Miyako was making her way along the road leading from the village into the nearby wood. She had accepted a quest to exterminate a few wolves that were stealing livestock from farms on the far edge of this village just upstream from town. This had been happening for a couple months but the villagers had to have time to pull together the money to pay a mercenary to come to deal with it. She heard that they all dragged their feet until one of the villagers tried to go deal with the wolves on his own and got torn to shreds. Suddenly, the villagers were able to find the money needed to put up for a quest! That was the reason that Miyako was out here on her way to fight them.
She had picked up the quest early this morning. Normally she didn’t get any of the really good quests because she liked to sleep a little too much but this morning she was awakened by a fight in the street near her window. If the two drunks hadn’t decided to noisily clobber each other over a prostitute she would have slept a lot later. Since she was awake, she decided to get to the mercenary’s guild early. She then had to wait for a while until the guild opened but she was the first one in and that got her one of the better-paying quests for her rank.
By that point, she was already a rank-three first-tier mercenary so she was able to handle a few wolves. As soon as she got to the posting boards, she found a fairly good-paying extermination quest for a pack of wolves and had snatched it before somebody else saw it.
After excitedly rushing to the counter and asking to accept the quest the clerk looked at her with a bit of worry. “Are you going to form a party to handle this? It seems like it might be a little hard to handle by yourself.”
Miyako started to snap a reply at him but then decided not to, it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know her circumstances. She’d been in a party a year or so ago and that had been a really bad experience for her. There was one guy who had begged her to join the party and it turned out that he wanted to have his way with her when they got far enough out of town that she couldn’t scream for help. But on the way out of town, the oldest member of the group treated her like she was an annoyance for being so new while the youngest member treated her like a threat to his position in the group.
Truth be told, if she had simply accepted the archer’s advances the young warrior might have had something to worry about. She wasn’t interested in being the archer’s nightly entertainment though and told him so a couple of times. As they got farther from the town, he became more persistent and finally tried to force her one night. After she shaved some of his hair with one of her swipes with her cleavers he decided to try and force her to leave the party. He expected her to come back begging not to have to walk home in the dark but she was just fine because she could see better at night.
When the party came back to the city, they found that they had been blacklisted. The archer left on his own while the other two ended up having to find other types of work. The old cleric was recalled to the church and sent to be a village priest. The young warrior joined a caravan going to Lyruus and he never came back. They could have tried their luck as a freelance roving mercenary band but they didn’t. they could also have gone bandit but fortunately, they chose to break up instead. For a while, she felt vindicated but she also felt kind of guilty and so she avoided even the idea of a party.
The clerk didn’t know any of that so she couldn’t blame him. “No, I’ll be handling this by myself. I don’t want to share my rewards. It may be a little reckless but if I do get killed then I won’t come back complaining and after a week the guild can just repost the quest. Some party can then take the quest that I failed but until then I’m still going to try this on my own.” She grinned at her morbid joke.
The clerk went slightly pale but he stamped the quest anyway. The guest details said that there were three or four wolves but that probably wasn’t right. After she got to the village, she talked to the farmers who were around the village center when she got there. There had been too many attacks for it to be only a few wolves. Also, for them to attack a human they would have to have felt pretty confident, which meant it was a full pack of wolves. From the frequency of attacks, it seemed it might be a rather large one too.
As Miyako was pondering all of this she began to get the feeling of being watched. She knew that there was a good possibility that the wolves were deeper into the woods but still she couldn’t shake that eerie feeling. She began to look around without turning her head or slowing her pace. At last, she spotted a low shape in the woods beside her and the shape was pacing her.
It was an ambush, they were waiting for her to get a little farther in, and then they would attack from several directions. At first, Miyako panicked and almost turned around and ran but she caught herself and calmed down a bit. If she had done that it would have signaled that it was time to attack and they would have run her down. She thought for a few seconds while she kept walking like she hadn’t noticed. Then she spotted two figures doing the same thing on her right side and she knew she had been boxed in.
As she had already fallen into the wolves' trap there was only one way she could see getting out, attack first! She gave herself a mental count of five and prepared the steps in her head. The moment the count was up she sprinted to the right while grabbing the twin meat cleavers off of her belt. The thin leather thongs snapped at the sudden intense pull and she was then holding her weapons of choice in each hand. She dashed straight at the two wolves on her right!
The wolves were so surprised by her actions that the one nearest her yelped and jumped backward and to the side on its hind legs. That made it collide with the equally surprised wolf beside it, a fatal mistake. In one quick swing, her massive cleaver went through the mid-torso of both wolves. The nearest one got its stomach sliced open while the one it had stumbled into got its back and ribs cleaved open.
As the two heavily injured wolves squealed and flailed, she turned her attention to the other side. The last thing Miyako wanted to do was stay near the two wounded animals. Any good hunter knew not to try and finish a wounded animal because they were the most dangerous then. She would instead give those two some distance and concentrate on the rest of the pack that was now trying to figure out what was going on. If she hit them quick enough and with enough force that she injured most of the ambush party they might all run away. At that point, she could track them back to their den and finish things off.
