Chapter 17

“There he is, that skinny guy next to Cheryl, that's him.” Yet another familiar voice. Jack sighed despondently. He looked up and sure enough there was warhammer guy approaching him accompanied by several other hunters, unfortunately another familiar face also accompanied him, Barry.

They walk up to the table and glare down menacingly at Jack and his associates, He takes a good look at them. They were the very definition of goons straight from a movie, any movie, take your pick, all stood flanking Barry who was clearly their leader. Jack was tempted to wave a hand in front of their hostile but somehow vacant glaring faces to see if he’d get a reaction. He nudges Cheryl.

“Er Cheryl, I think they want something from you.” Cheryl looks up at Barry with an especially bored unimpressed face.

“What do you want, Barry?”

“Him.” He points obnoxiously at Jack, his finger a few centimetres from Jack's face. “He assaulted my friend here.” He tilted his head in the direction of warhammer guy who smirks and folds his arms over his chest. Cheryl sighs heavily and turns slightly to Jack.

“Is that true Jack? Did you assault Mr.Lant here?” She asks him.

Jack doesn’t answer straight away, he doesn’t really want to say the other guy started it, like a child. From long experience of getting into arguments on playgrounds there probably wasn’t anything he could say that would satisfy anyone, let alone his need to justify his actions so he simply looked at Barry and spoke.

“I slipped.” Jack said.

Barry's eyes widened for a second. “You - you lying little fuck!” He spluttered.

Cheryl meanwhile looks at Jack closely for a second before reaching out with both hands and grabbing his face, she puts her thumbs on either side of his nose. Before Jack can say ‘what are you doing to my face Cheryl?’ She presses and twists, there's a click and sharp pain radiates through his nose.

“Argh! Shit!” He hunches over the table grasping his nose.

“That must have been some slip you had Jack, did you slip onto Mr.Lant’s right fist by any chance?” Cheryl asks, looking at warhammer guy and down at his bruised fist crossed over his chest. Warhammer looks uncomfortable and tries to hide his hands. Cheryl looks back to Barry, he looks equally uncomfortable for a second but rallies and puts his sneering scowling face back on.

“What the fuck does it matter? He insulted my friend and I expect recompense.” He growled a little at the end.

Despite the pain he was feeling and with his head still resting on the table Jack can’t help himself and tags back into the conversation. “Wow, you must really care about him, what a beautiful friendship.” He said in a muffled nasally voice. Everyone sitting at the table and even one of the goons snigger.

Barry’s eyes narrow on Jack and he glares at him before he frowns.

“Wait a second, I know you! You're that sparker from before, you remember Stace? The skinny little sparker shit from the alley.” He looks at Stacey who frowns.

“Yes Barry I remember.” Replies Stacey with an eye roll.

“Huh, thought we established you weren’t welcome here? Huh sparker?” He smirks at Jack.

Jack lifts his head off the table. “Erm no, I think all we established that night was that you're a complete prick. Then everyone left.” He smiles lightly and hears Rachael let out a snort in amusement.

Barry's face goes red and he lets out a snarl. He leans forward menacingly and grabs Jack by the front of his flak jacket, Jack feels himself getting pulled out of his seat and dragged across the table. He hears everyone sitting at the table objecting before he lands in a heap at Barry's feet, Barry plants a foot on Jack's back, Jack tries to move it and get up but it's like trying to move a car off him, no budge. Barry leans down and speaks.

“You’re nothing, just a weak fucking sparker with no power, you’re gonna die soon. If something doesn’t come along and eat you I’ll be there to make your life miserable.” He hisses angrily.

“Urgh, I don’t know what I’ve done to earn such a commitment, this is all so sudden, urgh, I don’t think I’m ready for all this.” Jack groaned from the floor.

“That's enough Barry, back off now.” Cheryl calmly says and stands up.

