Kyarako was picking her way through the Great Shadow Wood, the forest south of the city. This day like most others, she was out hunting on a guild assignment. She had been a hunter for a decent portion of her life but now that she had joined the mercenary’s guild, she got paid to do it. Her mother was the one who had taught her how but then she disappeared one day when Kya was eight. Her grandmother took her in after that. Her father had died of a disease before she was born.
After her father died, her mother went through several boyfriends and they all left after a few months. As a child she had thought that her mother was being selfish but when she got older, she realized that her mother had been lonely but more than that, she was trying to find a father for her daughter. It was a good thing that her mother had taught her how to hunt because the last boyfriend had actually left her a gift and a year later Kya had a new baby sister.
It was rather hard for her mother to go out hunting when she was pregnant, much less when she had an infant. Kya’s grandmother had a job cleaning in a house and was busy most of the time making the money that they used to pay rent. When she was able, she would watch little Mankusu but the rest of the time her mother took care of her daughter. Kya finally convinced her mother that she could watch her sister when she was seven. It had taken her two years. She never would have tried if she knew her mother would disappear a year later while out hunting. Kya used to cry at night begging her mother to come back but she knew, somewhere deep down, she knew that her mother was never going to come back… from the dead.
Kya only had a short time that she could go out and hunt while her grandmother was home from work. She got really good at making her time count. Then one day, the unthinkable happened. The lady of the house her grandmother worked at said that she had stolen jewelry. It was preposterous, they would have been able to eat much better if they had money from stolen jewelry and the town watch said as much. Her grandmother was free to go and the woman was accused by her husband of faking the whole thing to get more jewelry. Everything was good except that the family didn’t hire her grandmother back. How could they if they wanted to save face?
With her grandmother home, Kyarako was able to hunt much easier but there was a problem, they were almost out of money. How could she help her family? The only thing she knew how to do was hunt or take care of her sister. Oh, she could do a few chores but not like her grandmother could. Then she found out that the mercenary’s guild hired people for hunting. She used daggers which were a lot cheaper than most weapons if she were to lose one. She qualified right away and started making money to keep the household under a roof and her grandmother took over taking care of her sister.
At first, the hunting was fun but then it became boring since it was always the same requests. Deer, rabbits, and once in a while a wild sow. She always enjoyed the hunting for wild hogs because it was challenging. Also, when she would fell a sow, a boar would almost always come after her. The meat wasn’t as good but that was okay with her and her family. The people in town didn’t want boar meat, only the sows so she took those all for herself. There were other things to hunt in the forest but the townspeople wouldn’t eat those and certainly wouldn’t pay for them.
That day she was out on a quest for a deer and several rabbits. So boring, always the same. All she had to do was listen and follow her nose right to them. Speaking of, she had just picked up the scent of a rabbit warren on the wind. She began following her nose to it.
Draven and his buddies were out on a mission to hunt. It wasn’t that big of a deal, just some rabbits and a deer. Jux had just told them he had seen a rabbit in the underbrush near them so they all tensed up. They each had a sturdy branch to use as a club and Gran was going to be the spook to send them to the rest of the party. There were two more people in the party. There was Farris and there was Red. Everybody was human in Draven’s party. He just didn’t really like other races so since he was party leader, he only accepted humans.
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They were just getting ready to spook the rabbits out and start the hunt when a cat beastfolk girl in her mid to late teens wandered up sniffing the air. Draven was cursing her timing under his breath. If he weren’t worried about spooking the rabbits, he would have told her to get lost. Before Gran could make his way around to the bush, the cat-girl jumped right into the middle of it.
When she dove in, Draven jumped up and would have started cursing if he weren’t so livid. He watched as about eight rabbits bolted from the bush and was just about to order his guys to go try to club any they could before they all escaped when a flash caught his attention. At first, he didn’t know what he was seeing but then when he realized, he was speechless for a different reason.
Six daggers flashed out of the bush at barely above the ground and each one connected with a rabbit in mid-bound. The hapless bunnies were all left slightly maimed with only one shot connecting in an instant fatality. The cat-girl didn’t seem to notice them and that was probably because they were downwind. She jumped back out of the bush and the five squealing rabbits were dispatched within seconds. She approached each, snapping the neck and bleeding them with a hanging cord in a rhythm and at a pace that said that she had done this same routine dozens if not hundreds of times.
She then spent a minute cleaning her daggers and waiting for the rodents to lose most of their vital fluid. The moment she was done storing the last dagger on her chest bandolier, she pulled out a piece of waxed leather with a belt on it and put it on her left leg. She then took down the six rabbits and hung them on her belt. The bit of blood that was left in any of them slid off the ankle-length garment as though it had never touched it at all. Then the mysterious cat-girl ran off at a leisurely pace.
Kyarako finished the rabbit portion of her quest and was bored more than tired so she decided to take a nap. It was the work of seconds to scale an old oak tree with a huge overhanging branch just perfect for dozing off on. She had already stopped by the stream where she cleaned and packed the rabbits. The stream wasn’t very cold during the hottest part of the day but every little bit of coolness helped. The dry bressu leaves wrapped inside the huge vaso leaves with the meat would help to partially cure it before she even took it to the meat stand.
It was a couple hours later and the five guys in Draven’s party were looking for a deer. They had set the rabbit part of it aside for now. They had managed to find another bush that had some rabbits but only managed to club four of them. The smell of the rabbit carcasses was going to be a big deterrent to any of the small game and the pile of innards was likely to draw scavengers or even predators.
At least with the deer, it was big enough to hunt with a bow so they wouldn’t need to worry about the smell of blood on them and could stay well downwind of the deer. And put an arrow through it before it knew they were there. Speaking of a deer, there was a doe in front of them and he stopped his party with a low hand signal. He felt the wind change just as he was lining up the shot on his bow. The deer, which was a little on the small side but acceptable, seemed to smell them or maybe it heard them. Whichever the case was, the deer flicked it’s ears a couple times and turned around, and started walking cautiously away.
It didn’t get more than a hundred paces when a flash dropped out of the tree right on top of it. The doe didn’t have time to even flinch and it dropped. The same cat-girl from earlier stood slowly drawing her strange claw-like weapons from the back of the deer’s neck. She was perfectly straddling the deer as she drew the weapons free of it and its head simply drooped limply to the ground. Draven was speechless, the deer was dead before it even hit the ground and she had spent almost no energy to fell it, unlike his group who were fumbling around and walking for over a candlespan looking for one.
Kyarako was wiping her claws of blood lest they end up keeping the scent. The doe was a little light but not too underweight. Suddenly, her nose was twitching and she could smell blood that wasn’t from the deer. Then she heard the noise and looked in that direction. There were five men with bows standing there and in an instant, she knew they had been after this same deer. One of them drew near and he was talking about how they had been walking around for a candlespan looking for a deer and she just dropped on it out of nowhere. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She looked away and took off running to a chorus of shouts like “wait!” Why would she wait around for them to accuse her of poaching their kill? Kyarako was so sick of living by the rules of the CIVILIZED races. If only she had more courage, she would have told them to find their own kill. If only she had the courage to live her own way but for now, it was time to go find a new spot to ambush a deer.