(“Harvest them”)

Camila didn’t know the strange, snappy language the anomaly used. In all honesty, she couldn’t even be sure it was an actual language over just a bunch of random noises.

But still, her inability to translate the anomaly… no, that man’s words didn’t mean she failed to catch what he meant. With him casually pointing at the approaching predators, he could only mean one thing…

This would prove the old adage that gave birth to the taboo Camila was breaking at this very moment, by actively trying to understand the anomaly.

‘Am I to… attack them?’ Camila looked over in the direction the man was pointing at, only to stare right into the Gray Edgehound's eyes and gulp her saliva down.

‘Then, what if I pretend I don’t get what he wants?’ Struggling to even catch a breath, Camila raised her eyes to the anomaly’s covered face and… she just waited.

In the end, the anomaly didn’t raise the new, now much bigger weapon that it somehow created while she was asleep. It didn’t seem to mind Camila’s inactivity, commenting on it with just a sigh and later rubbing the right temple of his head. But it clearly wasn’t done with her yet.

To top it all off, the Gray Edgehounds were still on the scene, watching how the situation developed. Judging from how they were all ready to pounce at their targets to tear them apart with their teeth and claws, Camila didn’t dare to move a single muscle.

(Speak.)

The man spoke again, this time raising his hand to point at the duchess before turning bringing all of the fingers of its extended hand together, only to then move its thumb up and down.

‘Wait, his hand is just like a hand of a normal person!’

More and more pressed to believe that whatever came out from the other dimension wasn’t an anomaly but just a man, Camila gulped down her saliva and took a shallow breath, gathering both her strength and her wits to figure out what this man wanted now.

The man clapped his thumb against the underside of his palm a few more times before ending the weird gesture and pointing at the duchess again.

(Speak.)

“Me?” Realizing that she couldn’t just be inactive forever and there was a moment when she would have to, whether she liked it or not, take action, Camila took a short breath before pointing at herself. “And…” she then hesitated for a moment, trying her best to figure out what the man’s gesture could mean…

Only to realize that his first opened up and closed back down… mirroring the small movements of the man's mouth as he spoke!

“Speak?”

Camila raised her eyes back up to the man’s face after lowering them down to the ground when she focused on the task.

And as hard as it was to figure out what this man wanted, his eyes visibly sparked up in response to her voice.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

(Good,) the strange man commented, even going as far as to flash a small, extremely short smile. He then pulled his right hand back only to point at himself with his thumb.

(I am Leo,) the anomaly spoke out while putting an emphasis on the last word he used while shaking his whole hand a bit before turning it over and pointing at the duchess again. (“And you are?)

Even though Camila didn’t understand any of those particular words, she wasn’t stupid. And with enough context, just like right now, she could more or less guess what this thing wanted.

“I’m Camila,” the girl spoke in a voice as soft as she could produce.

The man’s eyes drove up and locked on the girl’s face, filling her with even more terror than the sight of the absolute apex predators the existence of which was only ever a theory given how there wasn’t a single person alive that could give an account of meeting them.

And yet…

(Keep going,) the man requested something again, painting circles in the air with just one finger of his.

‘What now?!’ On the verge of crying, Camila went with just what her gut told her.

“I’m Camila,” she pointed her hand to herself, only to twist it around and point at the man instead, “and you are Leo.”

Hearing her voice, the man appeared to rest his back against the small boulder he sat at, relaxing a little as he lowered his eyelids halfway down his eyes.

The relaxed look that flashed in the man’s eyes came to an abrupt end, though, as soon as Camila stopped speaking, making the man make the same gesture with his hand as before before following it up by painting even more circles in the air.

‘Does he want me to just speak out?’ Camila thought, struggling to hold back her tears. ‘So he wants me to be the bait for the hounds?’

Camila, as powerful as she could be when pressed, wasn’t a world-class warrior. And while her noble upbringing allowed her to manifest powers a commoner could imagine…

It was never her main goal and purpose to groom those powers and turn herself into one of the strongest nobles alive.

Camila’s power was just a necessity she required if she wanted to survive even the most rudimentary of assassination attempts that every noble would encounter at some point in their life, all the sooner and more often the higher their rank.

And so, as much as she dreaded the prospect of ending up as the Gray Edgehounds' meal…

“I’m Camila, I’m the duchess apparent to the Carmen Duchy. I’m currently on the run to the territory of the high count Marlow so that I can mount up a resistance against that bastard brother of mine who used foreign powers in an attempt to steal my inheritance and put an end to our prosperity that’s sole in the eye of our neighbors.”

The more she spoke, the more certain Camila grew that this man… Didn’t understand a single word she said.

And yet, whenever her voice would waver or outright break, the man would raise his eyelids just a little bit… before drawing circles with his hand again, urging the girl to keep speaking.

‘Thinking about it, why didn’t the hounds attack by now?’ Camila thought, glancing over at the beasts while mindlessly keeping up the random chatter, a skill she developed years before her court debut.

There were no actual records of how the Gray Edgehounds behaved, which, given the legendary if not mythical status of their very existence, wasn’t all that surprising.

Still, the behavior patterns of the Edgehounds were documented perfectly well and to the last detail from all the years of humans encountering and battling against those. Assuming the Gray cousins of the Edgehounds were an evolved species, they should act in more or less a similar way…

But against all of Camila’s predictions, the Gray Edgehounds rose up from their tense position and outright sat down on the bloodied plain, cautiously observing the weird interaction between the two hairless apes before them.

‘To think that I could see this monster and actually survive for longer than a mere instant,’ Camila thought, gulping her saliva down… Only to be too late to realize that in the process of doing so, she cut her words short and grew silent.

Raising her eyes to the man, she gave him a weary, scared look…

Only to see the man with a distant look in his eyes that quickly vanished when he looked down and then directly at Camila’s face.

“You are… Camila,” the man spoke with a slightly broken… but perfectly understandable language! But as if that alone wasn’t a surprise big enough for the duchess…

“You are…” Now that he said it the second time, the man’s pronunciation improved by leaps and bounds, reaching the levels of proper, educated speech.

“You are a noble. Camila is a noble.”