“Ha! Or what? You think you can bring me up on disciplinary charges again, my dad will just step in like last time.” Barry smiles smugly. But he takes his foot off Jack’s back and Jack climbs to his feet, Jack lets out a wheeze and stretches painfully.

“Ouch, huh? You're gonna go to your daddy? Is your mummy busy?” He said casually. Everyone laughed but this was clearly the wrong thing to say because Barry’s face suddenly went a deep shade of red, he balled up his fist and took a swing at Jack. Jack, having seen this barely has enough time to flinch before Cheryl suddenly intercedes. She punches Barry in the chest and then pushes him over onto the floor while he gasps for breath and struggles to breath.

She crouched down next to him and he tried to crawl away from her but she grabbed his leg and pulled him back towards her with one hand. By now their table had gained several onlookers but one glance from Cheryl and everyone looked away and went about their own business.

“Where ya goin Barry? You were so eager before, thought you wanted recompense. Changed your mind?” Cheryl tightened her grip on his leg and Barry winced in pain gritting his teeth.

“Fuck you bitch - argh!” He tries to speak but grimaces in pain again as she tightens her grip further. “Gah! Ok ok! Stop just stop!” He bangs his hand down on the floor. “No recompense needed! Just an honest mistake!” Cheryl immediately lets go and stands up, wiping her hand on her top. Barry just lays there, panting deeply, his face pale. Two of his goons try to help him to his feet but he brushes them off. “I’ll remember this.” He hisses at them.

“Hmm? Remember what Barry? Is everything alright here?” A deep male voice sounds and everyone looks around, there approaching the table is none other than Adrian Welts himself with several suits tagging along behind him.

“Gah! Er no no! I mean yes! Ev…ev….everythings fine here sir!” Barry stammered, the sneering arrogance was all gone, Cheryl had beaten it out of him and what little remained had been purged by Director Welt’s very presence. In its place was a stuttering little boy. Jack might have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t enjoying witnessing it so much. Barry’s goons slowly melt away until he’s left all by himself, the director continues to stare at him blandly before Barry edges to the side and shuffles off getting quicker and quicker. The director just watches him and lets him go without a word, not even acknowledging what Barry said. When Barry finally makes it to the guild hall doors and exits he turns to the table with a smile.

“Ah Cheryl, I’ve been looking for you, we’ve got some follow up work from the debacle with the Dire Woods breakout. I need your input.” He smiles at her.

“Yes sir, I’ll come now.” She answers formally and prepares to go with him. Before they leave the director turns to Jack who leans on the booth bench next to Nate.

“You’re Jack Errant, yes? The new hunter? And a lightning cultivator too?” He asks.

“Er yes to all three.” He replies cautiously. Cheryl momentarily makes a disapproving face at Jack for his glibness. Welts just chuckles good naturedly.

“Ha ha, hmm, it's been a while since we had a lightning element here, and you’ve lasted much longer than the other two combined. Already racked up three decent hunts and fulfilled your monthly job quota in your first week, pretty impressive for a lightning cultivator.” He grins at Jack. “Anyway I won’t take up any more of your time, I’m sure you’re all wanting to celebrate your successful hunts from today, so don’t let me stop you. Have fun, oh Zack, Rachael I’ll see you both at home tomorrow, your mother’s making lasagne.” With that he swept off with Cheryl and the suits following him.

Everyone at the table turns and stares at the two siblings, Rachael shuffles in her seat and looks annoyed, Zack seems embarrassed and scratches his head.

“The big man’s your dad?” Nate blurts out. Rachael frowns even further but doesn’t speak, instead crossing her arms and sliding down in her seat.

“Er hey, has anyone ordered yet? We gonna eat?” Zack tries to change the subject.

