The decadent, calorie-dense food didn’t just taste amazing. It was rich in flavor, but also literally rich with quintessence. Prepared properly, with the right ingredients, and food could provide a small boost of quints. It wasn’t usually much, but every little bit counted.
Quintessence was the essence of life, and food was made of the stuff of life. Plants, animals, and beasts, all forms of life had some small amounts of quintessence bound in it.
Thorn had absorbed a decent number of quints from the meal. Normally his System could pull in roughly a quint per day, just absorbing the energy from the naturally occurring quantum field that permeated reality.
One of Lief’s drones whizzed by his head, aiming for Gammon’s outstretched hand. Another crashed backwards, a fork caught in one of its blades.
Sitting on the table in front of Thorn was a tablet with the bill on it. Cook had placed it there after the three had finished eating. In order to pay, Thorn just needed to hold the tablet within his vision, authorize the amount on the screen, and his System would decode the complex sigil in the corner of screen and forward the number of quints to that payee, which was, in this case, Stellar Eats.
His foe distracted, Lief leaned forward to snatch up the tablet. But before he could, the entire top of the bar tilted up, knocking Lief off balance. There was a brief, high-pitched whining sound, and the two drones, the tablet , and all of the forks, knives and spoons on the bar slammed into Gammon’s outstretched hand.
Gammon let the top of the bar drop back down with a muffled thump, then held her other hand over it and dropped all of the pieces of metal she had attracted with the magnetic machine integration buried somewhere in her organic-looking arm. She gingerly pulled the scratched and dirty tablet out of the mess of silverware and held it up with a beaming smile.
“I got the bill this time,” she said.
“Cheater,” Lief sniffed, a poor loser at his and Gammon’s little contest.
“I believe the word you are looking for is ‘winner’ or possibly ‘thank you,’” she replied. “For a definition of ‘cheater,’ maybe ask an ex-wife.”
Thorn didn’t care who paid the bill, so long as it wasn’t him. He didn’t really understand the custom,but he was happy to let them fight over their “face” and the honor of making themselves poorer.
“Another round of caf to go,” Lief said, looked at the sleepy-eyed Thorn, and then added, “Actually, better make that two.”
“Tea,” Thorn corrected, dragging himself up from his stool
Cook grunted and set two already-prepared to-go cups on the counter. Thorn took them and followed Lief to the door.
“I have a to-go order to take back to the outpost as well, Cook,” Gammon said before turning to wave. Thorn waved back, while Lief gave her a single-fingered salute.
A cool breeze drifted through the parking lot, mingling with the heat rising from the pavement. The sun set early in Aba, dipping behind the mountains the city was nestled in. Lief threw his pack in the back of Thorn’s truck and hopped in the cab.
Thorn’s truck was an old, beat-up model, but it was a hybrid and could operate using solar energy, or quints in a pinch. Thorn obviously preferred not to spend quints fueling his truck, but he’d learned that sometimes, in order to make quints, he had to spend a few first.
He pulled his truck out onto the pockmarked street. Not all streets, roads, and highways were created equal… nor were the tolls for using them equal either. Thorn maneuvered on local roads mostly, avoiding the highways with expensive tolls, sticking to safer neighborhoods only marred by the occasional pothole or ditch, and slowly worked his way out of the city.
After one particularly egregious bump, Thorn glanced over at Lief, expecting a snide comment on his driving. The man was already asleep. It was as if the entire cup of caf he’d just drank was some kind of sleep tonic.
There was a rough passage carved through the mountains further south, but it was generous to call it a road. Thorn didn’t know how Lief could sleep through all of the bumps and jerks, but he could, slouched against the windowpane on the far side.
Thorn drifted into a trance, half his mind focused on driving and the other half lost in vague, dream-like thoughts. The kilometers ticked by as he sipped his tea, and a weight gradually lifted off of his shoulders, the tension in his face and neck slipping away.
