No Trespassing [2]

She furrowed her brows and thought hard. What would nana think? Before she could think more, she saw a flicker of light below her on the mountain top. The Ipili were closing on her.

As she climbed down her perch to resume her exhausted flight, she heard a light crunch sound. She froze as her fuzzy white ears flicked down and to the left.

Shhhhitip!

She narrowly dodged the short spear that stabbed deeply into the tree above her shoulder. A moment later and she would have been pinned to the tree and bleeding out.

"Stop running Huli, you can still be a servant to Captain Baofa if you give up now! You'll just have to get used to life without Glamour!" A venomous voice rang out in the dark. It was a grating and ugly voice like nails on a crystal, and it was coming from Galt.

She jumped from branch to branch before lithely hitting the ground at a sprint, not even bothering to waste her energy to speak.

Not because she didn't want to curse them to their faces, but because she didn't have the luxury to spend Glamour to translate her Huli language to Ancestral. She quickly disappeared into the forest with Galt and Kito hot on her trail.

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Galt raced ahead. He must capture this Huli! The merit from securing her alone would be enough to get him transferred off the scout team and into one of the Conquest Barracks. The meat in the Conquest Barracks was always better.

Always greater in both genetic activity and volume. If he was ever going to make a name for himself and move up in ranks, he needed a big achievement. Huli were rare now, and this one might be the last Huli they see this side of the Rolling Mountains.

With the grandeur of achievement shining in his eyes, he flexed and flared his hood.

Galt's scalp and neck spread suddenly, the scales widening out into a large coppery hood that was wider than his shoulders. With only 70% of his ancestral bloodline blocked by the Fera, his potential was great.

He might even become a captain one day. His two eye-spots on either side of his hood glowed a deep red as he inhaled. Galt suddenly exhaled firing poison from the eye-spots on his hood as fast as an arrow. The two bolts of reddish brown poison streaked through the air at Huli and he saw them strike her in the back.

The Huli fell from the branch she was on down into a small copse of trees, letting out an anguished scream.

Finally! I got her!

Galt raced ahead into the copse to see the Huli woman lying weakly on the ground, heavily panting and sweating. Her leg was broken with the shin bone prominently sticking out of the flesh and she had a look of abject terror on her face.

"You should have listened, now that pretty little leg will never heal right. But don't worry, I'll take special care of you before we harvest your tail," He said with a lascivious grin that split his face like a crescent moon.

This Huli didn't have a single out of place piece of fur on her face, she was clearly the highest born he had ever seen of any race. As he licked his lips in anticipation, he suddenly frowned.

Galt had tasted the scent on the air of his own poison, but instead of it coming from the Huli in front of him, it seemed to be coming across from behind his left shoulder. Startled, he went to spin around as quickly as he could.

Before he managed to turn, he felt an agonizing pain in his back and chest. He froze, looking down to see a sharpened bone protruding from his chest.

As he cried out in agony, the Huli woman on the ground in front of him shimmered and disappeared like so much wind.

Huff, Huff "Gloat in hell you son of a bitch. I normally wouldn't taste the genes of a fucking Ipili, but the irony of tasting yours will hopefully be better than the taste of the scum that runs through your blood."

The last rites an Ipili heard before one returned to the clutch would usually sing praise of the honors and achievements of the Ipili after a great conquest. If she cursed his lineage and then consumed his core, he would go down as a disgrace in the ancestry.

Hated by the ancestors and cursed to never survive the cruelty of the clutch again. Destined to be reborn again and again as nothing more than the most basic gene fodder for his superior kin.

Galt screamed in horror and agony as the genes faded from him. His hood retracted and his body withered in seconds. Hatred shone in his eyes as he gripped the dagger tearing the life out of his heart.

He suddenly coughed and spasmed as a small gemstone the size of a grain of rice, shining with a ruddy brownish red light fell from his lips. As the last light faded from his eyes, he couldn't help but marvel. My genes…were so pitiful?

The Huli woman gasped for air, as a violent shudder went through her body. This was not the first time she had killed an Ipili, but the thought of what she was about to do thoroughly disgusted her.

Exhausted, she used what little Glamour she had left and wrapped the rice sized gemstone with her tail.

Brownish red light shined and some of her snow-white fur on her tail took on a tinge of brown. She felt a wave of nausea as her stomach churned. Her body rejected these genes on an intrinsic level, and to forcibly absorb them to power her Glamour would have unknown side effects.

As she felt nauseated, she also felt a wave of vigor pass through her body. The nasty wound that had been so slow to heal on her side closed a little more firmly, no longer likely to break open in combat.

She let out a sigh as she struggled to her feet. She had to move. She glanced up at the sky, looking for the brightest known star, the Cold star. This star would always guide her further into the cold recesses of the mountains, and hopefully break the trail of the trackers.

Unfortunately, the smokey fog of the mountains made the sky difficult to see. She noticed a star though, one shining even through the fog, albeit barely. She moved forward in that direction. What she didn't know is that the very same star had previously seemingly swallowed the Hare and the Hunt.