For a breath I waited for the pain to spike.

  Nothing.

  My HP bar sat there, smug and whole. 28/62. No fresh red chunk, no new debuff.

  I let out a raw laugh that scraped my throat.

  “Oh my god. It works.”

  The boar staggered back a few steps, legs splayed, head low. It wheezed through its snout and stared at the shield with tiny mean eyes. Foam dripped from the steel rim and slid into the groove my block had carved in the dirt.

  The boy behind me clung to the back of my legs.

  “It didn’t hurt you.”

  “Armor’s doing overtime.” I pushed against the shield and straightened. “Stay behind my legs, yeah?”

  The grumbleboar snorted. It jerked its head to one side as if that might shake loose a different result. Its gaze tracked from my shield to my helmet slit, back to the boy’s bare toes peeking between my greaves.

  It pawed at the ground.

  “Don’t learn,” I muttered. “Please don’t learn.”

  The UI chimed.

  SHIELD RUSH – COOLDOWN: 12s.

  BLOCK – PASSIVE.

  The boar dropped its weight and launched.

  The second hit came harder. It had adjusted its angle. Tusks raked across the lower curve, hunting for a gap, something softer than forged steel. The impact boomed through my bones, rattled teeth, drove hot pressure along the fracture lines in my ribs.

  The Stonewall Regalia drank it again.

  BLOCKED. 0.

  I braced and rode the shock, boots grinding deeper furrows. Dust puffed up around my sabatons. My stomach flipped, not from pain this time, but from sheer stupid joy.

  “Okay. I love this set.”

  The boar pulled back, breath rasping, confusion rolling off it like heat from a forge. It shook its head so hard ropes of spit flew. Its gaze flicked to my shield, to the dent that wasn’t there.

  “Yeah. Same, buddy.”

  Noise crashed in from the far side of the village. Screams, the crunch of wood, something metal failing.

  Over the low roofs I caught a blur of deep blue and green.

  Beakly tore along the inside of the palisade like someone had fired a ballistic bird. Wings pegged tight to his sides for speed, head low, talons digging gouts from the packed earth with every stride.

  The other grumbleboars had crowded near the gate. One lay on its side under a sagging cart, legs shuddering. The man that I'm pretty sure is the blacksmith stood over it, hammer raised, shoulders heaving inside his leather apron. Two more boars gored the palisade supports, ramming until logs shifted and dust rained down. The last paced just out of the man's reach, working up the nerve for a charge.

  Beakly shrieked.

  The sound ripped through the village, high and metallic, too big for his frame. The grumbleboars froze mid-motion. Even the boy behind me flinched. One of the boars near the gate turned in time to see seven hundred pounds of feathered murder slam into it.

  Beakly hit with both talons. They punched into the boar’s shoulders and folded its front legs like snapped twigs. The animal went down hard, neck twisting.

  “Count Chocobo, you glorious nightmare.”

  He used the momentum to pivot, dragging the pinned carcass in an arc and flinging it aside. Blood sprayed in a wide fan, spotted his breast with fresh red over old rust.

  The other three boars broke.

  The one that had been hammering the palisade whirled away from the wall, so fast its hindquarters slipped. It scrabbled for purchase, then bolted down the lane, tail clamped. Another spun and tried to shoulder past it, nearly collided, then found open ground and sprinted toward the fields.

  The third met Beakly’s gaze. He ruffled his mantle to full height, every feather raised, eyes like molten coin. His hooked beak clicked once, slow and deliberate.

  The boar screamed and ran.

  They barreled through a split in the fence and vanished into the brush in a hail of snapped twigs and terrified squeals.

  The grumbleboar in front of me heard all of it.

  Its ears twitched in different directions, torn between me and the sudden absence of its herd. It risked a glance past my shoulder. From our angle it had a clear view of Beakly standing astride the fallen boar, one talon on its ribs like a banner planted after a siege.

  My mount flexed his claws. The dead boar jerked with each tiny movement, meat surrendering to steel. Beakly threw back his head and trilled, pleased, chest swelling.

  The grumbleboar facing me froze.

  “Go home,” I told it. “Bad day to be pork.”

