She skulked through and along the overgrown ruins like an unemployed shadow. A cultivator and his dogs had arrived to the decaying corpse her town, a place so lonesome, a place sullied by spirit defilers not that different from this one.
And what else could she expect from Cultivators. Their mother had said that they claimed to seek understanding of the spirit, but theirs was the knowledge violence begets. Their spirit was beaten, forcibly submitted to their will and understood only in this debased state. They would study a slave and claim to know everything about free men.
The cultivator pranced around like he had met fear and decided it was a cute puppy. This arrogance, she thought, would be his downfall, like it had been of many other intruders. Intruders like him, that had taken everything from her. Her home, her friends, her mother. Her life. Her whistles.
She missed her whistles.
From the embodiment of noise that her past self was the event had left but a husk of silence. She would never forget the Day the Femboys Came.
No, not that meaning of came. Arrived.
They razed the village to the ground and spared only four of them, severing six of the fingers of Franchuttio, who, due to the ruthless nature of the scorched town’s ruins and the plains around them, died as a result of his untreated festering wounds. She gave him a proper departing, though: she adopted an orphaned wolf puppy and fed her friend’s remains to it, to later name said wolf, a girl, Ruth. This is how her situation improved, being Ruthless no more. And this may sound like a childish, or sloppy way of acting, but Arcagnosticcs always preached about manipulating the heavens with whatever means they had at their disposal. And her spirit was too untamed still, her control of it scant and unable to provide the finesse necessary to seduce reality. But the gods had a sense of humor, and it could be appealed to: If to become their newest joker meant survival, she would perform.
To scratch the itch beelow her wooden mask would be to indulge in non-calculated movements. And such thing would be reserved for after she could measure the strength of these invaders.
Kalon, on his part, tried to elucidate why there were so many burnt things and half-buildings in that place. Haunted, definitively haunted. Haunted every blade of grass, haunted the grass for having blades. Who gave blades to the grass? It was dangerous to run around with knives, because they had blades. So it should follow that it was dangerous to live, being grass.
“Jagger, we must cut all grass. In the world. For its own good,” Kalon enunciated, head swiveling slowly from side to side to get a wider picture of the area.
Jagger decided to not dignify that eye-searing load of moonshine with an answer.
Samari almost betrays her position when hearing that. This boy was definitively a cultivator, and while what he had said was the most refined poppycock she had had the pleasure of hearing in her short life, there was a chance that it was some sort of code speak, that he was speaking to someone hidden or far away. Yet, she hadn’t been spotted, not by him. Hidden behind a decayed section of a wall, by mossy bricks and hidden form the evening sun, she would wait until he fell into one of her traps.
The setup was simple: a hole covered in litter, a fall of a couple meters, and a mirror inserted into the walls of the hole. Cultivators would fall and get entranced with the mirror, unaware of the girl throwing buckets of water on them, until the hole floods and they drown. It had worked four times so far. Twice on the same guy. Except he was a girl first. Weird things, cultivators.
Kalon stepped on the trap and didn’t trigger it. Brunhilda, following him, also passed unscathed: A lowly trap dared not annoy the big Brun. Jagger, a faithful believer of gravity, went straight down as soon as he rested his bodyweight on the leg over the hole. He fell head first, landing in a yoga-like position that did wonders for his back and warcrimes for his ribs. At least whoever had designed the trap had cushioned the bottom with… rotting, wet, and properly dead people. Curious interior design.
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Jagger wondered if taking a bite was worth the ensuing Salmonellosis. He desisted, because he wasn’t a Labrador. He was in charge of his stomach and not the other way around.
He spotted the mirror, half buried in the crumbling wall of the hole, and tilted his head. Whoever had designed that trap was either a moron of the highest caliber or an unparalleled genius capable of running complex simulations of idiots inside their head. This meant Kalon could actually be in danger, and thus him, and, by extension, his tramadol. He didn’t care about Brunhilda. Her survival was a given. She would probably maul the grim reaper if she had the chance. The matter of the fact was, if a battle of wits would ensue, he was his little team’s only chance of winning. And he had an ace up his foreleg fur, as no genius would reasonably expect a random Rottweiler to be the enemy’s mastermind. He needed to act like a normal dog until the time to reveal his hand was right. His paw. Were hands of cards a paw if a dog held them? Question for later, he decided.
That’s when Jagger realized he didn’t know how to act like a normal dog.
Kalon peeked over the hole and extended his open hand, attracting Jagger’s tail like he did when he needed to use his mind weapon. Frustration oozed off the dog as he kept on considering their situation and tried to ignore the fact he was hanging from his tail.
“You shouldn’t dig so deep in search for truffles! You are not an oink oink,” Kalon reprimanded his greatsword.
The breathsword farted once they were on solid ground. This made Kalon release Jagger’s tail, allowing him to wander around the decayed, paved street. He sniffed the floor seemingly at random, as if searching for a place to pee. Eventually, the dog caught a waft of a human, likely a female, likely about nine years old, likely very sassy, and very tasty for insects of the culicid persuasion. She was prime Mosquitoed-water-farm fodder.
The trap had failed. Her new enemy fostered some sort of levitation powers, and could extend them to at least one of his dogs. Because she had seen it clearly, how he stepped right into the trap and the ground didn’t give in under his feet. There was also the possibility of one of the dogs being an illusion, and the one that fell being the real one. Yet she couldn’t focus on only one dog, as if the other one was real too, it would be a catastrophe. Besides, the cultivator was about to happen upon another trap. Far more lethal, this one used the only thing she had gotten to keep from her mother: her spirit rending dagger, that she had used for self-defense in the past. It was an affront to the power structure of the world, a weapon that rendered anyone a menace to cultivators, that cut into their spirit and flesh alike. A masterpiece crafted by the most talented arcagnostics of past generations, and one of a kind. A weapon she had used to kill squirrels and rats for dinner, for which it was, one could say, suboptimal, as the weapons and wits of rats far surpassed those of her sworn enemies.
And where was this frightening child of hate? Lodged firmly between the branches of the tree above Kalon’s head, it pointed sideways, edges oriented vertically and a few centimeters away from a piece of rope. Said rope had a lasso at the bottom, and was connected to a trigger mechanism composed of a very complex series of pulleys, two bowling balls, seven planks, a stick, a counterweight, an old Tv controller that acted as a balancing implement for a marble, a parrot she had befriended, and a bucket. This contraption was covered in multiple drawings of people practicing martial arts born from the combination of the Muay Boran and Krabi Krabong, as it was common knowledge that many cultivators had eyes, yet couldn’t see Muay Thai.
And when Kalon stepped on the little branch whose crack alerted the parrot, the trap triggered, the rope’s lasso grasping his ankle before pulling him upwards.
She had won! In the next moment the invader would get gutted And she would be safe again!
Or not, because while the trap pulled upwards, Kalon’s trajectory was completely nonsensical, deviating around the tree, missing the dagger and crashing into the trap’s mechanism, coining the first parrot-shaped dollar against the trunk, by impacting right over the girl’s feathery friend.
She almost yelps in frustration. Reality was insulting her without mercy. And then, she felt something sniffing her backside. Turning with urgency, she noticed it was a Rottweiler. At least it seemed friendly, slightly stupid, and not the bipolar-aggressive kind.
“Shhh, shhh,” she tried to shoo Jagger away to not give away her hiding place.
Jagger sat, wagged his tail a bit, panted a little to act stupid and then broke out into an ugly laughter, begetting horror and confusion in the girl’s face.
“Got you, bitch! Try to be less traceable for a nose like mine next time.”
And after the dog spoke, Samari ran away, screaming like the little girl she was.