Renalia crouched low to enter the kennel, Boogie thumping his tail excitedly at the unexpected visit. She signaled for him to stay put, since the entryway could not fit both of them. With her body blocking the waning light from a setting sun, she flashed [Bogling Vision] to ensure she didn’t trip over the dog’s limbs. The skill lightened the darkness within the kennel into desaturated grays.

It also allowed her to spot several fleas jumping around the straw-padded ground. Before squeezing into the kennel, she encased herself with a fabric-thin application of [Bogling Skin].

“Isn’t this cool? I barely feel anything and it can last a long time. Granny said that cards may gain new abilities as they level. This became available a few days ago.”

She showed her forearm to Boogie, who gave it a dutiful sniff and lick. Curious, she sniffed it herself. Boogie’s bad breath came on strong, but underneath she detected a faint hint of what she associated with boglings. Soggy earth intermixed with the peculiar scent of trash before it turns into compost.

“Even though I’m becoming more like a bogling, you have to learn how to tell us apart, okay? Like Granny would say, ‘studying to training the mind, yes dog?’ Did you know Granny? I miss her. I miss Mama and Papa too. I mean, I’m glad I got to know you and Marcy, but I still miss them a lot.” She patted the dog’s big head, which had overtaken her lap once he realized Renalia did not come to play.

“So I was thinking, if I team up with Shim, we can continue to hunt together and I wouldn’t need my own dog. I don’t know how much Fanny is giving me for the herbs, but I don’t think I have enough for a dog. Besides, I don’t want another dog–I want you.” She leaned over to hug Boogie while trying to keep her legs still for Boogie.

“Plus, I’d still get to see Marcy every day. And Shim’s [Cut] is really nice since”–she hesitated before continuing–”it’ll make the boglings easier to carry.”

In practicing with her Deck, Renalia had found that [Bogling Hearing] allowed her to hear–albeit muffled–Malchim back at the house. She stopped the skill before its duration expired, not wanting to intrude on a private family matter. However, it reminded her of Mama’s admonition to keep quiet about her Cards. She didn’t think anyone would eavesdrop on a conversation with a dog, but her parents had instilled in her a paranoid obsession with privacy.

This private time in the kennel let her practice with her Deck in other ways, too. While training sessions with her mentors improved her skill activations, other explorations required time away from prying eyes.

For one, the beautification of the village square served as a reminder of the imminent visit from the Baron and the Deck Ceremony. Renalia picked ten cards, focusing on seeing with her physical eyes. Ten rectangles of dim light appeared, causing Boogie to perk up and smell them.

“Shh,” she whispered, pushing his head back onto her lap and stopping his test bite from interfering with the image. “Go back to sleep.”

Renalia practiced some more, picking ten other cards or showing different numbers of cards. Satisfied that she could do this on demand, she turned to a harder task: temporarily removing a Card from her Core.

The need for this became clear because the tracker on her [Delete Card] remained stubbornly at “4”. Despite her deleting several newly harvested bogling cards, the number refused to change. Since the number increased by one and two when she deleted level one and two cards, respectively, she suspected her Core did not want level zero cards.

This presented a problem since she did not want to lose the cards she currently had. So she planned to remove a card from her Deck, add a new bogling card, activate it once to get level one, delete it to increase her Core, and finally put the old card back, hopefully in its original leveled state.

However, the first step proved as difficult as she had feared.

In what seemed like ages ago, Granny had meditated for quite some time before attempting to remove [Find Herb] to give to her. While she did not know what Granny did to prepare herself, the strain and pain visible on her face during the extraction spoke to the difficulty of the process.

She wished Granny was here to help her right now, missing her all over again.

While her Core eagerly sucked in cards now, she remembered how difficult it was the first time. Back then, Granny had taught her to imagine how wonderful searching for a herb and finding it would be. To luxuriate in that feeling and focus on wanting to do it over and over again.

So Renalia tried to imagine the opposite of that for removing cards.

She had first tried to remove [Bogling Echo] several days ago. While she found the ability fun to play with, it seemed like the least useful of her bogling cards. As nice as having a 360-degree vision was during a hunt, she couldn’t imagine needing it. There would always be other hunters or dogs to watch her back. Besides, when have boglings ever attacked in a swarm?