The first rays of dawn were showing in the sky when Thorn arrived at the spot where they usually parked his truck. They were on the far side of the mountain passes, and down into rolling hills covered with forest planted by the first wave of terraformers to arrive on the planet. There were no roads here, and further south, a series of tributary streams and small rivers feeding the Fels River cut into the sloping hills. Very few of those rivers were passable by a vehicle that didn’t have aerial capabilities, seeing as they dug deep troughs and canyons through the ground.
Thorn turned his truck off and stepped out, breathing the scent of old growth deep into his lungs. The air was still, thick with silence. A faint croaking sound, the harsh warning of some bird or beast, echoed faintly through the trees.
He shivered slightly, despite the warmth emanating from the truck behind him. A cool breeze blew through the trees, dry and biting.
“Time to wake up and smell the caf,” Lief called from the back of the truck. His drones lifted up and sped off silently, flickering through the trees to the southwest and southeast.
“What caf?” Thorn asked, already knowing the answer.
“What caf?” Lief huffed. “Son, it’s the caf you’re making for me while I scout out where we’re going.” Lief had three drones. Two were light weight scouts with a range of tens of kilometers; they were equipped with visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light sensors as well as audio capture. His third was a mid-weight combat drone that sacrificed long-range mobility for a higher payload capacity and a small weapons package.
Thorn rummaged through his pack, setting aside his tarp, reflective blanket, and filter water bottle to pull out a small, self-heating pot and a packet of instant caf.
The faint croaking he had heard previously sounded again, except immediately behind and much louder. Thorn turned to see the dark flash of wings disappearing into the branches of the canopy hundreds of feet above them. Thorn frowned at the ill omen.
“Looks like we might have to find a new spot,” Lief said, shaking his head. They had been hunting together in this area for a few months; Lief for longer than that.
“Competition moving in?” Thorn asked, stirring the pot. The slightly burnt scent of instant caf began to fill the clearing.
This far south of Aba, there was no government, guild, mafia, cult, or upstart frontier town claiming sovereignty. That didn’t mean there weren’t other hunters out in the wilds, trying to make a living or on the run from past mistakes.
“Maybe…” Lief said. “Maybe not. Some of our plots have been raided, but not all. I’m not seeing any humper sign either.”
Humpers, formal name Meles Alpinus Agrotis, were a native species and a common animal in the deep forests of Agrotis. They dug deep warrens and tunnels beneath the trunks and roots of the massive trees that formed the canopy a hundred meters up in the air.
While broadly omnivorous, the humper’s favorite thing to eat were mushrooms. More precisely, a specific type of mushroom that grew on and near the roots of the trees that they dug their dens under.
Thorn gingerly handed the hot pot of caf to Lief, who took it and immediately downed half the contents. If Lief cared that it had been boiling just a few seconds before, he gave no sign of it.
“That’s the good stuff,” he said, smacking his lips.
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It was definitely not the good stuff, but it was weirdly nostalgic for Lief, and consuming a boiling-hot pot of the stuff had become something of a pre-hunt ritual.
Thorn repacked his gear and shouldered his pack, not forgetting to spray himself and Lief with a deodorizer to remove the smell of the caf and the long drive. If Thorn could smell it, there was no way that the humpers they were hunting wouldn’t.
“Let’s do a weapons check before we head out,” Lief said. Thorn groaned internally. He was ready to get moving, but Lief was a stickler for details, and even though he and Thorn had gone hunting together multiple times (with consistent success), he insisted on reviewing their equipment in detail every time before they set out.
“Tsk, tsk. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” Lief said, his tone one of admonishing superiority. Lief took every single piece of his two-meter-long sniper rifle apart and examined it with exacting patience. And when he was done with his, he would examine Thorn’s linear motor rifle, pointing out a few spots with a smudge or a speck that Thorn swore were not visible to normal human perception.
Thorn was a lot better now than he had been at first; he had learned a good deal under Lief’s tutelage. But it didn’t matter how painstakingly he cleaned his weapon, Lief could always find something wrong with it, and his System was absolute garbage when it came to work like this.
When Lief was finally satisfied they were ready, the two moved out of the clearing to the southwest. Lief took point, his two scout drones to the front and out of sight, and Thorn followed a few paces behind.
