Seras reached towards the flat bread with her left hand. A furred paw swiped at it faster than Seras could perceive. She pulled her hand back to her and glared at the silver ranked Leonid. “What now?” she snapped.

“Right hand, the left is unclean,” The women said plainly, a slight growl was present in her words.

“I washed, my hands are clean,” Seras protested.

“What does she want?” Athena asked next to her.

Seras noted that she was eating with her left and hadn’t received a swipe. “She doesn’t want me to use my left hand, says its unclean,” Seras translated.

Athena frowned, “then eat with your right hand. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s about the principle of the thing,” Seras said obstinately.

“Seras, she’s a silver ranker, we’re iron. If she tells us to hop on one foot and yodel all our words, then we will.”

“What’s a ‘yodel’.”

She frowned, “hard to explain, but it’s a way of shout-singing across mountains.”

Seras shook her to show she did not understand her, then she reached back out with her left hand, and received a second, harder, slap. “Bitch!” Seras cursed.

“Just use your right hand, Seras.” Athena urged.

Seras glared at the Leonid woman but reached out with her right and picked up the flat bread they had offered them and scooped in a large helping of the paste they had also provided. She took a bite and had to stifle a moan of pleasure from having real food. Spicy, roasty, with just a hint of nuts, it was good. Seras devoured the meal in several oversized bites.

The Leonid woman nodded, “good, now that you have been fed we can go over your story again World walker.”

Seras glanced up to the roof of the tent they were in and sighed. After being ambushed and briefly interrogated by these tribespeople they were escorted to this tent disguised as an outcropping of rocks with magic. Chase and Rohan had told Seras that there were more expensive magical tents that the tribespeople of the five deserts sold. They had tried to tell her how amazing they were, but Seras only heard the exorbitant price tag and tuned out all the rest.

Now she was reassessing her opinions on magical tents. This one could disguise itself as rocks, muffled aura signatures, and provided easy pop-up luxury while on the road. Magical heating arrays to keep the inside warm on cold nights, a magically see-through canopy to watch the stars, and dimensional storage for food. And if her eyes weren’t deceiving her she saw a small bathtub in the corner of the conical tent.

After a week of sleeping on cold stone tunnels, cramming themselves into one small single person tent, this seemed like the lap of luxury itself.

“I am an Outworlder, Seras Cross. I’ve been traveling with a merchant caravan for the last few months since I got to this world. While out hunting monsters around Cupric we encountered Omeda raiders kidnapping Civvies from the town of Westend. Director Arlee then assigned us to hunt down the Omeda and recover the kidnapped. We found them, there was a fight, at the end of this fight their leader pulled a Jackmoll and blew herself up and caused part of the mountainside to collapse. Athena and I had fallen down a nearby entrance to labyrinth and were trapped underground by the falling rocks. We ventured further into the labyrinth in search of a way out. Now a week later we found an exit and were ambushed by you and your people.”

“What is a Jackmoll,” the Leonid asked?

“A guy famous for blowing himself and a bunch of rich people up.” One of the reasons all the corpos started moving to space.

“I see.” The Leonid took a sip of the sweet, spiced milk drink she had served them. “I think you are not telling the whole story.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Of course not, a lot happened down there, monsters, tunnels, walking and talking, there’s too much to tell.” Seras leaned over to grab her own drink and received a lighting speed slap on her left hand. “Fuck! Stop that!”

“That hand is tainted, use the other,” she said as if that explained everything.

Seras glared and reached out with her other hand, “I’m left-handed, of course I’m going to default to it.”

“Exactly, imagine all the filth you have touched with your hand, its why you use the other for eating.”

Seras glared, “first off I don’t know what your implying, but if you mean what I think you mean then I would like to remind you that I’m iron rank and haven’t had to shit for a month now.”

A hand bopped her on the head, “speaking of such things over food is prohibited. And that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what do you mean?”

The Leonid quirked her head, “when you swing the butcher’s axe, is it your left or your right that holds it?”

Seras started and sighed after a beat. “I see now. Its still a pointless gesture, I’ve trained myself to be ambidextrous.”

The Leonid shook her head, “it matters not, such things are symbolic, not literal.”

“Then why does which hand matter?”

“Because the left is your dominant.”

She felt like they were going in circles now.

“Seras, what are you arguing about with a silver ranker?” Athena asked with a false sweetness in her words. It was the kind of tone that implied she would be smacking Seras soon if she didn’t stop.

