***Tirnanog, The Grasslands at the Old Camp***

***Astra***

I watched the pack of white and very fluffy gutters bounce down the hill towards us – howling all the way in a deranged manner that didn't fit together with their appearance. It would have been intimidating if they hadn't looked so cute while doing it.

The thought struck me that maybe this was just their way of fooling their prey. But that would have implied that these creatures were actually smart.

If it weren't for the howls, they would have appeared as nothing more than sweet, if a little oversized, puppies. When in fact, they were delighted about finding a group of three unsuspecting humans traversing the grasslands between the forest and the mountain range that led north.

“Die horrible deaths! You fuckers!”

A scream from my partner destroyed the unnerving atmosphere as a metal spear was launched right into the leading gutter's eye. The creature dropped instantly and rolled down the hill, but that didn't deter its companions.

It seemed like Tulkas had a few residual feelings about being chased by a pack of these animals while running for his life.

He launched another throwing spear – missing the target completely – then threw a third and a fourth one, hitting two more gutters. Unlike their leader, they didn't die instantly, but their charge was stopped when they fell.

Mark shot two arrows. One hit the nostril of a gutter, delivering a dose of deadly poison. The other arrow vanished down another creature's panting throat, causing it to stop its charge and start gurgling while it turned on the spot, trying to cough up the arrow.

I had to admit that Mark was a natural talent with his compound bow.

The last gutter howled in glee as it reached Tulkas, who had planted the butt end of his spetum in the ground and was waiting with the pointy end aimed at the charging monster.

The long blade sank deep into the gutter's chest as the monster impaled itself on the weapon, thereby doing all the work for my partner.

Gutters were large, but not as heavy as they looked. Most of their volume was actually just fur.

Once the gutter's fluff reached the cross-blades, the monster's momentum was abruptly stopped, as the creature's resilient fur didn't allow further penetration. A gutter's pelt was very good at stopping slashing attacks – like from my filaments – but it wasn't ideal when it came to being stuck with something sufficiently pointy and sharp.

The spetum's metal staff bent, then catapulted the gutter over Tulkas' head until it landed behind him in a heap, the weapon still embedded inside it. It writhed, too stupid to realize that it was already dead.

I watched my partner's muscles flex and the creature shuddered. Then it lay still, smoke rising from its snout.

“Damn, I have to look into getting myself some metal weapon,” I commented, happy that I hadn't been needed as a backup. My filaments tended to entangle themselves in all that fluff.

There was something about being able to stab through an opponent's armour to transmit the electricity right into the enemy.

“We could ask the blacksmith to make a second spetum,” Tulkas suggested as he pulled the weapon out of his kill and turned to face the wounded gutters who had fallen during the charge towards us but were still alive and kicking.

Mark drew a second arrow, aimed, then shot it into the eye of a gutter who was still crawling towards us with one of Tulkas' throwing spears sticking in it. “It's working exactly as I imagined it to.”

I considered the 'spetum', as Tulkas had called the oversized spear. For some reason, he had been very careful about explaining the weapon's exact design when I had disregarded it as a normal spear.

“No,” I said after a moment of consideration. “I get that I am now a lot stronger than before, but I still don't have Tulkas' body type.” While athletic, Tulkas' stature was of the wider variety. It meant that he had more base strength than I could ever hope to achieve with my more petite body.

My muscles were now enhanced just like his, but his upper arms were wider than mine by at least half, which meant that he was that much stronger. More muscle mass meant more strength – it was as simple as that.

“Your figure is more suited to wield something so big and heavy,” I voiced my thoughts towards my partner. “I think I am just going to get myself two long, stabby things and rely on speed to employ hit and run tactics. Wielding something like a spear would also get in the way of my filaments.”

“Why didn't you wield a weapon before?” Tulkas asked. “I saw none in your room.”

“Because it would have made no sense,” I replied. “All my strength came from my filaments and they are unsuited to wielding weapons. It would have been the height of stupidity to wield a weapon against people who possessed any strength mutation. And since mutations aren't always easy to spot just by looking at someone, getting into the habit of fighting with a weapon would be doubly stupid. It was much smarter to simply never engage anyone in a form of combat that I am simply not suited to. Though, I learned the bow if you have to know.”

I frowned and flashed my arm through the air. “But I guess that I no longer have this weakness.”

Mark thought about it. “Ask for something like a rapier. I don't think it's the most useful when it comes to killing something big, but it would fit the tactics you intend to employ. Your filaments can still function as a safety net to keep opponents restrained while you stick them.”

“That's actually a good idea.” I nodded. “Do you like medieval weapons, Mark?”

He scratched his head, looking embarrassed. “No, it's just because I spent so much time with Nolan, the blacksmith.” Mark lifted his compound bow. “Having this thing made according to specification cost me a pretty penny and a lot of time at his shop. The man gets kind of anal about misidentifying his weapons.”

