“What are you talking about?” Leopold asked, a worried look quickly appearing across his face.
“He has nothing, I tried to perform a basic check while examining him earlier, but his body rejected it. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. A case like his is nearly unprecedented.” Lana finished, shooting worried looks to Leopold.
Leopold sighed and sat on the ground slowly, deep in thought. He had a low amount of natural magic flowing throughout his body, so he found casting spells impossible, but to have no magic sounded impossible. He could tell why Lana was so nervous, the only other time a creature with zero magic had been discovered was a captured member of The Swarm. Examined and experimented on before its death, it was found that any magic once flowing through its body was gone, drained out once it fell to The Corruption.
Looking over Jake’s sleeping form, Leopold compared the two. It was not a long comparison, The Swarm were mindless hunters, practically walking corpses that had lost all sense of humanity and lived solely to kill and devour anything that crossed their path. Jake was nothing like that. He was still full of life.
“Do you think he’s dangerous?” Leopold asked after a long pause of consideration, turning back toward Lana. Lana seemed deep in thought, but after a short pause, she turned to Leopold.
“There’s no indication he’s fallen to corruption, just the opposite really. Magic is fatal to corruption, and he’s been enduring ever-increasing amounts of healing magic since we met him. Anyone who’s fallen to the corruption would have died long ago.” She sat down across from Leopold, still frowning, “I’m just not sure what to make of him anymore.”
Leopold gave a nod, before glancing back at Jake and asking,
“Is it a new problem?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” Lana said, looking over at Jake. “I’ve never seen anything like this before, but as long as I’ve been healing him, I’ve never felt a trace of his magic try and interfere with my casting or dilute my magic. I thought his magic was just incredibly weak or that he had incredible magic control, but I never imagined he would have none at all.”
Leopold looked back at Jake and considered everything Jake had done up till now. He’d always written Jake’s strange questions and odd behaviors off as a symptom of traumatic memory loss after his near-death experience. Looking back on it now though, Jake lacked any knowledge about the world or practical survival skills. Yet he could speak so fluently and the questions he asked were so specific, not general enough to help him regain the memories he'd lost. He didn’t seem like someone who’d lost his memories, just someone confused about where he was.
Leopold recalled Jake’s reaction to seeing magic cast on him when he claimed to be witnessing magic for the first time. Leopold had written it off as a strange delusion from a kid struggling to recover. But now…
“Just where the hell did you come from, kid?” Leopold muttered, staring at Jake’s sleeping form from across the camp.
----------------------------------------
When Jake woke up the next morning, there was a tense atmosphere hanging around the place. Lana sat opposite where he was sleeping, nose buried in a book. She didn’t give a greeting to his waking up. Jake recalled yesterday her strange reaction to the shock she had given him and wondered if he’d somehow done something to offend her. During dinner, they’d both lambasted Leopold for the stunt he pulled pushing Jake over the plateau’s edge so suddenly, but she’d felt distant. She’d jump whenever Jake called out to her and hesitated a bit before responding.
Wondering what he could have done yesterday to offend his savior; Jake was pulled from his thoughts by Leopold who strolled over to him and with a friendly wave called out to him.
“Morning Jake!” Something about his greeting felt off, and his smile felt a tad forced, but with a smile and a wave, Jake greeted him back in kind.
“Rick went off hunting earlier and should be back soon. Brought some berries for breakfast, said they shouldn’t be poisonous but who knows he may just be sick of all of us. “Leopold let out a large, exaggerated laugh while Jake thought this was a real possibility, “Anyway, Rick says he thinks he may have found a new camp spot a little further inland into the woods so I’m about to go see how easy it is to reach. Later, kid.”
As they talked, Leopold seemed to loosen up, and with a wave goodbye, Leopold left walking out into the dark beyond Jake’s field of vision. Jake wondered for a minute if it was safe for both Rick and Leopold to leave camp, before remembering Lana reading lazily against a tree across from him who from what Leopold said before was capable of blasting away an entire pack of Swarm on her own.
