Just because the immediate threat was down, did not mean they were safe. Dropping your guard immediately was a fantastic way for whatever threat you did not see to get you. As such, Mila was still wound tight as a spring as she scuttled back, eyes scouring the tree line and the pink pulsing at her vision.
Even as she watched, she did not stay still. Her weight, minor as it might be, shifted from foot to foot and the handles of her machetes bounced in her hand, ready to fly into movement at any moment. Ready to take on whatever thing wanted a piece of her next.
Seconds passed and eventually her eyes tried to trace back the big cat’s trail, its paw prints oddly sparse until it clicked that it had done what house cats do, each back foot stepping exactly where the front foot had been, even in its kobold-targeting sprint. It looked like it had come from the left, facing back down the road but she just could not say for sure without wandering off to look closer.
She did not do that, for she was not quite that dumb.
The first few words of whatever Aluca said did not cut through that pulsing, which also sat in her internal ears, attempting to drown out anything not trying to kill her. “-shouldn’t be more,” did make it through, which sounded promising, but did not slow her scanning.
“Should we move the body off the road?” Was Rora’s follow up, to keep the road clean and sanitary. It was the optimal thing to do in a vacuum, carry the carcass a ways away into the trees.
But again, Mila was not quite that dumb.
“We leave it. Scavenging critters’ll take it. Don’t trust the trees,” was what she got out through barred teeth, but Hughestace gave a grunt of agreement, so at least any more questions could be fielded by him.
After a few more seconds, Naw-Naw coaxed the group into starting to move along, only waiting long enough for Mila to move forward, wrench the javelin out, and move back to return it to its owner. Everyone was still tense, but Mila’s blood was raging, very sure that the threat was not over yet. Even if cougars were solitary - she had no clue herself, only what Aluca had probably asserted - that did not mean something else would not take the opportunity to try and get them.
A couple of minutes passed before Hughestace called the group to a halt, still in the middle of the road and fuck any of the shallow pools they had had to stomp through to stay away from the trees.
“Ten minutes, catch your breath and water,” were instructions that Mila would get to… eventually. Green eyes still did their best to pull hidden dangers out from the leaves and tree trunks, but her hands could at least do what they needed to do blindly. One hand, still holding its blade, came up with fingers extended and the other ran the flat of its blade down against the fingers, flipping and repeating to clean it of blood before tucking the knife into its sheath.
The other knife was similarly cleaned and put away before the bloody hand was wiped against Mila’s calve, mostly cleaning it so that she could pluck her small notebook from the little belt pouch it was in.
A stumpy stick of charcoal met paper then, each scrape enough to pull Mila’s gaze down for a split second. The sketch was nonsense, an elaborate trap reliant on an environment where gravity was directionally defined by what way ‘down’ was for any given trespasser and abusing that by having each tile set to snare and trip whatever tried to step on it. Impossibly impractical but absolutely brutal.
The nonsense, the impracticality, helped push back at the broiling blood that demanded action from Mila. There was no enemy here; as the intensity finally faded and her eyes started to clear, it became evident to her that anything following them would have stopped following the moment they left behind the massive, already defeated meal in their wake. In all likelihood, they were marginally safer now than they were normally when out here.
The logical understanding did not help, unfortunately. If anything, it made her more frustrated at her inability to calm herself down, which threatened to feed back into itself. So she acknowledged the facts, mentally nodded at them, and promptly threw them over her shoulder.
And that illogic did help, if only because her actual hands already knew what she needed and they demanded some of her attention on her trap theorycrafting, and the imaginary throwing away of facts was some more of her mind getting lost in things that were not the here and now.
That is how it always happened to some degree, after all. Whenever she got all worked up, she had to come down, and she was down before she realized that it was actually happening, no hint of pink in her vision at all.
Well, not completely true. Her scales were ever present on her, naturally, and her cleaning job had been shoddy, leaving small droplets of blood on her hands and arms, now with some faint fingerprints left against the paper and cover of her notebook.
With a soft “damn it,” she rubbed the stain on the cover before acknowledging that the ship had sailed and pocketing the little book once more. Once it was stashed, Mila finally looked up at the others and found herself a bit in the center of attention. Rora was right there and just offered up a cup of fresh magicked-up water that Mila took. “Thank you.”
“Of course!” Came with a smile just a tad bit warmer than Rora usually handed out, which was saying something. But that was set to the side quickly. “You’re alright, yes? Not hurt anywhere?”
“No ma’am. Big cat did not touch me at all,” Mila responded, inclining her head at Hughestace. His intervention had kept the stand off quick, gave the predator minimal time to get a lucky hit, and that was the name of the game. They all knew that, but the elf had been in a position to act without putting anyone else at risk, and had done a damn fine job of it.
Mila took a long sip from the metal mug. The water was not cold, not chilling her down to her core like that one polly’s voice had been reminiscent of, but it was still a jolt that almost hurt, in a good way. It was not yet the oppressive summer heat, but the warmth was still looming over the season, amplified by the humidity that dragged on every breath she took, and walking around tense, not to mention her brief spat of exercise, had left her overheated, that same humidity meaning that her thin sweat would be no help. The water was, though.
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She had to pause, let the shiver run from her stomach out and set her tail blade to rattling, before Mila could take a second drink. The water tasted filtered, with only the tang of metal on her tongue there to interrupt her savoring. And even then, the… pewter? She was unsure. The metal did not taste bad like how she thought of it in Scienceland. Something about it just gave the water itself, with its difficult to describe flavor, a little charge.
That thought was on her mind as Mila proceeded to house the rest of the human-sized drink, tilting it further and further back until she pulled it away with a flourish and a long “Ahhhh!” Probably too much at once, sure, but it helped reset her.
“That was just a normal mountain lion to y’all too, right?” Aluca asked, glancing at the others.