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When she turned around, she saw one wolf coming out of the brush behind where she was, two coming up the path towards where she was heading, and one looking straight at her from the left of the path. She sprinted straight at the one in front of her. As she passed the confused wolf from behind her she swiped at it with her left-hand cleaver and caught the very surprised wolf in the eye with the very edge of the cleaver. She was hoping for a more substantial blow but the wolf reacted at the last second and flinched backward, saving its other eye from suffering the same fate.
While the one wolf pawed at its eye and the other two uninjured wolves were too far away to help, she closed in on the target wolf in front of her. Finally realizing its peril, it attacked but it was already too late. By the time it decided to lunge at the dark elf in front of it she was already swinging her right cleaver in an upward arc. As it lunged toward her the cleaver that it didn’t notice cut into its chest, neck, and lower jaw. As blood went showering everywhere the now injured wolf ran off a few paces before dropping to the ground. She had severed its jawbone and an artery it looked like, that one wouldn’t be a problem for long.
She made a quick pivot and came around to face the three remaining wolves. She noticed that the two that came up last were very young, probably no more than a year old two at the most. The problem as she saw it was the far more massive third wolf which was now sporting a big red cut through one eye. It had its remaining eye locked on her and was growling ferociously.
Miyako could tell that her odds were bad, she had figured that from the outset. However, she was determined to finish this and track the remaining wolves back to the den. She was in the midst of trying to figure out a good strategy to deal with the three wolves in front of her. She was so focused on them that she didn’t notice the wolf behind her come up. It bit her lower leg, not very hard because it couldn’t get much strength out of the remains of its jaw and it was already bleeding out. That, however, was a perfect distraction for the other three who attacked as soon as she turned her head.
The wolves had great coordination and they had an element of surprise but there was one problem with their attack. The three wolves in front of her were too far away to reach her in a single bound and as soon as Miyako saw what had bitten her leg she ignored it and turned back after catching the movement out of the corner of her eye. Her left meat cleaver she held forward with the flat of the blade down and facing the wolf pups as an impromptu shield. While her stronger right hand got her main attention and she brought that one down at a diagonal that would make it hard for the now partially blinded wolf to see and that much harder for it to avoid. Her skill was right on point and the next moment one of the young wolves bounced off of the left cleaver just as the right one split the older wolf’s head wide open.
The problem was that the last young wolf got past her and attacked her. Miyako’s saving grace was that the pup was inexperienced. In its haste to attack, it grabbed the first thing it could find. Fortunately for her the thing it managed to sink its teeth into was her backpack. She was pulled off balance for a moment but when she managed to regain her footing it was all over. She swung the battle-ax-like meat cleaver that she used for blocking backward and caught the wolf latched onto her backpack in the flank. Her dominant hand brought the other cleaver across the neck of the other wolf as it tried to charge in and take advantage of her momentary balance issue.
With most of its hunting group dead and its rear leg uselessly dangling the last young wolf ran away from her and made its way back to its den. That was exactly what Miyako was hoping for. After wrapping her messed up leg in a roll of linen she finished the rest of the ambush party off and tracked the bleeding wolf back to its den. The den had a half dozen more wolves around it and probably a few more inside the actual burrow.
Miyako didn’t waste any time, she quickly climbed a tree with a view of the burrow and pulled out a crossbow and a dozen bolts for it. She knew she was a terrible shot but at least if she could hit a few it would reduce the number she had to face with her cleavers. She set the string into place and double-checked all the parts again so it wouldn’t break when she used it.
The whole time she was doing this she was thinking to herself about the teamwork of the wolves and wishing that she could summon monsters to do her bidding. She continued mumbling under her breath about it the whole time. “If I could just summon, I wouldn’t have to face everything on my own. I wonder if there’s anybody in town that I could get to show me how to summon monsters. I certainly can’t depend on people to watch my back. Maybe I’ll go looking for a summoner when I get back from this if I get back that is!”
The next day the villagers were astonished to find the dark elf girl walking or rather limping into town. Her face had scratches all over it, her leg was bandaged in two places, she had one arm in a sling, and she had a big blood-stained cloth patch over her ribs on the right side. In short, she looked like she had gone through hell, or at least a wolf pack mauling her ass.
That wasn’t all that the amazed villagers had to gawk at though. She also had three rather unusual items on her person. She had a pole over her shoulders and on one side she had the partially-eaten smoked carcass of a young wolf and on the other side, she had the pelts of 17 wolves. What they saw on her back got her the most respect though. Sitting in a net, in the open top of her backpack were three wolf pups.
The village quickly scrounged together an additional bonus payment to compensate for the extra wolves that none of them believed had existed till now. After the sale of the pelts and the pups, she had enough money to coast for a few months as long as she didn’t splurge much. It was a good thing that she was able to take the time off because her side got infected and she was sick for a month recovering from it.
At first, she wished she could summon monsters but as her fever grew over that first week she began to long for sentient company. The whole time she was sick she wished to herself that she had someone, even a vile bastard like her former party member, who would stay with her while she was sick.
Once she got better, she searched out the old dwarf wizard and began pestering him regularly to teach her magic. He told her, repeatedly, that she had no talent but she kept asking. He even told her that he knew caster magic, not summoner magic but she brushed it off as trivial and she didn’t believe that he didn’t know both anyway. Then one day she found the focus of her attention shifted. Suddenly there was somebody who the old dwarf had recognized as a talent in magic, and better than that, he was also cute and polite!