The day of rest was a physical relief but a mental torment. With no brutal manual labor to distract them, the gnawing, hollow emptiness in their stomachs took center stage, echoing in the quiet of the lodge.
By dawn the next morning, the hunger had sharpened into a focused edge. As soon as there was enough light to read the hatchet marks on the red bark, they set out for the stream.
They arrived at the steep embankment, dropping down to the water. The area was choked with heavy shrubs and bushes an absolute nightmare for visibility, but a perfect landscape for an ambush.
"Alright, here is the play," Recruit 1 whispered, taking instant command. She pointed across the babbling water to a dense patch of foliage. "7, you take that bush upstream." She pivoted. "14, you take that one on the side we just came from. I'll take the center bush opposite you."
The positions formed a perfect triangle, creating a tightly enclosed kill zone.
"Slather yourselves with a layer of river mud," she ordered, crouching to scoop up a handful of cold muck. "We need to mask our scent from anything with a sharp nose. We hold our positions and wait. When you hear this..." She let out a sharp, low high pitch whistle. "...we strike."
"Let's do it," Henry agreed, aggressively smearing the dark, foul-smelling mud over his face, arms, and armor before crawling into his designated bush.
They didn't have to wait long. Just under an hour into the cold, muddy stakeout, the brush rustled. Four large hares hopped cautiously down to the water's edge. Their coats were a mottled reddish-brown, mimicking the bark of the common red trees perfectly.
Just as the hares hopped into the center of the triangle, the whistle pierced the air.
Henry exploded from the bushes, his sword flashing toward the nearest hare. But the creature's speed caught him off guard.
With a single, explosive kick of its hind legs, the forty-inch hare zig-zagged, blurring past Henry's blade and vanishing into the heavy underbrush in the blink of an eye.
Henry stood panting in the shallow water, his blade empty. He looked upstream. Recruit 1 and Recruit 7 were walking back into the clearing, equally empty-handed.
"Those little shits are fast," Recruit 7 hissed, sucking his teeth in deep annoyance.
Recruit 1's expression was grim but calculating. "Adjustment. Next time a group comes through, we don't just attack wildly. On the signal, we all converge to trap the one in the back, cutting off its escape routes."
"Roger," Henry said, already turning back to his hiding spot.
"Reapply your mud," she called out to both of them. "The river and the chase washed it off."
The second wait was much longer, becoming a test for their patience.
Four hours ticked by, the cold mud crusting against Henry's skin, his stomach cramping with hunger. Finally, the heavy snap of twigs signaled an approach.
A group of three deer stepped delicately down the bank. They were enormous, standing five feet at the shoulder and stretching eight feet long, but their slender builds marked them distinctly as prey, lacking the terrifying bulk of the Metal-Mana Moose.
Like the hares, their coats were a reddish-brown camouflage.
'It seems anything that shares a coat with these red giant trees is prey trying to hide,' Henry noted.
He held his breath, his muscles coiled like springs as the deer walked right into the center of the triangle.
Fweeeeet!
Henry launched himself from the brush, sprinting right at the rearmost deer. Recruits 1 and 7 crashed through the foliage a split-second later. The sudden noise sent the front two deer into a panic; they split left and right, disappearing into the forest. But the one in the back found itself instantly boxed in by three armed humans.
Desperate, the massive deer lowered its head and charged straight at Recruit 1. At the last possible second, it pivoted violently, attempting to cave her chest in with a brutal double-kick from its hind legs.
Recruit 1 didn't even flinch. She sidestepped the lethal hooves with a dancer's grace and seamlessly drove her arming sword through the beast's ribs, piercing its heart. The massive animal dropping instantly.
"Good shit, 1!" Recruit 7 cheered, practically salivating as he stared down at the bloody carcass. He didn't care about the gore; he only saw his next meal.
"Good work," Henry breathed, wiping a streak of dried mud from his eyes.
Recruit 1 ripped her blade free, her face devoid of celebration. "Let's go. Finish all your water right now, refill your containers, and grab a leg. The smell of blood will draw every predator in the area. We leave now."
The sharp reminder of the fire-mana Lynx and similar predators snapped him out of his hungry daze.
Henry uncapped his waterskin, desperately chugging the purified water he had saved, then dunked it into the stream to refill it. 7, having already drunk his fill of unboiled river water earlier, immediately grabbed the deer's hind legs.
As they hoisted the heavy carcass, Henry watched 1 pull her large metal basin from her pack and fill it to the brim with river water.
The hike back was a panicked sprint against the clock, but they broke through the treeline and secured the lodge doors without any incidents.
The moment the logs were latched, the butchering began. Recruit 1 built the fire up and immediately began expertly stripping the reddish-brown hide from the meat.
"This deer is a blessing," she said, her hands slick with blood. "There's easily a hundred pounds of usable meat here. But we don't have salt or a smoker. We can't preserve it. It all goes bad by tomorrow afternoon." She looked up, the firelight catching her eyes. "So, stuff your faces. We don't know when we'll get a meal like this again. Plus, once I clean this hide, it's large enough to cut into three solid fur blankets for us."
Recruit 7's eyes lit up with arrogant glee. "You hear that, 14? All you can eat. You think you can eat as much as me?"
Henry slowly lowered himself onto his sleeping mat, exhausted. "We're a month away from graduating, and you still want to do these silly competitions?"
"What's silly about eating as much as humanly possible?" Recruit 7 argued, grinning. "Don't you want to make sure the food doesn't go to waste, 14?"
Henry just sighed, too tired to argue, as the rich, intoxicating smell of roasting meat filled the dome.
The rest of the evening was an exercise in pure gluttony. Driven by a primal need to recover their strength, Henry and Recruit 7 forced down an absurd twenty pounds of meat each, while even Recruit 1 managed to put away fifteen pounds of the dense, tough venison.
Lying back on his mat that night, Henry's stomach ached with a sickening fullness. But as he pulled his heavy, newly cut segment of red-brown fur over his chest, a deep, comfortable warmth spread through his bones. The fire crackled in the center of the fortified, locked lodge.
'We're finally getting our shit together,' Henry thought, his heavy eyes drifting shut. 'This isn't so bad.'