WIld Gourmet: Chapter 5

“That’s right.” Darvon put out his hand. “Nice to meet you. You really shouldn’t feel bad about taking what I can do for you. It’s not really much. I’ll be able to clear out rubble, put up a temporary door, and board up the windows. After I get a roof on and patch the walls, I’m pretty much done with what my class allows for.”

“That’s more than I need. To be honest, I’ve been sleeping in tents for years. That cellar is a big step up.”

“Maybe,” Moira said. “But it can’t be healthy to live underground, and you are going to need somewhere to cook and serve your food where smoke won’t build up. Have you thought about making a restaurant, by the way? We’ll need one eventually.”

The idea caught Brand off guard. He hadn’t really thought about it before now, but he supposed he did have all the tools he needed to run a restaurant of sorts. He bounced the idea around for a few moments before deciding on an answer.

“No. I don’t think so,” Brand said. “Most people don’t want to live entirely on monster meat to begin with, right? And I’ll have to be doing my very best with every single bit of meat I bring in. I’ll provide meat for the town to the extent I can while I hunt and cook for myself. That’s all I can manage, just yet.”

“Noted,” Moira said. “I’m sure we’ll get a more dedicated kind of hospitality class in here eventually. For now, we’d be glad to get whatever you can bring in. And I’m making an executive decision here. Darvon, come with me. I’m going to show you where to build some things.”

Darvon and Moira began to circle the building, making notes on what they thought needed to be fixed sooner rather than later. Brand watched them go as he checked over his gear. He was hungry, and there wasn’t going to be any way to fix that to a substantial degree until he got to work. His knife was still more or less in good repair, which he was glad for.

“That’s your weapon? It looks like a normal cooking knife.”

“It is.” Brand held the knife out for Moira’s inspection. “It was the best I could do when the army fell apart. Have we just about finished here? I need to get to work if I want to eat.”

“We are.” Moira motioned at the house. “I’m going to have him build some wooden enclosures for ovens and grills around the building. I figure you’ll need them.”

“They won’t take much time,” Darvon said. “And it’s better than being pulled off a job later. But besides that, I’ll get started on the work of cleaning this place up today. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to get it fixed, in a barebones way.”

“Well, thanks.” Brand sheathed his knife and nodded. “Now I need to get to work. There’s still Eberhunds out there, somewhere. If I don’t knock them down, they’ll be trouble.”

Brand didn’t have to kill every Eberhund in the world to make sure the town was safe, but he did have to take care of anything that had spread within an hour or so of the town. Sooner or later, monster populations either worked into an equilibrium or burned themselves out. The problems would arise if there was a pack of these things and if they had moved in the direction of lands that Brand would need to hunt or that other classless or newly classed folks would need to cross over to get to the town.

That meant the main road to the town was his first priority. He had gone fairly far from the beaten path during his travels, but now he stayed entirely on the developed road that led away from Bell. It used to be that the road would have taken him past working farms, smaller outlying settlements, and homesteads. Those had all been burned, as had the closest three towns. Bell had only survived to some small degree because of its wall and because it was the biggest settlement in this area.

There was no guarantee that any Eberhunds would be anywhere near the road, but Brand felt he might get lucky. It was roughly an hour after he left the town that the feeling was proved false.

Oh no. I’m not lucky. I’m not lucky at all.

The Krallenvogs weren’t something he could have seen until he was almost on top of them, and he had apparently caught them sleeping. The inattentive animals alerted him to their presence with their own sounds of surprise, then flapped out of a roadside gully into full, terrible visibility.

Krallenvogs weren’t a particularly tough enemy as far as flying bird monsters went, luckily. Brand had seen halfway decent soldiers take them down by the dozens to keep them away from camp food supplies. There were a lot of them, though, and Brand was still far from even half-decent standards.

“Four of you?” Brand set his feet and drew his knife. “Really?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Krallenvogs had no reply save a group-wide squawk and leaping into an airborne charge in his general direction. Brand was instantly thankful for every single stat point he had put into his dexterity as he identified a gap in the birds’ formation, jumped for it, and managed to stab down on one of their necks as he passed. It turned to swipe at him with its leg in retaliation, and he just managed to get to the side of its razor-sharp talons and dance back as the other birds got turned around and drilled forward at him again.

The Krallenvogs’ favorite attack was a feet-forward flight, essentially a wing-assisted jump at their prey that counted on a lack of the minimal skill it took to get around their gouging claws. If Brand hadn’t gone all in on dexterity, he probably wouldn’t have had what it took to circumvent those attacks. If he hadn’t fought the Eberhund the day before, he wouldn’t have had the bravery to do it.