Sarah’s silent breath could be seen as a white fog in the icy cold air. Apart from that, she was perfectly motionless, as she stared at the clearing in front of her. Vanessa, who stood next to her, shuddered slightly in the cold air.
“Are you alright?” Sarah asked telepathically and Vanessa simply nodded as an answer. Since Vanessa had also turned into a mutant, they were effortlessly able to communicate with each other like this. It didn’t even poison Vanessa when Sarah used her powers.
The only problematic part was the effect of her cannibal title, which caused other mutants to have an instinctive fear towards her. When Vanessa had first seen her after the transformation, she started screaming and wanted to run away. This resulted in her falling on her face and a bloody nose. It had taken some time until she could overcome the fear of Sarah. By now, she only occasionally flinched when seeing her. For example, when Sarah woke her up by coming close to her face and shouting her name.
Sarah smiled lightly as she thought about this, but quickly focused her mind again on the task before her.
There were other people. They didn’t seem very strong, or vigilant. They were dressed in thick furs and were gathering whatever edible things they could find. But Sarah’s experiences with other people so far screamed at her to be alert.
They had found them at the edge of the cliff, not far from the spatial rift where she had tumbled out from. They had no idea where they had come from so suddenly, as they made regular patrols in their immediate surroundings. But they would soon find out.
“Ready?” Sarah asked Vanessa, as the people were coming closer to their location. Vanessa nodded again.
They immediately sprang into action, jumping out of the foliage with such speed, that the people only had time to turn their heads in surprise.
Sarah sent out a wave of disruptive mental energy, as a means to confuse them before the fight. Contrary to her expectations, they all fell to the ground, twitching uncontrollably.
But they didn’t stop their assault. With quick movements, they tied them up without any resistance and lined them up in the snow before them. After a few more moments, two of them stopped twitching and looked at them with horrified and confused eyes. The others had fallen unconscious.
The still conscious people were a man and a woman, barely reconcilable underneath their thick furs.
Sarah crouched down to the woman, locking eyes with her. The woman was so terrified, she wasn’t even able to scream. Her mouth was wide open, but no sound came out.
“Monster!” The man next to her shouted, but Vanessa quickly shoved some leather into his mouth, which shut him up.
“Now then,” Sarah said coldly and grabbed the head of the woman. She activated her magical powers and attuned herself to the mind of the woman. She winced slightly upon the invasion, but couldn’t do much more.
“What are you doing here?” Sarah started the interrogation. The woman still stared at her in shock but didn’t answer.
“This is how this will go,” Sarah continued in a cold voice, “I will ask questions, you will answer them. So what are you doing here?”
The woman started shaking and stammered a response. “F-food. W-we came here for food.”
“Why?” Sarah asked suspiciously, but she couldn’t detect any lie inside her mind, nor any kind of magic interference.
“There’s not much left near our camp, so we came up here. And we needed more food. Please don’t kill me.” The woman started sobbing a little at the end of her words, which hit Sarah like a physical punch in her gut.
She could only feel fear, terror, and worst of all honesty in the woman's mind: no magic influence, no deception, nothing. Only the desire to live, find more food for her tribe, and the utter despair because of the situation she had found herself in.
Sarah recoiled, as if her hand had been burned, and stumbled backward a few steps.
Vanessa’s eyes widened and she was getting ready to jump the poor woman.
“Stop!” Sarah shouted and held out her hands. “They are only here for… for food.” She mumbled, suddenly feeling guilty and confused about her actions.
Vanessa’s eyes narrowed to slits and she gave the woman a murderous look. “Are you sure? What if she manipulated you?” As she said that, she crept further towards the woman.
“Stop!” Sarah said again, this time with a harder voice. “They don’t have any ulterior motives. They are just… normal people. Looking for food.”
Vanessa looked at her confusedly for a moment, and then Sarah saw the same difficult emotions on her face as she had before.
They had experienced so much horror, deceit, and violence, that a frontal assault had been the only viable option in their minds.
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They looked at each other uncomfortably, not knowing what to do with the situation.
“Please, just let us live.” The woman said and continued sobbing.
“Uhhh… sure,” Sarah said and her tail curled around uncomfortably. They awkwardly started untying them and lay the unconscious people in a more comfortable position. The conscious two people backed away from them and shot nervous glances at their companions.
“Are they… dead?” The man asked breathlessly and his bloodshot eyes flickered between them.
“No, no. Just unconscious. I simply knocked you out with magic.” Sarah said and tried to smile a little. She soon realized that this had been the wrong moment. The two people looked at her teeth in horror and Sarah quickly stopped smiling again.
Vanessa and Sarah looked at each other nervously, until they simultaneously said the same thing. “Should we get Melissa?”
Vanessa immediately started running and shouted, “I will get her!”
“Damn it!” Sarah cursed and awkwardly turned towards the people again.
They still looked at her in fear and Sarah tried to make conversation. “Soooo… awkward situation right? Uhm… Do you like mushrooms?”
