The group had been moving for a while, with hopes of reaching a village to obtain some materials for traps and food for the group. One fateful day Materlyn found Skuggi near the water source the next morning, scrubbing his hands clean from the previous day's butchering, thinking while staring at his hands.

  "Kitchen work today," she said. "We need vegetables prepped for the stew, and you've got knife skills now. Might as well use them."

  Skuggi followed her back to camp. Someone had arranged a work area on a flat section of ground, with several large stones serving as cutting surfaces and bowls made from hollowed wood for collecting scraps. They gave Kalf that task for him to entertain himself while working and helping out, and there was a pile of root vegetables and greens gathered from the surrounding forest.

  Hilde was already working, her knife moving in quick, efficient strokes through a turnip. Signe sat across from her, picking through a basket of wild onions, discarding the ones that had gone soft.

  Materlyn handed Skuggi a knife. Smaller than the one he'd used for butchering, with a blade that curved slightly toward the tip.

  "Start with these." She pointed at a pile of carrots, dirt still clinging to their surfaces. "Peel them first, then cut them into chunks. Uniform size so they cook evenly."

  Skuggi picked up a carrot. Brushed the worst of the dirt off with his thumb. The peeling knife felt strange in his hand after yesterday's work… lighter, more delicate. He positioned the blade against the carrot's skin the way Jurgen had shown him to position it against hide. Flat angle, with minimal pressure.

  The blade skipped off the surface. Too flat… but he adjusted. Tried again. This time the knife bit in but went too deep, taking a chunk of the carrot's flesh along with the skin. Hilde glanced over. “You're cutting it like it's going to fight back. It's already dead. Relax, kiddo."

  Skuggi loosened his grip. Started over on a fresh carrot. The bladcaught and, peeled away a strip of skin. Better, but ragged. He continued working around the carrot's circumference, each stroke revealing more of the orange flesh beneath.

  By the third carrot, his hands had found a rhythm. Not smooth, but he still removed too much in some spots, barely scratched the surface in others, at times functional. The pile of peeled carrots grew slowly.

  Materlyn set a bowl beside him. "Chunks, remember. About this size." She held up her thumb to indicate.

  Skuggi positioned the first peeled carrot on the stone. Remembered Jurgen's signs: careful cut, blade angled, fingers pinched together. He pressed down. The carrot split cleanly. He moved the blade, cut again. Another chunk, roughly the right size.

  The fourth cut went wrong. He pressed too hard and the chunk shattered into pieces. The fifth cut was too tentative and the blade stuck halfway through, requiring him to rock it back and forth to finish the separation.

  But the sixth cut worked. And the seventh. And by the time he'd finished the tenth carrot, his chunks looked almost uniform.

  Signe watched him work. "You're getting better fast."

  "Practice," Skuggi said.

  "Most people take weeks to develop that kind of control. You've had one day."

  He had no response that wouldn't lead to questions he couldn't answer. So he just picked up another carrot and kept cutting. Dissipating the fuel to establish a conversation with anyone interested in any matter related to him.

  They worked through the morning. The pile of prepared vegetables grew carrots, turnips, wild onions, some kind of tuberous root. Materlyn called it a skirret. Hilde hummed while she worked, a melody Skuggi didn't recognize. Signe told a story about her grandmother's cooking, how she could make anything taste delicious even when they only had scraps to work with.

  Materlyn brought out another basket. "These need sorting. Good ones in this bowl, bad ones we toss."

  The basket held what looked like parsnips, pale roots, thicker than carrots, dirt-crusted. Skuggi picked one up. It felt firm, solid. He brushed the dirt away, examining the surface for signs of rot or damage. Nothing visible to point out… He set it in the good bowl.

  The second one looked similar. Firm, intact skin. Into the good bowl.

  The third one looked fine too. Same color, same texture on the outside. He lifted it closer to examine… The smell hit him hard, as if discovering something new but nasty.

  Not strong. Not the obvious reek of something spoiled. Just a faint wrongness underneath the earthen scent of root vegetables. Sweet, but in a way that didn't belong. Organic decay masked by the parsnip's natural sugars.

  Skuggi turned the root in his hands. The skin showed no damage. No soft spots, no discoloration. But the smell persisted. He brought it closer to his face, inhaled.

  There. Fungal growth. The particular mustiness of spores reproducing in dark, damp spaces. It was coming from inside the root, not the surface.

