Sam

They continued on, and Will finished setting up the rest of a half-dozen traps in what Sam gathered was a rough semi-circle. He then moved to the center point between them and sat cross-legged on a large, flat rock, upturned hands resting in his lap so that he looked like some aged monk engaged in quiet reflection, the effect made especially pronounced by his cueball dome. She resisted the urge to rub it since he seemed to be concentrating on something.

"What are we doing now?" Sam asked. She leaned back against a broad pine, arms crossed. She shifted with a displeased grunt when she realized she was getting sticky sap on her shoulder. Rubbing at the spot only resulted in getting her fingers covered as well. That was definitely going to stain. "Dang it."

"I'm extending my Detect range as far as I can," Will explained absently, eyes serenely closed, chin dipped against his chest. "When an animal wanders close to a snare, I'll cast Pulse nearby—just a skill that creates a small sensory input, like the feeling of being watched—so that it'll panic and run in the opposite direction."

"Right into the trap?"

"Correct."

"Clever. Feels kinda like cheating, though."

"Would you rather go hungry?"

"Forget I said anything." Sam resisted the urge to wipe her tacky hands on her pants, just rubbed them together instead to work off little rolled-up bits of sap.

"Good. Now be quiet and let me work."

Sam rolled her eyes. "But of course, Your Majesty."

Will fell into stony silence, hardly moving a muscle. Instantly bored, Sam did some light calisthenics to pass the time. After maybe thirty minutes of that, Will suddenly picked his head up and announced: "Finished."

"That was quick," Sam said, bouncing upright from her push-up position and brushing moss off her palms. "All the traps are filled?"

"Yup."

"Damn. You're quite the hunter, aren't you?"

Will snorted, unfolding his legs with deliberate slowness. "Don't get too excited. It's mostly just rabbits. Still, it's better than nothing." He began to stand up, putting a hand on his good knee to push himself off of. "Come on, let's—" He trailed off as he straightened and tilted his head back, quietly turning it this way and that like a wolf keening for a scent. "Ah. We've got an uninvited guest."

"What kind?" Sam asked, immediately wary.

"Monster. Diregull. It must've felt the Pulses and thought it was a potential food source." He pointed at a random spot in the undergrowth some ten feet from her. "Give me that stone."

Sam didn't see any stone, but when she went looking through the shrubbery she soon found a fist-sized one jutting out of the dirt. Extracting it, she tossed it to Will, and he thumbed an uneven layer of wet soil off the thing while turning it over in his hands, his attention still fixed on the dense tree canopy.

"What are you—?" Sam began.

Will held the stone up, and it suddenly shot off like a cannonball from his palm, whispering through the lattice of coniferous branches. After that, nothing. Sam squinted upward, eyes shaded against the trickles of sunlight coming down, and was quite unable to make anything out.

The silence was broken by a distant screech, soon followed by a great crashing and breaking. Branches and pine needles came raining down, then a large body tumbled through the canopy with off-white wings awkwardly flapping and yellow webbed feet pumping at nothing. The creature hit the ground, bounced and rolled, came to a stop over twenty feet away, one broken wing splayed out awkwardly.

It was something like a seagull, speckled gray and brown and off-white, but twice the size of a bald eagle. Its long red beak was lined with sharp teeth, snapping at nothing. Limbs flailing awkwardly, head thrashing at the end of a long neck, it turned one yellow eye on the two humans, the pupil narrowing down to a baleful pinprick.

Sam settled into a ready stance, fists raised, but quickly realized that she wasn't going anywhere. Her feet were as good as cemented to the ground.

Freezing up again. Can't do that. Have to move.

The bird—a diregull, Will had called it—flipped onto its back, then scrabbled back to its belly again. That pickaxe of a beak opened wide, and the creature let out an awful, ear-splitting wail that set its throat vibrating with the force of it. The sound drove into Sam's skull like handfuls of dirty needles, made her clap her hands over her ears as she found herself suddenly lurching forward, left stumbling by an intense wave of vertigo.

"Cancel!" Will called in a loud, authoritative voice, cutting through the unnatural scream as the sound tapered off into a strangled croak, the diregull flailing its head against the ground in a furious—but futile—effort to continue producing the scream.

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"Now, Sam," Will continued. "Before it gets its innate ability back."

The command brought her back to the present, helped her find her balance. The thing that got her moving, though, was the monster turning its attention on Will, clumsily beginning to stand as it flailed toward him, pushed along randomly by legs and neck and the one still-working wing.

Sam broke into a stiff jog toward the diregull, quickly putting herself between it and Will. She was on top of it in three seconds flat, and it brought that huge wicked beak up to snap at her, hateful yellow eyes fixed on her. She dodged its attempt at pecking her face off, caught its head under her armpit when it tried to pull back, and held it stretched out so she could stomp on the elongated, white-feathered neck once, twice, three times. She felt its spine shatter, her boot leaving it sagging and limp like an old rope. Adjusting her grip so she had two firm handfuls of coarse integument, she swung it full-force to wrap its body around the nearest pine with a dull thump. The creature rolled to the ground, and she observed with mild queasiness that the thing was still alive, blinking and twitching spastically even though its body bore a sickening resemblance to a bag of broken twigs.

