Depthless Hunger

Chapter 51: Wilderness Etiquette

"Oh, come on!" Kai pulled his bow off his back and threw it down on the ground. "I don't want to hurt anyone, and you of all people shouldn't feel threatened!"

The old man blinked at him and squinted down at the weapon. "Is that bow made of metal?"

"It's Irunian steel," Kai said absentmindedly as he picked it up. He'd been overcome by a moment of frustration, but if the old man was going to attack him, he really wanted to have his bow ready. When he looked up, however, he found the old man chuckling.

"You really are new, aren't you? Running to strangers, looking at everybody's soul, just answering questions..."

"I was banished literally yesterday." Since this was the friendliest anyone had been, Kai returned his bow to its place and tried a smile. "I'm trying to get by out here, but I feel like I keep screwing everything up."

"I remember when I was first banished. There's an etiquette out here, and it's not one they teach you in fancy clans." The old man sat back down and patted the rock beside him. "Why don't you sit down?"

"...should I?"

"No, you shouldn't! Anyone who's offering something for nothing, or acting too friendly, probably wants to kill you." The old man raised a wrinkled finger. "That's your first lesson, and the only one I'm giving you for free. If you want to be polite, you tell someone exactly what you want from them. Only if they accept a deal can you start acting friendlier. Now, what else have you been doing wrong?"

"I just don't... wait." Kai froze mid-step, then stepped back. "What do I need to give you for future lessons?"

The old man cackled and slapped his knee wildly. "Maybe you're not doomed to an early death after all! I love these boars, but it's getting hard to run after them at my age. If you bring me another one, I'll offer you another lesson. Sound fair?"

"Sounds fair."

It took him until dusk to locate one of the monsters, but once Kai finally spotted the boar, he took it down with a single arrow. He trotted back to the hill, carrying it over his shoulder. It had taken discipline to not immediately take the monster's core, since the old man might want it, or want to do something cooking-related with it.

Kai was curious just how he was apparently surviving on monster flesh, but he thought that would be a terrible first question. Especially if he had to pay for every single question with another boar.

"Not bad, not bad!" The old man clapped his hand together and eagerly came to take the boar from him. "It took me three entire days to track down the previous one. It's possible to eat the ruined dogs, but there's nothing you can do about the taste."

"Can you tell me how communities like the one to the south work?" Kai asked. The old man waved him to a rock opposite the spit, and this time it didn't seem to be another test.

"This is about the point where it's okay to ask someone's name. I'm Aglahai Clanless, what about you?"

"Kai Gr... Clanless."

"We're brothers, then!" Aglahai laughed at his own joke without reservation. "Listen, Kai, if you help me with a bit of hunting, I'll tell you what you need to know. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but I'd like to help you out. You remind me a bit of me when I was your age. Speaking of which, do you want some of this boar? It's getting just perfect."

Aglahai pulled the boar off the spit with his bare hands and skewered the new one. Even cooked, the monster smelled foul, but Kai was getting hungry. He decided that this was a good time to test just how generous the old man would be, so he asked his most pressing question.

"How can you eat monsters? I thought they were always poisonous."

"Oh, you can burn the poison out! It's probably not healthy for you, but I'm still kicking!" Aglahai slapped his own stomach as he took the roast boar to a small portable table. There he began slathering it with a heavy sauce from a jar. "Mind you, it's an acquired taste, and it's never as good as proper meat. But if you know what you're doing, which I do, you can hide the taste with flavoring."

Once the boar was slathered in sauce and covered in some sort of aromatic herb, it didn't smell quite so awful. Kai accepted the offer of a slice and picked it up with his knife, carefully eating around the edges. It was too chewy and contained a deep bitterness that he disliked, but his body didn't react as if he'd been poisoned. If it was really possible to eat monsters, that was a skill he needed to acquire.

"You're taking to it fast." Aglahai had torn into his own slice and now spoke around a mouthful. "Probably because your Physique is right crazy for a boy your age. Or, then again, you might be used to bad food. You're not quite so polished as I thought at first, so I bet you've known some hardship."

"I grew up an orphan," Kai said between bites. "What about you?"

"Usually you don't want to ask people about their pasts. Now me, I don't mind. Hell, I'll talk your ear off given half the chance! But it's a bad first question."

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"Alright then... what about the communities? Why do they have a pit of burning bone?"

"It's a monster deterrent. Their bones can burn for a long time, and the smoke keeps others away. It's effective enough, but the young ones are always too confident in it. If there's a gamma-class monster, or a big enough group, or even an incursion... the smoke isn't going to stop them. But don't tell those little fire huddles I said that, or they'll get all huffy."

Kai chuckled. "You don't sound very fond of them."

"Wastes of time, in my opinion." Aglahai eagerly went to serve himself a second thick slice of the boar. "Mind you, that's easy for me to say because I'm not so weak. But you're a tough kid, I suggest staying away from them. More likely to get stabbed in your sleep than to get what you want. There aren't enough to be reliable and they're barely holding on, anyway."

"Well, if you can teach me how to cook the poison out of monsters, I should be able to fend for myself better."

"That's what I'd suggest!"