  It locked eyes with me for a long, tight second. Then it huffed, a rough, uncertain sound, and backed away. Two steps. Three. Once it cleared my shield angle it spun and ran, hooves churning up the lane. It crashed through a patch of kitchen garden and scattered cabbages, then vaulted a section of fallen fencing and chased the others into the trees.

  Silence rolled in behind it, thick and stunned.

  I eased the shield down. My arms shook. The boy still glued himself to my legs.

  “Still alive?”

  He nodded into the back of my legs.

  “Good. Find your mom. And don’t go near the bird.”

  He peeled away and ran toward the nearest cottage, bare feet slapping dust.

  I turned to the main street.

  Villagers had emerged from doorways and from behind overturned barrels. A woman in a flour-dusted apron clutched a rolling pin like a club. An older man with white stubble leaned on a hoe with both hands, knuckles bone-pale. A girl in a torn dress held a crying toddler on her hip.

  Every face pointed toward Beakly.

  He had already moved on to the part he enjoyed.

  He planted both talons on the boar’s flank, muscles along his thighs bunching. With a quick, practiced rake he tore a long trench through hide and abdominal wall. The cut opened like a zipper. Steam puffed into the cooler air, carrying that dense, sweet rot of opened gut that always lived on the edge between food and waste.

  Warm viscera spilled out in a heavy rush. Intestines glistened, loop on loop, studded with half-digested plant matter. The liver slid free, dark and smooth. Coils slapped against the dirt beside his feet.

  Beakly lowered his head and hooked the liver in one clean motion. He tore it loose, tossed it once, caught it deeper in his beak, then swallowed in two wet gulps. Blood slicked down his throat, bright against iridescent plumage.

  No one spoke.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The only sound came from Beakly, working through organs with the efficient focus of a creature that never wasted a kill. Each neat rip and crunch snapped through the still air. Somewhere behind me someone gagged.

  I stood in the road between them and him, ribs burning, shield still up at my side, and watched my dignified, ridiculous mount eat his way into the boar while the village stared.

  Beakly burrowed deeper.

  His head vanished up to the eyes inside the boar’s chest. Wet sounds thudded off the nearby walls. Something soft tore with a wet slap.

  Yeah. Not exactly the backdrop you wanted for a friendly neighborhood introduction.

  “Uh… Beakly.”

  His tail lifted, a slow sweep. He didn’t stop.

  “Beakly. Manners.”

  That did it.

  He froze mid-rip. For a second his whole body went still, even the small breaths through his ribs. Then he withdrew from the carcass with careful, unhurried grace, as if he’d always meant to stop right there and not one bite later.

  His beak was striped in blood. A sliver of something pale clung near the hinge. He clicked once; the scrap vanished. He held himself tall over the opened boar, talons sunk in flesh, feathers smoothed flat, eyes clear and cool.

  Regal. Completely drenched in gore, innards steaming at his feet, and somehow he still managed to look like he attended court.

  Every villager in sight leaned back a step.

  I cleared my throat and stepped forward, armor joints creaking. My ribs hated it. The pain snapped bright across my side and I felt the regalia buffer it the way it had buffered the boar—less impact, still there.

  “Hi.”

  Every head twitched my way.

  “Sorry about… all of that.”

  My hand waved in a helpless little circle that tried to include the dead boar, the gutted street, and Beakly’s entire existence.

  “I’m Emily. Emily Easton.”

  The name came out too loud in the quiet road. I reeled it in.

  “I’m—” Paladin? Doctor? Lost idiot in someone else’s code? “—kinda new.”

  The woman with the rolling pin stared over it like a shield. The old man gripped his hoe tighter. The girl with the toddler shushed him without looking down.

  No one answered.

  Right. Try again. Less weird.

  I lifted a gauntleted hand and tapped Beakly’s shoulder joint.

  “This is Beakly.”

  Both of his eyes swung to me, then to the crowd. Feathers along his neck lifted a fraction, the way they did when people cheered after a boss kill. He adjusted his stance on the carcass, straightened, and dipped his head the tiniest amount. Blood dripped from his beak to the dirt. The gesture still looked like a bow.

  A woman near the back crossed herself. Not in any sign I recognized, just a quick, terrified touch from brow to lips to breast.

  “He, uh… he’s with me,” I went on. “He won’t hurt anyone unless you try to hurt me. Or unless you’re, you know.” I glanced at the boar. “Dinner.”