Pulling himself upward with his cane, Jake walked over toward the pile of berries left abandoned on the ground on a leather cloth. Grabbing a handful, Jake turned around before to begin the walk toward where he’d been sitting before only to lock eyes with Lana, who’d glanced up from her book to stare at him. Having caught his eyes, Lana hurriedly set the book down, and called out to him asking,
“How’s the leg feel, any pain in it?”
“None at all, even the tingling is starting to fade away.” Jake replied with a happy smile “I really can’t ever thank you enough.” Lana pursed her lips at this, before drumming her hands against her knees and asking,
“Can you come over here for a second, I want to test something real quick.”
Jake readily agreed and walked over to where Lana was standing, preparing to sit down before being interrupted by her saying,
“You can stay standing; this will just take a second. You may feel a quick shock.”
Before she placed her hand on the leg she’d healed. There was a second where nothing happened, before suddenly a strong electrical pulse shot through his leg, causing him to jump just like yesterday. Jake reached down and rubbed his leg, not calling out in shock this time as he was warned beforehand. Lana gave a nod, and looked at him saying,
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“That’s all I needed, thanks,” before returning to her book. A confused and sad look crossed her eyes, but Jake failed to notice as he was busy attending to his leg. Straightening himself out and shaking his leg out, he walked back over to where he had been sleeping and sat down on his blanket. Reaching into his patchwork bag, he pulled out the book Lana had given him yesterday and resumed where he’d been reading the night before. It wasn’t the most interesting book, reading like a textbook rather than any sort of interesting story, but to Jake who found the topic of magic alien, it was completely fascinating.
He didn’t read for very long though, Jake felt like he’d only just begun to read after finishing his handful of berries when Rick emerged from the forest. Across his shoulders were what looked like three rabbits. From a distance, it was hard to tell but it seemed to have been a while since their deaths as they were no longer bleeding. After entering the campground, Rick looked around for a moment before looking eyes with Jake and strolling over to him. Arriving in front of him, he threw one of the dead rabbits down with a horrid squishing sound and said,
“Earn your keep, clean and skin that.”
One of Rick’s knives was still embedded in the Rabbit’s forehead, and though no blood emerged flowing from the wound, the fur around the knife was matted black. Looking closer, the rabbit was fairly large, larger than any rabbit Jake had ever seen, and had sharp fangs protruding out of the sides of its mouth. Looking up at Rick, who now stood leaning against the wall with an expectant look as he looked down at Jake, Jake gulped and grabbed hold of the knife embedded in the rabbit’s head.
It resisted coming out of the rabbit’s skull at first, but when it finally did come loose it did so with a sickening pop revealing the blade to be coated in dried blood. Looking down at the rabbit in front of him, Jake couldn’t even begin to imagine where to start. He hesitantly picked the rabbit up, feeling it flop lifelessly in his hand, and flipped it over to reveal the rabbit’s stomach. Unsure of how to skin it properly, Jake opted to just do what naturally came to him. To begin with he traced the knife down the rabbit’s stomach, and meeting little resistance began the process of making small incisions around the rabbit’s legs and head till he’d completely managed to remove the center of the rabbit’s pelt from its body.
It wasn’t a clean removal, unskilled with the knife he brought with the pelt large chunks of rabbit meat and fat still attached to the skin and fur, but it was now removed even if it left behind an uneven cut of meat. Next, he tried to remove the skin still attached to the legs of the rabbit, but found in the process his knife would often stab deep into the flesh of the rabbit till it hit bone, leaving pot marks of failed cuts in his wake. He eventually managed to remove the skins off the rabbit forming four mutilated sleeves of fur he tossed to side with the pelt of the body. The meat of the legs left behind on the bones looked completely inedible.
Last to go was the head, which Jake simply decided to guillotine off. He at first tried to simply stab downward and remove the head in one clean stroke, but when that didn’t work, he opted to saw the head off. This took several minutes, with the head becoming progressively looser and looser with each stroke till at last it came off, rolling across the ground. When he was finally done, Jake set the knife to the ground and sat back, shaking slightly. He felt like he might be sick. He’d never thought much of hunting before, it wasn’t a hobby he was interested in but always figured he could do it easily enough. Now having tried it, he felt like he might be nauseous. The smells released by the rabbit as Jake worked on it nearly made him hurl multiple times, not to mention the discomforting feeling of its bare flesh under its skin, and the effort it took to skin the rabbit was massive.
