CHAPTER TWO
She roused from the bed with the brightness of dawn's light filling the room and although R'chnt was usually an extremely light sleeper, he was sound asleep.
She tiptoed in an earnest effort not to wake him, but he stirred with the sound of a beep from his armor that made her jump from the opposite end of the apartment as she surveyed the hallway outside the door. The sound was soft, but in the still silence of the early morning, it echoed like a blaring alarm
R'chnt informed his group of the agenda for the day and stood.
He had barely slept, but it was enough for his needs after such a long day of rest on the last rotation. He had noticed the humans' need to sleep for hours and hours, far longer than any full grown Yautja and K'Shai was no different.
She had slept soundly the entire night, comforted in his arms, without moving.
When he rose and joined her as she made use of the bathroom, with nearly as much eagerness and pleasure as she displayed in orgasm, he smirked in amusement as he watched her and tended to his own needs, though with less vested pleasure.
When she returned to the bed, she retrieved a bottle of water from the stand alongside it and offered him a drink before she sipped from it.
"Do you have any of that jerky?" She asked.
He had come to learn that she called the meat he carried in a satchel jerky, whatever that was, and knew immediately what she was talking about.
The rations of meat were from a large, commonly hunted creature found on all of the worlds in his system. The animal was big enough to feed an entire hunting pack for more than ten rotations and the strips of meat were cured to last for weeks.
K'Shai took a large chunk of the food he offered her and bit into it, immediately shutting her eyes and moaning. Even eating elicited pleasure for her, in addition to urinating and mating.
He watched her in contemplative amusement as she ate the meat and he reached for a canister from his back pack. Her eyes lit up as soon as she heard the click of the top opening and he offered it to her before he took any of his own.
"This," she said, raising the canister slightly after she swallowed several gulps, "is the best stuff I've ever had in my life."
He nodded, accepting the compliment, although he silently thought that there were so many more, far better, experiences he wanted to expose her to if he was given the chance.
He did consider the drink for a moment, though. A'gha fruit had quickly become a staple in his and all the others' diet and K'Shai clearly delighted in the taste of it.
The fruit, eaten whole or juiced, was hearty enough to sustain any body for an indefinite period of time, and with the lack of available hunting prey on the overrun and decimated world, any hunter would be foolish to let his supply of it run too low.
Sitting quietly, he watched her take her fill of the drink once again, his eyes slowly surveying her thin and battered body as she stretched, arching her back and extending her arms, fingers crossed, into the air above her head.
She smiled as she pulled her body back together and caught his gaze shifting over her breasts and down her abdomen, across her thighs and back up while he inhaled deeply, his chest quietly raising and falling.
"What are you thinking?" She asked of him as she watched him watch her.
"I will teach you to hunt, for food." He said, eyeing her thin frame.
K'Shai nodded graciously, but whispered softly, in a playful tone. "Maybe not just yet."
She let her eyes drop from his commanding facial features to the defined muscles of his chest and abdomen, to his thighs and the extension hanging between them. She pulled herself to her knees and palms and crawled close to him, across the bed.
R'chnt clicked softly, piqued by her approach, catching the unmistakable scent her body emitted. It aroused him before she even made contact, but the feel of her hands pressing against his chest and shoulders and stroking his hair made his subtle clicking turn to a not-so-subtle aroused growl.
She leaned into him, wrapped her arms across his wide shoulders and around his neck, tenderly stroking his beaded tresses while she kissed his cheek, pressing her lips along his lower mandible, tracing the powerful line of his strong facial frame back towards his neck, stirring every quill with her tongue as she did.
She felt his body shudder under her touch, like he was forcibly letting go of the constant tension and high alertness, as if it were unnatural and uncomfortable and took a concentrated effort on his part to do so.
He teetered before her, sitting on the edge of the bed like a rock solid statue, swaying between the option of collapsing completely in an oozing heap or continuing on in an apprehensive and rigid display.
She pressed herself into him and helped him make the decision, as she delicately rubbed her hand between his thighs, stroking the skin of his inner thigh lightly enough to provoke him, teasingly enough to leave him wanting more.
He rocked back under her and shifted himself more centered onto the bed, allowing himself to release a deep exhale, forcing his tense body to ease up under her as she groped him.
She leaned forward, pressing her lips onto his body as her hands swayed across the definition of muscles of his abdomen.
His gray skin was firm, more solid feeling than a human body, and although it was textured, her fingers still glided smoothly across it. She brushed her fingertips over old faded scars, feeling the difference in the healed seams versus the undamaged skin around it.
She vaguely thought for a moment about the creatures that had made them, wondering if any of them were more horrific than the nightmarish bugs she had come to know, that he called the kainde amedha, the hard meat.
She leaned over him, tipped her head into his, kissing his cheek again and again while her hands rubbed along his body and groped his stiffening erection.
She felt him immediately, instinctively withdraw for a brief moment, a subtle, but noticeable display as before of his discomfort with being touched there, followed immediately by an equally subtle hint of acceptance.
She stroked him gently until she was sure she had him eased into a state of relaxation.
She moved her lips across his lower left mandible again, allowing the broken edge of the tusk that capped it to whisk across her cheek and under her chin as she pulled back and sat straight atop him, dripping with ready wetness between her thighs as she straddled him.
Only briefly did she also think to remind herself to hear the story of how he broke the strong tusk, before she raised her body off him, shifted her position and gripped the firm mass of his erection in her hands as she lowered her waist onto it, sliding her lubricated tract onto his waiting, equally lubricated shaft.
She slowly lowered herself into place, returning both of her hands to the very top of his hip bones, which she could just feel moving under the powerful muscles and thick skin that covered them, as she settled completely down upon him and he began to match the slow pace of her rocking hips with his own thrusting.
She moaned with delight and panted and tried to stifle higher pitched groans for risk of her voice echoing through the quiet corridors of the apartment building in the early morning hours as he thrust himself into her a little faster each time.
R'chnt's deep rumbling growl filled her ears, and though she stifled her own shrill squeals, she barely even pondered whether or not his voice was echoing anywhere beyond the bedroom; it just did not seem to matter.
