A/N: This late updating is really starting to become a bad habit. This chapter is also shorter than I would like but I gotta post what I have written for this chapter or it won't get posted at all. I'm struggling a bit with this fic and how I want to phrase certain parts of this story. I do love writing this fic though, so there's no need to worry that I'll abandon this fic. I just need to get my act together in regards to the update schedule and just what I want to write for future chapters.
To Queen Mo-Freakin: I'm so happy that you're still enjoying the story!
To Bungee: Thank you so much for reviewing! I'm glad that you're enjoying Clementine as a character and the story so far!
To Atlas Falls: Clementine has better cooking skills than I do so I'm not sure how I'll write the cooking scenes lol cx The lil' critter is going to be sticking around for a while so be ready to meet the newest party member! C:
To xenocanaan: I'm happy you're liking the fic so far.
If Clementine is going to be completely honest- death by pig is a pretty lame way to die.
Not that there is an ideal method of death she approves of for herself, considering that having a favored way to die includes death and Clem would personally rather avoid dying for as long as she can. But if she were to choose a way to die, being killed by a carnivorous boar in the middle of the forest would most definitely not be her number one choice. It lacks the finesse and excitement of dying in battle, or being murdered, or getting hit by a car, or falling from a cliff, or getting really bad food poisoning, or... nearly everything really.
That being said, it is a very good thing that she hadn't charged in blindly into a direct confrontation with the killer boars. The pigs are freaking enormous.
They're brutal as hell too.
From her place in the trees- she's sitting on a sturdy branch overlooking a clearing full of the vicious animals- Clementine winces at the wet crunch of a boar trampling another examinee. These Visca Forest pigs are much deadlier than she had originally anticipated.
She should have expected something like this though, considering she's lived with a Gourmet Hunter her entire life. She's should know better than to assume that the pork a Gourmet Hunter wants to eat will be easy to gather. Gourmet Hunters have very high standards for the ingredients they use in their cooking and if it just so happens that the best ingredients also happen to be the deadliest?
So be it, they're willing to risk their lives for a taste.
Clementine can admire the dedication that Gourmet Hunters have because although she has no intention of becoming one herself; that's not to say that she doesn't understand that there are just some foods that are worth dying for. There's no way that she could have gone her entire life as the daughter of a Gourmet Hunter without having an appreciation for flavor.
She's been stalking the boars below her since she first stumbled upon the herd but Clem isn't much closer to finding out how to kill one. She doesn't think that the pig will stand still long enough for her to close enough to inflict serious damage on it. From what she's seen, these pigs are fast. Fast enough to outpace fully grown men and crush them with their snout before they have a chance to properly react.
Clem is sure that she can kill it if she attacks hard and quick- which just so happens to be the only plan that has popped into her mind so far. So she is pretty much out of options if she can't come up with some other way of killing a pig that doesn't include her getting up close and personal with it.
She's not good at coming up with plans though. The time she has allotted for brainstorming has already ticked by and she's nowhere near close to an alternative solution.
At least her sensing tells her that there's not anyone close enough to see and yell at her for the incredibly reckless thing she is about to do. Like shrug off her backpack. Like gently tuck the animal she stole from the claws of vultures into a nook of the tree she's in, unsheathing her blades, and hoping that she doesn't end up dying in a lame, pig related death.
Clementine waits for one of the boars to wander close to the tree, to split away from the main team of pigs and then- she pounces. She lands on the back of the boar closest to her and the thing squeals like there's no tomorrow- though if things go as planned, then it won't be.
She locks her legs around the bulk of the boar's back the best she can and drives her knives deep into the animal's skull. Her blades sink into the flesh, tough skin giving way to sharpened daggers after she drives them down as hard as she can. It's messy, blood splattering her clothing and skin as the boar jerks and bucks with enough force to dislodge her.
