While Liam had unofficially signaled a truce between the two parties with his slight show of deference, she didn’t let down her guard in the slightest. Killing cultivators was harshly punished within the city limits--anyone guilty of doing so immediately being sentenced to Tower Ascension--but they were all far from the protective walls of her home. If she didn’t return, she’d just be considered another foolhardy youth that fell prey to the quest that had already taken countless lives, not a cultivator murdered by her peers. In preparation for the worst-case-scenario, Samantha spent 2 qi points on each person to get a better handle on her situation which brought her available qi pool to 9/18.

Liam - Low Copper

A cultivator that leads his two younger brothers on Spirit Beast hunts in the wilds outside of Yivesh. A spirit pearl accident in his youth has left his cultivation base damaged, and his progression has nearly halted as a result.

Highest Stat: Strength

??? – Low Copper

A cultivator that hunts Spirit Beasts alongside his elder brother and his twin in the wilds outside of Yivesh. Patient and calculating, he spends much of his time, to his chagrin, getting his twin out of trouble.

Highest Stat: Endurance

??? – Low Copper

A cultivator that hunts Spirit Beasts alongside his elder brother and his twin in the wilds outside of Yivesh. His violent temper has gotten him into trouble more times than he’d like to admit, but the beatings he received as a result have made him sturdier than most.

Highest Stat: Resilience

She took in the information and started planning a strategy. Even though she had gotten them to step back from their original positions near the trap, Liam and the twins were still only about 15 feet away, ahead of her and to either side of her, respectively. She was glad that she could likely outmaneuver them and flee if needed since none of them specialized in Agility like her, but it wasn’t a defensible position. Not to mention, three against two weren’t great odds. If they fought, it would likely be a fight of attrition, so the patient one would have to go first since his endurance was the highest. Then probably Liam if she could manage it because he could do the most damage. Then again, taking out the high resilience fighter second was also an option so that Liam couldn't harry her while she was distracted. She communicated the thoughts to Silas as she speculated, but she mostly hoped she wouldn't have to fight at all. She knew that access to Bond Abilities and a healing skill evened the playing field somewhat, but it would be a messy battle she would rather avoid.

There were few things that cultivators respected more than power. So, rather unintuitively, sometimes the best way for a cultivator to prevent a fight was to act like they were ready to start one, and wholly confident that they could win it.

“Off on the wrong foot? That’s a bit of an understatement, don’t you think?” Samantha quipped, lifting a brow in response to his words and tightening her grip on her spear. The intimidating pressure of her aura had lessened as the immediate danger passed, so she did her best to compensate with bravado. “It looked to me as though you three were ready to team up to gut me until I released my killing intent. Perhaps cultivators are not quite as honorable as I originally imagined them before I began my quest.”

The twin that her Inspect skill had labeled as patient and calculating spoke up then, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. He had the look of a young scholar, perhaps around the age of 20. His slight, toned build was reminiscent of a long-distance courier. The handsome features of his face made him appear kind, but there was the unmistakable glint of ruthless pragmatism in his eyes. Samantha got the sense that he was unafraid to play the fool or the supplicant to get his way.

“A misunderstanding! I confess, we three are part of House Braxand, the primary providers of Spirit Beast Bonds in Yivesh. Surely, you know of our family?”

Samantha’s heart dropped at the words, but she refused to let her reaction be reflected in her expression. “Yes, your family acquires and guards the secrets to bonding with various local Spirit Beasts. You have a wide selection of them that you rear to sell to families that don’t already have an ancestral Spirit Beast lineage, and you take great pride in having some method to determine the requirements to activate the bonding sequence.”

“I’m pleased, you’re familiar with our trade!” he said, nodding his head along with her words. “As you have aptly observed, we three are mere Low Coppers, not yet powerful enough to bond with any beast worthwhile and forge names for ourselves in combat. We also lack the ability of some of our cousins to excel in the shop fronts making trades, thus we’ve been given the task to be useful and acquire new Spirit Beasts for our House to investigate. While new finds are uncommon, such an achievement would see us all awarded with accolades and resources to catapult our individual prowess far beyond our current limits.”

