Chapter 49: Uninvited Company

Jet landed beside the Stonehide Blood Ape with the Vorpal Blade dripping in his hands.

Behind him, the gigantic body twitched once, fingers digging trenches through the broken earth before finally going still.

Blood poured from the severed neck in thick pulses, spreading beneath the rust-red fur and filling the shallow depressions created during the fight.

Frey released the remains of Vritra’s Coils and lowered his curved blades, breathing harder than he had during any of their earlier hunts. For several seconds neither moved.

The forest around them was a wreck of snapped trunks, uprooted brush, scattered stone and craters punched into the ground by the Ape’s fists.

Jet looked from the corpse to the cleanly severed head resting against a broken tree and slowly exhaled. "That thing was classified as Lesser?"

Frey wiped sweat from his jaw with the back of his glove. "If that’s what Lesser looks like when it eats properly, I’m not interested in meeting its older relatives today."

A dull crimson light gathered above the Ape’s chest before condensing into a Monster Core noticeably larger than most they had collected that afternoon.

Jet walked over and caught it when it descended.

The Core was warm, almost hot, with dark red veins suspended beneath its surface.

He turned it once in his palm before storing it. "At least the classification wasn’t lying about the reward."

Frey crouched beside the severed head and tapped one of the ivory horns with the flat of his harvesting knife. "Forget the Core for a second. Look at this thing. The route package listed Stonehide Blood Ape horns, plating, tendons and heart blood as valuable. We finally kill something carrying half a merchant’s inventory, and naturally it weighs more than a car."

Jet sheathed the Vorpal Blade and pulled off his backpack. "Then we take what pays enough to justify carrying it. We’re still several days from returning to Zenith."

They began with the head because it was the easiest section to process. The horns were short but incredibly dense, each rooted deep within the Ape’s skull.

Frey worked the harvesting knife around the first base while Jet held the head steady by one ear, and even with proper tools it took several minutes before connective tissue finally gave way.

Frey twisted hard and pulled the horn free with a wet crack.

"One," he said, examining the blood-covered ivory before placing it into a reinforced storage sleeve. "If someone tells me this sells for half a Core, I’m putting it back into the bastard’s head."

Jet started cutting around the second horn. "You won’t. You’ll complain for ten minutes, sell it anyway, and then complain about the buyer."

Frey considered that while helping him loosen the root. "That’s completely different. Complaining after receiving money is a professional right."

The second horn came free, and they moved to the body. Removing the stone-like plates proved considerably worse. What had looked like natural armor was fused through dense connective tissue along the shoulders, forearms and chest.

Jet tested one plate with the harvesting knife, found the edge barely scratching it, then used the Vorpal Blade instead. The Relic slid beneath the plate far more cleanly, allowing him to separate it from the muscle without ruining the material.

Frey held each section up once removed, checking for cracks caused during the fight. Several chest plates were damaged where his Coils had compressed the Ape, but the shoulder pieces remained intact.

They selected four manageable plates and abandoned the rest rather than turn their backpacks into anchors.

Frey sat back on his heels and looked across the ruined clearing while Jet sealed the last plate. "We’re doing better than I expected. Five hours, that Ravager pack, Harts, Manticores, those annoying tortoises, and now this thing. We haven’t had to use either Mana injector yet."

Jet nodded while opening the route package on his navigation unit. Their progress marker showed they had moved well beyond the crowded trails near Zenith, though they were still comfortably inside the western portion of their selected hunting territory.

"We’re doing well because we haven’t done anything stupid. That’s the part I want to keep."

Frey glanced at the headless Ape. "You jumped onto something the size of a bus, so I’m not sure you qualify to make that statement."

Jet tightened a storage strap and replied, "I jumped after you restrained it. There’s a difference between taking a calculated opening and charging something blindly."

Frey considered the answer before giving a reluctant nod. "Fine. I’ll allow moderately stupid."

Jet returned to the corpse and began searching for the tendons identified in their information package. The Blood Ape’s enormous arms contained thick silver-white cords beneath the muscle, valued for reinforced bowstrings, flexible armor components and certain crafted equipment.

Extracting them was ugly work. Jet opened the arm along the inside while Frey separated muscle and connective tissue, both quickly becoming covered in blood past their wrists. There was nothing heroic about harvesting.

It was slow, messy labor performed beside something they had killed minutes earlier. Yet leaving everything behind would have been throwing away a significant part of the expedition’s value.

Monster Cores mattered most to their Divine Runes, but materials paid for everything surrounding that progression: information, supplies, equipment, repairs, food and whatever unexpected expenses waited back at Zenith.

