They were well past noon when their calm little stroll came to an end. There was movement in the woods ahead. Leaves rustling like a pack of wolves, but she knew that stench. At four days out she was expecting another pack of wolves but her Perception was telling her something different. There was the smell of a lot of men, and possibly women, who chose not to wash. She stopped and opened her bag to get out her little side project she’d been working on at nights. Alera stared at her curiously as she pulled out thick balls of various sizes and proceeded to stuff the larger ones down her dogs’ ears. By the time she moved to Koda she began explaining. “There’s bandits ahead. When we reach them I want you to scream. If it affects us in any way stop and I move to plan B. Otherwise just keep screaming and we’ll do the rest.” Alera nodded. Cassidy finished stuffing her ears last.

They kept walking, tension growing with every step before a man and a woman stepped out of the woods and they froze. The cloth was working well enough, Cassidy had to rely on her sight and saw plenty of the bushes still as the men behind them got into position. She held the stilling leaves like a map in her head, so she’d know where to shoot. Her footsteps mirrored Alera’s as they approached the man and woman.

The strangers spoke but Cassidy was once again deaf to them. This time literally. All she saw was drawn weapons next to rough and ratty clothes. Alera looked back to her before responding. It looked like the leading man laughed. He was Tier 3, all in red. The woman Tier 2. No way to tell who was in the woods. Alera stepped forward and seemed to be pleading. Cassidy had to admit that might work for Alera; it was hard to tell women like her no. But the man just kept laughing and Alera took a step back. Cassidy stepped forward and got hit by a reverberating pain that shook her body. But she was still standing. She glanced at her dogs. They looked like they were bracing themselves, but they hadn’t run. They looked to her. She gestured to the woods on the left and they ran to clean it up.

It was her turn and she didn’t trust her arrows against a Tier 3’s Resilience. Besides, with Alera's Scream, her hands were shaking too much for even her Skills to save her. She darted forward as the man tried to pick himself up only to fall back in the dust. Her own steps swaying under the pressure from Alera’s scream. Blood began to drip from her nose but she reached the two all the same.

Falling to her knees, somewhat intentionally, she drew her dagger and stabbed it toward the Tier 3 who was lying face down in the dirt. With his Reflexes he began to turn from the assault but she was too close. Her arm kept extending and pierced his throat. There was resistance, as skin merely bent under metal, but she pushed more force through her elbow and his throat burst beneath her dagger. Blood spraying into her eyes. She was wiping at her face as she moved to the woman who tried to crawl away but was slowed by retching. Cassidy’s own body was shaking now and she was losing dexterity. She just threw herself down alongside the bandit, piercing her dagger in the woman’s throat and pulling it down—cutting out the esophagus as well as opening the arties. The woman couldn’t even make a sound. Not that Cassidy would have heard.

Cassidy rolled onto her back, leaning on the corpse and gestured at Alera. If she was this bad, she worried about her dogs. She wasn’t feeling up to killing the rest that hid in the woods and was pretty sure the bandits weren’t up for a fight after being subjected to Alera for so long.

She pulled the cloth from her ears and felt a deep ache in her ears but also heard running in the woods from both sides as whoever confronted them fled. Which was good, because she was pretty sure if they didn’t Alera would be taken out in seconds. Cassidy was not looking forward to sharing that. Instead she headed to look for her dogs and whoever decided to stick around and wait to recover.

The rough branches dug into her sleeves as she pushed them aside, tracking her dogs’ trail. Twigs and leaves embedding themselves into her blood-soaked shirt. She passed several bodies, nearly tripping over them as they walled off the path in places, before she found her babies lying in the dirt, panting. It looked like her cloth balls only slowed down the effects. They flinched when she went to work cleaning out their ears. They were whimpering as they looked at her. Her heart was breaking. She whispered as she called on Animal Husbandry: First Aid. It showed damaged to their eardrums, especially their inner ear. She tried to soothe them with quiet words and calm hands, but they lay whimpering beneath her. Guilt crawled through her as she realized, she never needed her puppies in the first place. They didn’t have to go through this.

Desperate now, she remembered that feeling she got when she called up a Boring Needle. It was here too in this Skill. She pulled and pushed on this 6th sense of a substance, funneling it through First Aid and pointed it towards her dogs’ ears. They quieted beneath her hands. The damage wasn’t healed. Her Skill did tell her that much but she heard that voice ringing out.