Gonna have to finish it off, I guess.

Swallowing bile, Sam spun on her heel to find a nice big rock to bash its brains out with. But before she'd spotted one, Will was there with a hand on her chest.

"You did good," he said with a soft smile. "Let me take care of the rest."

"But—"

"Don't push yourself. There will be times when you'll have to do this stuff yourself. But not while I'm here."

Sam hesitated. Though unwilling to turn back and face the monster again, she could still hear its disturbing deathrattle honks. "Okay," she said, gaze downturned as she bit her lower lip.

Will moved away. There was a soft swish of steel through flesh, then a few final gurgles, then stillness. She was vaguely aware of Will wiping his dagger clean on a sheet of moss before coming back to her side, putting an arm around her. "Good job," he said.

The praise only made Sam feel more ashamed. "I'm sorry I couldn't kill it."

"Don't be. Freezing up during an emergency is one thing, but this was just a single diregull. You did well. Like I said, no need to push yourself." He planted a light kiss on her shoulder. "Was it hard for you?"

"Yeah," Sam reluctantly replied. She glanced down at him, fighting memories of dead grumplings that looked far too much like human children, and forced herself to let up on her lip when she realized she was worrying at it nearly hard enough to draw blood. "Do you… mind if I sit down for a while?"

"Go ahead. Take your time."

"I'm sorry for being so weak."

"Shush, now. It's weird how we both have opposite definitions of what weakness means. But if you ask me, I don't think there's anyone stronger than you."

"Pssht." She allowed herself a trace of a smile. "Your lies used to be at least a little believable."

"Shut up and sit, or I'll put you on your ass myself."

"Sorry." Sam went down on her knees with a sharp sigh, forcing herself to face the dead monster. Seeing the corpse, twisted like a wrung towel and hemorrhaging oily-black blood from a clean cut across its throat, she found it difficult to reconcile the damage she had inflicted almost effortlessly, and she had to repeatedly swallow down bile.

She sat there for a little while and forced herself to really consider the death of the thing in front of her. She didn't regret killing it. With Gug as the only exception, monsters were evil things that hated humanity to a fault. There was no live and let live with them, no chance of a peaceful coexistence. Even so, she felt the need to apologize. Not to the monster, but to herself.

"I'm sorry I killed you," she whispered.

Will waited patiently by her side until she was ready to stand up again. When she did, he patted her on the head and praised her again. "You really are too good for this world," he murmured.

"I'm sorry."

"In a good way, stupid. The Frontier could use at least one decent person to shake things up."

Following Will's lead, they left the dead diregull behind and went to harvest their catches. Five skinny rabbits and a pheasant. Sam had expected him to leave the snares up overnight, but he took each one down in turn.

"The grinners will eat them otherwise," he explained. "Not because it's nutritious for them, but because they'll see that they're manmade and destroy them out of spite to keep us from making use of them."

"They're really not very nice, are they?"

Will chuckled. "No, they really aren't. And we'll have at least a couple thousand of them as neighbors for the next little while, so let's try to exercise some caution, yeah?"

"Okay."

"That means no impromptu morning jogs through the woods. I know you've gotten stronger, but the moment you start underestimating the Frontier is the moment just before you get your head chewed off."

"Got itttt."

They returned to the farm without any more issues, and Will immediately set to work slaughtering his catches out behind the house, which gave Sam a bit of free time to spend on whatever she liked. Finding that Gug was reading to Sunny in the living room, troll cross-legged on the floor and little girl sprawled over an armchair, she decided to join in on that for a while. The book he was reading from turned out to be the first draft of his very own novel, The Adventures of Greg the Human, which he was looking for feedback on. It honestly didn't seem too bad based on what she heard, although Sunny's verdict was decidedly less glowing as she was soon dead asleep. Gug didn't seem to notice.

Will had apparently taken a shower when he came through some time later, wearing a fresh set of clothes and toweling a bit of dampness from the back of his neck. Ember followed meekly at his heels, the former prostitute walking with her eyes downturned and her hands clasped before her.

"I'm sorry to break this up," Will said, interrupting Gug's dramatic rendition of how Greg the Human had braved a haunted house to save his friends, "but I'm gonna need you all for a while. Since your circumstances are all… fairly unique, I'll be conducting interviews to figure out exactly what I'm dealing with. You first, Master Troll. Miss Ember, you can stay here with the girl for a while—I'll call on you later."

"Understood," Ember replied, and moved to begin fussing with the sleeping girl.

"Interview?" Gug said, squinting in thought. "Like what they do with famous people?"

Will hid a smile by rubbing his stubbled jaw. "Sure. Are you up for it?"

Gug bumbled upright, nearly hit his head off a roof beam, and clapped his big hands together. "Of course! Anything for a fan!"

"That's very gracious of you." Will motioned toward the kitchen. "Take a seat in there, please. Sam, do you want to listen in on this?"

"Sure!" Sam replied, and followed the troll into the next room, with Will coming through last.

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