Through the Scope
Part One of the Sinex Conquest Saga by Bardothren
Chapter 1
Keith's world narrowed down to a criss-cross of black lines, notched with smaller lines for reference points. His brown hair was kept just long enough to sway in the breeze, and his eyes, bleached a pale green from staring so long through refractive lenses, blinked so infrequently that people called him 'snake'. He had a permanent ring around his right eye, caused when a tauros rammed straight into his rifle.
He had on a rough cloth shirt and pants, both dyed a patchwork of greens and browns. They were woven from scavenged mareep wool, making them waterproof and shock resistant. He wore a matching set of gloves, and he had spare cloth wrapped around his feet, which was tied into a knot over his Achilles heel. He also had a rough knapsack behind his back, tied across his waist with twine, and a belt knife, hilt sewn into the pants.
He was lying on his stomach atop a rocky bluff, almost five hundred feet above a wide grassy plain. Despite his best attempts of clearing the area, a small pointy chest wedged itself into his ribcage, making each breath scrape tiny cuts on his chest. Even though he could feel drops of blood soaking into the fabric of his shirt, he didn't move.
Keith was considering getting up when he saw a flash of yellow in the grass. He looked closer, and he could make out brown-tipped ears, meandering through the brush. As he watched, two more ears joined the first pair, followed by more. Brown-tipped jagged tails emerged from the grass, releasing a shower of sparks each time they touched.
His finger brushed the trigger when he saw a pink berry fly into the air. The delectable missile was shot down with an arc of lightning, and the charred berry smoked as it fell into the grass. Another berry, a blue one, was thrown up, followed by a clump of small red berries. A few of the red berries pop, spraying a shower of seeds onto the field that Keith could only see because the grass was so green, the seeds so dark, and the sun so bright that every detail was kept in sharp contrast.
As a fourth berry was thrown up, the wind changed, blowing down towards the fields. At once, every ear pricked up. Keith picked a pair of ears, felt the wind blow through his hair, and nudged his aim a few degrees to the left. Then he fired.
At once, the ears disappeared into the brush, leaving a ghostly trail of swaying grass in the wake of the fleeing pikachu. Keith fired another shot and saw a grass trail come to an abrupt stop. He moved his scope in wide arcs, but he could not find another target. After he reloaded his rifle, he waited twenty minutes, to ensure that no predators would ambush him, before he threw down his rope, climbed the bluff, and checked his kills.
The first was a clean shot in between the eyes. It still had sticky blue juices at the corner of its mouth, and it seemed to have a smile on its face. Keith cut off the ears and put them in the pouch at his waist.
The second was still twitching. The bullet hit it in the thigh, causing a slow yet lethal loss of blood. Keith swiftly grabbed its head and jabbed the knife point into the base of its skull, causing it to jerk in panic before it fell limp. Keith felt a surge of electricity through the gloves that caused his hands to go numb. After he rubbed feeling back into his fingers, he sliced off the ears and dropped them in his pouch. He stopped only to collect his rope and bullet shells before leaving the plains.
He walked through the forest, sniper held in his arms to fire at a moment's notice. Keith didn't shoulder his weapon and relax until the forest thinned out, and the path beneath his feet had fewer weeds and more pebbles.
His village, the village of Konago, was a patchwork quilt of ramshackle wooden huts and dilapidated metal buildings shored up with wooden beams. Windows were either boarded up or had their precious glass hidden behind sturdy shutters, and all the doors in town were thick sturdy planks that slid aside. The streets were a mix of mud, flat stones, and asphalt that had crumbled into black, sticky pebbles. Lampposts stood watch along old street corners, but only a few remained upright and functional. The LED bulbs had been installed years before the old age ended, and, with an unconventional source of electricity, they still functioned decades later.
Fewer than a hundred people lived in the village. As a group, their hair was long and ragged, their clothes either animal pelts woven together or old cloth repurposed into extensively mended garments. Most had brown hair, brown eyes, and darker complexion, as if the abundant sunlight tanned every surface of their bodies. Everyone bathed daily, but there lingered a faint scent of sweat and the barest hint of dirt on each person that couldn't be scrubbed out with coarse cloths, crude lye soap, and river water.