~Congratulations! You have gained a Skill in Animal Husbandry: Soothe—Calm the inflammation, calm the pain. Your hands are a cold compress that eases the pain of your Companions.~

She didn’t want to move from them as they lay there, reorienting themselves, but she had to check that the woods were clear. The leaves crunching beneath her boots was more of a feeling than a sound as her ringing ears missed the quieter noises—which is how she missed the man breathing behind a tree. He swung around, sword slicing air, poor balance the only thing that saved her as the blade went wide and she ducked. The damage to his inner ear was much worse and he fell immediately after attempting to take her head. She just stood there, breathing heavily as he rolled around on the ground. The image of that blade cutting the space before her eyes ingraining itself in her mind. She fell to her knees beside him. He got his sword up and began swinging it toward her again but she stabbed her dagger into his wrist. Her Precision was high enough to make it easy, even with the damage to her balance.

He dropped his sword and she pulled out her dagger, changing her grip to stab it down directly into his throat. He made a pathetic attempt to block her, but failed entirely. That was her third kill up close that day and she was painted red as the blood dripped down her shirt and coated her hands. She could feel it drying on her face and clumping her hair together.

The smell of blood mixing with the vertigo from Alera’s scream was terrible. She felt sick, like vomiting, but she had to clear the woods. Some of those bandits had bows and arrows and if any stuck around till they recovered, to follow her party, Alera and Cassidy would have no warning before a bolt in the back took them down. Her only solace was the bandits had been hit a lot harder than she had. It should give her time to find them all before any that lingered got into fighting form.

Cassidy stumbled from the woods to find her dogs sitting guard around Alera. Apparently, Alera was the better option than tracking their owner through the trees. The woman was waiting in the open, like it didn’t make her a brilliant target. Cassidy would have to talk to her about that. In the meantime, Cassidy had cleared the woods. She didn’t count how many there were, but some were Tier 2 which would explain why they were comfortable staying so far from the city.

Cassidy was awfully sticky by this point but her efforts had taken most of the afternoon and they needed to find shelter, not a place to wash—sadly. By this time her balance had recovered enough to stand straight and she walked forward down the path gesturing at Alera to follow. Her voice seemed to have died a little more with every life she had taken. All that mattered now were necessities, like finding a camp away from the bodies. They had an hour left to cover that distance and she wanted to make it as far as possible. Alera took one look at her friend and held her silence. If Cassidy wasn’t taking the time to clean, there must be some urgency and she’d learned not to push her friend, especially when her friend had that look that said there was one goal left in the world. Alera had seen it all too often in training and received a boot to the rear for questioning it.

They’d managed a couple miles before the sun hovered over the horizon and they had to admit night was coming. Cassidy drifted along the edge of the forest as they walked, looking for a good place to curl up for the night. Alera just kept her eyes on the horizon, watching the clouds light up red, then purple, then pink when Cassidy finally called her over. It was the first time Alera heard Cassidy speak since the fight. Or in hindsight, massacre. The bandits never had a chance to injure them, at least from Alera’s perspective. She wasn’t with Cassidy in those woods. She wasn’t the one dodging wild swings and straying arrows. She didn’t hear the voice.

~Congratulations! You Attribute Reflexes has broken its Bottleneck!~

Alera made it to where Cassidy waited, holding back the branches on the overgrown trail to the small clearing. The grass had grown a little tall but that should just make the ground a bit softer when they lay down.

Cassidy still wasn’t in the mood for speaking. She merely passed some bread and jerky to Alera before taking care of her dogs and herself. She fed her shirt to the fire and spread a small handful of water over a cloth before proceeding to scrub her face and hands. Alera helped with the spots she missed. The dogs watched in quietlyas the two women worked in silence to clean the blood from Cassidy but in the end there was too much on her arms to do more than just smear it around. Too much to wipe from her hair. Too much on her boots and jeans to just dab away. She didn’t have enough water to clean them. She wouldn’t sacrifice anymore till she knew a clean source was close and she wasn’t going to burn something as rare as a pair of jeans. Instead, Cassidy put on a long-sleeved shirt, hoping that would cover the smell but there was no hiding from her Perception. So, as she let Alera take first watch, she lay down to the smell of so many deaths surrounding her.