  Beakly clicked his beak, affronted.

  “Fine. Breakfast.”

  Someone snorted. It broke out of them like a hiccup, startled and sharp. A few other faces twitched, caught between horror and the muscle memory of laughing in a village street.

  Good. Cracks.

  I pulled my helmet off one-handed and tucked it under my arm. Warm air hit sweat, cooling fast. My hair probably looked like a bird’s nest. Whatever. People tensed anyway; I’d gotten used to the way they reacted when they saw my face under this tier of armor. Human, but not one of them.

  “I’m injured,” I told them. “Ribs. Nothing you need to panic over, but I can’t stay upright much longer on my own. Is there somewhere I can sit down, maybe get some water and—I don’t know—bread? Anything? And if there’s a healer, great.”

  I let the question hang.

  For a heartbeat the crowd just breathed at me.

  Then a man stepped out.

  He emerged from the knot of villagers like he’d been pushed and only realized he was in front once he arrived. Thinning hair curled damply at his temples. A brass chain hung around his neck, dull and finger-worn; he caught it now, thumb rubbing over one link as if it might tell him what to do.

  “Welcome to Oakhaven, Mistress Easton.”

  His voice started soft and picked up in the last word, like he’d found it on the way to his own mouth. He looked older than his hairline suggested. Decades of creased brows had carved permanent worry into his forehead.

  “We owe you… an impossible debt.”

  His gaze flicked past my shoulder. Beakly stared back. The man swallowed. The chain clinked as his fingers tightened.

  “And your… companion.”

  I kept my face straight. Companion was generous for the giant murder-bird bus that occasionally abandoned me to go hunting.

  He took a few more steps, stopped when Beakly shifted his talons on the carcass with a soft wet grind.

  “I’m Gideon Brody,” he went on. “Mayor here. Or I was, before a mayor meant anything less than useless against beasts and blight.”

  His mouth twitched like he’d meant to smile and thought better of it.

  “You have our thanks. All of you owe your lives to—”

  His hand started toward his heart in some formal gesture, then stalled halfway when Beakly’s eyes tracked the movement.

  The mayor let the hand drop to his side.

  “We’ll offer what succour we can,” he finished. “Food. Water. A bed. You’ve earned that much and more.”

  Relief washed through me so hard my knees loosened. The Stonewall Regalia caught that too, the leg plates guiding my squishier parts into stillness, but the little dip didn’t escape him. His eyes narrowed, measuring.

  “I’ll take the basics,” I said. “Somewhere flat where I can breathe without feeling my lungs sandpaper my ribs.”

  “And a bath, if you’ve got one,” slipped out before I could stop it.

  Because if I could smell myself through dried blood and steel and boar steam, they definitely could.

  “We have hot water still,” came a voice from near the floury woman.

  She moved forward, the pin lowered now, held like a tool instead of a weapon. Hair scraped back in a knot that had given up on neatness an hour ago and strands of it stuck to her cheeks. Flour dusted the front of her brown dress and the apron over it.

  “Name’s Elspeth Harrow. I keep the inn. The Weary Wanderer, just there.”

  She jerked her chin toward a two-story building with smoke curling from its chimney and its sign hanging a bit askew. The painted wanderer on it had flaked eyes.

  “The village might’ve lost more than fences today without you.”

  Her gaze ran over the smashed cart, the leaning palisade, the dead boar, and a little boy clutching at her apron. It was the little boy I had saved. Her eyes were red as she looked down at him, but I saw no tears. She looked back at me, my chestplate, the etched stonework, the small crest over my sternum. It lingered, wary curiosity mingling with something else. Appraisal, maybe. Habit of someone who saw strangers for a living.

  She wiped a palm on her apron and stepped close enough that I could see the tired rings under her eyes were built from more than one bad night.

  “You look ready to fall over inside that tin skin, girl.”

  “Just structurally sound on the outside,” I answered. “Like a nice, hollow statue.”

  “You can fall over in a bed at my place, then. We’ve a room. Food. Brew’s not what it used to be, but it’s wet and fills a belly.”

  The little boy tucked himself against the back of her legs. Same brown eyes, same shape to the mouth when he pressed his lips together. His hair stuck up in whorls that no comb had beaten in the morning.

  He peered around her hip at Beakly, eyes huge like saucers.

