What Kind of Howl Would a Little Piglet Let Out When It Heard How the Old Pig Had Suffered?

Kas shook his head and took a deep breath, willing sensation back into his numb body.

He opened his eyes and saw Seneya's worried gaze in the dim torchlight.

The werewolf let out a plaintive whine, as if begging him not to eat poisonous food so carelessly.

"Aowu~"

"It's okay, Miss Seneya. I'm fine..." Kas shifted and sat down on the ground.

The man's skeleton, which had been sharpening arrowheads, had turned into a pile of shattered bone fragments.

From the marks, it looked as if someone had smashed it with an axe.

"Did I do this?"

"Aowu~" Seneya nodded and gestured wildly, trying to reenact what had happened.

But neither of them knew sign language. Seneya gestured frantically for a long while, and Kas still couldn't figure out what had happened.

"Old geezer?"

"Mm... Not long after you passed out, you started acting like a sleepwalker. You roared provocatively at that skeleton and used your axe to break every one of its skull bones into the shapes Seneya likes to eat.

"Even in your dreams, you were trying to find food for your wife, Kas. You're something else."

Ancestor seemed to have returned to his usual irreverent self. He didn't seem interested in what Kas had encountered after eating the mushroom, and continued cheerfully:

"Well, looks like you've found a clue. We should take care of this."

"We're still missing one thing: Nosa's location."

Kas waited for the old geezer's reply, but all he got was a faint, inscrutable smile.

"You already know what to do. Do you really need me to remind you?"

Sigh... Looks like I'm going to keep going further down this 'I reckon' path.

Kas sighed inwardly and walked over to the skeleton of Nosa's mother, Angeli. He bowed his head.

"Forgive me for this intrusion."

He gently moved the infant skeleton from the woman's arms and untied Angeli's delicate linen robe. Beneath her exposed bones, two shriveled umbilical cords, preserved in oil, were tied in the gap between her pelvis and sacrum.

To the Rishiman People, umbilical cords held a deeply sacred meaning. When a mother died, the shaman would cut open her lower back and tie the cord, which had been specially treated with ointment and dried, to her sacrum.

This symbolized the mother's death taking a part of her child's "spirit" with it. After death, the mother, now a "spirit," could use the cord buried in her body to find her child across the vast wilderness.

Legend had it that witches used the umbilical cord connecting mother and child as a substance for curses, driving the mother's "spirit" to kill her child with vile incantations.

Kas carefully untied the cords from between the pelvis and sacrum, holding one in each hand.

[Plan: Walk the dog without a leash, and the dog ends up walking you]

[Status: In progress]

[Inspiration: What kind of howl would a little piglet let out when it heard how the old pig had suffered?]

He returned the swaddled infant to its mother and bowed his head in silent mourning for a long while.

Then he gripped the umbilical cords and squeezed hard!

In a warm nest, the missing Nosa was sharpening arrows. She didn't care what had become of the pack of hyenas she'd sent out. They were the killers of her family.

Cold moonlight seeped through a crack in the rock, shining on the steel arrowhead. Nosa slowly turned the arrow that had helped her kill countless beasts and enemies. The mirror-smooth steel reflected her amber eyes.

Kas was Seneya's husband. He had to die... Most likely, given enough time, he would abandon Seneya just as her father had, unable to break her curse.

The first time she saw Seneya, Nosa had been drawn to her lonely air. If there was anything in this world she would willingly give her life for, it could only be Seneya.

Seneya's human kindness and animal cruelty were intertwined. It wasn't the fate she wanted, but fate was like that: a cruel joke that forced harsh realities onto gentle souls.

She's like me...

Nosa turned the arrowhead around. Its gritty surface reflected a pair of orange-yellow eyes filled with hatred.

Abandoned just the same, just as ignorant of the future, and born carrying the prophecy of a curse...

She hated them. She'd let the hyenas devour everyone who entered the forest.

They had never considered what the child in her mother's womb wanted. They'd tried to make others bear their suffering for all kinds of reasons, but had never asked if she agreed.

Yet she loved them, too. The happy memories woven into her flesh were something she'd never found with the animals she raised. She was their owner, but never their family.

Nosa thought of Seneya and murmured to herself:

"We'll stay quietly in the forest, fill a basin with hot water and soak our feet every day, watch the rain fall from the eaves in silence, do nothing at all, forget every memory, and wait for a quiet death to come..."

She hurried to sharpen the arrow, but suddenly her hand froze. The cold arrow slipped from her fingers and clattered through the cave.

Nosa clutched her head and curled into a ball, her small face beneath the red velvet hood trembling violently.

"No, no, no, no... How could he do this to you?"

Her body stopped shaking. She slowly turned to the waiting army of beasts, her lips barely moving.

"Kill him."

Through the window, Kas and Lilac watched the thin mist drifting like strands of thread through the forest. The gray gloom swallowed all the light of the stars and moon, and an invisible haze seemed to cloud their vision.

An oppressive weight, heavy as a wall, bore down on them. In the blurred distance, a few streaks of deep red flickered now and then.

As expected, the little piglet howled just like the old pig... Nosa's back.

"Frost Wolves, Iron-Bristle Pigs, Saber-Toothed Tigers, Blood Vultures..." Ancestor, who loved watching a commotion, counted the beasts in the forest one by one.

"Looks like you're in big trouble, Kas. Those hyenas were just an appetizer Little Red Riding Hood prepared for you. I've never seen a Beast Speaker who could make a hundred beasts move in silence. She's an extremely rare Beast Speaker.

"My advice is to bring her under your control. With just her will and thoughts, she can easily make even the most powerful beasts submit. That would be a tremendous help to the clan.

"With her, we could build a massive army of beasts and launch another war of conquest in the south."

Kas ignored Ancestor's suggestion with the look one gave an idiot. He had to admit he'd badly underestimated Little Red Riding Hood.

Was it too late to surrender now?

"Kas, Kas! What did you do to my family?"

Nosa, wearing a red velvet hood, appeared astride a gigantic antlered deer. The enormous white deer stood nearly a meter taller than an ordinary warhorse, and its powerful body looked like a heavy tank.

Golden light rippled along its crown-like antlers. Its pure white mane fluttered in the breeze as it walked, and the trees and flowers parted before its hooves to make way, as though unwilling to defile such a sacred creature.

"The Golden-Branch Giant Antlered Deer? How is that possible..." Morse cried out, then clenched his teeth. An unspeakable shriek rang from the cracks in his skull.

"This is bad. You can't fight back—not even do anything that could be considered offensive!"