People greeted Keith as he walked past, and he answered them with a wave or a nod, never his eyes off the path. Anytime someone asked how his day was, he held up two fingers.
The hunter's lodge was a low, flat wooden building on the east side of the village, right next to the main road. The lodge was bleached light-brown and cracked in many places.
Keith walked inside, stopping to check the old slate slab hanging from the wall. Set upon the slate with a white, powdery stone was a list of bounties and corresponding figures.
"Good evenin', snake. A few items went up," said a man from behind the counter. His hair, atop his head and sprouting from his chin, had a few streaks of gray, and wrinkles clung to his forehead. His clothes were pokemon furs woven together in a hunter's patchwork quilt, lightened by decades of exposure to the sun.
"Including pikachu ears?" Keith asked, as he shifted his gaze to the wall decorations. Hanek, owner of the hunter's lodge, kept a small collection of his favorite acquisitions. A salamence pelt, stretched out in a hoop with living saplings, hung behind the counter. Teeth necklaces, furry pelts, mounted horns, strands of braided hair, jars of pokemon eyes, and jagged claws decorated other walls and shelves in the lodge.
"Yeah, those too," Hanek replied. "Ten an ear."
"That much?"
"Word came in yesterday. The New Empire'sbuildin' a big dam out east, in Helio. They're buyin' up every conductor they can find."
"Helio?" Keith asked as he dumped the ears out of his knapsack. "Isn't that town a bit small?"
"The dam's pokemon bait," Hanek slid forty dull copper coins across the counter and picked up the ears. "Capital City needs more generators."
"Better them than us. I'll take as many rounds as this will buy."
"That's the fifth time this week. Don't tell me you're planning an expedition!"
"I saw signs of tauros further north. I'll hunt a few tomorrow."
As Keith walked out of the lodge, Hanek shook his said and said, "the mayor's gonna be furious."
Keith returned to his hut, which stood just outside of the town. The hut was a wooden dome formed of curved planks, held up with a ribcage of wooden beams. A stone chimney jutted out the center, with a dome over it to keep out the rain. The door was a single thin plank carved to match the hut's contours, with crude wooden hinges. Inside, a stone hearth squatted in the hut's heart, radiating heat on all sides. Old pokemon skins and feathers hung from the walls, and an enormous charizard pelt covered the floor, providing a tough, rubbery carpet that felt pleasantly warm on bare feet. The hammock was strung up on two wooden poles on the other side of the fireplace.
Keith lay down on the hammock and picked a feather on the wall. For a whole hour, he stared at the feather, making note of every iridescent color and the way individual strands twitched in the slight draft. He also observed all the other walls, noting their presence in his peripheral vision, along with the sounds outside his hut. He heard the mayor stomping on tree branches a full minute before the knock came at his door.
"It's open."
The mayor opened the door and hunched his way inside. He waddled his way around the fireplace, knocking a skin off the wall.
"Are you really leaving tomorrow?" he asked.
"Day after," Keith answered. "Time to move on."
"Please reconsider! I have a hard enough time keeping the Empire here as is!"
"Game's getting scarce" Keith said, staring past the mayor at the feather. It fluttered with each hoarse, wheezing breath the mayor took.
"Then just stay the winter. There's no need for you to go out!"
"I'll bring back something nice."
"We can't risk it!" the mayor said. "You're the only hunter we've got!"
The feather, blown off its hook by the mayor's breath, drifted on thermals onto Keith's lap. He picked the feather up and twirled it in his fingers.
"We have this conversation every time, and every time, I come back."
"That's no reason to go!"
"That's not a reason to stay either."
"If you just taught someone, this wouldn't be a problem!"
"Do you have anything to say that we haven't already discussed?" Keith asked, pointing the feather at the mayor.
"Will you just hear me out?"
"No."