By the time her watch came around she hadn’t been able to gain a minute of sleep, but by now she was use to it. She bid Alera good-night with a touch to her arms and let her dogs stay where they were, around a now Cassidy shaped hole in the grass. She stood at the edge listening to the darkness, wishing she could stand down wind of herself and not remember each moment of the day. It was beginning to blend together with every massacre she committed. The sleeping herd. The bandits outside the Northern City. Sure they had fought back and she’d been wounded but in the end she’d stood, surrounded by dead bleeding into the dirt. That was a lot of death to carry on her hands. She breathed in deep, hoping to find the Stillness and clean air but all she caught was decaying blood and a rise in her tension. She needed to find some peace or risk losing it.

Alera woke to see Cassidy staring off into the hazy woods as the sun rose. She called out and Cassidy turned. A strained smile on Cassidy’s face but she finally spoke a good morning.

They were on the road by the time the sun breached the horizon. Alera wasn’t sure what to say. They were used to quiet but Cassidy was weird and Alera didn’t know what to do, how she could help. She kept glancing at the girl from the corner of her eye, but Cassidy’s face remained flat, eyes on the road. Even her dogs seemed upset. They kept looking up at their owner, as if waiting for some cue or clue to the girl’s distress.

By noon, Alera had had enough. She stepped close to Cassidy who stopped in surprise, and ignored the pungent odor. Alera reached up to poke Cassidy in the cheek only for the bloodied girl to flinch away. Alera just frowned. “What’s wrong?”

There was a pause as the question hit Cassidy. Cassidy just started laughing even as she began to cry into her hands. “Do you know how many we killed yesterday?” Alera stared at her. “Do you know how much blood I have on these hands?” She pulled them away from weeping eyes. “There’s a difference between hunting for food and massacring people in the road.” She barely whispered. Alera’s eyes widened at that. The woman stepped forward to put a hand on Cassidy’s shoulder but the girl just turned away. “I don’t even know how many. I stopped caring after the third one swung his sword at me. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. How can that not matter?!” She yelled the end, but she’d stopped crying.

Alera was speechless. Cassidy was the rock. Cassidy was the one who always knew what needed to get done. Cassidy was the one you could always rely on to get things taken care of. But now Cassidy was the one staring at her wide-eyed, cheeks red in frustration, and wild strands of brown hair blowing in the slight breeze. The world had changed and Alera had been relying on Cassidy to be the one to deal with that change. She shut her mouth in shame. “It wasn’t just you.” She tried. “I’m the one who knocked them down. I shouldn’t have just relied on you take care of everything else, but their bloods on me too.”

Cassidy turned away and rolled up her sleeves, black patches covering them like a malaise. “I don’t think it is.” She didn’t wait for a response, she just moved forward with purpose and Alera had to trot to keep up. Now the smell was all around them and they both travelled under the scent of death.

They’d barely gone on a half mile when they saw figures in the distance. Cassidy cursed under her breath and Alera looked at her in concern, but they walked onward to meet the fellow travelers. As they got closer, Cassidy could see it was another group of knights riding on horses, just like what happened in the North, only their armor was leather, brown striped in red. A few meters out. Cassidy and Alera stopped to meet the once again, larger group. Alera tried to get Cassidy to roll down her sleeves but Cassidy was beyond caring. It wouldn’t help with the smell anyway.

The knights rode up and the lead took of her leather helmet, but none dismounted. Instead their hands hovered near their weapons. The leader glanced at Alera before stopping on Cassidy. The only one armed of the two. “It looks like you’ve had a rough time.”

Cassidy was just staring at the horse’s chest. It was brown, glistening with a light sweat. But she cut Alera off just as the woman tried to speak. “There were bandits. You’ll find what remains about half a day's ride up the road.

The horses’ hooves danced at this, reacting to their riders’ tension. The woman spoke again, eyeing Cassidy from up atop her horse. “There’s a stream a half hour walk through the woods. You can clean up there while we check out these bandits.”

Alera cut in this time with her warm smile. “Thank you. We’ll see you later.” She reached for Cassidy but the girl just walked past her to enter the woods and get this stench off.