Hughestace and Mila both nodded, with Naw-Naw speaking their agreement. “A big one, though. Bigger ‘n I’ve eva seen.” Which was a fair shake of things as Mila had experienced it. Bordering on actual lion territory.
“At least they’re not group hunters. Should be good for the time being,” was his expert opinion, echoed by everyone else, but Aluca stayed in the middle of the road just in case, as he cracked one of his tomes. He was off to make sure there was not some monster that looked like a mountain lion, Mila figured, and that was better safe than sorry.
Rora did not put away her steel, but she did shift is so that it was easier to carry, if a bit less at the ready, and Mila decided to use the time to get herself packed away too. She handed the cup back with a deep nod of thanks, in case her initial words had not been enough, and trudged up the road a short ways to a large, clear stretch of water puddled up in a rut, probably made by some trader’s wheel from the end of winter.
Mila was careful to just barely run her knives under the surface of the water. Disturbing the clay would set the small pool swirling with red and would not only get her blades a bit dirty but would see her seeking out another puddle. The sediment would settle eventually, but red clay had a way of taking a long while, getting lost in its own hypnotic swirls.
Unfortunately, while her rigid blades had no issues, she only got to the fourth link from the tip of her tail weapon before she thoughtlessly brought her hands closer together and dragged the chain against the bottom. With a sigh, she moved to a different puddle and started over. This time she even managed to get to the seventh link!
With her prospects being to get a third puddle or swallow her pride, she finally decided to do the latter, turning about and approaching Rora. She was doing her best to pretend she had not been softly laughing as she had watched Mila concentrating, tongue stuck out at an angle, as she tried to clean her new weapon. Had Mila not been picking up tidbits of that laughter before, the mask of seriousness might even have worked!
But Mila did not mind either. “Would you mind helping a gal out?” She asked, bringing her tail up and around carefully as she kept a grip on the pointed tip, holding the weapon up for Rora.
“Of course I can help!” was her response. It took a moment for Rora to decide to put her sword away, sliding it into the metal-reinforced leather straps that held it across her back. Once it was safely secured, she could do her work unhindered.
And as far as Rora was concerned, her work was to fluster Mila. She held Mila’s gaze firmly with a smirk as a hefty gauntleted hand took a firm, but not uncomfortable, hold of Mila’s tail, halfway down its length.
She gave a quick wink as she brought her other hand up, and Mila did her damnedest not to let the smooth confidence and metal-clad contact touch her face but also knew it was a lost cause. Rora’s smile split wider, flashing fangs, as she summoned an orb of silver in her second hand. She gave the ball a squeeze, trickling the moonlight down onto Mila’s tail.
Moonlight had the unique property of being both hot and cold. It did not hurt or anything, not like captured sunlight which broiled whatever it touched, but it felt intense and contradictory. Even though Mila knew it was coming, Rora chuckled at her slight jump before pulling the moonlight down along the long tail between them.
Rora was not actually dragging the light, not physically, but the hand motion was still needed to get it to smoothly slide down, climb over each of the cuffs along Mila’s tail, and over the bladed chain links. Wherever the silvery liquid met spatters of blood or mud, it slipped between it and the scales or leather or steel and proceeded to let the muck slide right off.
The resultant soft little patter did not distract either of the kobolds, who were instead caught up in the intimacy of the moment. Even after the moonlight had left her scales, Mila had a hard time keeping slight shivers from racing up her spine from the hand on her tail, and Rora could just make them out in how their gaze shook.
It was with a flick of the wrist that Rora swept the moonlight over Mila’s other hand and shot it off into the woods, where it immediately vanished in the yellow-green light of the day filtered through the trees. The weapon was cleaner than when it had been given to its owner, but that was all backseat to the grin Rora wore, having managed to pull out a well-guarded, unique little moment of vulnerability from Mila. And it was such a feast!
Mila had not really quite gotten the whole ASMR thing in Scienceland. Did not see the appeal. But the descriptions she had gotten of it did kind of line up with whatever all that was, like Rora had just taken her foreclaw and plucked at the taut string of Mila’s soul. And while, yes, there was absolutely some things to unpack with what she just experienced, Mila also knew that Rora had done it on purpose.
It still took her some painful seconds to recompose herself, trying to ignore how Rora was still holding her tail and the wide, goofy smile she wore, like she thought she had won something. Well, then. Mila did not even flicker her gaze as she took a step forward, her tail still between them but now hardly the symbolic barrier it had been moments before.
“Two can play that game, Rora,” she said, as much ominousness dumped into her voice as she could get even as it ran a bit huskier than usual, her own free hand coming up to rest on the back of the gauntlet there. “But keep in mind that I will win. I….” She did not know how to continue, where was the line for what she was allowed to… say? Promise? With how they had agreed they would go a bit slower.
“I look forward to it,” was the answer, both women starting to get lightheaded with their proximity, feeling the other’s breath on their faces. There was a playful spark in Rora’s eyes, one that made promises of its own that Rora felt the need to speak. “Well. I look forward to you trying, at least. It’ll be cute.”
Before Mila could fire back, the other cursed gauntlet came up and pressed a finger against her nose and lips, near-immediately releasing as Rora eased back, turning to walk away with her prized little moment. Mila watched her retreating… girlfriend? And ground her teeth, eyes narrowing severely as the view started to give her some ideas about her eventual revenge, not giving a good goddamn that she was staring this time around. Rora would not be getting away lightly with booping her snoot.
Aluca sidled up to Mila after a minute, enough time for her to have undone the cuffs of her tail whip. “She really has got you bad, huh?” he observed with a chuckle.
His laughter turned into an outright uproar as Mila just raised a hand as high as she could, almost to his eye level, and very pointedly, enunciating each movement of her hand, flicked him off.