BXBX NOVEL 117. One Strand to the Sky
"Eh, good enough." Wisp gave the thread a good tug, then nodded to herself.
"I\'m sure you could get it with another try or two," Ike encouraged her.
"Or I could climb up and throw again from the other side of the barrier, where it\'s easier," Wisp said.
"Or you could do that," Ike agreed.
She chuckled. Handing the thread to him, she gestured him on. "Go ahead."
"Me first?" Ike asked, surprised.
"You\'re the one more likely to fail," she reasoned.
"Guess so." Ike took the thread and gave it a tug himself, looking up at the stone where it attached to the wall. Compared to a spider, his thread-climbing skills were pitiful. Not that he was bad at climbing. But spiders, who lived their whole life in webs, were professionals.
Just as he was about to climb up, Ike jolted. "Wait, hold on. What if the city lord comes by while we\'re climbing out?"
"Uh… I don\'t know. I guess we just hope he doesn\'t," Wisp said.
"But why do that, when I have a solution?" Ike asked. He stepped away from the webbing and patted around until he found the invisible wolf\'s body. Ike sliced its belly open, letting the organs fall out. "Just one second. I\'ll have us completely invisible in no time."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing? Those are good eats!" Wisp said, startled. She leaped on the organs and slurped them up, stuffing them into her mouth.
"Do you want the meat, too? I don\'t have much use for it," Ike admitted.
Wisp made grabby gestures.
"Just leave the hide, claws, and teeth untouched. You can have the rest." Ike handed it over.
Wisp snatched it from him. She scurried off. Ike turned away, giving her privacy to do whatever disgusting things she needed to do. Slurping, gulping, and tearing noises came from behind him, and then a floppy soft item dropped on his head. Ike grabbed at it, pulling and pulling until the skin fell in front of him. Its underside appeared at last, bloody and all-too visible. Ike pulled a face. "I\'ll be scraping this thing for absolute ages. Look at that mess."
"Just use magic, or whatever," Wisp said. She wandered back over, picking at her teeth.
"I don\'t have skin-cleaning skills," Ike said, giving her a look.
"Then what the hell is your being-a-human doing for you? Just become a monster," Wisp opined, leaning back against a nearby tree.
Ike stopped. He squinted at her. "If I don\'t have skin-cleaning skills, I might as well become a monster?"
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"Well, yeah. Humans are the ones who have all those useless-but-convenient skills. If you don\'t have useless-but-convenient skills, what\'s the point of being human?" Wisp spread her hands and gave him the smug look of someone with an unassailable argument.
Ike opened his mouth, then shut it. He shook his head at her and turned back to the skin. Drawing his razor, he settled in. "I\'ll be done in a jiff. Just give me a day or two."
"A day or two isn\'t a jiff," Wisp said impatiently.
"It\'s a jiff for curing skins. Though what I\'m doing isn\'t a true cure. It\'s a field dry. Barely processed at all. When we get to civilization, I\'ll have to check if it turned out right, and if not, properly preserve it."
"Yeah, yeah. Just cast some human magic on it, it\'ll be fine," Wisp said, waving her hand.
"The hell do you think human magic is?" Ike muttered, mostly to himself. The razor shivered in his hands. The nostalgic feeling of removing gore from a skin came over him. He moved on instinct, easily handling to shift and stretch of the un-stretched skin. There\'d been plenty of times he\'d had to process a skin too large to put on the racks. In fact, he was the only one his uncle had allowed to process those large skins.
Ike snorted under his breath. I guess he did value my work. At the time, I couldn\'t see it, but looking back, he clearly favored my skill.
Fuck-all that did for me, though. If our paths ever cross again, I\'m killing that motherfucker.
Time passed. With his magehood, Ike could work through the night, and he was able to finish cleaning the skin before the sun rose again. Finding a pair of well-spaced trees with few branches, he cleared out the space between them and took down the trouble branches in the place he\'d need to stretch the hide. He borrowed a bit of thread from Wisp and bound the hide up to dry. When the underside of the hide was taut and dry, he brought it down. He severed a piece at the bottom for Wisp.
Wisp was off hunting by then, so he set the hide aside for a moment and took up the wolf\'s fangs. They were invisible like the rest of the wolf. He swung it around, trying it out. This could make an excellent hidden weapon, but… He turned it left and right, then took up his sword and tried to cut the enamel. The sword scratched the surface, but not much more. Rather than risk dulling the sword, he set it aside in favor of the super-hard spider\'s fang that he\'d used on the doll. That cut into the tooth with ease. He carved out a handle, then slashed at a tree. The side of the fang did little, but when he punched directly at the tree, it pierced straight into the wood. Raising his foot to the tree, Ike yanked it out with all his strength, staggering back a little from the recoil. He looked at the fang and nodded, satisfied. Not bad! Not bad at all. I\'ll take a punch dagger. No one will expect it when I primarily use a slashing-based sword technique. And it\'s invisible. A good thing to keep in reserve.
Wisp walked by, chewing on a large, crunchy grasshopper leg. She tore off a chunk with her teeth and crunched it down.
Ike winced. "Yuck."
"Incorrect. Yum. You done tinkering, by the way? Someone will notice the thread sooner or later, and if they do, we\'re fucked." She opened her mouth and lifted the grasshopper leg. It was larger than her own leg, but somehow vanished into her mouth. She chewed, then swallowed and patted her stomach, satisfied.
"Got some snacks for the road?" Ike asked. He hung the fang-dagger from his hip and collected the rest of the materials, sticking them into his bag. Reaching to the tree, he tossed Wisp her portion of the hide and wrapped his around himself. Using a tiny scrap of Wisp\'s sticky thread, he created a neck-closure to hold the fur around himself, folding it up to make a rudimentary hood. He turned. "Wisp, you should—"
Wisp connected another piece of thread to the bottom of the fur, all but stitching it closed around her. Only her face and a tiny slice of her body were visible. She looked up. "Yeah?"
Ike glanced at his suddenly-inadequate solution. He shook his head. "Nothing. Never mind."
"Oh, you want me to close yours? Sure, stand still." She crossed to him. Holding a ball of thread in her palm, she extended a thread to her fingertips. Touching on the left and right side of the fur\'s opening, she quickly stitched his shut in the same method as hers.
"Th-thanks," Ike said awkwardly.
"No problem. We help each other out, right? That\'s what friends do."
Ike grinned. He nodded. "That\'s right."
"So, go climb that thread!" Wisp said, pushing him toward it.
"Alright, alright. I\'m going." Ike chuckled under his breath, then walked toward the thread on his own power. He grasped it, gazing up at the distant sky. Here goes nothing.