The forest was mostly old growth conifers, never logged or settled by human colonists in the past several hundred years. These trees were the remnants of the work of some long-forgotten terraforming guild that had moved on to the next planet. Smooth tall trunks with flaky gray bark rose high in the sky, with only a little light peeking through the dense green canopy. Pockets of underbrush dotted the dips in the hills.
Deep, narrow ravines cut through the hills in unpredictable patterns. Lief and Thorn crossed one of those ravines by walking on a massive fallen tree, its trunk ten meters across and at least a hundred meters long. Thorn paused halfway across to peer over the edge, kicking off a bit of rotten bark. He didn’t hear it hit the bottom.
Without Lief and his scouting abilities, Thorn would have found himself in countless dead ends, backtracking out of steep hollows and dense thickets. After a good half hour of walking through the woods, they made it to their first plot. Lief took a knee next to the exposed tree root topped with large, bulky mushrooms.
When Thorn had first driven his truck south into the woods with the vague promise to Cook of returning with meat, he had simply wandered around the forest hoping to get lucky. Lief had found him skulking around one of his plots, and kindly asked him if he’d known any of his ex-wives, as he seemed adept at “plowing another man’s field.”
Lief didn’t hunt like Thorn was used to. No, he didn’t so much “hunt” as cultivate the forest, just like any gardener cultivated their herbs and vegetables. He created conditions, such as the plots of mushrooms growing on the exposed roots of trees, and then took advantage of those conditions.
It took effort, and it took time, but the results spoke for themselves. It was quite difficult to stumble upon a humper, out of the burrows and roaming around the forest. It was even more difficult, and destructive, to try to dig out their burrows, or smoke them out in some way.
But getting them used to plentiful, tasty snacks? And if a few of their number disappeared every now and then, that just meant more for the ones remaining.
“My drones are showing no sign of any humpers at all,” Lief mused. “Infrared shows their burrows are completely empty. I don’t like it.”
“Has someone else been hunting around here?” Thorn asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lief said. “I don’t see any sign of other hunters. Human ones at least… Let’s move on.”
“Harvest some of the truffles?” Thorn asked. Cook used the mushrooms, if sparingly, and would take a small bag. They weren’t worth near as much as the humper meat.
“Technically not truffles, even if people say they are. And since the tribe of humpers around here that we have been culling appears to have pulled up roots and moved completely out of the surrounding burrows… yeah, why not. Just a few though.”
Thorn took out a knife and quickly gathered a small bundle of the earthy mushrooms and stuffed them into his pack. Lief sprinkled a specialized mixture of nutrients designed to promote the mushrooms’ growth where Thorn had harvested them, and then knelt next to the exposed tree root that the mushrooms were growing on. He held one hand over the root while placing his other hand on the ground.
Water dripped from his hand, mixing with the fertilizer he had sprinkled. There was a faint tinge of blue to Lief’s hand, so Thorn knew that whatever System-given ability Lief was using, the water he was pulling out of the ground to mix with the fertilizer was also mixed with bits of quintessence.
After he was finished, Lief took the lead and they moved forward again through the forest.
They went on a meandering route further south and west, up and down steep slopes, checking on the plots where they had either planted mushrooms or promoted their growth. As the hours went by, though, they failed to see a single sign of their quarry.
Instead of speeding up, Lief slowed their pace and began to backtrack, visiting additional sites of interest his scout drones had found. Thorn was mostly quiet, letting Lief work, but as midday came and went, his initial irritation was replaced by worry. Usually by this time, they had bagged as many humpers as they could easily carry in one go and were processing the carcasses back at his parked truck.
Their plots had also gone from being completely untouched to being completely consumed. It was strange. Not a single humper, yet all of the mushrooms were completely gone.
The forest was quiet, and as the day stretched on, it felt even quieter. Even the ever-present buzz of insects felt hushed.
