squeezed her, hugging for all his inconsiderable strength.
“Thought you were a goner.”
“So did I. So did I,” she replied.
She opened her eyes and looked at Laura, who raised her hands as if apologizing.
Didn’t know about that one, her friend mouthed silently.
They all stood next to the road, before shivering set in.