He settled into a powerful thrusting pace as his arousal reached its fullest and his growling purr was joined in synch with his working breaths, and matched only by her own groaning and panting as he pumped into her, bouncing her body over his hips with each upward thrust.
K'Shai rocked her hips in time with his movements, tipping her head back and gaping her mouth wide as she shut her eyes and allowed the feeling of his hardness sliding in and out of her to overwhelm her until she held her breath just to focus solely on the sensation.
R'chnt's shaft was lined with small nodules, not too unlike the rippling bubby texture of his skin, only smaller.
As he worked himself back and forth inside her, slipping his full erection completely into her so she could feel the subtle ridges on the tip of his shaft deep in her, and drawing it back out again until the tip was nearly out of her, then pressing it back in again, the small nodules that lined his shaft in a few rows that ended just below the ridged skin of the tip, grew progressively more pronounced as they hardened.
The sensation did not hurt K'Shai, but it did certainly serve to stimulate both of them. As he neared his own climax, K'Shai felt her body surge and tingle from deep within, brought to full raging orgasm that made her eyes loll into the back of her head as he continued his smooth, gliding penetrations before releasing himself into her with a completely satisfied moan accompanied by a series of smaller, faster thrusts, harder than all others as he rumbled with a deep, animalistic sound that added to the vibrations she already felt from within her.
Her body surged to the bones, shuddering in overpowering delight as R'chnt cooed and purred below her, completely relaxed; the tension from his constant state of alert awareness of his surrounding and heightened arousal both slipping away.
It was hours later when they both revived themselves from a deep slumber, R'chnt sleeping more soundly than K'Shai had ever seen him.
She stirred carefully awake, hoping to not disturb him with her movements, as she listened to his deep breathing. He was snoring. At least, the low grumble he produced, which sounded just a few decibels lower than the purr he made during moments of relaxation resembled a snore, she thought.
She watched him for a moment, a thin smile on her face. It was a rare sight to see him so at ease, asleep.
It did not last long. K'Shai barely shifted her legs to sit up on the edge of the bed and R'chnt immediately was up and on his feet, glancing around as though he had heard a battle raging without him.
Unlike K'Shai, who woke slowly and took her time in his company to stretch, inhale deeply and slowly ease away the woozy feelings that followed a good sleep, something she had not experienced in more months than she could recall before meeting R'chnt, he was up from his deep slumber immediately, clear headed, jumping up with alarm and displaying no signs of relaxation. R'chnt was back to full on tension.
K'Shai watched him, a little taken aback by his sudden start, pondering if rigid alarm was simply as natural to him as the skin on his body. He suddenly seemed to realize how much daylight had gotten away from him and was armored up within minutes.
K'Shai snapped in a few pieces of his armor into place, but mostly watched him dress so quickly it did not seem possible to put on all the complex panels and weapons and connect the entire system together as fast as he did.
With the final connections in place that powered the shoulder cannon and firing mechanisms that he could control in three different manners, from his arm gauntlet computer on the left arm, from one bony looking pendant he wore around his neck that, as it turned out, was not bone at all, or from hidden controls inside his helmet which he operated with his tusks in a wildly efficient use of the additional Yautja extremities, the entire armor beeped and lit up, sending a flicker of blue electrical current over his entire body.
For a fraction of a moment he looked like he was completely engulfed in static electricity, or lightening.
The armor pieces itself, K'Shai thought, seemed like they had a life of their own. Indeed, they could respond through a series of hidden switches that were essentially motion activated, giving the appearance that the armor operated under its own free will or through some kind of telepathy.
Even though R'chnt had begun lightly familiarizing her with the functionality of the armor pieces, so she had a vague understanding of how it all worked, it still seemed hard to grasp how his essential hunting necessities, the protective pieces that defended, guided, and provided for him, operated so seamlessly.
Matching his haste, and assuming that R'chnt hurried so because he did not want to leave his group Leaderless for an extended period of time, K'Shai dressed and followed him back out the fire escape window through the living room, and up the grated metal stairs to the roof of the brick building.
She quietly considered the notion that he had gotten so comfortable and relaxed with her he actually let his duties as Leader lapse, even if only for a few hours, which to her did not seem like much. Surely, his group could manage without their Leader for the course of about fourteen hours according to her watch.
Though, she did realize as she stepped onto the roof and found the other eight members of the group mostly spread out keeping watch or talking and eating, that she had never once seen R'chnt return to the ships in orbit for supplies, as she knew others in his group did.
She also had not seen R'chnt leave his group to hunt for food, rather, that task was usually assigned to one of the other hunters. She quietly pondered if he had broken some kind of protocol which would account for his hurried mannerisms upon waking.
She noticed that he tensed up even more as his underlings eyed him. He flared his mandibles just wide enough to indicate that he was on alert.
R'chnt could not help but to swell a bit before his pack as he rejoined them on the roof. He had succumbed to the waves of pure pleasure K'Shai had induced in him and he relaxed next to her, watching her fall asleep after a second round of mating that had both thrilled and eased him, and wore her out.
He did not even recall drifting to sleep himself and when she stirred and awoke him, he could barely believe the single sun of the world had been up long enough it was nearly halfway to its peak of rotation.
He imagined his group would be questioning his whereabouts, not so much his activities, for the scent of his musk when he departed their company the night before would have told them all they needed to know about his intentions, but his lack of return for so many extended hours would no doubt have sent a ripple of curiosity and doubt through them.
They would wonder if perhaps he had succumbed to his injuries to account for his lack of return. Perhaps, he postulated as he hurriedly dressed himself with K'Shai's gentle help, they might think she had beaten him so fully he could no longer move, which given the relaxed feel he had succumbed to, was not too far from the truth.
He knew they would curiously speculate as to what it would be like to mate with the small human.
They were curious about her, but knew their place. Though, K'Shai did not seem to mind at all when the rest of the group displayed their curiosity outwardly.
They knew their place with R'chnt and they knew that contact with her in any manner would result in dismemberment or death, and if there had been any doubt to that, the events of the night she was attacked would settle that matter for both the Yautja group as well as the humans.
K'Shai behaved differently than any female Yautja ever would. She readily welcomed the group's curious questions and tried her best to answer in Yautjan.