They managed to extract several usable lengths before Frey flexed his blood-slick fingers and looked down at the opened arm. "I understand why experienced teams bring dedicated harvesters now. Fighting is the easy part. You kill something in five minutes and spend half an hour elbow-deep inside it."

Jet sealed another tendon and handed it over. "Dedicated porters make more sense too. Imagine finding three of these."

Frey packed the tendon carefully before answering, "I’d celebrate for ten seconds, then cry while calculating what we had to leave behind. Next time we’re in Zenith, we should check better storage equipment. Nothing ridiculous yet, but there has to be something between these containers and whatever the veteran teams are using."

Jet agreed. Their current setup worked, but pack space was already becoming a problem, and they were only on the first day.

The heart blood came last. They rolled the Ape partly onto its back using leverage and one newly manifested Vritra Coil, exposing the massive chest.

Jet cut between the remaining plates while Frey followed the instructions included with their harvesting notes. Blood taken indiscriminately had little value; what buyers wanted was the dense residue concentrated around the heart of certain monsters shortly after death.

When Jet finally opened the cavity, heat rolled from inside despite the Ape having been dead for several minutes. Its heart was nearly the size of his torso. Dark red fluid gathered around it, thicker than normal blood and carrying a faint metallic shimmer.

Frey studied it and shook his head. "That’s disgusting enough to be expensive. Please tell me we’re not carrying this for three days just to discover it’s worth less than lunch."

Jet passed him a reinforced container. "Hold this steady and try not to spill our disgusting expensive blood."

They collected what they could without contaminating it, sealed the container twice, then checked their remaining capacity. Between Ravager materials, Manticore membranes, Hart organs, Rootback plates and what they had taken from the Blood Ape, both backpacks had become considerably heavier.

Jet redistributed several smaller items so the load sat closer to his back.

The reinforced frame helped, but there was an obvious limit to how much they could carry while remaining combat effective. That alone changed how he thought about hunting.

Killing everything they encountered wasn’t automatically efficient if half the harvest had to rot in the forest because carrying it would make them slow enough to become someone else’s harvest.

Frey cleaned his harvesting knife while Jet checked their Core count again. The total had risen steadily throughout the afternoon, enough that their earlier anxiety about Beyond currency had eased considerably.

Still, neither suggested consuming anything yet. They were outside the Citadel, several days remained on the expedition, and the emergency reserve rule existed for exactly this reason.

They could decide what went toward progression after establishing camp and reviewing what they’d earned.

Jet stored the count and looked toward the lengthening shadows beneath the trees. "We should start thinking about where we’re sleeping. We still have a few hours before the light becomes a problem, but I don’t want to be assembling shelter after dark."

Frey nodded and reminded him that their purchased map showed a raised stone shelf near a stream farther east, with open visibility on two sides and only one dense approach through the forest.

The location was close enough to reach without pushing toward the Deep Wilderness, and after more than five hours of hunting, finding a defensible place to rest mattered more than squeezing another Core from the remaining daylight.

They finished packing the heart blood, wrapped the harvested plates, and returned to the Ape’s arms for one final check.

Frey had just begun cutting free a smaller tendon they had missed when Jet’s hand stopped above an open storage container.

Something had changed.

There had been no obvious roar or snapped branch. It was simply the faint disturbance of leaves somewhere to their left, followed by a silence that felt deliberate rather than natural. Jet slowly turned his head. Frey did the same at almost precisely the same moment, his harvesting knife becoming motionless against the Ape’s flesh.

Both stared into the trees.

Several seconds passed before the undergrowth shifted. Branches moved aside, and figures began emerging from between the trunks.

Boots stepped over exposed roots. Weapons remained visible but undrawn.

One Walker appeared, then another, followed by several more behind them, spreading naturally as they entered the devastated clearing.

Their eyes moved over the shattered trees, the enormous headless Ape, the blood-soaked ground, the harvested materials and finally the two young Walkers crouched beside the corpse.

The Walker in front smiled calmly and raised one empty hand where they could see it. "Hello there. Looks like you two have had quite the afternoon."

Jet and Frey stood immediately, every trace of fatigue disappearing beneath sudden vigilance.

Jet’s hand closed around the hilt of the Vorpal Blade while Frey dropped his harvesting knife and drew both curved swords with a metallic hiss.

Mana surged around him, thick enough to stir the bloodied grass at his boots, and five enormous spectral serpent coils materialized one after another around his body.

Neither of them answered.