“Sam, could you fire a fire arrow or something like that up into the sky?” Hilda asks while she stares into the forest.

“Ah, trying to do a flare?” Sam asks back, nocking an arrow on her bow.

“Yep, that’s the idea.” Hilda nods.

“Alright, coming right up.” She pulls back her bow and then tilts up. Releasing the arrow in almost a 90 degree angle compared to the ground.

“I can see the arrow! It’s about five-hundred meters to my left!” Lise calls back.

“Okay, now let’s get your sister before her yelling attracts another one of those things.” Hilda pats my back. “Nikki, could you stay behind with Brianna?”

“Sure thing.” Nikki nods and sits down on one of the passenger seats again.

“We will be right back.” Sam, Hilda and I then move into the forest. It’s rather dense which makes heading through the forest pretty hard.

“It’s hard to imagine a creature that size could move through this forest like that.” Sam remarks.

“It must’ve made a little opening for itself where it had its lair. Or it could have also just been laying in wait for someone to pass.”

“Even though Brianna didn’t know of it?” I ask as well. “Someone should’ve known it was here if it stalked the roads, right?”

“Or we are just very unlucky.” Hilda shrugs. “For all we know it could also just have been a migratory… dragon… bird… chicken?”

“Migratory? With those wings?” Sam chuckles.

“It wouldn’t be the first ‘game’ with absurd monster designs where small wings actually work. I know because I have to review most of them.” Hilda laughs.

“Fair enough.” Sam continues her chuckle as we walk deeper into the forest.

It actually doesn’t take very long before we start finding traces of my sister in the form of tree debris that has been strewn about the forest floor.

“She must have hit the treetops over here.” Sam points. “And looking at the direction the debris is in, we’ll probably have to move in that direction.” Sam points her bow.

“Well, you are better at tracking than I am. So please do take the lead.” Hilda gives my girlfriend a small bow.

Sam smiles and bows back after which she walks out in front of us. We don’t see any debris for a good while before finding some broken branches. This time the debris trail doesn’t stop and actually keeps increasing, finding bigger branches and even completely snapped off treetops. At the end of the path of debris, my sister is hanging in the middle of a tree a couple of meters up. She looks very beat up, she’s bleeding from scratches and lacerations on her face. Her armor is pretty darn dented too.

“Ah, there you guys are.” Lise looks down at us with a rather painful look on her face.

“Can you come down by yourself?” Hilda asks.

“No, otherwise I’d have done so myself. I think my armor is somehow hooked on one of these branches.”

“I’ll climb up to take a look.” Sam puts her bow on her back and approaches the tree. In a couple of seconds she’s already almost halfway there.

“Can you see anything, Sam?” Lise asks, she wants to look down at what is happening but she can’t get an angle.

“Hmm… Give me a sec.” Sam climbs up even more and reaches my sis in no time. When she gets there she starts inspecting my sister, to see what exactly is holding her up. “Oh, holy shit.” Sam says.

“What?” Lise asks.

“Your armor is practically impaled here.” Sam takes out a serrated combat knife and starts sawing something behind my sister’s back.

“Wait, impaled? But I’m fine, right?”

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“Shouldn’t you know that? You are the one hanging up there.” Hilda comments.

“Hey, my entire body is hurting right now, it’s kinda hard to make a distinction.”

“I don’t think it got to you, I don’t see any blood anyway. That, or the branch is stopping the bleeding but we can’t tell until I get you loose.” Sam keeps sawing through the piece of wood. “Almost there.”

“Wait, Sam, shouldn’t you attach a ro-” Before I can finish my comment, I hear a snap as Sam saws through the last bit of wood. This results in my sister falling down, face first, onto the floor, with a loud metal bang.

My sister groans loudly. “Ouch.”

“Oh, shit, sorry.” I look up and see Sam looking down at my sister, her expression looks terribly guilty.

“It’s… fine…” My sister replies and she tries to stand up.

“No, wait, sis, please stay down.” I keep her down. I really don’t want her to move much at the moment.

“O-okay. I’ll just… lay down for a bit then…” She lets her body drop back to the floor again. I make sure to put a part of my cloak under her head so she has something soft to lay her head down on.