With Prey’s Perception, Samantha could see the other twin beginning to inch subtly towards where her blind spot would have been if she lacked extended senses. She noted that he seemed to be the total opposite from his brother, his rugged features, crooked nose, stocky build, and plethora of scars giving him the appearance of a true brawler. She didn’t like where this was going.

The scholarly twin continued speaking, oblivious to her observations, “Unfortunately, with the dead season nearly upon us our trapping efforts have been mostly unsuccessful, and we’ve only been able to gather bundles of herbs thus far. So, to have finally captured a new Spirit Beast to study--and an elusive Lunar Hare at that—we were elated! This discovery would be the thing made a significant difference to our standing in the family, after all. When you appeared from the brush and freed the Hare, we believed you a thief come to steal away our prize. Alas, once you declared yourself a fellow cultivator and said that the Beast was your bond, we realized the error we made.”

Now that they had declared their noble family affiliations, Samantha had to move forward a bit more cautiously. She had forgone the chance to name her own house in response to theirs, wanting to spare her family from any retribution if things go poorly, which in turn meant that they would assume she was an insignificant nobody with no backing. The Braxton’s were incredibly wealthy and had a lot of political pull, so this would shift the power dynamics of their conversation considerably. She could at least continue talking with them as equals because they were still of lower cultivation rank than her, but just barely.

She kept her expression hard and her tone slightly haughty, “You mean, once I made it clear that I was stronger than the three of you? Once you decided that the cost of a fight between us wouldn’t be worth the reward?” Samantha tried to emphasize the fact that she wouldn’t let them get away completely unscathed if they tried anything, but it didn’t seem to have any notable effect on the man.

He had the gall to simply shrug, explaining, “Such is the way of cultivators.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be willing to give us your bond, would you?” Liam cut in, the smirk never leaving his face. “Our family would richly compensate you for the inconvenience, of course. Sure, breaking your contract with him would cost you cultivation progress, but the Braxand’s would give you enough spirit pearls to recoup your losses and more! It’s more than a fair deal.”

Samantha, now freed from her initial panicked state of mind, was able to take a moment to look closer at him. Liam was tall, broad in the shoulders, and seemed to be in his early 30’s. His face was rather plain, and he had no distinguishing marks other than a singular streak of gray near his left ear that marred the uniformity of his black hair. Inspect had told her that his cultivation base was crippled, but he still gave off a relatively potent aura that made her uneasy.

As she listened to his proposal, the silent twin had settled behind her and to the left, his muscles tensing nearly imperceptibly as he eyed her. Samantha sent a mental message to Silas to prepare for things to get ugly. She flexed her foot to check the state of her ankle and was happy that no pain remained from earlier. At least a full minute must have passed for Flawless Regeneration to finish its work.

“It does sound quite generous, but what if I’m too attached to him to give him up?” Samantha inquired nonchalantly, shifting her grip on her spear. “I’d possibly be willing to share the requirements with you, for the right price?”

The scarred twin interjected this time, a somewhat predatory smile spreading across his face as he explained, “I’m afraid that won’t do. Our family has stringent constraints for adding a previously unknown Spirit Beast to our roster. If the Lunar Hare doesn’t come along with the information to do extensive testing in-house, it will be discounted as unprovable and unrepeatable. This isn’t common knowledge, but there’s surprisingly more than one way to bond one type of Spirit Beast. For instance, someone may discover a bonding ritual during certain times of day, using unique ingredients, or in special locations that the prompts don’t explicitly list after the fact. It can even vary based on the gender of the bond and the cultivator! In short, how you bonded with it will likely not work for everyone, and it takes significant experimentation to nail down a bonding strategy that consistently will, which is what our family specializes in.”

Samantha sighed, bracing herself for the inevitable, “Let’s quit dancing around the real problem. Why can I not just sell you the information, and you get a different Lunar Hare to bring back with you? I’d think you’d need at least two to breed them anyway.”

