The massive bastions were what divided the Core Lands from the Outer Lands. Long, sprawling rivers of concrete ran across the border, with guard posts located on them, armed to the teeth with some of the best weaponry available to the Reclaimers. And not only that, but long-range weaponry located on the inland bases was ready to be unleashed should something as threatening as a sand reaper come close.
Separation between the two regions looked jarring for anyone. On one side of the wall, a weary traveler would find overheated stone, with rare patches of green hiding within the shadows of great hills and mountains and newborn trees, struggling bravery against a cruel new reality. The settlements were rare and carefully placed near the most important places, such as mines, buried underground cities, or water sources. Far more common were farmlands, which grew not vegetables like in the days of old but a far more precious resource. Meat. Each farm looked more like a village, hidden behind makeshift iron walls, hawkishly watching over their precious livestock, the famed cusacks. Cusacks were the beasts created in the laboratories of the Old World.
Sturdy, undemanding, capable of surviving and thriving on sunlight alone, omnivorous but easily tamable, with an immune system capable of walking off most known diseases and stings of parasites, these beasts gave milk in abundance, bred fast, and got fatter ever faster. Perfect beasts for any caravan and even a perfect source of meat. Every village and settlement owed at least a hundred heads, with farmlands keeping several thousand. Farmlands themselves were gatherings of families, with one family owning the whole place and the other living there as hired hands. These were hardy people, even cruel at first. Back in the day, farmers would refuse access to a wounded traveler during the night, if they let one in at all. But years without the constant attacks of raiders and slavers smoothed the harsh mood, and the scars of losing loved ones have healed. Now both the settlers and farmers viewed each other not as rivals but as neighbors, enduring harsh times side by side.
But danger still existed in these lands. Skinwalkers, insectoids, madmen, thugs, and many other threats could easily snatch away a life or bring about a fate worse than death in these parts. From their childhood, the children of farms learned how to wield firearms and treat wounds, and even their more civilized counterparts, the children of the settlers, also received their first handgun at their fourteenth birthday.
Each day, caravans were leaving the massive gates around the wall, bringing water, prosthetics, and medicine to the settlements in exchange for ores and unearthed relics. And from the settlements themselves, school buses, armored trucks carrying high-caliber weaponry and accompanied by several guards in exoskeletons were moving out to pick up farmers’ kids and bring them to school. When needs arise, similarly protected doctors move between farmlands and settlements.
And there, beyond the stone wall and mighty iron gates, was another world all together. A field of green grass, heavily modified to survive the harsh climate, stretched as far as the eye could see. Well-maintained paved roads, like blood vessels, carried cars all around, from villages to cities, from mines to factories. The horrors of the Extinction were forced back, and people rarely even carried handguns around here. Police forces patrol the roads, catching the immigrants and bringing them back to the detention centers outside of the walls. Barbaric concepts such as blood vengeance and buying a bride have almost completely died out.
But the most stunning change that Janine and Marco both felt upon jumping off the crawler was the air itself. A gentle and cool breeze, so unlike overheated, lung-tearing air from the north. As they left the dust cloud that followed the moving armored column, they soon felt no stone particles in the air and saw no parasites the size of a human hand in the grass. In fact, to their surprise, they felt tiny drops of water on the stalks, and when Marco came to touch his first ever tree, Janine showed him a squirrel, a creature so unfit to survive in the modern era that it made the young boy laugh at this incredibility.
The Terraformation Institute recreated many creatures and released them into the wild. Aside from their obvious similar looks, these beasts had little in common with their perished kin. Their muscles were slightly stronger, and their immune system ensured their prolonged survival even if the heat came back. The same was true about grass and trees. Iterna wanted to restore the world to the way it was before. The Reclamation Army admitted that change was inevitable and improved upon the outdated designs, giving animals a slightly better chance of survival should the foolishness of mankind wipe the state clean once more.
Yet even on these paths, occasional danger existed. And Janine soon sniffed it. A trio of people came to a nearby hill to watch the moving column. Two more were coming to them from the south. And in the canyons behind them, something stirred—something that had come via suffocatingly small tunnels leading to the Outer Lands.
They came, five bodies scurrying at the bottom of a small canyon, leaving behind a trace of slime to navigate their way back. These were insectoid drones, creatures walking on six thin legs, barely reaching a meter in length, their oval-shaped bodies covered by chitin plates. Stones were splitting beneath the claws at the end of the legs; their long mandibles were fully capable of taking an arm even off a Wolfkin’s female.