  He set the parsnip aside, separate from both bowls.

  "That one's contaminated," he said.

  Materlyn looked up. "Which one?"

  He pointed.

  She picked it up. Examined it from every angle. "It looks fine to me."

  "It's got fungus inside. I can smell it."

  Hilde stopped humming. Signe set down the onion she'd been peeling. Both of them stared at Skuggi.

  "You can smell fungus through the skin?" Hilde asked.

  "Yes."

  Materlyn pulled out her knife. Cut the parsnip in half lengthwise. The flesh inside had darkened to gray-brown in patches, shot through with threads of white mold. The smell intensified immediately, now obvious to everyone.

  "How in all the hells did you know that?" Materlyn demanded.

  Skuggi looked at the contaminated vegetable. At the spores visible now in the exposed flesh. "The smell was different. After smelling the rest this particular one felt… wrong."

  "We've been looking at vegetables all morning. None of us smelled anything."

  He had no explanation. In the lab, his senses had been tested regularly—visual acuity, hearing range, olfactory sensitivity. They'd measured everything, documented the improvements, adjusted the treatments accordingly. He'd known for months that he could smell things others couldn't. Hear things they missed.

  He just hadn't thought about it being unusual outside his own realization.

  "Check the rest," he said. "There might be more."

  They went through the remaining parsnips together. Skuggi smelled each one before passing judgment. He found three more contaminated roots hidden among the good ones. Each time, Materlyn cut them open to confirm. Each time, the interior showed the same fungal corruption.

  Egil trying to show some superiority claimed the fungus had no effect on the meal, so Skuggi cut a piece and rubbed the fungus in a small plant, it dried instantly, taking away all the life it had as if it had taken all its resources.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Skuggi looked back at him, saying, "Do you want to end like that plant there?" I'm open to the idea.

  Egil remained quiet…

  By the time they finished, a small crowd had gathered. Torsten, Egil, Aionel. Even Jurgen had come over to watch.

  "That's impossible," Torsten said. He picked up one of the contaminated roots, sniffed it. "I can't smell anything wrong. Not until it's cut open."

  "I can," Skuggi said.

  Aionel crouched beside the pile of sorted vegetables. "How long have you been able to do this?"

  "Always. I didn't realize it was different from how everyone else smells things."

  "It's very different." Aionel looked at Torsten. "How good would you say his nose is? Compared to tracking dogs you've worked with?"

  Torsten's expression shifted. Understanding dawning. "Better. I've had hounds that could track a deer for miles through the forest, but they needed the trail to be fresh. And they couldn't tell you what they were smelling; just follow it."

  He turned to Skuggi. “Can you track? Follow a scent trail like a dog would?"

  "I don't know. I've never tried."

  "We should try." Torsten's voice picked up energy. "If you can smell contamination through a root's skin, you can probably smell other things we can't. Blood… Sweat… Fear… saying the last one with a more sinister tone."

  "Fear doesn't have a smell," Hilde said.

  "It does." Skuggi spoke without thinking, then registered the silence that followed. "When people are afraid, their bodies release some kind of smell; I can't quite catch a name for it. Through sweat, through breath. It changes their scent.”

  Freia had appeared at the edge of the group. She watched him with that assessing look she sometimes got, like she was cataloging information for later use.

  "What else can you smell?" she asked.

  Skuggi thought about it. Focused on the scents around him now. The obvious ones first…smoke from the fire, unwashed bodies, wish i will take my time to say two havent done so in weeks. Occasionally the smell of copper tang of blood still on his hands from yesterday's butchering. But underneath those, subtler things. The sap bleeding from a tree Egil had cut that morning. The particular mustiness of Kalf's clothes, which had gotten wet two days ago and never fully dried. The herbs Materlyn had tucked into her belt pouch something sharp and green, rosemary maybe.

  "Everything," he said finally. "I can smell everything. I just don't always pay attention to all of it. There's too much."

  Torsten implied that would be the reason for his drastic reactions in the beginning as we began to do things together.

  ¨I clearly remembered when he smelled a deer's blood, he almost vomited by how strong it was, or that time fire gave him an uncontrollable sneezing," added Egil.

  Torsten grabbed his shoulder. "This is useful. More than useful. With a nose like that, we could track game for days. Could smell predators before they get close. Could tell if water's safe to drink or if there's disease in it."