The two didn’t answer and the awkward silence stretched out unbearably long. So Sarah decided on another approach. With a quick pulse of mental power, the two people also fell unconscious and flopped to the ground.
“Phew,” Sarah said and breathed out contently. “That could have gone worse.”
She hurried over and started leaning the unconscious people onto each other, so they would not start to get cold.
Still not quite sure if this was enough, Sarah started to pile branches with needle-like leaves on top of them, to give them another layer of insulation.
When she was finished, only the heads of the six people could be seen, underneath a pile of leaves and branches.
Sarah nodded contently and sat down to wait for Melissa. If someone was able to mend this situation, it was her.
While she sat there waiting, she couldn’t help but brood over her decisions. It had become second nature to her, to assume that everyone else was a threat. That it was imperative to be the first to strike, as everything else put you in danger. That violence was her only option. But was that true?
The sheer look of terror on the woman's face lay heavy on her mind. She wanted to protect herself and the people she held dear, but what had happened to her? Did she become like the people, she wanted to protect herself from?
It’s not like the people they had ambushed were trustworthy, only because she had sensed no deceit in the woman’s mind. But they surely hadn’t deserved the brutal assault and terror Sarah and Vanessa had inflicted on them.
She snapped out of her brooding when she heard two people coming towards her. She smiled involuntarily when she felt Melissa’s presence come into her sphere of detection.
She stood up, still smiling, wanting to steal a little kiss from her lover. But as Melissa came to the clearing, Sarah quickly lost her smile and her tail curled around in discomfort.
Melissa stared at the neatly packed up group of people for a few seconds, and then at her. She had a tired look in her eyes and shook her head in frustration.
“Just… why?” she asked incredulously.
“Uhhhh…. Well, I thought they might be cold?” Sarah answered, trying to smile apologetically.
“Mhm. And that was before or after you knocked the rest of them out?” Melissa asked with a dry voice and massaged her temples.
“They fell unconscious by themselves,” Sarah said and tried to sound as convincing as possible.
Melissa seemed to seriously consider this while looking Sarah up and down. But then she narrowed her eyes and shook her head.
Sarah didn’t quite understand the look Melissa had given her, but she felt slightly insulted.
She let out a heavy sigh and waved them over. “Well, might as well keep them warm for as long as they are unconscious. Can you wake one of them up?” Melissa said and looked at Sarah with a forgiving smile.
Sarah let out a breath of relief and went over to the pile. She grabbed the woman she had spoken to before and pulled her out. She sat her gently on the ground again and woke her up with a little spike of magic in her mind.
She woke up with a gasp and immediately started screaming upon seeing Sarah so close to her face again. “Don’t eat me! I swear, I taste awful!”
“It’s okay, she won’t eat you,” Melissa said from the side and gently pressed Sarah away.
The woman wanted to back away at first, but as Melissa touched her arm and started soothing her soul, the woman let out a sigh of relief. “What…”
“I soothed the trauma you have just received,” Melissa said in a soft voice, still holding the woman by her arm.
The woman shot a fearful glance toward Sarah and then back at Melissa. When she wanted to protest, Melissa started explaining their situation, and why Sarah was not a monster.
When Melissa told the woman about magic-related stuff, her eyes became wide. “We also have people with fantastic abilities. But if what you say is true, you people are way beyond us.”
“I would be very interested to talk about this some more, but first we have something else to discuss,” Melissa said, still gentle but with a slight hardness in her voice.
“We have experienced a lot of peril and violence. So we became very cautious of other people. And you have entered our territory. Will you be a threat to us?” By now Melissa’s voice had become even harder and she looked unblinking into the woman’s eyes.
She became nervous again and her eyes flickered towards Sarah. “I-I swear. We are no threat. We are only looking for food.”
“This is a threat in its way,” Melissa said with a soft voice and the woman blanched. “This is our territory. This is where we gather our food. If you come here and take this away, we might have a problem on our hands. Do you understand what I mean?”
The woman nodded quickly, but a look of despair crept into her mind. “But he has no food near us and… we came up here in the hope it would be safer.”
“Safer?” Melissa asked curiously.
“Well… you see we live inside caves at the bottom of the cliff.” The woman hastily started explaining. “Our homes are probably in the middle of it, far away from the bottom. Because… there are monsters down there. We don’t know what they are, but they killed a few of us… since then, no one dares to go down there. As we found a tunnel leading up here, we thought we’d try our luck here.”
The woman looked at them with hope and despair in her eyes. “Please, we have nowhere else to go.”
She backed away as Sarah came close to her face with a manic fire burning in her eyes. She licked her lips in excitement and her claws involuntarily came out of her fingers. Only now she noticed, that it had been too long since her last fight. She didn’t know when it had started, but her body and mind had started craving the thrill of a fight.
She grabbed the terrified woman by her clothes and pulled her closer to her.
“I think I have a solution to both of our problems,” she said with a wide, toothy smile. “Tell me more about those monsters.”