Chapter 278: Don’t Eat The Shiftless Girl’s Charity

Meanwhile, the Jackdaw tribe had made their camp in a part of the woods not too far from the downward slope leading to the bottom of the plateau.

Some of them were angry.

Most of them were terrified.

That was the part Naiya could not stand.

If the shiftless girl had attacked them, they would have known what they were dealing with. If she had come with beasts and teeth and claws, they would have fought her, and some of them would have died, and it would have been a thing that happened and finished.

Instead, the ground opened up, and they had just appeared somewhere else.

It had happened more than four times now, and each time made Naiya more frustrated.

This was not even something they could fight or run from, and it had demoralised most of her tribe members.

What was Tera doing to them, and where did she get that magic thing?!

The tribe had thought at first that she must have eaten some strange leaf to be able to use magic.

The shiftless girl had been thrown out of this tribe with nothing. No food, no shelter, no mark, no beast form, and no strength worth speaking of. She should have been dead, and everybody had believed so until now.

Tera had to have eaten something to be able to do this. It was not normal for a shiftless beast to have this much power.

This was how the tribe came to the only logical conclusion; the leaves here must have given her power.

What followed had been the single worst day in the tribe’s recent history, and that was saying something, considering the storm.

The surrounding leaves had been gathered into piles, and the piles were eaten in groups, so that when somebody developed a power, everyone would know which pile had done it.

Each pile was bitter enough to make their eyes water, and some vomited the whole thing within a few minutes.

Six of them fell sick for four days, and two passed out bloody stool.

All in all, no beast developed a single power.

Despite all this, Naiya still thought the theory was sound. The execution had simply been poor.

They would have to scrub the leaves all over their bodies.

But before she could test the theory, she noticed that two of her beasts were missing.

"Where is Reno?"

Nobody answered her immediately, which was its own answer.

"I asked where Reno is."

"He went out," somebody said.

"Out where?"

There was a pause, and then one of the older females said, carefully, "Nobody has seen either of them since the morning. Some of them think—"

"Think what?"

"That they might have gone up... there."

Naiya stood very still.

"Up there?" she repeated.

"It is only what some of them are saying—"

"To her?!"

The beasts shifted on their feet and looked away.

"They went to her. Behind my back! Those backstabbing, spineless—after everything—how dare they?!

"This is exactly why we are in this position," Naiya snapped, pointing at them. "What happened to the strong and mighty beasts you all were? We literally outnumber them! We are all adults while they mostly have cubs. If we can just find a way to go up there and—"

Someone pouted. "She will send us away again."

"She cannot do it forever!"

"She has done it five, six times now?"

"Are you stupid? Some of you were moving so slowly. That is why this happened. It is simple. When we get there, we get rid of them and—"

"We have not been eating properly," someone spoke up. "Some of us don’t even have the strength to stand up again. What strength would we even have to fight them? You saw that they were well fed..."

Naiya fumed, unable to say anything. She didn’t want to admit either that the male was right.

She was about to speak up when Reno and the younger male appeared, carrying a large basket between them.

The entire tribe stood up at once.

Naiya could see fruits, and the sweet smell that filled the air made the beasts water after eating leaves for days. One of the wolves who had lost the feeling in his tongue started feeling it again.

In the midst of that pile, they could also smell roasted meat.

Instantly, nearly every single beast converged on the two males, grabbing at the basket and demanding to know where they had found this.

"We went up," Reno proudly explained.

The noise did not stop so much as change shape.

"You what—"

"We went to her, and she gave us food for the tribe."

Naiya pushed through the crowd. "You idiots! Get away from it! You took food from her hands?! After all the antics she had done, are you not scared of what she would have put inside?!"

Several of the beasts stopped reaching for the basket.

The younger male looked sad, and his stomach grumbled. "She did not poison it."

"You cannot know that," Naiya hissed.

"Her own beasts packed it. We watched them. She called them over, and they filled the basket in front of us."

"Her beasts? You think those ones obey her?" Naiya sneered. "Throw it away!"

Nobody moved.

"I said throw it—"

"We are hungryyyyy!"

"We are so hungry, Naiya."

Naiya looked at the ring of faces around that basket and understood, in a cold way she did not like at all, that she was not going to win this one.

So, she changed direction.

"Fine. Fine. Eat it. Eat the shiftless girl’s charity if that is what this tribe has come to." She laughed. "Her beasts, he says. Her beasts. Do you hear him? He has been up there one time and has come back talking about them like she is something."

"But she leads, and she even has mates now. Three of them—"

This silenced everyone.

What was Reno talking about?

Naiya wanted to slap and punish the males alone for going to that female without her permission, and now they were talking about her having mates?

Two, for that matter.

There were limits to one’s delusion.