The mayor waved his arms in frustration and waddled out of the hut, knocking over another pelt in his wake. Keith left his hammock to hang the pelts and feather, throw more wood into the hearth, and gnaw on a strip of tauros jerky before falling into his hammock and falling asleep.
Chapter 2
Keith always hated the northern hunting grounds. Unlike the east, with its high cliffs and wide, grassy expanses, the northern plains were small and surrounded by dense forests. It left Keith standing out in the open, vulnerable to anything that charged at him.
A herd of tauros were grazing at the other end of the clearing. Their tails lazily flicked away insects as they munched on the long, verdant grass, and their horns gleamed in the sunlight like ivory spears.
To Keith's left and right were four other villagers, each wielding a thick wooden spear. They milled about impatiently, waiting for Keith to take the first shot. Keith had been waiting for the right moment for almost an hour when one of the tauros raised its head and sniffed the air. Keith's bullet chipped the underside of its left horn and passed through its temple.
Most of the tauros bolted in panic, but four charged towards him. Keith fired off two more shots as they closed in, taking out half of them with heart shots. The third had its head lowered, shielding its body with its thick skull and horns. Keith knew better to aim between the eyes and instead aimed above its head, at the spinal cord. Keith's shot pierced the tauros' neck behind the skull, and it instantly collapsed. It slid to a stop just inches away from the barrel of his rifle.
The fourth slammed into the villagers' spears, impaling itself on the fire-hardened tips. The villagers were thrown back with the force of the impact, but they all stood up without injuries.
"Bring in the wagons!" one of them called. On cue, six white-topped wagons trundled out onto the fields.
"How many?" a wagoner asked.
"Five! The snake got four by himself!"
"Damn. Let's get 'em loaded!"
Each tauros had to be lifted onto the wagons by hand. Even with fourteen people, each Tauros took ten minutes to load. The wagons' axles creaked and groaned, but Keith could tell the axles would hold. He could still remember the faint sound of cracking wood that preceded a broken axle during the last tauros hunt. That wagon, with the dead tauros still loaded on it, had to be dragged back to town.
Once the wagons were loaded, Keith and the other villagers jumped onto the sixth wagon. With a crack of a whip, the domestic tauros, stripped of its horns and firmly fastened to the harness, pulled the wagon forward with a small grunt.
"When will you be back?" a villager asked as the wagon trundled along.
"Sometime," Keith answered.
"I told you, Beckard, there's no point in getting anything out of him. It's like lookin' for pidgey teeth.
"Are you at least gonna take a prentice?" Beckard asked. "Everyone'd feel a lot safer with two hunters."
"There's not enough game for two hunters," Keith answered.
"Nolan took you on," another villager countered.
"Like him, I will take an apprentice when I'm ready to die."
Another ten minutes of silence followed before they returned to the village. Every able-bodied person emerged from the ramshackle huts with cleavers and knives, swarming around the meat wagons. Villagers carried away the hunt by the handful, dumping the heads, bones, entrails, and other inedibles onto the fire pit. Huge hickory logs were dragged on top of the refuse, and a great fire was lit, its flames dancing high above their heads. Once the fire subsided to smoky embers, skewers of meat were hung in the hickory heat that wafted from the ashes like incense.
Two villagers turned the spits while the others cooked the remaining meat in their homes, making stews and steaks in preparation for the feast. Keith finely ground up his meat and stirred in herbs, creating a moist meaty cake that smelled faintly of bay leaves and thyme. He cooked it on a battered metal pan in his fireplace, letting the cooked meat patty sit in its drippings. As he took the steaming meal to the communal hall, others left their houses, each carrying their contribution to the feast on old metal pans and crude wooden plates. Two carried barrels of beer and another handled a box of wooden mugs.
The communal hall was a huge, old metal barn. A single table, a hodge-podge of wooden slats mashed together with crude iron nails, sat at the center of the hall. Wooden benches, the younger cousins of the table, lined the edges of the table. The whole room was lit by a single LED bulb perched atop the ceiling like the North Star, and rows of wooden torches in crude sconces fastened to the walls.