Attempting again now, she tried imagining how weird and nauseating it was to see all around her at the same time. How unnatural the experience was and how much she did not need it nor want it to happen again.

The card remained unmoving in her Deck. As she glowered at it, she saw the number on the lower left, tracking available usages, change from zero to one. She activated it straight away, “seeing” the complete image of the inside of the kennel for one second. She smiled at the image, then grinned broadly as that activation took the card to level four.

How could she convince herself she didn’t want a card when her whole life she loved learning about card abilities and wanted a Deck to play with? Maybe it would be easier to convince herself that she wanted whatever new card more than [Bogling Echo]?

She sighed. She was being silly and greedy. Her Core Card, which somehow allowed her to loot any bogling cards, was more important than any individual bogling card. She vowed to feed [Bogling Echo] to her Core the next chance she had to fill a slot with a new card.

She glared again at the [Resist Hunger] cards occupying a full seven slots in her Deck. She couldn’t wait to show them at the Deck Ceremony and delete them afterward. It would give her seven slots–six, if she kept one, just in case–to explore new cards with.

They were all at level four too, enough to push her Core past both the five and twenty-five thresholds, leveling it twice. Not all cards gained ability variations on level up, but that didn’t stop her from fantasizing. Maybe each bogling would yield two cards instead of one? Or maybe she could harvest from dead animals? She forced herself to think of other possibilities, not dwelling on the “dead humans” that briefly entered her mind.

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With her practice finished, Renalia drifted off to sleep, the darkness and the deep rhythmic breathing of a sleeping dog proving too strong a soporific.

After some unknown length of time, she stirred to the potent smell of alcohol.

“Shh,” Malchim said, “let’s get you back in the house.” She drifted back to sleep in his arms, barely hearing him say, “Thanks, Renalia.”

The whole Ongock family was still asleep when Renalia left with Lexi and Donaldson in the morning. The half bottle of wine remained untouched on the kitchen table, though, a silent testament to a possible change.

“How is Malchim?” Lexi asked.

“I think he’s better,” Renalia replied, omitting any details of last night. It did not feel like her story to tell.

“Good. We tried getting him to Allain’s wake yesterday, but he really did not want to go.”

“Had a few choice words to say about it, too,” said Donaldson.

“Donaldson,” Lexi warned.

“What? It’s the hunter’s language, ain’t it? Or are you still trying to prevent Renalia from being a full Hunter?”

Lexi growled, making the dogs’ ears perk up. Renalia giggled, enjoying this family’s comedy much more than last night’s tragedy.

“Anyways,” Lexi continued after a few more back-and-forths with her brother. “It’s been a week and the consensus is that Allain had dealt a lethal blow to his bogling. So we’re going deeper into the bog to hunt again. This time, the three of us will hunt as a team, like we have been practicing.”

Anticipation and anxiety intermingled as they walked further into the bog, gradually muted by the lack of any bogling encounters. About an hour in, they heard a scream in the distance.

“Go!” Lexi shouted.

Donaldson dashed, abandoning their formation. Renalia followed, keeping pace with the running dogs through her [Bogling Speed]. Lexi trailed them all. While her ability to make herself lighter made her faster than an unpowered human, it could not compete with a dedicated speed card.

As they approached the source of the noise, Renalia saw a hunter struggling to hold a lizard-like bogling the size of a forearm between his hands. Another hunter tried to grab the bogling’s arms while avoiding the mouth filled with sharp teeth. Donaldson arrived at the scene, poking a hole straight through the bogling from the side.

“No! Don’t kill it!” the first hunter shouted.

“Don’t worry, Brian, I won’t steal it from you,” Donaldson said.

“No! We wanted it alive,” the second hunter said.

Startled, Donaldson only managed a “What?”

“Yo, Brodir, you’re bleeding,” Brian said, lowering the bogling, which had stopped moving.

Renalia arrived, and they all stared at Brodir’s side. Tiny holes traced an oval where the bogling had bitten him. Small spots of red rapidly grew from the holes, expanding and joining into one big splotch.

Brodir lifted his shirt in a panicked scramble. A chunk of flesh, shaped like half an egg, detached from his side and slipped off.