Still, R'chnt knew they would assume she was as aggressive in mating as any female, and given his injuries, he imagined that after this length of time, the group would already be mulling over who might be daring, or foolish, enough to make a claim as Leader.
Naturally, that title would fall immediately to W'rsa if there were no other challengers. In the event of R'chnt's death, W'rsa, who had hunted with R'chnt for two centuries and trained with him, would stand to fill his place.
He imagined W'rsa, who was the only other of the group that K'Shai seemed well at ease with, might also make a move for her as well.
He presented himself on the roof top and flared his mandibles as he straightened his back tense enough to add more height to his already formidable frame.
He felt a rush of pride take control and he strode smoothly towards his group, confidently strutting across the roof top, allowing each hunter he approached to take careful note as K'Shai strode readily next to, and just slightly behind him, following his lead.
R'chnt did not often speak of his conquests on the hunting field, or in mating. His scars from both activities would speak for him, and he was equally as proud of them as he was of K'Shai who stood so close to him now.
Though he had known it to happen from time to time, if she was inebriated on c'ntlip enough perhaps, it was normally highly uncommon for a Yautja female to spend any length of time with a male after mating, and certainly not to mate with them again.
Strutting powerfully enough to be even more imposing than normal, R'chnt worked hard at hiding the fact that he was still feeling utterly relaxed and pleasured with lingering satisfaction by the version of mating K'Shai offered him.
His body still tingled with an unrelenting echo of her hands caressing him, gripping his shaft and stroking it, and putting her lips to him as he mounted, covered, and thrust into her. He felt a sense of pride having experienced her as a mate and as he surveyed his group, he could not help but to flare his mandibles and glare at them all, eyeing them for any challenge to his conquest.
K'Shai had wanted him. She laid herself down willingly and through gentle caresses and tender touches, she stimulated him in ways he had never even imagined.
He was wise enough to know that no creature could ever experience all there was in the vastness of the universe to experience, although it was a massive fault of many brash young Yautja who were convinced they already had.
R'chnt silently credited himself with a wealth of experience, having hunting on nearly fifty worlds, more than ten times the number that most other Yautja would even fly by in their lives, let alone hunt upon.
The mere fact that she laid with him not once, but twice, overwhelming him with pleasure each time was something he had never even considered a possible experience.
He watched the group before him now, carefully judging their reactions, to see who might take too keen an interest in her, or question him. They had long since become accustomed to K'Shai, and the rotations past that had led up to this had clued them all in to R'chnt's desires for her as a mate and K'Shai's own reciprocated urging.
The familiarity was a good thing, and it reminded the group that they all had their places and that so did K'Shai, though R'chnt knew he would need to ensure she had a place in his Clan.
He glanced at W'rsa, noticing how his eyes flickered to K'Shai for a little too long before they flicked back to him, and silently considered the chain of events that might occur if he were to be cut down on this hunt.
He had hunted the kainde amedha long enough to know what he was doing, long enough to have developed a sense of cunning around them that others had not, long enough to make risky moves appear easy as he cut the hive queens down on his own, but he was also wise enough to know that when the paya called a warrior to them, there was little choice on the matter.
R'chnt had fully intended to have a long and fruitful life with K'Shai at his side, but he also knew he had to be aware of every possibility. He would handle those arrangements in time soon enough. For now, he turned to K'Shai.
"We shall hunt now." He said simply, loud enough for all to hear.
His brief statement informed the group of his intent while silently telling them they should all wait for his return, and simultaneously combined with his extended arm gesturing her forward down the other fire escape on the far side of the roof, told her she was going with him.
R'chnt moved in behind her, the metal stairwell creaking and wobbling slightly as he stepped onto it.
She found herself looking down the five stories through each consecutive grated metal landing, and wondering if the thing would hold until they got to the bottom. If it did fall, she assumed he could manage to somehow scoop her to safety and climb the building wall instead.
She realized as she did finally touch the sidewalk, that she was almost a little disappointed the fire escape had not collapsed, just so she could see how he would handle it. She watched him descend to the sidewalk behind her, jumping over the railing off the second floor and thumping to the ground powerfully.
Four men, keeping watch around a burning barrel on the corner of the street, about a half a block away locked their eyes on the pair and stopped their conversation mid-sentence as they eyed her and the alien that loomed behind her.
R'chnt growled, evaluating each of the alien males for any display of aggression or challenge, for anyone who might reach for one of the low-powered projectile weapons slung around their sides and take aim, for anyone who might glance to or question K'Shai in a tone he did not approve of.
K'Shai eyed the males only briefly and turned away in silence as R'chnt directed her with a sweeping gesture of his hand. She said nothing as they walked and walked, far out of the edge of town.
Still in a cleared zone, there would be no danger of running into any kainde amedha, R'chnt confirmed with a few clicks on his computer panel. The cleared area was vast enough to provide a safe buffer to allow his group rest, allow some time for himself with K'Shai and also offer up the opportunity to provide her with a little much needed food source hunting.
He had noted that she seemed more to be a scavenger rather than an active hunter when it came to food and resources. Her behaviour as such also accounted for why his group thought of her as some kind of pathetic little animal unable to defend itself when she first had approached them so wary and apprehensive, hunkered down and timid.
He felt a little guilty for having shared that thought of her, and allowed himself to reflect on how she had humbled him from those thoughts with her displays of intelligence, strength, boldness and willingness to trust him.
She followed his lead and direction more sharply and with less hesitation than some of the students he had trained over the years, and had convinced others of her own kind to do the same despite their obvious apprehension.
Now, she did exactly as he explained, stepped as he showed her, listened to every word he said with unwavering attention. She made mistakes, but she was trying, and her desire to do as he said, follow his lead, and ultimately please him, already put her leaps and bounds above most Yautja students.
He had playfully engaged her in some light sparring during other rest breaks. Mostly, he did it to gauge her skills and see what she knew, which he discovered within seconds, was very little when it came to handling weapons, and even less when it came to hand to hand fighting.
Despite having survived for so long on her decimated world, she lacked finesse with even the weak projectile weapons the oomans clung to so dearly. She did slightly better with the plasma caster he had provided her, but the need for her to learn was obvious, and R'chnt was naturally inclined to teach her.