They ate in silence for a while, Kai just filling his stomach. The smell of the new boar was starting to get to him, though, so he pushed for a new question. "I understand that using your spiritual sight is impolite, but do you really just... guess about everyone's strength? I'm used to investigating everyone automatically."

"For a start, throwing around phrases like 'spiritual sight' is liable to get you punched. Lots of folks call it 'eyeballing' someone, and anyway you don't want to do it unless you want to start a fight, or think they're going to start one." Aglahai waved his slice of meat cheerfully. "Mind you, most of the people out here are half-trained and half-blind. If you're subtle enough, you can get away with it."

"I think I've read about that being a thing, but it had never seemed important." It was one of the mana exercises he'd set aside as less relevant to his development, actually, and he knew exactly how he needed to train. He was inadvertently copying the old man's casual speech. "Anything else I should avoid doing?"

Aglahai was eager to give his opinion on any subject under the sun, so the conversation stretched late into the night. Eventually Kai pretended to go to sleep and watched the old man, just in case it was all a long trap. Somehow he fell asleep for real, and fortunately woke up alive.

"Up up, no time to waste!" Aglahai jabbed him in the side with a foot and then began puttering around camp. "I can't sleep in anymore, not with my back. You'll have to put up with that if you stick with me, haha! But really, get moving."

Over the next days, Kai followed the old man in a roughly northwestern direction and discovered a side of survival training that he'd never realized existed. Most importantly, he learned that cooking monsters required intense heats that would scorch other meat, as well as a number of tricks to eliminate the poison and hide the worst flavors.

In exchange for the lessons, Kai helped Aglahai hunt down monsters. He actually hoped that they would run into something truly menacing, since it would have been interesting to see the old man fight, but they were remarkably lucky just when he wished they weren't. Like fate had dealt him a mortal wound, then tickled him just to be obnoxious.

As freely as Aglahai talked about anything, he actually took a long time to reveal much information about himself. Kai only gradually discovered that he was from much further south in Goralia. Apparently the lush heartland could be just as vicious when it came to clans. Exactly why he was banished, Kai had yet to learn, but the old man had apparently spent almost his entire life in the wastelands.

A week in, Kai began to wonder if it would be possible for him to build a new community outside the city. Either Aglahai picked up on it or the timing was bad, because the old man started asking about which direction Kai would go off on his own.

That was still an open question. Other than his general goal of the Krysal City States, Kai had nowhere he actually needed to go. Instead of worrying about it, he dedicated himself to learning everything Aglahai would teach him so that he could survive in the wasteland on his own. Running into a friendly veteran was a remarkable stroke of luck, and Kai had few enough of those that he couldn't afford to overlook them.

Obviously he couldn't absorb a lifetime of tricks, but after two weeks Kai thought that he had a solid foundation. Monster cooking, wasteland etiquette, tips for water, training suggestions, and more. Even though he knew the day was coming, Kai was going to miss the old man.

Eventually they sat around a fire much like the one where they'd met. Aglahai had been uncharacteristically quiet that evening and finally spoke up in an odd tone. "It doesn't take much, does it?"

"What doesn't?" Kai looked up from his food preparations curiously.

"Life. Everything was going great for me too, once. The Hunter Trials were a bit different in my day... but I suppose that's neither here nor there." Aglahai sighed like a creaking building. "The long and short of it is that I killed someone. It was an accident, but that didn't matter. They banished me as a murderer and that was just it."

"Your life hasn't seemed to turn out so bad."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Wouldn't seem that way if you asked my parents or my fiance."

"Did you ever see any of them again?"

"Only during an incursion, and I wished I hadn't." Aglahai's usual grin lowered to reveal surprising bitterness. "I suggest you get out of this place, sonny, and never come back. The whole Frontier is cursed. I don't mean the central wastes, I mean every nation fool enough to live near it."

Not sure what to say, Kai worked in silence. It didn't take long for the old man to continue.

"I might look strong to you, but the older I get, the more I realize I'm not. It's too early for you to think about, but there are all kinds of barriers in life. And at some point, you just get full up. You don't want it enough and you can't keep pushing yourself. I don't know what to tell you about life, but I'll say this: either find somewhere you can marry somebody nice, or stay hungry. Do both and you'll just end up like me."

"You don't seem weak to me," Kai said. Aglahai immediately scoffed.

"You'll eat those words, sonny. Now, I can see you have a Class problem, whatever is going on there. But I would bet you that even without a Class, you'll surpass me. In ten years your Physique and Soul will be so far beyond mine, you could kill me by farting. Though please don't."

Aglahai laughed and slapped his knee again, but it rang a little hollow. Both of them knew that they wouldn't have that much longer together. Kai looked over his potions and belongings, wondering if there was something he could give the old man to truly thank him. At the very least, he wanted to leave things on better terms than his rushed goodbyes with everyone in Monskon City.

In the morning when he woke up, Aglahai Clanless was gone.

Without him, Kai realized that he was going to need to make his own plans again. He was reasonably far from Monskon City now and extremely far from Krysal. Heading further north to find the mercantile path was still an option, but that no longer seemed appealing. After everything he'd learned, Kai had a much stronger sense for the wastelands.

Further northwest, there was a crossroads where travelers from many nations met. Wherever he ended up in the end, Kai's next step would be there.