  "Could tell if someone's lying," Freia added quietly.

  Everyone looked at her.

  "People's scent changes when they lie," she explained. "Stress, like when your heart is about to explode, increased sweat production. If Skuggi can smell fear, he can probably smell deception too."

  Skuggi hadn't considered that application. But she was right. He could smell the biological markers of emotional states. Lying would produce its own signature: the stress of maintaining a falsehood and the physiological cost of suppressing the truth.

  Aionel laughed, but it sounded forced. "Well. That's going to make things interesting."

  The group dispersed slowly. Back to their tasks, back to the comfortable routine of camp work. But Skuggi caught the glances they threw his way. The reassessments happening behind their eyes.

  First the boar's neck. Now this.

  He was becoming a collection of impossible things. Each new ability that surfaced pushed him further from normal and made him more of an anomaly they couldn't explain.

  Materlyn handed him another carrot. "Finish these. We still need to eat, supernatural nose or not."

  He peeled and cut in silence for a while. Let his hands work through the familiar motions while his mind processed what had just happened.

  Jurgen sat down across from him. Picked up a knife and started helping with the carrots. They worked together without speaking, the only communication being the occasional sign… here, like this, good.

  After half an hour, Jurgen set down his knife. Signed a question: different, yes?

  "Yes."

  Born different? Or made different?

  Skuggi met his eyes. Jurgen's face held no judgment. Just curiosity. The same kind of curiosity Skuggi had about this world he didn't understand as he saw the alchemist carve open his body and skin.

  "Don't know yet," Skuggi signed back. It was one of the first signs Jurgen had taught him… hands shaping something from nothing.

  Jurgen absorbed this. Nodded slowly. Signed again: Who would know but you?

  "I don't know… ."

  That didn't seem to be enough of an answer. Jurgen picked up his knife and resumed cutting. The conversation ended there, but something had shifted. An acknowledgment passing between them. You're might be different and I don't understand why, but I'm not going to treat you differently because of it.

  Freia joined them an hour later. She didn't take a knife, just sat nearby, ostensibly organizing the sorted vegetables but really just existing in the same space.

  "They're going to want to use you," she said eventually. "For tracking, for security, for whatever advantages your abilities give them."

  "I know."

  "And you'll let them."

  "Why wouldn't I?"

  She looked at him. "Because once you become a tool, people stop seeing you as a person. They see what you can do for them, not who you are."

  "I don't know what will be of me," Skuggi said. "I'm figuring that out the same way I'm figuring out everything else. If being useful helps me survive while I learn, then I'll be useful."

  "That's a dangerous way to think."

  "All ways are dangerous right now."

  She didn't argue with that. Just went back to arranging vegetables, her hands moving in precise, controlled gestures that spoke of old training. Noble manners applied to refugee work.

  Torsten appeared again as the sun started dropping toward the horizon. "Tomorrow," he said to Skuggi. "We test that nose of yours properly. I'll set up a tracking exercise. See what you can really do."

  Skuggi nodded. "Alright."

  After Torsten left, Freia spoke again. "You're going to fail some of these tests. You know that, right? Whatever they made of you… you won't talk about, they didn't make you perfect. Nothing is."

  "I know."

  "And when you fail, some of these people will lose faith in you. Will decide you're not the miracle they thought you were."

  "Good."

  That surprised her. Her eyebrows lifted. "Good?"

  "I don't want to be a miracle. Miracles are untouchable. I want to be competent and useful and present… for now. Those things I can actually be."

  She studied him for a long moment. Then, so quietly he almost missed it: "You're smarter than you look."

  "What do I look like?"

  "Someone who breaks things. Someone dangerous."

  "I am dangerous."

  "I know. But you're also thoughtful. Most dangerous people aren't."

  She stood and walked away before he could respond to that.

  Skuggi finished the last carrot. Added it to the bowl with the others. Looked at the pile of vegetables they'd prepared… enough to feed the group for days if they supplemented with meat and foraged greens.

  His hands had stopped destroying everything they ever touched. That was progress of sorts…

  Tomorrow he'd find out what else he could do. What other abilities the lab had given him without his understanding or consent.

  One discovery at a time. One test at a time.

  Until he knew what he was.

  “???????? ??? ???????... ?????? ???? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????...”

  “Monsters are mirrors... showing only the darkness we refuse to see in ourselves...”

  How was it??