Chapter 45.1: Towards The Southern Beastmen Tribes
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month IX: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 9th Month
The Journey
On the first day of the ninth month, a separate group moved out of the village heading north.
August accompanied Princess Mee-rka, Prince Marakan, Baliti, and the beastfolk bodyguards who had been with the royal siblings since their arrival at Maya Village. The destination was the Great Chiefdom of the Southern Beastman Tribes, a conglomeration of differing chieftains living under a single community structure — a kingdom by any human equivalent measure, though the beastfolk did not use that word for it. Mee-rka and Marakan were its prince and princess. Baliti was returning to his own place within that community. And August was going because there was a conversation that needed to happen in person with the person who had the authority to have it.
Mee-rka's position in Talon One was temporary for exactly this reason: her father the Great Chief Midoka Kotoko-ko had not yet been asked whether she could hold it permanently. August was going there to ask. If the answer was no, her position in the team would need to be reconsidered and a replacement found. This was not a situation that benefited from indefinite postponement, and August was not the kind of person who postponed things that needed doing.
He said his goodbyes to Angeline and the household the previous evening, assured them he would return by the second or third week of the current month, and set out with the settled focus of someone who had accepted that being away from home for a defined period was the cost of something worth doing.
Finnester went overhead. The eagle was not capable of carrying a group of this size, and the beastfolk had their own way of moving through terrain that did not require assistance, so the arrangement was that Finnester flew above and August traveled on foot with the group. This turned out to be more efficient than the standard road route would have suggested, because the beastfolk did not use any of the standard road routes built by humans and other civilizations.
They moved in a direction that was, as August calculated using the system's mapping function, essentially just bulldozing straightforwardly. The conventional road route would have taken two to three weeks navigating the built path network (using the old routes of the kingdom of Ogind). The beastfolk route, cutting directly through terrain that built paths worked around for reasons of human logistics rather than actual impassability, reduced this to a week and a half by conservative estimate and possibly as little as a week at the pace they were setting. The pace was a marathon run with minimal breaks, which was the beastfolk's natural travel mode and which August maintained without embarrassing himself, though his body registered every hour of it.
They stopped for food and an hour of rest during the day. At night they made camp, because beastfolk superior night vision did not fully compensate for human limitations in darkness, and because even grandmaster-candidate individuals needed sleep. Bodies had their limits at the end of the day. This was not a fact that any ambition could negotiate away.
The first day went without incident. The terrain was new to August, which was its own kind of pleasure for someone who had spent most of the preceding months inside or near the village. The company was comfortable in the way that the company of people you have fought alongside is comfortable: not requiring performance, allowing the day's movement to carry its own weight.
He may have needed this break more than he had realized.
---
Day Two
The second day had more to it.
The first event was an encounter with a beast in a woodland area that was possibly near a settlement, moving through what was clearly an established range. It was large and immediately distinctive: it had white hair hanging past its body and sagging to the ground, trailing along the earth and collecting debris and mud and dead leaves into its coat as it moved. Any other color such as white, in a woodland environment full of earth tones and filtered green light, was not a camouflage color. Given the creature's size, it had presumably concluded that camouflage was not something it needed to survive in its evolutionary trail.
The group halted. Nobody moved toward it. The beast watched them with the quality of attention that very old, very intelligent animals bring to the assessment of unfamiliar things in their territory: comprehensive, unhurried, and not yet decided.
The decision it arrived at was to continue what it had been doing before the group arrived. It filed them under not currently a threat and moved on.
The group moved on too. They did not push through its established area. The beastfolk knew instinctively what August's system confirmed: a White Haired Gorangutan, a species of ape-like beast of considerable intelligence and documented tool use. Docile when treated with appropriate respect. Dangerous when cornered or threatened. Wise enough that the locals said it could use human tools when it chose to. It had assessed the group as not worth the trouble. The group had correctly assessed that not being worth the trouble was the ideal outcome.
The second event was less civil.
They heard screaming from the direction of the main road running parallel to their line of travel. Not screaming that had the quality of people in distress specifically, but screaming that had the quality of distress convincingly performed, which was a different thing and one that August's instincts flagged before his conscious assessment finished processing the sound.
He urged the group to investigate. Not out of nosiness, but because when you hear what might be screaming you go and look, and August had never developed the capacity to hear potential distress and continue in the other direction without him investigating.
What they found was nothing. No people. No obvious cause. Just a section of forest that was slightly too still in the wrong ways, with a tree at its center that was slightly too present in the wrong ways.
The Mimic Tree revealed itself in the moment it recognized the lure had not produced its intended result. What it had produced instead was a group of beastfolk and one very unimpressed human who had already classified it correctly and was looking at it with the expression of someone who had just wasted several minutes of travel time.
August burned it. Not casually, not as a demonstration, but with focused fire applied to the specific point where the system identified the creature's root core — the actual biological mechanism that kept it functioning — burning downward through the root system until nothing remained that could regenerate. A Mimic Tree left partially burned was a Mimic Tree that would lure someone else's children into its range next season.
So he made sure, at least this one wouldn't cause any trouble for the locals.
They moved on after the controlled burn. The rest of the day passed without incident.
---
Day Three to Seven
The third through fifth days covered terrain that expanded August's working knowledge of what existed beyond the village's immediate surrounding territory considerably.