His expression soured at her response, but before he could speak, his scholarly twin responded in his stead, “Lunar hares are notoriously difficult to find and even harder to catch. However, with one already in our possession, all we’d need to do is wait until it is in heat and then follow its progress to locate others. Without it, the expenses for a hunting expedition are not worth it, especially for a species that may not even sell well. That’s not to say that your bond isn’t valuable, of course!” He paused, and his voice darkened ominously as he spoke the last sentences, all previous pretense of servility departing from his demeanor. “Knowledge itself can be priceless, don’t you think? Especially when it is so unusually in easy reach. So, will you take the deal?”

“I think you already know the answer.” she responded.

For a half second, all in the forest seemed to go quiet. No birdsong echoed through the branches, and no leaves crunched underfoot. The air stilled with anticipation as every combatant looked upon the other with growing contempt, before a single drop of rain fell from the heavens and broke the spell. As the liquid kissed the earth, the three sprung towards her in unison, and the battle was joined.

Samantha dodged a whirlwind of slashing steel, ducking her body under the straight blades of their swords and leaving not more than mere centimeters between. She jumped back, her advanced Agility allowing her to thrust her crude spear forward with blurring speed, scoring some superficial cuts on whatever opponent happened to be closest to her at the time.

As she made space on the battlefield, she navigated to areas where trees would prevent them from surrounding her. This also somewhat limited the range of attacks that she could make with her own weapon, but she considered it a worthwhile exchange. The three chased down and hounded her at every opportunity, managing to make their own cuts on her body as she misjudged distances or lost track of the path of a strike, but it wasn’t enough to force her to activate her healing yet. It was when the brawler managed to land a punch of all things that she feared the fight would take a turn for the worse. That’s when Silas activated “Thump”.

A comet of brown fur shot upwards towards the scholarly twin’s head and slammed into his jaw. A shockwave of force rippled through his face, blood spraying liberally from busted lips and a partially severed tongue, as he stumbled back and howled. The two other brothers were stunned momentarily by the sounds and the unexpected injury, so she took the chance to make sure he was out of the fight for good. Activating Swift for 2 qi points/second, she jumped between the incoming slashes and committed to a wide crescent swing. The tip of the boar’s tusk glided effortlessly across the twin's stomach as she partially disemboweled him, his hands clutching desperately at exposed organs as he fell to the ground.

A scream of murderous rage erupted from behind her, and the other twin threw his straight sword at her aiming for center mass while she was still slightly off balance from the swing. Thankfully, with the added traction that Swift bestowed to her, she only needed to utilize the tips of her toes to avoid a fatal blow. Still, the sword managed to cut deep into her side, and she activated Flawless Regeneration even as she felt a portion of the damage be shared with Silas. She had 6 qi points left.

The remaining twin rushed her like a rabid dog, his temper getting the best of him as he forsook the efficiency of proper martial arts form for the brutality of a brawler’s fist fighting. A red haze seemed to be coming from his body when he moved, and when he punched a rock to smithereens, she confirmed to herself that he must be using a qi art to enhance his stats. In tandem with Liam, they gave her no other chances to build space between them again, and she found herself victimized by glancing blows that broke bone or opened flesh. She put 3 more points into Flawless Regeneration to withstand the onslaught, not wanting to risk emptying her qi pool relying on Swift to get her out of the situation when she didn’t know how long his ability lasted.

“Hang on!” Silas called out to her in a panic, “I found their herb stash!”

Samantha didn’t have the mental bandwidth to try and decipher how that would help, so she ignored it and kept focusing on not dying. It was when foreign healing energy started coming to her from Silas that she had a suspicion of what was going on.

“They have a bunch of healing herbs! I’ll keep eating until my attack recharges!”

Normally, it was unsafe to eat any sort of unprocessed alchemical herb. Nearly every plant she knew of came with positive and negative effects in its unrefined condition and eating it raw would give the consumer both. Refining the herb removed the bad effects so that the person only got the positives, but the medicinal aspects still built up a general toxicity in the blood. In other words, there’s a limit to how many medicines and elixirs someone can take at once before the medicinal toxicity kills them. For a creature like Silas, however, an herbivore that almost exclusively eats rare, unrefined herbs, and has unique resistances to counteract the building toxicities… this was less of a concern. He could feast on mountains of healing herbs, sharing the healing effects with her through their bond, and offset any negative effects naturally just because of his species.