“Nope, I was too busy getting manhandled, I am a bit peckish though.” Jack says, before sitting down again and resuming his perusal through the menu. The others continue to chat and Jack eventually finds something he wants to eat, ‘mystery monster ragout’, a type of stew with slow cooked meat from an unknown monster served with roast potatoes and vegetables, apparently part of the fun was to guess what the monster was from the taste. He selects it and pays, it's a little pricey at ninety pounds but he feels like splurging today. Eventually it arrives about the same time as everybody else's orders, just as the waitress was arriving with their food however, she slips and very nearly spills their food everywhere. She catches herself at the last second and puts the platter of food on their table, Jack looks at where she slipped and sees a small puddle of red liquid with a slip mark through it. The liquid seems to originate from underneath their table, he looks underneath it and sees that the trail of red liquid is leaking from the bag of Bloodletter wolf heads that he’d tossed underneath the table and forgotten about. Oops.

The waitress apologises with a red face about nearly dropping their food and serves them all before she quickly walks away, slipping through the same spot and catching herself again. Jack rummaged around beneath the table, trying to stop the leak before noticing a small tear in it. Instead he simply gets out a new sack from the roll in his harvesting kit and puts the entire bloody mess inside it. While he is doing this the entire table watches him, Zack and Rachael smirk while Stacey and Nate look confused.

“Whatcha got in the sack Jack? Heh rhyming.” Nate asked.

“Heads.” Jack simply replied.

“Huh?”

“Bloodletter wolf heads.” Jack expanded.

“What? Their whole heads, really?” Nate asked, surprised.

“Yup, seemed easier than prying out the fangs or chopping off jawbones, maybe I can work out a deal with the taxidermist in the plaza.” Jack mused.

“Yeah, we saw him do it too.” Rachael chimed in.

“Mm, I told him it's a really useful skill and he could go on high ranked hunts but he said he doesn’t want to.” Zack said.

“Can we see one Jack?” Stacey asked.

Jack obliged and pulled one out of the sack, it was a mess of sticky matted black fur, its mouth hung open grotesquely and a long pink tongue lolled out.

“Whoa.” Stacey looked at it in fascination.

“Nice!” Nate looked delighted.

“You know, Zack’s right, you could make a whole lot of money if you can do that so easily.” Stacey said to him. “Usually it takes several hunters or cultivators of the same element working together to attune an entire body part of a monster, and even then they sometimes mess up and the whole thing looks like a melted mess.”

Jack frowned for a moment before answering. “So, wait a moment, if obtaining entire monster body parts is so difficult, and obtaining whole corpses is impossible, then what the hell do the taxidermists actually do?”

“Whole body parts still come in that they can work with and they sell really well, arms, legs, tentacles and the like, heads are rare though. But when they want a full monster they’ll basically get parts from multiple monsters of the same species, and, well, sew them together.” Stacey explained, hesitating at the last part. Jack gave her a ‘are you serious look’.

“Like Frankenstein's monster!” Nate and Rachael said at the same time then laughed at each other. Jack laughed too before grabbing a handful of napkins from the table and cleaning up the blood smears from the floor and throwing them in a nearby bin.

“I think the venom from the wolf fangs mixed with their blood, it was still very er, drippy.” Jack said as he sat down and finally dug into his food. It was delicious, though he had no clue what monster the meat was from. Eventually they finished eating and decided to go to the plaza. It was late and well after closing time but apparently due to the priority hunts it would be open all night in order to accept loot drop offs from returning hunters.

They left the guild hall together and walked over to the med vendor room, steady flows of people were entering and leaving the room, going in and out. They entered the med vendor room and walked through into the hunter’s plaza. It was a little dim with many shops closed but a few of the shops were still open with hunters gathered around them, many holding various bags of loot they wanted to sell. Zack pointed to a shop past the fountain at the edge of the semi circle of shops on the ground floor, he and Rachael walked over with their small bags of wolf teeth and jawbones. Nate and Stacey found a place to sell their Centasaurian chitin plates at an armourer’s shop, Jack however decided to try his luck and see if the taxidermist on the upper floor was open.

