While Marcus was catching up with his mother, the army that had come with him had finished exterminating the Rakshnurians that had been used to make time for the escaping ones. Captain Raven and his troops didn’t know that they had done this, so they were closing in to the three main zones where he thought that the women could’ve been.

They visited both the market and the administrative house of the town before they got to the church. Being the third and last place where they expected both the women and the female Rakshnurians to be, the troops felt their nerves at the highest point during this whole raid.

They rushed into a room littered with corpses, both human and Rakshnurian now. Right in front of the army, Marcus the boy that had came with them with the hope to save his family, talking loudly with a woman. On the corner of the room was a woman that had just given birth to a Rakshnurian, based on his color.

No other Rakshnurians were on sight, as the loud voices the army had made right before they went in had made the smart one understand that he and his sister were at risk. His younger, newborn brother as well, but he didn’t have a way to save him and keep him quiet, it was a sacrifice he was forced to do.

In a perfect world he’d have stopped everyone from fighting each other, making no one die. But the world he had been living in was brutal and unforgiving, not a nice place for any living being to be born in. Alas he couldn’t do anything to change it, so he pulled his sister and hid her and himself behind some rubble that was nearby.

- Did you kill them?

Asked a man that gave off a similar presence that than the tribe leader of the Rakshnurians, to which the young man that had entered not too long ago answered:

- They attacked me, so I fought back and killed them.

He explained. Easy to understand, but the army still had questions, such as where the other Rakshnurians were, especially the female one. To this Marcus answered that he had seen it and a few others take a lot of babies and made an escape out of the village, but he thought that they’d get killed by the army.

- Damn! We can’t let them get away. Ok, we’ll divide in two. Some take the ones that still live to our encampment to feed them enough, so they live. The rest come with me; we are going to chase for them! We can’t let them live inside of the Munny Kingdom! Nothing else we should know, and you aren’t telling us?

Marcus thought about the Rakshnurian with which he had identified with and about whether or not to inform the army about its existence, just short enough so that the army wouldn’t doubt him.

- No, nothing that I can think of.

The still unnamed Rakshnurians hiding on the corner of the room heard and watched this scene, but only one of them actually understood what had happened. That man had just saved them; he’d make sure to repay him if he ever had the chance to.

After evacuating the women from the church, all the way outside the village, Raven finished the process of this type of mission. If the town was unsalvageable or it wasn’t easy to repopulate, he’d have to burn it down to make sure that no monster or anything dangerous settles inside. Therefore, he prepared a bow and arrow for Marcus, giving him the honors of finishing his town for good.

Marcus knew that the two young Rakshnurians were still inside, but he had already given them the option to survive and now they were on their own. He was still a human and resented their species for taking away his sister. Maybe in the future their kinds could live together, but by what he’d been told it was as likely as finding a needle in a haystack – over a hundred times in the first try, one after the other. Still, there was a chance.

When the people evacuated the village, the sister wanted to go out and play, but the smarter boy stopped her to be careful if there was any of those uniformed men still inside the village checking for Rakshnurians like them. But this was a mistake, he realized, as the smell of burning wood filled his nose and the temperature started to rise.

- Yu, follow!

The male shouted at his sister. He had never shouted before, so she was taken aback and followed his command. As soon as the Rakshnurians left the church they were met with hell. Burning buildings everywhere they could see, and their instincts yelled at them that they were going to die. Through many tight situations where any of the two could’ve died they managed to escape the village, towards something light blue that seemed to be ground and move at the same time.

The army was watching the show from a hill on the other side of the town, near the dryer forest, so they couldn’t see the two small escaping figures because of their relative size and that the smoke difficulted their sight.

The young ones ran towards the moving ground and as they tried to walk over it the fell. It wasn’t ground, it was… something similar to what they had drank in the village! But they kept falling and soon they couldn’t breathe. The older fellow realized that he could move his body to move up and so managed to breathe once more, his sister, on the other hand, had trouble with surviving.

The male didn’t want to lose another family member, even less on the same day, so he tried to rescue her. It wasn’t easy, but after a few attempts he managed to get both his sister and him on the side of the river, barely breathing, but alive, nonetheless.

They still had to run away; the male feared. He didn’t want to die, he wanted to live, to exist, to be able to talk, to think, to listen, to watch. If he died, he wouldn’t be able to do anything like that, he had realized that with the corpses of the women of the village. It was forever.

And so, the brothers adventured through the forest, eating leaves and whatever else they could find. They experienced hunger and thirst like never before, but they lived on. After a few weeks barely surviving they found meat. It was a victim of a predator. The brothers were too hungry to be careful, so they went and ate the meat, enjoying its juiciness and flavor, still quite fresh as the animal had been hunted today and the predator had already taken everything it wanted.

Exploring the forest a bit more, they found some sort of animal burrow. The feet of the Rakshnurians, although tough, weren’t quite so on newborns, so they were full of cuts and hurt a lot. Not as much as their thirst and hunger made them feel, but as they had satiated those needs, they were starting to feel them more.

So, they decided to keep watch for a while, trying to see what sort of animal lived there, but after a full eight hours of waiting the sister got too bored and rushed in. Luckily no animal was inside, it was usually used by bears around the zone to hibernate, which meant that it was quite spacious, but the ground was pretty rough. Still, it was a safe haven for the brothers so they could rest.

And rest they did, they slept for over a day and after that, feeling hungry and mentally sleepy, the sister was controlled by her instincts and managed to catch a bunny that fed the two for the day. The brother, that noticed that his sister hadn’t been in control was now wary of her, because of the risks such uncontrolled actions may have.

After their feed had healed, they decided to keep moving and maybe find someone that could teach them something. If there was something that Petrió had understood during that time it was that organization and knowledge was very useful. He had observed different animals act intelligently and that way captured prey the two of them could only dream of.

And these were the moments when I was as free as I could. Free from duties, expectations and beliefs. I wouldn’t want to go back to being an uncultured, dumb kid, but I must admit that these months were some of the bests of my life. But now back onto that time, the second time we were on death’s doors.

When the two were about a year old, but about the size of four-year old children, being the sister the tallest, they found something different. It was meat, but there was wood impaled in it and something else weird was nearby as well. But no meat was worth giving up, so the two of them went to eat, munching on the meat when a sudden light blinded them, and they felt being lifted from the floor. They had been captured.