They crossed mountain passes that the road network avoided by routing around. They forded waterways at points the beastfolk knew from generational familiarity with this specific land. They moved through areas that had no names on any map August had any access to and which the system logged as new territory with the quiet persistence of a mechanism that recorded everything in the background.
They hunted for food rather than stopping at settlements, which was the beastfolk's natural preference and practically speaking the faster option given their pace. Finnester contributed from above: the eagle spotted a rare Dodu Bird, a winged avian that the Finnester took from the sky with the efficiency of something that had been hunting airborne prey since before it was even born (hardwired into its system). The beastfolk on the other hand showed their hunting skills and have brought down a Single Horned Rinoteraptor, a bull-type beast whose charge had carved a tree in half before it was stopped and whose feet were sharper than they looked. August noted the feet for future reference.
The best find was a Ramelk on the fourth day, an enormous creature with two twisted horns and two antlers whose size made the butchering work substantial. Once they had cooked the first portion and tasted it, the entire group arrived at immediate consensus: this was what the remainder of the journey was going to be primarily about. August stored the cut portions in his Magical Item Pouch, which held everything at the temperature it was when stored. The Ramelk would arrive at the chiefdom exactly as it had left the fire.
The sixth and seventh days were the specific monotony of sustained travel: break camp, move, hunt as needed, make camp, sleep, eat and repeat. August found this less unpleasant than he might have expected. The terrain kept changing. The company had settled into the comfortable rhythm of a group that had been moving together long enough to communicate without needing to.
---
The Eighth Day: Arrival
They arrived at the chiefdom on the evening of the eighth day.
The timing was unfortunate in a specific way. An updraft in the valley before the chiefdom's outer boundary carried their scent away from the settlement's guards rather than toward them, which meant the first indication the guards had of the group's arrival was visual rather than olfactory. For beastfolk guards this meant they had significantly less information about what was coming than they were accustomed to having before they needed to respond to it.
Their response was what the response to an unidentified group approaching a protected settlement in the evening was: defensive posture, weapons out, full alert.
Then the wind settled. The scent arrived. The guards registered Princess Mee-rka, Prince Marakan, and Baliti, and the defensive posture began to resolve toward welcome, and then the guards registered the human in the group and the posture went somewhere more complicated.
The beastfolk who had accompanied the royal siblings from Maya Village moved immediately between August and the weapons, communicating to everyone present that this human was not a stranger who had wandered into bad company but a guest of the royal household.
Mee-rka's response to weapons being pointed in August's direction was immediate, delivered in the Beastman formal declaration register, the language used when a member of the royal household wanted their words to carry full institutional weight.
"What the hell are you doing! This human is our esteemed guest. Lower your weapons!"
The elder who had reached the scene first responded with the measured tone of someone who was not going to allow their guards to lower their weapons because a princess told them to.
"Princess, the law of the chiefdom does not permit humans within our sacred lands. Entry by a human is an act of war."
"Grrrr….Elder, you know exactly how disrespectful you are being right now."
The argument that followed was the kind that happens when two people who are both correct about different things occupy the same space and neither is wrong enough to concede. Mee-rka was correct that August was an honored guest and that the welcome being offered was an insult to that status. The elder was correct that the law was the law and did not contain exceptions for honored guests of any category.
Into this arrived Great Chief Madok, drawn by the commotion with the expression of a leader who has heard enough noise to know his direct involvement is required before it resolves itself.
He assessed the situation. He smelled the air.
He stopped when he realized the familiar scent.
"August," he said. "The Blurred Devil."
The name landed on the assembled crowd with the specific weight that a name carries when the people hearing it have heard it spoken with reverence and are now processing that they have been pointing weapons at the person it belongs to.
The Great Chieftain Midoka Kotoko Leader of the Southern Beastmen Tribe and his brother the Great Chief Madok who had arrived than the (king) at the scene earlier, had already performed the necessary calculation of a leader with two things in conflict: first is the current law of their Chiefdom, which was absolute, and his awareness of who was standing outside his border and why. The Great Chieftain Midoka then called the assembly of the chieftains and elders of the tribe to put it into discussion.
Mee-rka objected with the full force of her personality, which was considerable. Marakan and Baliti applied themselves to prevent the objection from becoming something worse than an objection. August watched all of this with the patience of someone who had been in rooms where decisions were being made without him before and understood that the correct response was to wait.
He could probably hear the meeting with effort. He chose not to. Translating the Beastman language through the system forced new neuron pathways to open up inside his head in ways that were not comfortable, and eavesdropping on a meeting he had been excluded from was not the kind of thing the meeting's outcome would benefit from being associated with. He would rather wait for the conclusion.
The night grew later. The conclusion of the meeting did not arrive just yet. Mee-rka emerged at some point, having been removed from the assembly by whatever process assemblies use to remove the people making the most noise, and rejoined the waiting group with the specific energy of someone ejected from a room they wanted to be in.
August looked at the situation and made the assessment that a man who had been traveling for eight days almost nonstop and was now waiting for a meeting he was not part of to conclude had the time and the need to sleep.
He found a suitable position outside to make camp. The beastfolk guards who had made the journey maintained their watch. And he closed his eyes.
The meeting could finish without his anxiety helping it along. It would reach its conclusion whether he slept or not, and he was considerably more useful to whatever came next if he was rested.
After a few minutes he began to slip into deep sleep.