The creatures who Mark had shot finally expired due to the poison, allowing us to get to harvesting. There was only a small window of time until the first zippers would show up to claim their due.

I helped with taking apart the first corpse, but followed Tulkas' instructions as soon as the first zipper showed up.

Using Second Sight, I watched how the creature deployed its muscles, creating a wave-like energy pattern over its entire body before it dashed back and forth, snatching a bit of meat and a bit of innards here and there.

The problem lay in the fact that the zipper activated the skill so quickly that there was practically no time to rationalize what it did. Even the Bullet Time ability that I got from Tulkas wasn't of much help.

It made me wish for something that I had read about in the clan archives, a high-speed camera.

I watched my forearm and pulled down the corner's of my mouth upon trying to copy the creature's technique. Intellectually, I knew what I wanted to do, but my brain just didn't want to play along.

Like knowing that, theoretically, my eyes could move in any direction, but refused individual control. There was no looking up with the left eye and down with the right one at the same time. Something inside my brain was hard-wired to have them focused on the same point.

This was a similar problem, but it felt like it was possible to overcome it. It explained why Tulkas was so frustrated with trying to copy the skill and thought that it would take months, if not years of training.

I nonetheless used the time to memorize the pattern that was supposedly responsible for the zippers' supernatural movement skills.

Tomorrow, we would harvest more eggs at the zippers' breeding grounds in preparation for our departure a few days later.

It remained to be seen how we would be able to keep strengthening the zipper evolution. I had a bad feeling that there was no other choice but to have it remain a seasonal thing. That's why I suggested stocking up on at least two hundred eggs for the two of us.

If we boiled them only for a short time, it might be possible to pickle the eggs in salt water without actually destroying the genetic code. That would allow us to keep strengthening the mutation throughout the winter.

Tulkas had suggested to just have them spoil since the Carrion Eater trait would allow us to eat the eggs anyway, but I was absolutely against it. Not only did spoiled eggs stink to the high heavens, but they would also create a scent trail for any predator to follow.

Aside from watching the zippers, I also kept watch on our surroundings.

My thoughts had made a full round once the two men had harvested the gutters' fur.

There wasn't much else on the creatures that was worth taking.

Although some extremely unlucky people possessed a gutter-mutation, no sane person actually wanted one. Nobody in his or her right mind desired to sprout a white pelt, half a metre in thickness, that made one look like a fluffed up yeti.

Once all three of us were on the way back to the Old Camp, loaded up with white fur, I held Tulkas back a few steps so that Mark could take the lead.

“I actually joined your hunting trip because I wanted to talk to you about things,” I started the conversation. “Away from listening ears back at the camp.”

Tulkas hadn't fallen onto his head and immediately understood what this was about. “You want the whole story.”

I nodded. “Just between the two of us. Please?”

He looked at the sky and actually slowed down so that Mark got even further ahead, meaning that he didn't trust his own friend with this information.

Then he started to talk. “We already had this conversation in part, and just to make sure, I don't want anyone to know about this. My real name is Magnuson Elrod, but everyone just called me Magnus.

“I was born in Iceland and studied physics and programming there. My parents had me fairly early in life. Let's just say that I was the 'accident' that caused two very young people to marry. Though, I can say that I grew up in a happy family. Went to school, got my degrees and everything was just fine with me working at the university regarding space research until I turned twenty-seven.

“Some people in suits showed up at work and told me that I had to come with them – to identify the corpses of my parents and two little sisters. Only that there wasn't much to identify with four charred bodies. To say that I was a little out of my depth after that experience would be an understatement.

“I retreated into my work after that. Right up until someone approached me with very convincing evidence that my sisters weren't dead at all and that they had been abducted.

“The group that provided me with this evidence wanted to know why my family had been targeted and I began to look into things on my own. You see, my parents were nothing special, just two bureaucrats that made a living by checking piles of files. Land charge registers, stuff like that.

“Colour me surprised when I found hints hidden in their personal stuff that a certain pharmaceutical firm had bought and built upon lands that were supposed to remain a natural reserve. And that this firm was a very lucrative business in cahoots with the current political leadership. I think it doesn't have to be mentioned that pharmaceutics is always involved with a lot of money. My parents were told to let it be, but they wanted to go public. Then they were silenced.

“I offered this information to the man who had approached me and blackmailed him. I was so furious, I wanted nothing more than revenge, and joining a group that worked against the people who had killed my family seemed like the obvious thing to do. Alone, I would have achieved nothing against figures like that.

“Turned out, I had joined what was publicly known as the 'resistance', though we just called it the organisation.”

He sniffed in disdain.