“Still the hand thing,” she translated. The silver ranker didn’t speak whatever language Athena knew. Since Seras had language adaptation she was forced to be the translator for Athena.

The silver ranker frowned, which on a Leonid was extra intimidating because of all the extra teeth. “You explained why you were there, but not her. How does she fit into all of this?”

“Oh Athena, I don’t really have the right to give away too many of her secrets, but she was traveling alone when the Omeda kidnapped her. I freed her from her cage, and she ended up falling in with me.”

“So you two have only known each other for a week. You feel more connected than that though.”

Seras shrugged, “stressful situations have a way of doing that.”

She sniffed the air, “and you two aren’t… closer than that. I find that most odd.”

Seras blinked in shock, “yeah no. Not that I’m opposed to it. But…” Seras glanced to Athena and remembered their uncomfortable argument in the tunnel-, “no.”

The Leonid woman chortled to herself, “it is not a bad thing. Such joining’s come with bad implications and sometimes make for bad breakups. It is something I am supposed to look out for and correct as a sub-tribal leader.”

“Uh, thanks?”

The Leonid stopped laughing. “I believe your story is true, even though you hold much back. I could force you to speak, but the honor of rank forbids such tyrannies.”

“Honor of Rank?” Seras questioned.

“It is not a thing the more… urban people of the desert follow, but among the true people of the desert we know that the difference of rank is hard to surmount and could create all sorts of injustices. The honored ancestors saw all this and bound their people to a code of conduct for higher rankers. A single bronze rank man among normal rankers could do great harm, and a silver could twist a whole city to wicked ends in a land as weak as the deserts. Of course there must be rules for such things. Among the city dwellers such things are implicitly implied by the social implications and can be discreetly ignored, among the tribes however it is stated by law and tradition.”

Seras remembered Dale and that stupid bar. If Seras had been a normal pretty girl then what was to stop a man like Dale? Nothing really, not in the moment. There were social implications like the Leonid said, but that meant fuck-all to men like Dale. But was a codified law better? Seras knew that laws only mattered if the person was caught and the law was enforced properly, plenty of room for wiggling out of it.

But given how strictly this Leonid observed even the least of traditions… Seras wasn’t a lawyer, and this kind of thing was mostly lost on her. On her world and this, one thing remained true, if you wanted to be safe then you needed to be powerful enough to protect yourself.

“So what now?” she asked.

The Leonid woman stared at her and sighed, “I will take you to the main camp, there the elders will deal with you. I may be silver ranked, but I know my place is as the spear of my people. They will know what to do with you.”

“Are we breaking some kind of rule by being here?”

“You are, though you wouldn’t have known given the dictate was put into effect after you fell into the labyrinth. There have been attacks on the Toruach herds here, and more than just the Omeda stirring up trouble. Poachers have tried their luck at stealing kills. We of the Akemi cannot allow this since the herd has decided to calf in region. We have told the people of Cupric that this land is now off limits until the herds have cleared out.”

“And people are listening?” Seras asked in shock.

The Leonid made a fierce predatory grin, “yes, because some of our honored gold rankers have returned home to enforce the edict. Only a single man in Cupric could challenge their might, and he knows better.” The Leonid gestured around the tent, “World Walker you have spent much of your time with the outsiders, the people of the cities. But they do not rule these deserts, we do. They live only with our forbearance and because the price of blood grew too great.”

“Weren’t you the one’s winning that war?”

“Yes, and the killing was changing us in dark ways. Such slaughter wears away all honor, it is why the Omeda fell like they did.”

An elbow drew Seras’ attention away from the Leonid. “You’ve been talking for a while, what’s going on?” Athena asked.

“Oh, so much, but the keynotes are that we’re going to the main camp of the Akemi tribe. Then they’ll decide what to do with us. We’re apparently violating some edict cordoning off the Toruach herds. But we might be forgiven since we had no way of knowing.”

“Oh, okay.”

Seras turned back to the Leonid Akemi woman, “would we be allowed to contact our friends, let them know where we are and to arrange a pickup?”

The Leonid shook her head, “that is not for me to say. I am just a guard dog.”

Seras stared at the lion woman. The very feline, lion woman.

She saw what Seras was thinking and bopped her on the head again, this one left her head ringing. “As a World walker you might not know this, but reducing Leonid’s by our species association to cats is considered very rude. You smelly bald ape girl.”

Cranial plating is dented, time to repair 8 minutes and twelve seconds.