Clem lands on the balls of her feet, her legs bent and her body rolling forward to soften the impact of a fully grown boar sending her flying off its back. Seeing it collapse as two of her knives are buried into its skull, blood dripping from its wounds and with a vacant look in its eyes.
She keeps her senses open and tracks the other boars in the clearing- thankful that they're less focused on teaming up to kill her and more on getting their young out of her immediate vicinity. At least some of the freaky animals in this God-forsaken forest act like they're supposed to.
Clementine is just ecstatic that she has her pork.
Now all she needs it to do is to do a quick field dressing and it will be ready for cooking.
She trudges to the corpse with a giddy smile.
She's going to be cooking for Buhara and- more importantly- Menchi. The Menchi. The World's Finest Gourmet Hunter. That Menchi. Clem is still deliberating whether it'd be appropriate for her to ask for an autograph or not.
She's less than five feet away from the dead boar when something in her senses lights up and quickly eats at the space between them with a warbled squeal. It's one of the other boars of the group that has split off to attack her. The enraged boar shoots toward her with an agility she does not expect from a creature of its size.
She hurls herself out of the way, feeling a gust of wind from where the boar narrowly misses crushing her. The boar hurtles past her and the speed in which it moves is incredible. She scarcely has time to get back on her feet before the boar is charging again.
Clem darts behind a nearby tree, not the one where she has hidden the animal she rescued earlier, and yanks out the blades sheathed in her boots. She holds them with the handle grasped tight between her fingers, the blades facing downward in a reverse grip.
Her senses blare out a warning and Clementine twists around the trunk of the tree as the boar charges once again. The bark splinters under the attack but does not shatter. Clem uses the small distraction to slash at the creature's neck, blood spurting from the new wounds the same way they did from the first boar.
If Clem can avoid death, then the boar will bleed to death on its own sooner than later.
She's not sure she has any time to waste though. She's mildly terrified that she won't have enough time to make the recipe she plans to appease the Gourmet Hunters with.
Clem shakes the worry out of her head. She will make that recipe for Menchi- and Buhara too, even if he's not really who she's trying to impress.
What that means is that she has to hurry up and kill the boar attacking her as soon as possible.
The trick to killing the boar by stabbing it in the face seemed to work just fine; but without the tree branch giving her the height advantage, Clem isn't sure how to kill this new boar without making a mess.
The boar is stubborn. Its aura loses its vibrancy, the blurred edges of animal growing faint as time ticks by but still, the boar refuses to die without a fight. It charges at her with the fatal wounds it carries slowing it down. Making it easier to avoid but not any less dangerous, as Clem soon finds out.
Even at death's door, the boar is freaking fast.
She's ready to fling herself out of the way and let it ram into one of the trees behind her but then- as her knees bend and her world narrows down to the space between her and the rapidly approaching pig- she hears a small mewl, almost unnoticeable besides the thundering footsteps of the boar.
Her blood freezes. Her sensing confirms what she fears.
She takes a moment to think about all the bad decisions she has a tendency to make when unsupervised and sends a mental apology Hanzo's way- because Clementine knows that she's about to do something completely reckless and idiotic.
She curls her hands tighter around her knives and sees the boar charge, closer and closer.
Clem braces herself.
This is really going to hurt.
Hanzo's head snaps up from the dead pig in front of him.
His Clementine-is-being-reckless-radar is beeping.
Insistently.
He would like to think that Clementine hasn't gotten herself into more trouble less than two hours after she narrowly made it to the Second Phase. He's aware of how capable she is in defending herself, not that she'd be a challenge for him to defeat, but Hanzo hasn't spent close to a week with her without noticing just how reckless she can be.
Speaking of which, he hasn't seen a hint of the girl since she ran off in the beginning of the Second Phase, actually. Ideally, that wouldn't be enough time for Clementine to get into trouble.
Realistically, it's more than enough.
And that's why he's worried.