Brodir started screaming repeatedly, each one cutting off the previous one before it finished.

“Shit, shit, shit,” said Brian, as he dropped the bogling, but just held out his hands, uncertain what to do with his flailing cousin.

Renalia hyperventilated, the scene recalling her own experiences with bleeding out. She shut down the building panic with a burst of [Restrain Impulse] and calmed herself with [Dull Emotions].

“Bandages,” she said in a level tone, reaching into a pouch tied to her vest.

“Right, bandages,” Brian repeated, unslinging his pack and dropping to his knees to ruffle through it.

Donaldson grabbed the hunter around the chest, as Brodir seemed ready to bolt in fright, joining his dog in its frenzied dashing to and fro.

Lexi finally reached them. She stopped in front of Brodir, and in one smooth motion, slapped him across the face. “Get a hold of yourself. You’re a Hunter, for God’s sake.”

Brodir’s dog growled but quieted as the slap shocked Brodir into silence and stillness.

Taking the opportunity, Renalia clapped a gauze pad onto the gaping hole in the flesh. With clinical detachment, she noticed how the blood swiftly saturated the thick cloth at the gushing wound, but slowed around the edges. If only I had something like this in my first hunt, Renalia thought. Together with Brian, their four hands working in concert, they wrapped a long strip of bandage around Brodir.

Lexi took over holding Brodir from her brother. “Donaldson, send word for Healer Rensto.” Motioning Killer to stay, he dashed off towards the village without a word.

Lexi laid Brodir on the ground. “Brian, get some rope. We’re making a stretcher.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brian said as he hopped up to grab some rope.

“And Renalia, calm this damned dog.” Brodir’s dog, at that moment, was trying to push past Lexi to sniff at the gauze pad.

Renalia wiped her bloody hands on her pants, saying a mental apology to Marcy. She wrapped her arms around the dog to drag it away. It raised its lips and a low rumble started deep in its chest. But as Renalia continued to make soothing noises, it whimpered and allowed her to pull it away.

“It hurts,” cried Brodir, as Lexi pressed a hand on his wound.

“Yeah, you fool. What were you thinking, trying to capture a bogling?” Lexi found the numbingweed powder she had been looking for and dumped it in Brodir’s mouth, not waiting for a response.

“Well,” Brian answered instead, gesturing at Renalia. “She did it.”

“Hers couldn’t even hurt a small child. Yours is full of razor-sharp teeth.”

Brodir coughed as some of the water went down the wrong pipe. “I mean, this all would still be worth it if Donaldson hadn’t killed it. We heard you secured a buyer for that bogling. How much are you getting for it?”

Lexi pointed a finger at Brodir, saying, “None of your business.”

“And you,” she said, pointing at Brian. “Don’t call me ma'am. We went to the same Deck Ceremony, for God’s sake.”

“Fools, the lot of you,” Lexi said to no one in particular.

Renalia–original capturer of a live bogling–thought Lexi included her in the last chastisement of fools, too. But she was wise enough not to confirm it.

While the adults tied together spears and shields to make a stretcher, Renalia repacked everyone’s pouches and packs. She took the chance to grab the lizard bogling’s card. As she expected, its icon was a perfect representation of a mouth full of teeth.

She deleted [Bogling Echo], the sadness from its loss quickly forgotten when the number on her Core Card increased by four to eight.

Still, she wished she got something more versatile than teeth. In recent days, she had exclusively applied [Bogling Skin] as protective armor. But the experience just now made her remember its first life-saving usage: as actual skin to hold her blood in.

Renalia and Lexi escorted Brodir back to the village, rejoined Donaldson, and went back out into the bog. They mostly walked in silence, each absorbed in their thoughts.

After a while, Donaldson seemed to reach the end of where his thoughts took him. “So, the business side of things has always been your business, not mine. Heh. But, uh, how much are live boglings worth?”

Lexi shook her head. “Not you too.”

“Well, obviously, we won’t try to catch any with our hands. But with nets and your [Force Shield]...”

Donaldson continued laying out his plan, but Renalia stopped listening. Instead, she became focused on some bubbles breaking the surface in the watery parts of the bog.

The scene felt familiar, somehow.