Gritting her teeth, she started to trade blows with her enemies, trusting that Silas’s gluttonous nature would prevail over the damage alongside her Flawless Regeneration. She cried out and shouted with every wound she received, but she made them pay for every successful hit as well.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably less than a minute in reality, the red haze blessedly faded away from the raging berserker. He notably slowed as his body normalized, his punches and kicks losing nearly all the force behind them, and his breathing becoming ragged. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, she took the opening and put 2 points into Swift to land a crippling blow on her in-fighting tormentor. He remained relatively undamaged up until this point due to his high resilience, so she knew that to significantly hinder him, she’d need to aim for critically weak points on the human body. Thus, she went for the knees. Too fatigued to dodge her attacks, two extremely fast jabs saw the tendons and ligaments securing his kneecaps sliced away, and he screamed a curse as he fell behind her and Liam’s still rapid exchanges.

By now, she was in bad shape and only had 1 qi remaining. She had several broken ribs, one of her eyes were swollen shut, and she was covered head to toe in cuts varying in severity. Every swing of her spear caused fresh pain to lance through her body, and her movements felt more unresponsive than normal with the rain turning the floor beneath her feet to mud. She could only speculate that without splitting the damage with Silas and him doing his best to heal her from afar, she would have died halfway through the fight when she started getting hit with the twin’s red haze ability. Encouragingly, Liam wasn’t in top condition either.

He was breathing heavily and drenched in sweat and blood—his and hers. They broke apart from their latest rally and glared at each other, Liam spitting at her feet. “I will make you regret this, wretch. You will suffer for the pain you have caused me and my brothers.”

Samantha spit back, signing him a rude gesture with her off hand. “You’re the ones who started it, so you can’t complain about the results!”

They rushed forward to clash again, on more equal footing now that the combat only involved the two of them. Neither was able to get a clean strike on the other, that is, until Liam kicked a glob of mud into her eyes. With her primary sense stunted, Samantha jumped back to avoid the strike that she knew must be coming… and slammed directly into the trunk of a tree that she had forgotten was behind her. Dang, he got her.

Samantha preemptively funneled her last qi point into Flawless Regeneration and curled in on herself slightly, trying to protect her vitals. She felt cold metal spear through her gut and pin her to the tree at the same time as she heard the delightful sound of a supersonic slap and the snapping of bone. Not waiting for her vision to clear or to confirm the results of Silas’s sneak attack, she ripped the sword free of her body with the strength of desperate adrenaline. It didn’t hurt as she removed it, and she couldn’t tell if that was a really bad sign or not.

Focusing the healing energies around the newest wound, since it was the most serious, Samantha wiped her eyes and scanned the area for Liam. When she finally caught sight of him, it was of his backside as he turned tail and fled. She noted with grim satisfaction that his right leg was bent at an impossible angle as he limped away, Silas’s kick having shattered the bone.

She gathered her bond in her arms, not wanting him to be preyed on while she was away and pursued her fleeing foe. Her gut wound discouraged fast movement, but she was still gaining ground on the cultivator with a busted leg. She observed him pausing his flight to drag his crippled brother towards the scholarly one, now unconscious or dead in a pool of his own blood, and then kneeling between both of them. Why had he suddenly stopped? A foreboding feeling overcame her and she sped up to try and catch them.

As she neared, a white pillar of light stretched up into the sky that was centered around a brightly shining Liam. Sensing that things would get much worse for her if she let him complete whatever art or talisman he was activating, she took a page from the brawler’s book and chucked the straight sword in their direction with all of her strength. Before the weapon reached its target, however, a flash as bright as the sun lit up the forest and blinded her.

When the spots in her vision vanished, she saw that all three of the brothers had as well. There was no trace of the trio, other than the pool of blood that still coated the earth. The sword was nestled harmlessly into the dirt nearby the red stain.

“Well… shoot. I just know that’s going to come back to bite me later, somehow.”