He had learned well on his own hunts, grew wise from his experiences, and many would say that he displayed the natural characteristics of a true Leader and teacher from the beginning.
He had always remained respectful of his own Leader, an attentive student who had quickly learned to keep one eye on the opponent before him and another eye on the situation around him. There was a subtle edge that the better hunters displayed, and R'chnt had learned well, when he was very young and his own hunt Leader had displayed incredible prowess in every action he performed.
When he had accomplished his first chiva and earned the mark of a blooded hunter amongst his Clan, earning his place, he learned a tough lesson that day that taught him the difference between brashness and wisdom, the sometimes cloudy line between bravery and foolishness. It was a lesson he learned well and bore visible evidence of, as a tell-tale reminder.
Although others had always credited him with a mentality geared towards teaching, he refuted the very notion of it for a century until he took on his first student and word spread that R'chnt was now willing to accept his place.
He had taught so many youngsters up through their first chivas and many other accomplished hunters to further their skill, that he had no choice but to realize he was exactly as the others called him.
Now, to teach K'Shai came on an almost instinctive level.
Her heavily lacking skill proved that she needed to learn and learn well. In order to have a place in his Clan, K'Shai would need to be a hunter. For her, there would be no other way and he knew it.
He would teach her all she would need to know, and by the way she mimicked his actions, followed his instructions and tried as hard as she could to do as he taught, he knew she would be a worthy student.
Her injuries and the glimmer of angry fury in her eye that reflected the struggles she had been through and survived were already symbols to him that she had passed the chiva.
Unknown to her, K'Shai had already endured much of the rigors that young Yautja experience before their own blooding hunt to prove they have a place in the Clan, but she had much to learn.
He slowed his pace to a crouched creep and fell silent, gesturing to K'Shai, who tailed him so closely her chin almost bumped into his shoulder armor when he stopped, with only hand signals.
K'Shai looked past the nearly black metallic armor of R'chnt's right shoulder and her eyes quickly settled on a pair of does scouring the ground as they walked, sucking up the overgrown grass of a lawn at the back of a long since abandoned warehouse.
Whenever possible, anyone in her group would hunt, kill, and cook animals. As supplies like living essentials, medicines, and precious food became harder and harder to find in stores they raided, the group quickly found themselves living off a diet of canned goods, and eventually having to ration those so heavily that living in a constant state of malnutrition edging on flat out starvation had become the norm.
Eventually, no animal, if unimpregnanted with a seed of the Hellspawn itself, was off the menu.
K'Shai briefly thought back to the first time squirrel was offered up for her to eat, like a kabob, blackened on a stick over a campfire, and she nearly vomited at the notion.
Eventually, squirrel and pigeon became something like a delicacy that everyone savored, and were only overshadowed by the even rarer fine dining that consisted of rabbit, raccoon, or possum.
Once, during the winter, a huge protest from the group arose when a stray dog was recovered, but even those who voiced their most profound objections still allowed hunger to override their standings when they smelled its meat cooking.
It was a lucky time another outing that the group found, of all things, a lone angus steer idling happily near the ghostly remnants of a traffic jam on a highway. It seemed like some kind of ironic shame in a way to kill the thing, but it was a lucky break, especially since it did not have a gestating alien larvae in it.
But deer; K'Shai had not seen deer in more months than she could recall. The group did once spot an elk running down a street; no doubt a lucky escapee from a zoo.
The witty animal managed to evade its human would-be hunters, though that was near the beginning of the downward spiral of life, and the group was not yet so capable of making kills.
R'chnt hovered in silence, offering no direction, and K'Shai assumed he was holding position to allow her to show him her hunting skills. She immediately reached for the rifle slung over her shoulder and crept alongside R'chnt, who began a low rumble.
"What?" She questioned softly as he put his hand over the barrel of the weapon and forced the tip down towards the ground.
He withdrew a compacted weapon from the back of his armor, one that she did not even realize he had. It was a thin spear that was quickly and silently extended at the press of a button which he showed her.
The weapon was longer than an arrow, but not by much, and certainly nowhere as long as the larger spear R'chnt also carried, which when fully extended was taller than he.
"Hul'tah," he said in a whisper so low she almost would not have heard it if she had not been holding her breath.
She did as he directed and stayed put, watching. He crept like a lion through the brush, stalking his prey.
R'chnt stayed low, well-hidden, downwind as he had told her she should always be. He never even left the tree line; just moved to a position that offered him the best shot and lobbed the thin weapon through the air with precision and ease.
The intended target dropped to the ground while the other animal, spooked by the sudden thud of its companion darted away.
"Ok, that was impressive." She said with a smile as she watched R'chnt hover over his kill and attached a tether around its legs.
"I will teach you. Watch then do." He said simply.
K'Shai patted the rifle at her hip. "I can barely get one with this."
"Too noisy, your weapons. Draws too much attention." R'chnt grumbled, unimpressed. "Silence is a weapon."
"You must stalk silent and kill silent. Leave no traces, K'Shai. You will learn to hunt like Yautja."
He spoke smoothly while he crouched over the deer carcass, wrapping the limbs together slowly, his large hands working easily to secure his kill, but going slow enough to allow K'Shai to see everything he was doing.
Even after the kill, she could not help but notice how he moved with purpose, power, and deadly intent.
When he stood, holding the tie around the legs of the animal with one hand, he guided K'Shai away with the other. They walked on quietly, R'chnt only stopping from time to time to scan the woods.
K'Shai quickly learned to keep a close watch on him and when he stopped to listen, she did the same, although she always had the sense that while she was straining to determine if anything was out there, he already knew.
She followed him as he led her down a street, through an expanse of unkempt lawns that backed up a long abandoned industrial park and out into the woods beyond them where he once again crouched to a halt, this time at the edge of a river where he handed her the very same spear he had used to impale the deer that he placed down on the rocks nearby.
She took the weapon with a curious smile and R'chnt turned his helmeted head onto the river, wading in softly. She followed along and they came to a halt on a flat patch of rocks.
In a moment, R'chnt pointed towards the stream and K'Shai studied it carefully, looking through the surface, past the reflecting sun, and spotted some large fish, carp, idly swimming past.