Rick seemed unbothered by Jake's discomfort, coming off the wall and examining the final product Jake had produced.
“Well kid, this is terrible.” He began after thoroughly lifting and inspecting the meat left behind for a few minutes. “You punctured and destroyed most of the internal organs before removing them, so the meat left behind is probably ruined, and that's not even mentioning the sloppy job cleaning the skin.”
Rick threw the meat Jake had spent what felt like hours working on to the side without a second thought and lifted another of the three rabbits he’d hunted up.
“Watch close kid, I’m only going to demonstrate once.” Before starting to skin the rabbit. Still feeling queasy, Jake leaned in to watch Rick work. In a few quick strokes of his knife, Rick had loosened the skin from the body and with a quick turn of the rabbit’s head, Rick was able to easily pull the rabbit's skin free from its body, leaving it hanging in the air in his hand. Jake was amazed, what had taken him what felt like hours to achieve Rick accomplished in under a minute.
He wasn’t done either. Carefully tracing the knife down the rabbit’s stomach, Rick pulled back and opened the chest cavity of the rabbit, allowing its innards to fall out. Jake was surprised at the smell, letting an involuntary gag escape his throat which earned an annoyed stare from Rick before he returned to the rabbit and finished the removal of the rabbit’s innards. Once he was satisfied, he set the flayed rabbit to the side. Turning back to Jake, Rick tossed the last remaining rabbit toward him and leaned back without another word.
Jake felt queasy still, but knowing he’d need to adapt sooner rather than later he began to try and emulate what Rick had shown him. It was difficult, Rick had moved so fast Jake had barely had time to catch his movements. Still, the first few incisions, though made much more slowly, he felt confident about. It was with the last few he began to struggle. As he sat there, his knife hovering over the back legs of the rabbit unsure of where to cut Rick started to give one-word directions,
“Up, forwards, down, cut, slowly”
With Rick's monosyllabic help, Jake managed to make the last few incisions and with a twist to the rabbit’s head, he removed its skin. Nodding with a satisfied expression, Rick grabbed the rabbit from Jake’s hand and proceeded to gut it, removing its innards the same way he had before. This time, prepared for the smell, Jake didn’t let out a gag though he did find it vile.
Jake sat back, amazed at how much he’d been able to improve as Rick began to collect the two flayed rabbits. Jake started to reach out to hand him back the knife he’d been using, but Rick shook his head, saying,
“Hold on to that for now. You’ll need it for practice. Come help me prepare dinner, the more you know how to do the more useful you’ll be around here.”
Jake nodded and started to stand up, before stopping and glancing down at his knife coated in blood and rabbit flesh. Looking around, Jake eventually found a spare piece of fabric dangling from his bag which he ripped free and used as a handkerchief, whipping his blade clean.
----------------------------------------
“I tested him again, Leopold, there’s definitely no magic anywhere in his body. Not even where my magic is cast, which is where it should be naturally converging.” Lana said in a whisper to Leopold, standing apart from Rick and Jake who were busying themselves preparing a stew for dinner, “What should do?”
“Nothing,” Leopold said with a simple shrug.
“What?” Lana said, looking shocked at his simple remark, “Who knows where he came from, what he could be capable of!”
“Now you're worried about that Lala?” Leopold asked giving her a side eye and cracking a smirk before continuing, “We’ve been with him long enough to know he’s not a threat to any of us. Hell, Rick is trusting him with a knife. I thought about it all night Lala, and I realized it this morning when I was talking to him. Jake is just Jake, just the same as he ever was.”
“But he’s hiding something, who knows where he came from!”
“Everyone has a past, Lana.” Leopold said his voice growing serious for a second as he fell into remembrance, before it lightened up again as he said “Besides, it looks like Rick is just starting to like the kid. Be a shame to ruin that." Lana went quiet for a minute, before sighing and saying,
“Fine, if you think we can trust him then we’ll leave it be,” Lana said, a hint of uncertainty in her voice, mixed with the sounds of relief.