I inspect the big wooden branch that has managed to pierce through the back of my sister’s plate armor. “Uhm, Hilda, could you try to take it out?”

Hilda inspects the piece of wood too before she wraps her hands around it. “Sure, but you’ll need to hold down your sister’s armor then.”

I give her a nod as I weigh down my sister.

Hilda pulls but the piece of wood doesn’t seem to want to move.

Sam, in the meantime, has managed to get back down from the tree too. “I’ll help.” Luckily Sam left plenty of space while she was sawing the branch off so two people could still quite easily grab a hold of it at the same time.

“Right, on three, okay?” Hilda looks at Sam.

“Yeah.”

“One… two… three…!” Hilda and Sam both pull on the branch the hardest they can.

“Try to twist it a little.” Sam says with a labored voice.

“Yeah…”

When they twist I can finally see the branch starting to move. And then all of the sudden it just pops out, sending my sister and Hilda flying backwards to fall on their butts.

I immediately look at my sister’s back but luckily it seems that the gambeson stopped the branch from getting to my sister’s skin.

“So… what’s the verdict? Am I an Élise satay?” Lise asks, she still sounds like she’s in pain but at least she can still make jokes.

“Nah, it looks like you are just a normal slab of meat for now… maybe just a little tenderized.” I joke back, and since there are no foreign objects in my sister, I can finally start healing her.

The advantage of my healing ability is that I’m also repairing and undenting her armor at the same time.

“Oh, Ami. Thanks for that.” The relief I can hear in my sister’s voice is immense. She also manages to finally sit up. “That really hurt a lot.”

“You must’ve been flying incredibly fast for that branch to be able to penetrate your armor, especially with those stats.” Hilda says as she holds the piece of wood they pulled out of her armor.

“Yeah, it felt like I was going fast too.” Lise rubs her face, the scratches are already gone. “I think I bounced a couple of times too before I really started going into the treeline.”

Sam nods. “We definitely saw evidence of that.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised you even managed to survive Nikki’s nuke. Let alone the ‘crashing into the trees’ part.”

“What can I say, I am the party’s tank after all.” She smiles smugly at Hilda. “But if I didn’t manage to block the brunt of the blast with my shield, I might have been off a lot worse. Speaking of… ” My sister holds out her left arm and mumbles something. Her shield appears out of thin air. “Nice. I’m pretty sure this thing is indestructible.” In her other hand her sword appears. “And this one too.”

“Yeah, otherwise we could go looking for it now as well.” Sam smiles and helps my sister up now that she’s healed up enough.

“Thanks.” My sister gladly accepts the help.

“But if your sword and shield are indestructible, why isn’t your armor?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it is, but I think it is indestructible in a way that if it’s completely destroyed or lost, that I can just call it back to me. So it’s not too overpowered.”

“Ah, that would make sense. It means you are not unkillable.”

“Yeah, I think so.” Lise then looks at me and smiles, she then puts her sword and shield away and gives me a big embrace. “But really, thank you for the heals, sis.”

“No problem.” I giggle. “It’s kind of my job isn’t it?”

“It is, but still.” She then lets me go and gives me a head pat instead. She then nods in the direction of which we came. “Should we head back now? We should if we still want to set up a nice camping spot, shouldn’t we?”

“Yep, let’s go.” Hilda smiles and gives her a nod. She then starts walking away with Sam right next to her.

“By the way, I got to say that I’m pretty happy I could pull some heroics today, even if it hurt like hell. Heck, if the flying and crashing into trees didn’t hurt that much, it would actually have been pretty darn fun.”

“So, what you are saying is that you are happy that Ami didn’t steal your thunder this one time and that you could do what a tank is really meant for?” Hilda chuckles.

“Ami can steal my thunder every time she wants.” She replies. “Although it is fun being in the spotlight at times.”

“You deserve it, sis. Every gram of it. Because you are the best sister anyone could wish for.” I smile at my sister.

“Oh my, you gosh darn cutiepie.” My sister stops me and takes me into a bear hug once more.

-Being smothered by love is also really fun.-