Following his direction, although admittedly with much reservation and a sense of embarrassment at her inability, K'Shai did her best to curb her frustration and spear the fish. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, her frustration got the best of her.
"Patience, K'Shai." R'chnt barked at her agitated outburst.
"Show me how to do this." She said adamantly.
"I am showing you."
"No, I mean," she emphasized as she pressed the spear towards him. "Like you actually get one."
R'chnt clicked, crouched, and looked over the carcass on the shoreline. "I got that."
K'Shai sighed, feeling a little defeated. He killed a skittish deer from fifty meters and she could barely spear a slow moving fish five feet in front of her. She had half a mind to unsling her rifle and start shooting the fish, but R'chnt's words about utilizing silent weapons echoed in her head and she huffed sharply and tried again, turning towards the water.
She lobbed the spear once again and instead of thudding dully to the bottom of the river for her to retrieve it, it pierced the scaly hide of the large fish she spotted.
"Aha!" She howled in amazed victory and turned to R'chnt with a brimming smile.
"Good, K'Shai, good." R"chnt approved. "Now, do it again."
She retrieved her kill and smirked, feeling as though it was merely a lucky break that took half the afternoon to achieve, but she turned back to it once again and in a few minutes, had speared another carp, followed by a third, then fourth.
"Ok!" She said excitedly, "I think I am getting the hang of this. It's kind of fun."
He stood and dipped his head, bowing his biohelmet to her approvingly, then clamped a powerful hand on her shoulder and directed her and her kills for the day, back to the shore.
She followed along with him back through the woods as the late afternoon sun slung lower and lower in the sky. R'chnt consistently scanned the area, stopping from time to time to focus his senses, and each time he did, K'Shai tried her best to try to perceive anything around them. On the third time he halted, he glanced down to her, turning the sleek metal cheeks of his biohelmet her direction.
"What are you aware of right now?"
She stopped and contemplated her surroundings. She took in a deep breath and held it, straining her ears to hear anything she could past the rustling of leaves of the trees above her.
"I hear birds." She said with attentiveness. "I hear the wind rustling the leaves, and I think maybe I hear voices echoing. I know we're close to the camp. I smell the fish and the blood of the deer."
"What are you aware of?" She asked, looking up at the helmeted head towering two feet above her own.
"Eight birds, two small ground animals, two ooman males there," he pointed towards a location behind K'Shai, "three more there," he added pointing in the direction they were heading, "all out of sight, but near enough to be smelled and heard. Many scents in the air," he indicated another direction, "and…" he paused and turned to look at her.
"What?" She said quickly.
He brushed her face gently with two fingers and a quiet clicking sound began to emanate from under the helmet.
K'Shai felt her body shudder as he stepped in tightly to her and she shut her eyes, tipping her head into his hand. She reached her own hand up and caressed his fingers and palm against her skin.
R'chnt's body pressed so closely to hers that the little bone necklaces that draped down his chest bumped into her head. His clicking turned into a familiar purring sound as he reached towards her with his free hand and lifted her off her feet.
K'Shai gasped in excited anticipation and pressed her head against the side of his helmet. He tipped his head back and she kissed under his jaw, her hands stroking the bare areas his chest armor did not cover as R'chnt backed her up against a tree.
"Now I smell something." She whispered with a soft moan between pressing her lips to him. "It smells sweet… a bit… musky."
"Dai-Shui," he said softly.
"Die-she", she repeated in a poor attempt to mimic Yautja infliction.
"Smells so good," K'Shai mumbled through a trembling breath as R'chnt slid his hand off her face, down her chest and lightly dragged his claws over the waistline of her jeans.
He had caught her scent in the air, mixed in with the other scents of the alien world, from the sap in the trees to the blood of the beast he dragged behind him and the stench of the ooman males carried on the wind as well.
Her scent gripped his attention the most and as he became aware of his body's own musk building, he could not help but wonder if K'Shai was even aware that she smelled like she was in a constant state of mating readiness, enough to drive his own body into a state of activity he barely even achieved during mating seasons.
K'Shai kissed him and ran her hands along his body, sliding her fingers under his own armor belt just the same as he had slid his own under the restrictive garments she wore around her waist.
R'chnt's subtle purr amplified and was overpowered with a distinctly aroused growl as K'Shai's voice lifted in excitement, the scent of her body lingering into him, thrilling him.
He put her down as she indicated and with eager haste, they both were quickly devoid of their lower coverings. K'Shai removed her upper garments quickly, with a raspy breath as R'chnt lifted her once again, one hand gripping her under each of her thighs as he positioned himself between her spread knees.
She wrapped her calves around his hips, her heels dangling behind his buttocks as he pressed into her, erection full, hard, dripping.
Her back was supported against a tree and she moaned hoarsely and deeply as she felt him penetrate her, slowly and smoothly at first, allowing her to adjust to the angle and feel, then deeper again and again, faster and harder with each forward movement of his hips as he emitted a low, steady rumble, accented by the occasional loud snarl between his own gasping breaths.
Mating with her was like nothing he had ever even imagined experiencing. Her soft skin against his thick and weathered body soothed him. Her small frame against his large bulk willingly and readily accepted his dominance without question.
The scent of her aroused state filling his nasal passages and the sounds of her moaning as she submitted to the pleasures he put in her, tingled and aroused his body in ways he had never felt before.
K'Shai tipped her head back and huffed in time with the rhythym of his thrusts, feeling him press deeper and deeper into her with each forward shift of his hips.
He suspended her easily, thrusting himself up into her with the familiar deep, rumbling growl deep within his chest that K'Shai had quickly heard was a sound he only made when he was aroused for pleasure.
She gripped her hands over his powerful forearms, clinging to the armor that protected them as every muscle in her own body flexed with each panting breath.
Every action he did, K'Shai knew, from something as simple as tethering a line around the legs of his kill, to the way he moved in his noticeably stalking and calculating way, was done with purpose, control, and commanding power so smoothly executed it seemed to be chiseled into every fiber of his body.
His confidence and dominance reassured her; it was reliable, true, and unquestionable. She knew how many different ways he could have killed her at any point over the entire stretch of the last seven months, and in the process she learned his immeasurable self-control.