And these drones were target practice for cubs back in the pits. Just a few decades ago, shamans were carelessly sending cubs to bring back corpses, leaving them with next to no supervision and making the small rascals rely only on themselves. This led to so many deaths. After heated arguments at a Gathering, Lacerated One finally gathered enough support from both the shamans and warlords to put a stop to it, ensuring that at least one shaman would always oversee the hunt and preventing deaths from occurring.
This was the role that Janine now took on for herself. She stood at the canyon’s edge, dressed just in cargo pants, with Marco standing next to her. Long sleeves of a basic exoskeleton encased his legs, connecting at his waist. Janine had a bit of trouble finding a gear so small at the crawler, eventually asking Camelia for aid, knowing that the Ice Fang’s cubs use a crude version of power armor in their training. The Sword Saint pleasantly obliged, quickly making Marco try several models before stopping at the one best suited for him.
Janine rarely had to treat wounds herself. She knew the basics, of course: how to stop the bleeding and clean the stomach to deal with poison, how to detect potentially poisonous elements in the air, and how to fix a misplaced bone. For all her knowledge, she no longer trusted herself to operate on any wounded or ill person, not unless the situation absolutely demanded it. It was all because of a lack of practice. When your fingers became big enough that you could accidentally tear the mouth of your daughter instead of pulling a bad fang… You know that you should shut up, swallow your pride, and ask for help.
But Janine knew enough about how normies treat their wounded. Mechanical exoskeletons provide their users with enhanced strength and speed. But they were also used to give people with broken or brittle bones relief in their everyday lives. Working in energy-saving mode, this model will not provide the boy with any unfair advantage, only looking for the safety of his bones and muscles rather than strengthening him in any way.
“Five,” Marco gulped nervously, grasping the handles of twin knives. Each Wolfkin had claws, but males of the Wolf Tribe had weaker and softer claws and fangs. Shamans mercifully allowed them to use melee weapons during the Rite of Passage. “Isn’t it a bit too much?”
“If you fail, the people on the ridge will die,” Janine said cruelly, holding both paws behind her back. “You can do it. Marco,” she calmly said, seeing how he made a nervous step to the edge, “take a deep breath. You have plenty of time. These are insects; they have rudimentary cleverness, but at the end they are ruled by instincts. They are prey, and you are a hunter. Remember your training and think about how to distract them. Think about what you will do after the distraction. There are plenty of tools around us already, ready to be wielded by our bodies.” Janine smiled, seeing a flash of realization in Marco’s eyes. “Good. Believe in yourself. Now take a life to save a life.”
Marco came to the edge of the canyon, lowering himself on one knee and sniffing the air. With pride, Janine noticed how he gauged the distance between the canyon’s edges, estimating it to be only four meters in length. The boy took out the knives and breathed in and out, waiting for the critters beneath to pass a little bit further. Panic has left his eyes, and a deep hunger has come into his eyes, reined in by a need to perform his duty excellently.
He leaped forward, unbothered to conceal the sound. Janine tilted her head, ready to come to his aid if needed. Should she have been in his place, she would’ve torn chunks of stone and smashed the pests. But for a male, it might’ve been a bit too hard.
The insectoid drones stopped in their tracks, turning toward the source of the sound. Marco’s legs came crushing into the opposite walls, creating another loud boom as he jumped off, flying above the prey. The force with which he slammed his legs into the walls had created a series of falling stones, starting a cacophony of sound that confused the insectoids. The drones shifted their bodies again, and, in this moment, Marco was on the last of them, landing right behind the drone. The knife in Marco’s left paw slid right between the chitin plates that protected the neck, severing nerves that connected the head to the body and leaving a mortal wound. With his right paw, Marco has struck at the second insectoid, ramming the blade straight through the mouth and leaving the knife inside the head before the mandibles could close in a death twitch.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Janine wanted to clap for him. All cubs were supposed to kill one insectoid drone for their rite of passage. Of course, girls usually killed a few dozen, competing with each other, and males always worked in packs, bringing back even more creatures. But her son was alone, and he just offed two in under five seconds. Still, there were three remaining, and Janine kept on watching. Marco didn’t try to take on the three angry critters at once; turning around, he jumped at the wall, climbing up and groaning slightly from the pain in his knees.
The drones followed after him. Their legs were covered in tiny, small hairs, which allowed them to scale even the tallest obstacles. The uneven surface of a canyon was a child’s game for them, and soon they started gaining on Marco, their black, compound eyes fixated on his small legs, the mandibles ready to bite and tear…
Marco let go of the wall, using it like a springboard to jump down. He landed on the closest bug, mounted it like a horse, and buried his remaining knife in the black eye. With a cruel twist of his knife, he killed the creature, tore his weapon free, and allowed the claws of his feet to pierce the stone while the drone fell down on the last two insects. The impact tore them off the wall, sending them toppling down. Their chitin plates endured the fall, revealing pale, unprotected underbellies. And Marco leaped after them, crushing the belly of one insectoid with the claws of his feet and piercing the second’s chest with his knife.
