Terry discovered that taking a road trip on foot with other people was irritating in different ways than doing one in a car. There were no radios, streaming music services, or even MP3 devices, so no one was arguing about music. However, Terry might have welcomed that argument if it meant he could hear music again. He really missed music. It hadn’t crossed his mind a lot since he first arrived. There had been all that fear of death, fighting monsters, and trying to navigate a society he didn’t understand at first. Those had been very potent distractions. There had been lulls in all of that, though. It was during those lulls that he had found the time to miss things like music, air conditioning, and other little quality-of-life-improving things. Music had hit him the hardest, though. He’d had a rather extensive collection of digitized albums on the overpowered desktop PC he’d used as the brain for his partially automated apartment. He’d literally just needed to talk in any room to summon the music he wanted to hear.

All of those albums were gone now. Even if he did, somehow, some way, find a method to store music again, he’d be limited to whatever passed for music on this world. Given that they probably didn’t have electric guitars in this terrible place, he felt confident that there would be no hard rock, grunge, or any of their more recent offshoots. While his world had produced plenty of music that no one should ever listen to, never being able to listen to Alter Bridge again just felt like an unnecessary twist of the cruelty knife to him.

Despite bypassing all arguments about what to listen to, there were plenty of other things to annoy him about traveling with others. He was used to setting his own pace. When traveling by himself, he’d aimed for what he felt was a sustainable pace. Sustainable being a pace that he could maintain for a full day. It turned out that his idea of sustainable and the other adventurer’s idea of sustainable were very different things. He was forced to keep slowing down to about half the speed he wanted to be walking or the other three started looking like they weren’t doing so well after the first few hours. It was irritating.

He hadn’t thought that food was going to be an issue, but it turned out that it was. He’d been keeping his meals simple. There was only so much food he could carry at any given time, so he carried essentials. Spices had not been high on his list of priorities. It turned out that what he considered average fare did not meet the approval of the others. They weren’t vocal about it, but they didn’t need to be. It turned out that Ekori and Jaban preferred much, much spicier fare than Terry would normally make. Haresh seemed to like that kind of food as well, although he’d seemed fine with what Terry made as well. All of that would have been fine, but then they got all weird about eating monsters that Terry killed.

“You can’t eat that!” said Ekori about three days into their journey.

Terry had gone out and found a bird that sort of reminded him of an ostrich. It was about seven feet tall and had the long neck and legs he associated with ostriches. That fact that it spit fire and had a razor-sharp beak that looked to be made out of metal ruined the resemblance, but those things were small potatoes to him these days.

“Why not?” asked Terry as he positioned an enormous wing over the fire on a makeshift spit.

“It’s a vile beast,” she proclaimed, as though she was uttering profound truths.

He gave her a flat look and said, “It’s a bird. It’s made of meat. I’m not just leaving it out to rot when I can eat some of it. Especially after I went out and specifically killed it to be eaten.”

Terry knew next to nothing about cleaning animals properly, so he was pretty cautious about which parts he’d eat. There was always the chance of the meat getting contaminated by something inside. With a giant bird, though, a wing was almost certainly a safe bet. He’d left the rest of it for Drumstick after discovering he couldn’t use the core. He hadn’t been entirely certain the big chicken-lizard would eat the leftovers, but Drumstick had pounced on the creature. It did make him think that Drumstick was more lizard than chicken. Ekori lifted her chin and stared down her nose at him. It was an incredibly haughty gesture that he felt was way out of proportion to what was happening.

“I won’t eat it,” she said.

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“Okay,” said Terry, long since feeling done with that particular conversation. “Don’t eat it. As my mother was fond of saying, if you don’t like what I’m cooking, have a sandwich.”

He glanced over at Haresh and Jaban.

“The same thing goes for you two,” he added.

From the look on his face, Jaban felt exactly the same way that Ekori did. Haresh simply lifted his hands in a placating motion.

“My mother used to say something very similar,” offered the older adventurer. “Some people have particular views on eating the monsters. I do not share those opinions.”