She knew as he growled like a wild beast, pumping furiously into her, riled up into the heated throws of pure pleasure as his body fueled him into a sort of unstoppable need to complete the event, that he still maintained his composure and his control on some level.
It was so fully engrained into him that it came just as naturally to him as the guttural growls that he filled her ears with. He held her firmly, but never even so tight as to cause a sore muscle, let alone actually scratch or puncture her skin with his talons. He would caress or grab her head, but never so harshly as to damage her in any way.
As he filled her with the result of his delight, she moaned and gasped, her own body surging into powerful orgasm, spurred on by the scent of his musk, the heat of his body, and the hot fluid that filled her.
She slouched her back loosely against the tree, taking deep breath after deep breath, her eyelids dangling half closed, her lips relaxed into a softness that reflected her ecstasy, her fingers slowly groping his forearm gauntlets, his elbows above them, his powerful biceps, flexed and rigid from supporting her, his shoulders and his chest where she rested her palms over his immensely heated pectoral muscles.
R'chnt growled, overcome with a wave of pleasure as he felt K'Shai's soft skin against his.
He supported her from underneath with both hands, and though the rush of euphoric ecstasy that surged into him charged him into an aroused state of tension, he remained highly aware of just how much pressure he used against her.
He did not want to damage her, but he very much wanted to have her rip his helmet off so he could sink his tusks into her exposed shoulder as the final throws of his arousal filled his body with a rippling tide.
He resisted one urge in exchange for the overpowering sensation of another one and remained motionless for a few long moments afterwards, holding her, shifting his body closer to her, his multi-tonal growl turning into a gentle purr that he could not ever recall sharing with a female, before he finally eased himself out of her to her wincing and gasped moans.
In short order, they returned to the camp before the evening light had completely left the sky, and K'Shai proudly offered up the results of her first spear-fishing lesson to her group, along with a quartered cut of the deer R'chnt had killed.
He sliced it up before he delivered it back to his group and she thanked him for being willing to oblige her request, halfway suspecting there was little he would not do for her when properly rewarded.
Lewis, Carlos and the others had not had a true meal in weeks. They had found a valuable stock of canned vegetables, soups, and even a few cans of pasta complete with meatballs during a lucky raiding run three weeks earlier, but fresh meat was a delight few and far between, and while the Yautja never shared their kills before, K'Shai had always at the very least stashed away a healthy portion of whatever meat of the day they had and a'gha slices for the children.
The group eyed her in shock, seeing her approach with a spear full of fish, and a nearly seven and half foot tall Yautja looming just feet behind her, carrying a bleeding deer carcass over one shoulder and a freshly dismembered roast section and hind limb in the other hand, but their astonishment soon turned to delight upon the realization that she was delivering the food to them.
R'chnt dropped the meat in a rather undignified fashion on the ground and growled something in his native tongue, which K'Shai nodded an acknowledgement of.
"Aren't you going to stay for some?" Lewis asked as K'Shai turned to walk away after a short while, having surrendered the spoils of her hunt to them with a quick synopsis of how she had spent her day.
"No." She said with a simple smile and glanced her eyes in the direction of the Yautja group, far above them on the roof of the apartment building.
She had her share of venison in the company of R'chnt, tucked so close into his side that he encompassed her with his arm as he ate until she began to doze off, secure and warm in the crook of his arm.
When she awoke sometime in the early morning hours, she was in her bed in the apartment she had commandeered.
She did not remember getting there, but she eyed her surroundings quickly, realizing that R'chnt was sitting on the foot of the bed, biohelmet on, pressing buttons on his left computer panel, taking readings, or scanning maps of the area, perhaps sending a communication, she did not know; his computer panel could perform a multitude of functions and was in many ways, the life and the death of the hunter.
He clicked loudly, the sound echoing out under the metal head ware and reverberating in the quiet apartment.
It was an unusual and intimidating enough sound to make anyone suddenly tense in agitation and fear upon hearing it, but K'Shai was slowly beginning to distinguish the slight tonal differences in the clicking sounds that the Yautja made.
Some of the sounds were produced in the throat, like an agitated gurgling, while some clicking noises were made by directly tapping the tusks of the mandibles together. Different sized mandibles created different sounds.
A throaty clicking was likely to be followed by a deadly blow, while a tusk clicking was a sound of contentment, concentration, or curiosity. R'chnt's tusks made a deep clicking, like a woodpecker strumming at a tree that was not quite dead, and as he turned towards her, acknowledging that she had stirred, he removed his helmet and spread his tusks into a smile, ending the chittering sound.
He torqued his upper body towards her as she crawled over to him and rested one hand on his back, between his shoulders, feeling the cold hard metal plating that protected him as she brushed her hand under his thick, fleshy hair.
The Yautja did not sleep anywhere near as often as a human, but K'Shai was grateful that he remained with her keeping watch over her while she got some rest.
Without a word spoken, for Yautja also preferred less verbal communication in exchange for something more subtle and ethereal, R'chnt projected his thought process through a gentle caress of her cheek and the immediate accompaniment of a quiet purr.
K'Shai moaned quietly through lips pressed into a gentle smile and leaned into him, feeling the heat rising from his body along with the scent of his musk as both amplified in union with the sound he made. She slid her hands across his chest; she pressed her lips into his cheek.
She ran her tongue along his quills, eliciting a sharply aroused growl before one hand slid its way down his abdomen and between his legs.
R'chnt tingled and crested, feeling her touch and her rising scent mixing with his own, broadcasting what seemed like her almost constant state of readiness for mating.
He only idly wondered if this was a quality all ooman females possessed, though he never noticed it before if they did, so he logically calculated that it was a reaction he spurred in her.
He allowed his purr to deepen and reverberate through his body, feeling the effects of it down to his toes and noting that this was part of his reaction she spurred in him. He unbuckled his chest armor and removed his gauntlets, then removed his lower leg bracers as K'Shai stripped herself free of her own layers before he stood.
She knelt on the edge of the bed as he stood beside it, pressing the palms of her hands onto his lower abdomen and rubbing them down over his hip bones as R'chnt growled with arousal and readiness and removed his belt.
His deep voice rumbled as she stroked him, feeling the throbbing erection in his hands growing quickly to full hardness. K'Shai stretched up her body as tall as she could make it, extended her arms, elbows straight, and laced her fingers around the back of his neck as she leaned into his body.