Jack slowly walked up the curving stairs with his rustling black bag of Bloodletter wolf heads, he surveyed the lower floor and watched the hunters milling around selling their loot and listening to the haggling going on. Once he reached the upper floor he looked to the other end and saw that the only shop open on the floor was the taxidermist, with all other shops closed up and dark. He walked along the upper floor, his hand on the railing, looking down at the lower floor. After a minute he finally got to the taxidermist. It only had one other hunter in there, they were trying to sell what was apparently a bucket of slime.

“Oh c’mon! This is an entire gallon of slime! It's an entire monster corpse, you said you would pay a massive bounty for an entire intact monster corpse.” The hunter tried to reason with the shopkeep.

“That's hardly what I’d call intact, it's in a bucket, this is a taxidermist, not a - not a - a slime moulding shop or whatever we’d need to be to turn that thing into something recognisable.” The shopkeeper argued back and pointed disdainfully at the bucket.

“Pff, whatever. No imagination, that's your problem! I’m outta here!” The hunter turned and stomped out of the shop, lugging his large bucket of highly corrosive sloshing slime leftovers.

Jack stepped aside and gave him a wide berth. When the irate hunter had left he stepped into the shop and approached the front desk with the shopkeep cautiously watching him approach. It was an older grey haired man wearing a white shirt with a grey apron and wore thick round spectacles. Jack acknowledged him with a smile and nod before lifting his bag and carefully placing it on the table.

“Hiya, um I got some body parts to sell.” Jack said politely.

“Alright sir, might I open the bag to see? Also is it dangerous in any way? Venomous, corrosive, sharp and the like?” The shopkeep asked, still cautious.

“Hmm, the teeth are definitely sharp, and they still have some venom on them I think, judging by how the blood hasn’t clotted or coagulated or whatever.” Jack explained.

The shopkeeper's eyes widened for a moment. “Teeth? Are you - are you saying you have a monster head in here?”

“Four actually, Bloodletter wolves. My friends were all busy prying out the teeth or hacking away at jawbones and I thought, huh, that looks a little laborious, so I just chopped off the heads and then attuned the whole thing.” Jack explained casually.

The shopkeep looked like he was about to die of excitement and quickly ducked behind the counter and emerged whilst frantically pulling on some thick looking gloves. “Can I open the bag sir?” He asked, the older guy somehow managing to look like a child about to open his presents on Christmas morning. Jack nodded with a bemused smile. The shopkeeper fumbled with the bag for a second before opening it and freeing the first head which splatted into the desk in all its gory glory. Jack grimaced a little, it looked terrible, even worse than before, the fur was matted with blood, the wolf had a grotesque expression on its face, the blood was making a puddle on the desk, definitely not showroom ready.

On the other hand however, the shopkeeper looked absolutely delighted. He let out a little giggling laugh and clapped his gloved hands together. He quickly dragged out the rest of the heads from the bag and onto the front desk. There they sat, all four of them in a line still steadily dripping some blood forming a small puddle on the desk, leaking down onto the floor a little. The shopkeeper turned to Jack.

“You did this? How? Which team are you a part of? Attuning monster heads is incredibly difficult, you know, almost impossible. These heads are actually fully intact, any heads I receive are usually too damaged or too warped to be of use.” The shopkeep babbled.

“Uh, I’m not a part of any team, and I don’t know how I did it, I just did it. Anyway, why is it so difficult to attune heads? Some people told me taxidermists still get monster body parts sold to them.” Jack asked.

“Body parts yes, heads no. It's relatively easy to attune a piece of a monster like a horn, a fang, fur, scales, or blood or something because that's just one thing with a single composition. But it gets much harder when you try to attune an entire body part like a leg or something because it’s made up of several different things like skin, muscles, blood, bones and other things, each component requires a different level of attunement and so needs multiple people at the same time attuning it. That needs a certain level of competence and coordination in attuning which is rare, it's called cooperative attuning. But heads, well, they are incredibly difficult, with the most complicated makeup out of all body parts due to the brain, the eyes and other parts of the central nervous system. I think hunter teams have tried to simply attune the heads while ignoring the brain but for some reason that never works.” The shopkeep waffles on and Jack nods dumbly trying to take in as much as he can. “But still though, you said you did this by yourself? Not that I'm doubting you because I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this, but how exactly?” He asked, peering intently at Jack.