It's hard to trust that Clementine will be careful when in the few days they traveled together, Hanzo has already developed a gut instinct for every time she isn't.
Although, maybe not every time.
Like as they ran through the Numere Wetlands and she chose to split away from him to help Leorio and Kurapika. His newfound radar hadn't beeped then- but some of Clementine's questionable decisions are so obvious that if he truly needed the Clementine-is-being-reckless-radar to notice; he'd be a terrible shinobi.
They're all in one piece after facing down the boars, which thanks to Gon's quick discovery of their weakness, didn't take as long as the shinobi had been expecting. Now, the clearing is full of dead boars and examinees that don't have a single clue as to how to make roast pork, Hanzo among them.
"How are you supposed to cook pork?" Leorio asks in a loud whisper. "Do you just put it over a fire until it's cooked? How do you even know it's done cooking?"
"Unfortunately, the art of Ninjutsu doesn't extend to the art of cooking." Hanzo chimes in, dragging his boar over to where the others are gathered. "But I'm sure we can make something that is both edible and appealing to the palate." His words seem to calm Leorio down.
Kurapika makes a thoughtful sound. "Hanzo is correct. Panicking will do nothing to resolve the situation at hand. We should spend the time we have doing our best to cook to the best of our abilities."
"But Kurapika!" Gon exclaims, "Aunt Mito never taught me how to cook."
"I've never been inside a kitchen in my life," Killua adds with shrug, "The only thing I know how to cook are poisons to kill people with."
Hanzo smiles reassuringly. "I'm sure that with enough determination we can manage something that won't kill the examiners."
Gon crosses his arms and looks away from the ninja, a pout on his face. Hanzo is sure he's still upset at him for carrying him out of the Numere Wetlands instead of letting him follow Clementine into danger. Hanzo did make a promise though, so he can't find it in himself to feel bad about how the boy reacts to him fulfilling it.
"If we're going to prepare a meal we should head back to the cooking stations," Kurapika says.
Hanzo agrees with a smile.
Inside he's sweating.
He has a feeling that Clementine is the only one among them that has the slightest idea of how to prepare a meal without potentially poisoning anyone who consumes it. Or at least that's the impression he got from watching her swoon over the woman, Menchi, and take off into the forest while rattling off ingredients.
The only thing he knows how to cook is rice.
The sense of taste can't be that hard to fool, can it?
The first thing that crosses her mind after the boar slams into her with the force of a freight train and she is hurled back- is that she's glad that no one is around to see what a disaster this turned out to be. If Clem wasn't as sturdy as she is- or if she hadn't known enough about Nen to coat herself in Ten right before the boar stuck her- then her bones would have snapped under the pressure she is hit with.
Even with her aura focused into Ten and curled around the delicate tissues of her organs and bones; when the bark of the tree behind her splinters under her back and the wood shards explode into her skin- it burns through the haze of adrenaline pumping through Clem's veins.
Clementine groans. It's going to be impossible for her to pick out every splinter out of her back on her own and until they're all out then this pain isn't going to get any better. For now, she has to push through the pain and focus on the matter at hand; which is the dead pig in front of her and the fact that her arms are halfway in a dead pig's mouth.
It's the result of a last-minute gamble- of a sudden change of plan born from the boar opening its mouth as it charged towards her. An opportunity that had blossomed at that moment, an opportunity that Clementine had seized in the space between one heartbeat and the next; in the tightening of her fingers around the handles of her blades and the thrusting of her knives upward just as the boar collides against her. The pig died the moment her blades cut through the roof of its mouth and buried themselves in its brain. More blood splattered over her and the stench of iron now clings to her clothing in a way she knows will be impossible to wash off.
Clementine feels absolutely disgusting. She is completely soaked in blood. She's in pain and still has to cook for the Gourmet Hunters waiting for her.
Clem wishes she was capable of making good decisions- because a lot of these reckless ones end up with her gasping in pain after she survives the bullshit she finds herself in.