R'chnt stepped in closer to her as she teetered on her knees at the edge of the bed, hanging off of his neck with most of her balance before she pulled herself back and turned away from him.
On her knees, intended to crawl teasingly away from him to center herself on the bed, K'Shai dripped with tingling readiness and R'chnt's growl immediately amplified as he grabbed hold of her hips and stopped her motion.
K'Shai gasped and squealed, feeling R'chnt's full erection find its way to her wet opening and enter.
The sensation of pressure and massage as he worked his way, attentively and carefully, into her down to the base of his skin, made her body quiver, tense, flex, soften, and throb again and again in rhythm to the action of his hips pressing forward and sliding backwards as he glided through her, pressing his large self into her harder and harder each time, forcing her to expand to accommodate him.
R'chnt leaned over her body as he thrust himself into her, his eyes closing with pure satisfaction in response to the sensation of her tight, swelling tract dripping lubricating juices over his rod as she gasped and squealed, paralyzed in pleasure.
K'Shai could feel his tusks tickling the back of her neck, dragging softly along her shoulders, tracing the edge of her body as his hot breath huffed onto her skin in time with his pounding action. There was nothing she could, or wanted to, do other than remain on her knees before him, taking pleasure in his enjoyment of her, allowing every little sensation of the feel of him sliding in and out, the heat of his body, the sounds he made, the feel of his testicles slapping against her as he worked, to overwhelm her until she rolled her eyes into the back of her head as a surge of orgasm caused her to actively stifle a hoarse bellow.
Immediately, R'chnt joined her in harmony, making no attempts to stifle his own guttural bellow as his body built pressure in a few final thrusts and exploded with a sensation powerful enough to almost make him consider collapsing on top of her.
He shifted his balance and rounded his body over her, leaving himself deep inside her as they both gasped and panted, taking a few moments to catch their breath before he slowly withdrew himself free of her throbbing, hot, swollen tract as she raised her voice in a high pitched moan in response to the sensation.
K'Shai did exactly what he had wanted to as well, and dropped to the bed with a satisfied huff. She rolled onto her back and faced him, smiling as she shut her eyes and stretched her body, arcing from her toes to her hands, which she folded behind her head and shifted her elbows into the air as her back raised off the blankets.
R'chnt purred deeply, loudly, a thoroughly pleasured reverberation that soon lulled the both of them to sleep as the sun barely peeked over the distant horizon.
Not neglecting her body's needs, the daily ritual upon stirring for the day meant that K'Shai made her way out of the bed to the bathroom.
She tried, again, to silently slip away from her peacefully sleeping mate, and although she was sure she had not made a sound, she assumed he must have felt the shift of her weight, perhaps the loss of her body heat against his, because he was up instantaneously, on his feet, stiff, straight, and glancing around warily.
"I was trying not to wake you," she said with a soft giggle, her voice in a near whisper.
R'chnt clicked thoughtfully, said nothing, but followed along with her, his relaxation clearly reflected in the dangling unit between his legs, K'Shai noticed with a pleased smile.
She felt sore, stiff, no doubt perhaps a bit bruised in deep internal places that were not accustomed to such activities. She was still adjusting to him, and she certainly did not blame him for any discomfort she felt. The pleasure he elicited in her overrode the uncomfortable side effects anyway.
She watched him tend to his own needs after her, before she splashed some water on her face, giving herself a quick rinse with a gallon jug of boiled down rain water she kept on the bathroom sink, her shower in a bottle.
She patted her face dry with a clean towel and eyed R'chnt as he started to move past her, then stopped directly behind her and reached around her body, embracing her tightly with her back in his abdomen.
Once again she heard his purr build through his chest and rattle its way out of his body, like it seeped through his skin and into hers. It was a soothing sound, eliciting a sort of content peace and calm in the quiet morning air as R'chnt indicated his arousal to her by firming himself up into her back.
K'Shai moaned quietly through pressed lips and turned slowly around to face him, smiling up at him as she gazed to him and took in a long, deep breath and contemplated her next move. He was ready, she was sore.
He purred deeply, the pitch dropping into a sensation that could be felt more than a sound to be heard as his musk built in conjunction. She stroked his body, ran her hands over the powerful muscle mass that covered his ribs, and traced them down his comparatively slender hips and down his thighs.
"Come here," she said in a whisper and slid laterally to the toilet, popping the lid closed as she sat down upon it in a straddle. "Sometimes, humans have other ways of pleasing each other. Let me show you."
R'chnt followed her a half a step sideways and stood before her as she lowered herself in front him. He stiffened, bristling slightly with a hint of reservation, which clearly, he thought, K'Shai picked up on, since she assured him her intention was to please.
Her position allowed her to be at the perfect height for her needs. She was uncertain exactly of what the best process was for such an action she intended to perform, having absolutely no experience in such things.
R'chnt seemed to feed off her uncertainty and much to her surprise, he braced up, even withdrew slightly. She took a deep, long, slow breath and spoke again in a whisper.
"Put your hands on the wall."
He hesitated for a moment at her request, his uncertainty claiming charge of his actions. It was a response he was not accustomed to, and for whatever reason he could not quite understand, K'Shai seemed to elicit it in him frequently.
What pleasure she intended, he could not even begin to comprehend, but he had learned through months of ever-growing contact with her, that K'Shai would not intentionally harm him. He leaned forward, resting his palms on the wall behind her head as she had indicated.
She leaned into him, gently cupping her hands around his shaft as she opened her jaw. R'chnt's body thrilled and surged in reaction to the sensation of her fleshy, moist, and warm lips wrapping around the tip of shaft.
He immediately tensed, agitated but overwhelmed with feelings he could not quite place, having absolutely no base of reference for. She pressed her lips closed, moved her mouth back and forth along his shaft, and grappled the base of him with both hands as his claws tightened and dug into the weak wall supporting him, leaving marks.
R'chnt gasped a terse breath, held it, and suspended his rumbling growl as he held motionless, in shock and surprise. He locked his body rigid, and K'Shai huffed through her nostrils, her mouth currently occupied.