“Good,” said Terry. “I don’t know why people would give up such an easy way to get stronger.”

Ekori and Jaban both straightened up like someone had hit them with a cattle prod.

“What do you mean about getting stronger?” asked Jaban.

The young man had been very quiet for the last few days after calling Terry a coward. It seemed like a tactic to avoid having Terry pay too much attention to him, but in a group that small, it was a pointless exercise. There was no way to avoid paying attention to everyone with him. Terry pointed at the frankly absurd wing that was sitting over the fire. It hadn’t even started to sizzle yet, which told him they all had a while to go before it was going to be ready to eat. That sucks, thought Terry. I’m actually hungry. I wonder if I have anything easy to eat left in my pack. He shook off that thought and focused on Jaban again.

“These are beasts, sure, but they’re magical beasts. They have power coursing through every part of them. You eat the beast, and you get a piece of that power. And even if you don’t, it’s fresh meat. Fresh meat is always better than dried meat.”

Ekori narrowed her eyes at Terry like she thought he was trying to pull a fast one on her. She turned to Haresh.

“Is that true?”

“Yes. Fresh meat is always better than dried meat,” Haresh answered.

It was the most perfect deadpan that Terry had ever seen. He felt an urge to applaud the performance, but better sense ultimately prevailed. He doubted that Ekori would be amused. It was one thing to have her teacher poke fun at her. If Terry got in on the action, it would probably come across as mocking whether he meant it to or not. While he didn’t much care what they thought of him, he didn’t want to aggressively alienate any of them. It became a challenge to hold a straight face when it looked like Ekori might actually stamp her foot in frustration.

“You know that isn’t what I meant,” she said. “Is what he said about getting stronger by eating monsters true?”

Haresh visibly hesitated at that. Terry wondered if he’d overstated the benefits. He didn’t think he had. He was quite sure that eating those monsters had made him stronger. It wasn’t like what he got from absorbing beast cores, but it had been noticeable. Haresh finally made a decision. He held up a hand and waggled it back and forth in a so-so gesture.

“It does seem to work that way for some people,” he admitted. “Others report that it doesn’t make a difference for them. I haven’t ever noticed a difference, but I've only eaten monsters a handful of times.”

That answer left both Jaban and Ekori with consternated expressions. They both spent the next hour or two surreptitiously eyeing the enormous wing. Terry found the entire thing fascinating. He wondered whether they would chuck their beliefs and eat some of it or stand firm. Ekori came to a decision first, summoning some food from her storage ring and eating it. Terry did notice her gaze drift back to the cooking bird meat more than once. Jaban took substantially longer to make his choice. It wasn’t until Terry was cutting pieces off the wing that the young man resigned himself to not eating any and asked his sister for something. Oh well, more for me.

Haresh was perfectly happy to cut a piece off for himself. The meat was a bit gamier than Terry liked, but the flavor wasn’t bad. As he’d noticed the other times he’d eaten monsters he killed, he could feel something settling into his muscles and bones. It was subtler than the rush of power he got from cores, but it felt like his body solidified a bit more. He almost wished he’d been paying more attention. He could have run an experiment. Maybe even figured out which beasts offered the most benefits when you ate them. At this point, though, he was starting to think that there had to be limits to the benefits. He’d eaten these kinds almost nonstop when he’d been in that forest. He was probably going to hit whatever that limit was before too long. Not that it would stop him from eating the stupid monsters that looked edible. If he was going to have put in the effort to kill them, he might as well get something for his trouble. Despite his earlier intentions, though, he couldn’t help but poke the bear a little.

“Man, this is really good,” said Terry around a mouthful of monster bird.

Haresh gave him a knowing grin and added, “Very tender.”

“And juicy.”

“Bit more pepper next time, do you think?” asked Haresh.

“Hmmm, maybe so. It could probably use a little extra kick.”

Terry could feel the glares from the other side of the fire without even looking.

“You two are not funny,” said Ekori through clenched teeth.

“What?” asked Terry as he projected all of the guileless innocence he could muster. “It could use more pepper.”