Lukas didn’t stop. Not even for a breath.
The mont the last boar hit the ground, he was already moving — efficient and unhurried, working through the aftermath with the practiced calm of soone who had learned long ago that hesitation after a fight was its own kind of waste. He ordered Tommy to begin assimilating without ceremony, and one by one, after prying out the beast cores with quick, clean motions, he sent the emptied skulls sailing toward Tommy for processing.
The assimilation was smooth. Almost chanical. The bones vanished into Tommy’s fra with quiet, steady absorption, the whole process taking barely any ti at all.
From the dozen ordinary Bloodthirsty Boar skulls, the total ca to twenty sacrifice points — a decent haul, unremarkable but solid. The legendary grade boar contributed another twenty on top of that, its rarity apparently translating into sothing the sacrifice system recognized and rewarded accordingly. Forty points in total, sitting ready and waiting.
He could upgrade any of his techniques to the next level right now if he wanted to.
He filed the option away without acting on it. There was sothing more pressing.
With a quiet word to Tommy to stay alert and hold the periter, Lukas turned his attention to the awakeners.
He gathered their cold corpses onto slightly elevated ground — four of them in total, all killed at the hands of the legendary grade boar before he had arrived on the scene. He crouched beside the first and began to search thodically, moving through their belongings with the quiet focus of soone not entirely sure what they were looking for, but certain they would recognize it when they found it.
The first pass turned up the usual things — items that belonged to scouts, mostly. Navigation tools, lightweight supplies, nothing that painted a clear picture of purpose or destination. Practical things carried by people who spent their lives moving through dangerous ground.
Nothing that explained why they had co this far.
He was on the verge of concluding there was nothing useful here when his fingers found sothing in the chest pocket of one of the bodies — a silver dallion, small and flat, its surface dark with dried blood. He turned it over, trying to read the words engraved across its face, but the blood had filled every groove and the inscription remained illegible. He set it aside and kept searching.
Then his hand closed around sothing else entirely.
A small wooden box, pure and unadorned, sitting tucked beneath a fold of fabric as if it had been carefully placed rather than casually carried.
What is this?
Lukas straightened slightly, turning it over in his hands. The box was light, the wood smooth and pale, without any marking or embellishnt on its surface. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about it — and yet the deliberateness with which it had been stored said everything about how much the person carrying it had valued its contents.
He felt the quiet pull of possibility in his chest.
This might be it. This might be the reason they ca this far.
He opened it.
A soft click. The lid swung back.
And Lukas’s eyes widened before he had consciously registered what he was looking at.
The bird.
The sa bird — small, still, with those distinctly unsettling beady white eyes — the sa one that had been hovering around Tommy, watching with that quiet, almost intelligent attentiveness that had caught his notice before.
The gears in his mind began to turn.
He held the box for a mont, looking at the bird inside it, then let the thread connect itself.
The bird I found earlier might have belonged to this group.
He said it quietly out loud, as if giving the thought a voice would help him be certain of it.
So these birds are so kind of reconnaissance device. These people were out here searching for sothing — and they accidentally stumbled across Tommy in the process.
The word accidentally landed with a particular weight.
A slow, careful exhale left him.
He was relieved — more relieved than the situation strictly warranted, perhaps, but relief felt appropriate. He had not wanted Tommy’s abilities attracting the wrong kind of attention, and a dedicated scouting operation aid specifically at uncovering what Tommy was capable of would have been a far worse scenario than accidental discovery.
But accidental or not, the situation still carried risk.
Any one of Tommy’s abilities — taken individually, examined closely, understood even partially — was sothing that powerful guilds, veteran awakeners, or hungry upper organizations would move mountains to acquire. Or to eliminate, if acquisition turned out to be inconvenient.
Lukas had no illusions about how that world worked. The minds of powerful guilds and high-ranking awakeners followed a logic that ordinary people found difficult to anticipate, and the mistake of assuming safety just because no one had moved yet was the kind of mistake that only got made once.
He closed the box quietly and slipped it into his pack.
Better to stay alert. Better to stay one step ahead of whatever question these awakeners had died before they could answer.
Just as he was thinking, Ambrose’s cat-masked face surfaced in his mind without invitation.
He pushed it aside, but the faint edge of regret that ca with it was harder to dismiss. Accepting her offer had been a decision made in the heat of the mont — tempted by the number, moving before he had fully thought through what agreeing would actually cost him in ti and attention.
But regret was a luxury he couldn’t afford to sit with for long.
He had made the decision. What mattered now was not undoing it, but making sure he didn’t repeat the sa mistake again in the future. Not every call he made was going to be the right one. That was simply the nature of moving fast, and Lukas had chosen long ago that moving fast was preferable to standing still and deliberating until the opportunity was already gone.
He put the thought away and got to work.
Four pits appeared in the ground in quick succession, the soil giving way cleanly under his hands. When they were ready, he severed the heads from the four corpses thodically — without ceremony, without comntary — and buried the bodies one by one in the earth.
So people might have furrowed their brows at the sight. Found it disrespectful. Muttered sothing about the dignity of the dead.
Lukas had no particular response to that. He wasn’t a saint, and he wasn’t pretending to be one. These awakeners had died out here in the forest, unknown and unwitnessed, and he had been the one to find them. He could take their skulls as a modest fee for the inconvenience of cleaning up after them, giving them a proper burial...couldn’t he?
He tossed the heads toward Tommy without looking back.
Tommy began assimilating imdiately — that quiet, steady process of absorption that Lukas had grown accustod to observing. He watched from a short distance, monitoring the progress, running idle calculations about whether the sacrifice point yield from human skulls would differ aningfully from beast skulls.
A few minutes passed.
Then a few more.
Lukas rubbed his chin slowly, his eyes narrowing.
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