She paused delicately, wondering if what she was doing pleasured him at all, or if she was doing something incorrectly, then she suddenly felt her heart to begin to race as the realization that she was quite possibly frightening him dawned on her.
She was used to see him rigid, tense, alert, but he always had a way of sort of oozing into her company and relaxing. Now, he simply held utterly motionless, more tense than she had ever seen him, and so quiet it was almost alarming.
She thought of stopping. She was told by many friends throughout high school that the boys loved this sort of thing, but as the giant, deadly, fearsome warrior alien that loomed over her braced in almost fearful tension while he audibly dug holes into the wall with the bony claws that capped his fingers, she had the not-so-vague idea that perhaps this was definitely not a pleasuring experience for him.
She did suddenly think of how his reaction to the first time she put her hands on him caused a similar response; he withdrew as if unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the sensation. He did relax into the feelings of her hands on him rather quickly, but as the seconds ticked by now, she saw no sign of him giving him.
He felt rather like he was being held prisoner, wanting to pull away, but somehow forcing himself to stand his ground because he was trying to cater to her desires, while she worriedly presumed she was not meeting his.
Just as quickly as the notion to stop popped into her mind, during the fraction of a second that she nervously analyzed her own actions and his reactions and flickered through her recent experiences with him in her head, R'chnt growled deeply and his body lurched. He finally relaxed, exhaling almost a breath of relief.
Though his grip on the now damaged wall tightened up and she heard his claws crack more drywall, it did not feel to her like a nervous response. His body shuddered and all at once, he eased into a state of pleasured suppleness, his body arcing over K'Shai, repositioning slightly so she could achieve a better angle and his deep growl rumbled away with vigor.
Spurred on his sudden change of apparent interest, K'Shai moaned, and amplified her efforts, working her tongue and lips smoothly back and forth, applying and releasing pressure in waves as she did so, and moving his loose skin easily over the stiffened cartilage under it as she listened to R'chnt's heaving breaths above her.
Within moments, R'chnt shifted again and released one hand from the crumbling pale blue drywall. He pressed his hips forward, changing vocalizations from a deep rumbling growl, to a loud clicking back to a gurgling groan in between his own huffing breaths as he lowered one hand to her hair.
R'chnt's fingers eased up against her skull, forcing all of his aroused tension to be directed to his hand still on the bathroom wall, which crumbled a bit more under the pressure. With his hand on her head, he guided his fingers smoothly around, lightly gripping her long pony-tailed hair between his thumb and index fingers.
K'Shai could feel the nodules on his shaft begin to harden, she could feel that his tension had fully turned from apprehensiveness to completely aroused. While the parts her mouth and hands encompassed were stiff, the rest of R'chnt suddenly began to feel as though it was melting.
He swayed over her, crooning a rumble like nothing else she had ever heard him make. She was not in a position to notice that he had shut his eyes and bowed his head until it slung so low his tusks were dangling almost into her hair.
R'chnt's body throbbed and whirred in entirely new ways as he entered into an almost trance-like state. His mind had completely stopped functioning.
He stopped trying to figure out how K'Shai was able to perform such an action, or what possible reason there was for her species to even imagine doing something like that; it did not matter.
The pleasurable sensations she elicited by sucking on him and moving her tongue around him, stimulating his hardening skin, had succeeded in evacuating all possible upper brain functions out of his head. He succumbed to an instinctual need to build up, then release the wave of pressure in his rod.
He pumped his hips forward slowly, pushing himself a little further into her, judging the best he could just how much she could take and what her reaction might be. In response, K'Shai tightened her grip on the base of his shaft, her fingers tickling his large scrotum, which drove him into further pleasure and pushed him into the state of za'nyuk-de.
K'Shai felt the transition in R'chnt. His slow and steady, almost exploratory thrusts as he swayed his hips suddenly turned dramatic and powerful. She felt the same thing from him when he reached a certain point during mating and as he pressed himself between her lips, the sensation almost overpowered her.
He began a frenzy of pumping into her, one hand carefully gripped around her head, holding her pony tail, applying pressure, but even though in one sense he had lost some control and composure, he still maintained enough self-awareness to know how much force he used on her. He torqued his fingers around her long black hair, pulling slightly, but causing no discomfort.
His growl rumbled loudly and he sped up his thrusts as though driven by pure instinctual urging to do so. Her nose filled with his scent and her ears with his deep vocalizations.
Her mouth quickly filled with warm juices that flowed powerfully forth from him like a volcano eruption, the taste a little bitter but also slightly sweet. She swallowed what she could, and what was too much overran her lips and dripped down her chin onto her abdomen.
R'chnt, bellowing a muffled howl somewhere between a roar and a purr, extracted himself slowly, spurting continued flow across her chest and onto her thighs before he did something that K'Shai was not only shocked by, but quite absolutely certain was not something he would ever have done in anyone else's company.
She almost could not believe what she witnessed, and if she did not know that it was from a completely overwhelmed sense of pleasure, she would have almost felt bad for him.
He withdrew and managed to slide one foot barely half a step backwards before she spotted his body trembling as he released his grip from both her hair and the wall. He was shaking, vocalizing a guttural sound between ragged breaths and then suddenly, her lower viewpoint allowing her to see it clearly, his knees buckled and he dropped to the ground in a simmering heap.
He leaned up against the opposite wall, shut his eyes, and his skin rippled as his trembling muscles underneath flexed and spasmed.
She pressed her lips together, swallowing again, watching him with barely contained amusement before she stood, cleaned herself up with her shower in a bottle and moved in against him on the floor.
R'chnt lurched towards her, lowering his head into a state of total submission, and pressed the bony ridges along the edge of his skull where his fleshy warm tresses grew from, into her chest. She wrapped her arms around him and listened to him breath, embracing him, shutting her eyes as she rested her chin against his head, ignoring being softly jabbed under her jaw by the spiny horns that protruded from his huge crested head.
They sat together for some time in silence, with only the conjoined sounds of their hearts and their shared body heat to soothe them as R'chnt quelled his breathing and fell quiet in her grasp.
When he finally moved, it seemed his strength had returned and K'Shai released him and they both stood and returned to their pile of clothing and armor still on the bedroom floor, R'chnt's hand gently clapped over her shoulder.