  “That’s Finn,” Elspeth added without looking back. “He should be in the cellar, where I told him, but here we are.”

  “I had to see,” the boy muttered into her skirt. “Mam, did you see its feet? It—he—it has knives for toes.”

  Beakly’s chest inflated.

  “Talons,” I corrected. “He’s very proud of them.”

  Finn edged out a little more, emboldened by the fact nobody had been eaten in the last sixty seconds.

  “Is he yours?”

  “Contractually, yeah.”

  Blank look.

  “He’s mine,” I amended. “And I’m his. Don’t worry, he only eats things with tusks. Or, uh, hooves. Or scales. Or—”

  Beakly swiveled an eye at me.

  “—I’ll give you a full list later,” I finished.

  The watchful tension in the villagers loosened by degrees. Not much, but the air changed. A couple of them let tool-handles drop from white-knuckle grip. The blacksmith in the distance leaned on his hammer and blew out a breath, gaze still on the ruined gate.

  Elspeth looked from me to the mayor.

  “She needs a healer, Gideon.”

  “We’ve herbs, and old Mara’s hands,” he answered. “Not what she once was, but still more than most. We’ll send for her.”

  Elspeth's attention snagged on Beakly again. The smell probably hit her now that the wind shifted—copper, offal, hot meat.

  Her jaw worked once.

  “We’ve stables out back of the inn,” she said. “Couple of stalls, bit of yard. Not much compared to—”

  Her eyes ran the full height of him.

  “—that.”

  Beakly fluffed his wings, offended at being measured in stall units.

  “He won’t fit through a normal door,” I warned. “And he….”

  I glanced at the shredded boar. The line of pale intestine hanging like a discarded rope. The little boy’s fascinated stare.

  “He’s messy.”

  “The boy’s seen blood,” Elspeth cut me off. “Half the village has, these days.”

  Her fingers picked at her apron strings, tightened them once, let go.

  “I’m not about to welcome a rider and tell her beast to sleep in a ditch.”

  Her voice hardened on the last word. Pride surfaced under the exhaustion. A different kind of line in the sand: we are still people who offer shelter.

  “We’ll move the old cart, clear the big stall,” she went on. “He can have that. Long as he doesn’t eat my hens.”

  Beakly emitted a low, questioning croon at the word hens.

  I followed his gaze to a coop behind the inn. A handful of bedraggled chickens scratched in the dust, thin and stubborn.

  “Non-negotiable,” I told him. “Those are off-limits. Village hospitality clause.”

  He clicked his beak, which could mean anything from assent to a complaint filed with management.

  “I’ll keep him busy,” I promised Elspeth. “He prefers game he has to chase, anyway. Grumbleboars, wolves, the occasional… thing with too many teeth. Chickens are beneath his dignity.”

  She eyed the gore streaking his chest.

  “If you say so.”

  “Your mount is welcome,” Mayor Brody put in, the word awkward on his tongue. His gaze had fixed on the talons again, but there was something new there now, beneath the fear. Calculation. Hope pressed thin and wary. “Whatever… arrangement you have, Oakhaven won’t be the one to break it.”

  He dragged a hand over his face, smearing sweat and dust.

  “We have little,” he said. “But what we do have, you’ll share while you’re under our roofs.”

  He glanced up at the sky, then at the leaning palisade, and his shoulders sagged before he squared them again.

  “Please,” he added, the authority dropping out of his tone, leaving only a tired man with neighbors to feed. “Come inside, before something else decides to try our walls.”

  I nodded and shifted my weight. Pain flared again, dulled but insistent. My vision pixelated at the edges for a second.

  “Okay,” I breathed. “Inn, food, water, not falling over. In that order.”

  Finn darted forward a step.

  “Can I—can I touch him?”

  Elspeth’s hand snagged his collar.

  “You can help draw water for our guest, that’s what you can do.”

  She hooked an arm under my elbow without waiting for permission, steering me toward the inn’s door as if I weighed no more than one of her sacks of flour.

  “Save your questions for when she can stand straight, boy.”

  Beakly watched us move, then stepped off the carcass with slow care, each talon coming free with a soft wet pop. He shook one foot, flinging off a loop of something ropey, then fell in behind us, his shadow stretching long over the street as he padded toward the promise of a stall that would never be worthy of him.