Letting out a shout of joy, Marco threw his head to announce his victory to the skies with a howl and screamed instead, seeing a claw aimed at his eye. He calculated his attack half-correctly; his initial attack killed both remaining foes. Yet in their death throes, their sharp legs had struck madly; the claws capable of slicing through metal now were coming on him.
Janine beat aside the claws, grabbing Marco by the nape of his neck and lifting him above the twitching bodies. They looked at how the bodies went stiff, and after the last limp stopped, Janine let out a proud grunt.
“Five at the cost of an eye, not bad at all for the first time.” Janine put her son down and took a corpse in her paws. “Tell me, what was your mistake?”
“I forgot they can twitch after their deaths,” Marco replied, and Janine broke a corpse above his head in two, covering her son in white ichor. Marco grinned happily before sitting briefly and trying in vain to massage his knees through the metal.
Janine seated herself next to him, helping the boy take off the metal sleeves. The skin around his knees became swollen, but thankfully no cracks were visible. Tearing off a chunk from the insectoid, she gave the meat to Marco to feast on and clumsily performed a massage that the doctors taught her, easing the strain on his muscles before putting the metal back on.
Doctors… Janine tasted the idea in her mouth. Wolfkins disliked asking for help from the medical personnel, but didn’t the medics cure Janine’s condition? Surely, in Houstad, there are an abundance of medical clinics. If cloned limbs are now being produced, then there has to be a cure for Marco’s underdeveloped condition. But what will the shamans say?
Who gives a crap? She asked herself. You have a duty to your pack. Do it.
“Well done. Congratulations on passing your initialization, Marco. No, hold back your howl,” she told him. “Let’s go meet the people.”
She held the corpse while Marco clawed the missing knife out of the dead head. Once the deed was done, together they climbed out of the canyon and rushed toward the ridge of a hill to come face-to-face with a group of scared people.
This group looked unusual by the standards of the Outer Lands. Dressed in simple linen white shirts and simple pants, two men and a woman had placed a camera and were filming the passing crawler and the armored vehicles of the Third Army, with the man holding a microphone in his hands. Seeing the Wolfkins, the people jumped in place, frowning their noses at a smell coming from Marco.
“Peace.” Janine lifted her paws, showing that she means no harm. “What are you doing here at such a late hour?”
“We are from the Sights Unseen!” The man showed a press ID card to Janine with a trembling hand. “We came here to make a report about the army’s arrival.”
“Sights Unseen?” Marco stood on his toes, forgetting all about the pain in his knees. “What’s that?”
“Press. Journalists. Very evil people who want to make the Blessed Mother and all others look bad. Don’t talk with them,” Janine warned him, standing in front of her son to protect him from being filmed. “You should’ve been more careful. There were insectoids in the canyon leading to this hill.”
“She is lying!” The woman snapped angrily. “Boy, we have no intention of making you look bad or… Wait, what was it about the insectoids? You are joking, right? Here, of all places?”
“I am afraid they are not!” A cheerful voice said. “You can check the canyon; the remains are there.”
Two men were coming up the hill. One was a giant of a man; his skin was deeply tanned, and the exquisite black suit on him looked as if it was ready to burst at any moment. The other man was smaller, looking just like an ordinary person, with slightly messed-up hair and keen gray eyes that looked curiously at Janine. The Warlord replied in kind, looking a person over. She could’ve sworn that she had seen him before, but she could not remember where. This hunched posture, a slightly forward head… A merchant perhaps?
“Sir…” The journalist choked on her words, while her colleagues quickly turned the camera to film the man. “D… D…”
“Just call me Daniel.” The man waved his arm at them before coming to Janine. “I… somewhat own land and came to meet a friend tonight when my bodyguard told me about a possible intrusion. We came to aid, but thank the Planet, you’ve already done it.”
“Marco did it, not I.” Janine nodded at her son, never once letting her gaze leave the man. “Have you ever been to the Outer Lands by chance, sir?”
“In my line of work, I have to travel far and wide. But in the last few decades, I have stayed in the Core Lands.”
“Sir, we better leave the area.” The bodyguard spoke for the first time, putting his hand up to block the camera.
“No need. With Warlord Janine here, no harm will come to pass.”
“I don’t remember giving you my name, sir.” Janine narrowed her eyes.