Thirty plates were set on the feasting table, each covered with roughly identical wooden domes. The mayor ordered everyone to close their eyes and shuffled the dishes around while everyone turned away from the feast. It was supposed to be random, but Keith could smell Maria's cooking behind him. She was the mayor's daughter and the village's best cook, and her work often found its way in front of Keith at feasts.
Once the food was redistributed, the mayor gave the word and everyone turned around. Keith saw that he was correct; only Maria could slice beef so thinly, the au jus was a perfect, homogenous liquid, and the loaf of bread vented steam through its sliced crust like a chimney.
The mayor took the first bite, placing a tiny meatball drizzled in white cream sauce into his mouth. The village watched as the mayor meticulously chewed the meatball. He swallowed – the signal to start the feast. Keith slapped the meat between two slices of bread, drowned the sandwich in au jus, and crammed half of it into his mouth. He counted every herb he could taste – twelve – as he chewed and swallowed. He finished in two minutes. Everyone else ate as he watched and listened.
Once everyone was finished, the mayor pushed his plate away and stood up. He cleared his throat and began his speech. He thanked everyone in the village for contributing to the feast and extended additional gratitude to Keith. A prayer for Keith's safety finished the speech, and everyone raised their mugs in a toast. Keith only had a sip while everyone else drained their mugs. When the conversations rose in volume, buoyed by the alcohol, Keith slunk out of the hall, seen by no one.
A leather pack of smoked meat was left outside of his door. He crammed it into a bulky leather backpack with his box of rifle cleaning supplies and survival equipment, a crude sketched map, and twenty-eight hand-sized sacks of ammunition. From the wooden crate beneath his hammock, Keith retrieved a small handgun, its dusty box of .22 caliber bullets, a black collapsible fiberglass crossbow, a wrapped pile of fiberglass and wooden bolts, and a leather-bound tome. The crossbow had a tough polyester glove that fit snugly onto Keith's right hand, and the pistol had a holster that could be buckled to his twine belt.
Armed and packed, Keith settled into his hammock with his clothes and weapons still on, falling into the restless sleep of a hunter. His eyes were closed, but his mind made note of every shift in the wind, every creaking branch, and the sound of footsteps approaching his door. The footsteps stopped short of his home, as he knew they would.
Hours later, well before the first hint of dawn, Keith left the hut and found Maria slumped against a tree, clutching a cloth sack in one hand and a thick woolen blanket in the other. Her long black hair was tangled up in one of the tree's lower branches, and her cheek was pressed against rough bark. Keith scooped her up, carried her inside his hut, and set her in the hammock. The sack slipped out of her hand, landing on the charizard pelt without a sound. Keith took it and left.
When he walked outside, Hanek was waiting for him, leaning against the same tree Maria was sleeping on. He was picking at his teeth with a skarmory feather that glinted in the moonlight.
"Caught ya this time," he said.
"You should get some sleep."
"Why? It's not like I'll have much work to do once the tauros pelts are tanned. And I might never see you again."
"I'll be back."
"But I might not be here. I'm getting old, snake. My pops wasn't much older than me when he went, nor my mom. I find more gray hairs in my beard every mornin'. My bones creak, my hands ache, and I have trouble remembering where I put my knives. Heck, this feather took me ten minutes to find."
"If you think you'll see me again, you will."
"Do you really think that works?" Hanek asked.
"Works for me."
"Say goodbye, just this once. We might not get another chance for a farewell."
"No. Goodbyes are for dying men. You've got a few years yet."
"You won't even say it to ease the fears of a friend?"
"Nolan said it only once," Keith answered, taking the book out of his pack. "That's when he gave me this."
"Then, see you soon, I guess. Don't forget to bring me something nice."
Hanek walked off, slashing at the branches in his path with the feather. Keith strode in the opposite direction, towards a tall, snow-capped mountain just south of the village, leafing through book pages as he walked.