“Um, it might have something to do with me being a lighting cultivator. For some reason attuning seems to come easy to me.” Jack said with a shrug.

The scrutiny from the shopkeeper intensifies for a moment before he looks back down at the heads and picks one up, he looks at it lovingly and Jack almost wonders if he should leave the two of them alone.

“Can I ask, what rank are you at the moment?”

“Rank G. Bottom of the pile.” Jack replies.

“Hmm, would you be willing to undertake some exclusive hunts for me, some higher ranked better paid hunts perhaps?” The shopkeeper asks. Jack frowned, Zack had warned him about this. On the outside, higher ranked and better paid sounded good, but that would lead to more attention, which would inevitably lead to him being outed as a successful lighting cultivator which would lead to people clamouring for him to share his methods, and if he caved and told people how to cultivate the lighting element, that would then lead to all sorts of fucked up shit. He realised he was probably skirting the line between anonymity and notoriety even now with his actions but he still felt that keeping this secret for as long as possible was for the best. With that in mind he answered the excited shopkeep.

“I don’t know about high ranked hunts, but I can do any G and F ranks you want until I rank up.” Jack answered cautiously.

Far from being disappointed as Jack had been expecting, the Shopkeep looked rather happy. “Excellent! Brilliant! I have a few hunts in mind already, oh this is so exciting!” He was practically bouncing in place.

“Uh huh, well here's my licence and details, just text me when you have a job you want me to take.” Jack handed him his licence and the Shopkeep noted down Jack’s contact information in a small notepad from his apron pocket. “So then, how much for the heads?” Jack asked.

The shopkeeper picked up each head and did a thorough examination. “Hmm, each head is intact, no disfiguration and no repair work needed. I know plenty of people and collectors who would pay handsomely for these. How about five fifty for each?”

Jack had no idea if that was a good price or not but the shopkeep seemed like an honest guy, more of a craftsman than a merchant. Plus he knew if he tried to haggle he’d probably look like an idiot, in any case if he accepted the deal he’d be walking out of the room two thousand two hundred pounds richer which made him slightly dizzy just thinking about it. And so with all that in consideration Jack made up his mind. “Deal.”

“Excellent! I’ll transfer the funds to your hunters account. A genuine pleasure doing business with you uh Mr Errant.” He looks down at Jack's licence for a moment.

“It's just Jack, and the pleasure was mine. Remember to text when you have a job in mind you want me to take Mr er.” Jack said as he took back his licence and trailed off, preparing to leave.

“It's just Steven.” The shopkeeper replied happily beaming down at the wolf heads.

Jack nodded. “Ok, thank you Steven, I’ll see you next time then.” He waved and exited the shop leaving an enraptured Steven picking up a ragged looking Bloodletter wolf head.

With that done he decided that was enough excitement for one day, one harvesting job and one unexpected hunt was enough for him. All in all it had been a very profitable day and if one disregarded all the death and mayhem it had been a not so terrible day too. Jack made his way downstairs and with a light step walked across the plaza, through the doors and headed back to his flat for some well needed rest.

What he didn’t see however was Cheryl and director Welts standing near the shops observing the sales and interactions of the various hunters. Cheryl noticed Jack walking down the stairs from the taxidermist side now without the black sack she’d seen him with earlier, she nudged the director and he turned to look as well. They both watched Jack exit the plaza before looking up at the lit area surrounding the taxidermist that was just visible from the ground level of the plaza. Once Jack was gone they nodded to each other before walking up the stairs and entering the taxidermist shop. Director Welts smiled at the spectacle clad man behind the counter who was still enthralled by a severed wolf's head.

“Hello Steven.”