“Oh, but you did, several times, in fact.” Daniel gave her a pat on the wrist and looked at Marco. “I know farmers nearby if you want to take a shower.”
“No need. This is an honor.” Marco smiled at him. “I’ve become a real man tonight!”
“A smelly man.” The farm owner pressed a finger against his nostrils and flashed a smile. “Congratulations, Marco! May you see many happy years!”
“Thank you… Daniel,” Janine forced herself to say his name. Her instincts were running wild in her body. She sensed no threat from the man; he felt rather like a long-lost member who came to say hi. At the same time, something within her urged her to keep herself professional with him, never once allowing even a hint of weakness. She left the questions for later and put her hand on Marco’s shoulder. “Everyone is safe. Howl to your heart’s content.”
And so he did. Marco threw his head up, unleashing his strongest howl yet, filling the skies with a sound of his happiness, a sound of being glad to be accepted, a sound of promise to protect and serve. His voice trembled a little, but Janine felt nothing but pride for him. Females always trained their howl in secret; therefore they sounded so bombastic upon passing the test. There is beauty in honesty. And she gave birth to this honesty.
A bone-chilling howl came in response, making the journalists fall on their knees, closing their ears, and the bodyguard jump in front of Daniel, looking around at the plains suspiciously. Where Marco’s howl sounded like a trickle of water, the newcomer’s howl sounded like an avalanche, making nearby trees shake and bend under the sheer force of the wind being unleashed. Janine had to catch the camera before it could fly away and be smashed aside.
Blessed, truly. The Blessed Mother has accepted Marco too. Janine fell to her knees, hugging her son, thanking the Spirits for this, and wondering what made Ravager leave her stolen den in the crawler. When she stood up, a part of her white ichor was licked away from Marco’s shoulder, leaving wet drool in its place. And on the ground behind him were four gigantic footprints.
****
“Feeling better?” Janine asked when this Daniel fellow escorted the frightened reporters away. A large cloud came above them, hiding a few stars.
"Yes, Mom." Marco smiled, looking proudly at his shoulder with shining eyes. "I’m never going to clean myself ever again."
“Just try it, and I’ll kick your ass.” They stood side by side for a while, enjoying the night’s air and the calmness of the moment. Following a sudden urge, Janine picked up Marco and seated him on her shoulders, walking back to the crawler. “Marco, you are not weak or useless. You are simply weaker than me and can’t do everything on your own. And that is okay. I, too, can’t do some of the things that Ignacy can. Nor can I crack jokes like Bogdan can, and frankly, I don’t regret it. There are tons of normies who are weaker than you; does this mean that they should feel bad when we protect them?”
“No,” Marco replied quietly, hugging her neck.
“You are not a loser. A loser is someone who never tries to do anything out of fear of failure. You are trying your best. Just because you can’t become as strong as Anissa or me does not devalue you as a person. I trusted Colt with all my heart, even though he was weaker than me. He was a trusted comrade, always protecting those near him with a well-placed shot.” Janine blinked away the memories. “You’ll get even stronger in time. But strength alone won’t bring you calm. Stop fixating on what you can’t do. Socialize with the others, watch over your comrades, learn new things, hone your skills, and live happily. Then you will truly leave your fears behind. And… The offer still stands if you want to… you know, live a normal life.”
“No,” Marco replied quietly. “I want to serve and protect the people.”
“The police in the Core Lands serve and protect. Or so I heard,” Janine noted.
“But not like us,” the boy whispered, and Janine gave up.
She felt the water drop on her and looked up, seeing how water started dropping from the cloud above them. Feeling a bit silly, Janine opened her jaws, catching a few drops of water with her tongue, and gulped down the pleasant and clean water.
“What’s this, Mom?” Marco asked, standing on her shoulders and looking around. “Why is water coming from the skies? Is one of the terraforming facilities nearby damaged or something?”
“I believe this is called rain, Marco.” Janine smiled, lifting her paw up.
It boggled the mind. Once, nothing but sand, rock, ruins, and bodies covered this place. Cruel sandstorms were reigning supreme, fighting fearlessly to topple emptied cities and turn the remains of the dead into dust. And now life has come back; water is coming from the skies; animals and insects once populate the no longer-lifeless plains; and humans too are here! Their sacrifices were not in vain. Her sons and daughters… They were all giving their lives for the right cause; Janine was sure of it.
Although the rain felt cold, the mother and son raced toward the crawler in full haste, seeking cover from the annoyed water. Janine briefly begged the Spirits to leave some deserts in the coming world. Normies might like it, but Wolfkins like heat.