“But let's be honest, it's a terrorist group that actively goes after many of Earth's leading figures who can be thought of as the movers and shakers. I always knew that the organisation's ways would have never changed Earth's political behemoth. Kill one fat pig in power and all you get is another pig taking its place at the food tub. Look away, and before you know, the other pig is fat too – fat being my euphemism for corrupt. It's just a question of time, even if you manage to get an idealist into a position of power. The system itself is built to corrupt people, or at the very least to make them despair and give up.

“I kind of knew that there was no point to any of it, but the organisation offered an opportunity, skills, and resources that would allow me to find and punish everyone involved.

“It took me a few years to learn all I could while I followed leads all over Earth and made use of the resources that the organisation had to offer while I climbed its ranks. My parents were nothing more than the sacrifices to a much bigger game, but I eventually learned where my sisters went and who was responsible – if only indirectly. I doubt they were more than a small report that he had to sign off on his way to his coffee break.

“I killed the fucker, but I am sure that his replacement is already sitting at his desk, keeping the machine running. It's all so entwined that not even the people in power could change it if they wanted to. The organisation doesn't really see that it's running all on its own by now and that the people who they are angry at are just cogs in a greater machine. But that's what you get for allowing bureaucrats to run free for a few hundred years.”

He shrugged.

“Empires rise and nations fall. It will be no different with the current order, I am sure. At some point, the big crash will come and people will pick up the pieces. Time will take care of it without me. I nonetheless got my revenge. Call me vain or ignorant. In the end, I just wanted to kill the person responsible with my own two hands... Went over a lot of dead bodies and did things I am not proud of to get to that point.

“But I found out that my sisters had survived and that their charred bodies were fake. I don't know why, but they had been shipped off to Tirnanog. There are still a lot of things that make no sense to me or the organisation. So, I did everything I could to follow them, even to the point of being sent off by the same wormhole facility so that I would land in the same part of the world.”

He ended his story and we walked in silence for a minute or two.

I would have never thought that he had that kind of chip on his shoulder. But while his actions weren't noble by any means, going so far as to join a group that he himself thought of as terrorists, his story made him all the more endearing to me.

He looked at me. “Do you think of me as a bad man now?”

I smiled. “I think you already knew that I anticipated much worse from finding a potential partner at the Old Camp. A sizeable amount of people are child molesters, people who murder for money, and worse. Your story and your reason for being exiled sounds actually better than most. I can live with a man who did a few horrible things because someone hurt his family.”

To make sure that he understood, I took his hand. “If your sisters are still alive, they should have made a living by now.”

Magnus nodded. “I figured the same. I am a few years too late to come to the heroic rescue.”

“If they are still alive, then we will find them,” I affirmed and squeezed his hand. “If they are not at Aerie, then we can join a trading caravan once we have proven ourselves and the winter is over. It would be nice to make a round trip to all the major clans. Maybe we can turn it into a diplomatic mission. Though, the Thich will be a little bit troublesome. Those idiots are isolationists compared to the other clans.”

“There are trading caravans?” Tulkas asked with something like hope in his voice. “I thought all the clans stick to themselves.”

I chuckled. “Mostly, that's true. But there are groups like the Caravaners who choose a nomadic lifestyle. During winter, they often buy themselves shelter at one of the larger clans. But I suppose we would give it to them anyway. Trade is simply necessary for survival. Without the caravans, the other clans would get no ores from Mount Aerie. No wheat from the Vier, or salt from the Coasters. The Hochberg have a monopoly on some rare herbs. Jeng pretty much owns the hardwood production. And Thich has easy access to clay and lime pits.”

He furrowed his brows. “That's lucky for them. All you need to make cement in one place.”

I nodded. “They are the only clan that actually managed to build a real city... though it's more like a fortress town from what I have heard.”

“How do they transport anything through the wilderness?” Magnus asked with a confused expression.

“Oh, by having a lot of very powerful people protect the caravan,” I clarified. “Just imagine what we could become within a few more months and quadruple that with a lifetime of fighting experience. The Caravaners are not to be messed with, though there are cases when even they have to abandon their goods and run for the hills. But it rarely happens nowadays. They learned the hard way which regions are safe to travel with wagons. And by safe, I just mean that it isn't the territory of a creature too large to fight.”

I gestured towards the mountain range in the north and the woods in the south. “If you ever find yourself alone in the wilderness, try to stick to hilly terrain, or the deep woods. It won't be safe by any means, but it at least ensures that there won't be creatures that can kill you by stepping on you. Stay away from grasslands like these or the swamps in the east. Large bodies of water are also to be avoided.”

“Then why is this area safe?” he asked.

“It isn't really safe,” I corrected him. “But it's 'safer' than other open areas. This grassland is just a narrow patch between the mountain range and the woods. Large monsters tend to stick to the open plains in the west and seldom stray into this region…”

We kept talking about the local geography while we caught up with Mark.

I had a good feeling about this developing thing between Magnus and me. It would turn out well.