A raucous croaking sound, the same that had greeted Thorn in the clearing, sounded behind them. Lief stopped abruptly and held up his hand. They were walking down a narrow gully. Thick trunks of the forest’s giants stretched hundreds of feet above them. In front was a dense thicket of younger growth.
The message from Lief pinged on Thorn’s System HUD. Thorn didn’t stop to ask him why. He secured his rifle over his shoulder as he ran, pushing through the undergrowth to a decent-sized pine in the middle. He dropped his pack and yanked four metal stakes out of the special pouch on his pack designed for quick release. Each was about the length of his forearm and the color of brushed aluminum, except for a black button on the top.
He stabbed three of the stakes into the ground in a rough triangle around the base of the tree, pushing the button on top of each with a firm click. He moved as quickly as he could but made sure that the inside of the triangle could accommodate both him and Lief.
Lief grabbed the last stake out of Thorn’s hand, slamming it at head height into the tree trunk with a dry thunk. He armed the last stake with a metallic click, then pulled Thorn down to the ground. He shifted his poncho so that both he and Thorn were covered, then activated a camouflage ability with his advanced System. A blue shimmer covered the poncho, and then took on the appearance of what lay behind it.
Both he and Lief were now hidden. Thorn did his best to slow his breaths and calm the hammering of his heart. He could still see from inside of Lief’s poncho, though looking through the poncho made things appear in infrared.
Thorn handed Lief the activation key for what they affectionately referred to as the “pumpkin,” the portable shielding device that they had just set up.
A portable shield was fairly cheap to buy, but very expensive to operate. It guzzled quints like a desert in a rainstorm. More expensive models had better efficiency, higher defensive strength, and so forth, but Thorn was happy to have any kind of life-saving measure.
It was a simple truth that making more quints was difficult when you were dead.
Seconds turned into minutes. The two waited. There was a quiet rustling, and an enormous humper, a true lord of the forest, appeared from around a tree trunk. Its shoulders were as high as Thorn was tall, its powerful hind legs larger than a horse’s. The eponymous hump on its back was tinged white.
The humper shuffled forward, sniffing the air. And to Thorn’s growing alarm, the massive beast (for there was no doubt that this was an awakened beast) was walking directly towards where he and Lief were holed up.
Thorn twitched at the message, then moved to comply. He was crouched over his pack, so he slowly reached down and pulled out the pouch of mushrooms he’d gathered earlier. With a quick motion, he tossed the mushrooms as far away from them as he could.
The beady eyes of the humper shifted at the motion, tracking the mushrooms as they spilled onto the forest floor.
The beast snuffed once, then pranced forward unevenly. It appeared to be favoring one of its back legs. As it turned to gobble up the mushrooms, Thorn noticed a sickening, black wound on its back haunch that was oozing pus.
Despite the danger, Thorn’s trigger finger began to itch. They had so far gotten absolutely nothing for their efforts. If they could bag this awakened beast… Thorn clenched his jaw, unwilling to give up the possibility of the thousands of quints, but also unwilling to cross Lief.
After the humper had finished its snack, it sniffed around the clearing once more and sneezed violently. It slowly turned, favoring its back leg, and gradually backed out of the thicket.
Thorn let out a sigh, half of frustration and half of relief. At least they had half of an answer now as to why most of their mushroom plots had been completely demolished. The appetite of that awakened humper was certainly enormous, and it could sniff its favorite snack out from pretty far away.
It didn’t help that those mushrooms, juiced up on Lief’s abilities, had more imbued quintessence than they would normally have. Quintessence had a “weight” to it that beasts and some Systems could sense. The mushrooms should not have been that “heavy,” but maybe that was just to humans, who wouldn’t absorb as much from eating plants and animals as a beast would.
But apparently it was enough for this forest lord. Either that or it really liked the taste.
After a few more minutes of tense waiting, Lief let his camouflage ability lapse and stood up. He helped Thorn gather up the pumpkin stakes and deactivate them, before placing them back in Thorn’s pack.
“Now what?” Thorn asked, still irritated that they hadn’t taken a shot at the massive humper.
Lief smiled a predator’s grin.
“Now we follow.”