Chapter 322: Deceive and Ambush!
Even as the two figures up on the branch traded words, Hoshimi Miyabi’s battle was still very much underway.
After putting some distance between herself and her targets, she planted her feet and held her ground, watching the herd of Mosswine as they bunched together and glared at her with furious little eyes — and yet she made no move to strike.
The jarring wrongness of that last swing had been plain even to Kairu watching from the sidelines. For Hoshimi Miyabi herself, the one who had actually thrown the blow, the sensation must have been far more acute.
And so, right here and now, she was attempting something that most would call suicidal — searching, in the middle of live combat, for the linking point that could bring two diametrically opposed styles into balance.
If anyone else had tried it, calling it a death wish would not have been an exaggeration. But Hoshimi Miyabi had faith in her own martial gift — and she had faith in Andrew, who stood at her back with that quiet smile, watching over her.
And as it happened, both of those faiths were well placed.
Hoshimi Miyabi’s martial gift had never once betrayed the trust she placed in herself. And neither had Andrew, standing behind her, his eyes fixed on her back.
Facing the herd that was champing at the bit and on the verge of a collective charge, Hoshimi Miyabi’s breathing had steadied itself into perfect calm. The fox ears atop her head stood straight and tall with the tension running through her body, and she let herself feel every current of power as it stirred and flowed through her limbs.
The tip of her blade hung still as stone, pointing toward the ground. Flecks of moss clung to the edge and drifted down, catching the moonlight as they fell.
That stillness, however, read as something else entirely from where Boss Puu stood on the other side.
The wariness in those small eyes evaporated on the spot, replaced by something far too close to gloating.
"Oink? Heh heh! (Told you no human could take a drop from that height without their body paying for it — bet the recoil’s got her frozen solid!)"
From her protected spot near the back of the formation, Fifth Puu tilted her head in puzzlement.
"Hrruloo? (Boss, what’s recoil?)"
Boss Puu answered by butting Fifth Puu firmly on the head with her snout — a clear message to keep her eyes on the target and stop interrupting. At the same time, Boss Puu let out a thunderous bellow:
"Grunt! Grunt grunt! (I’ll explain later! Right now, get in line and help me send this little trespasser flying!)"
"Squeal!" ×4
Faced with that oddly human-like exchange, Hoshimi Miyabi instinctively tilted her head just a fraction.
She wasn’t particularly troubled by it. After all, Andrew had told her — Mosswine intelligence could reach roughly the level of a human child of around eight years old.
The one in the lead just looked like it was running a little higher than average on that scale.
Still, as the herd began to stir and coil itself toward a charge, Hoshimi Miyabi decided it was time to move first and take them all down before things got any further along.
She drew in a slow breath and let her shoulders drop, just slightly.
Don’t let the size fool you — the Mosswine charge was anything but slow. In the span of just one or two breaths, the stampeding herd had already closed the gap and was right on top of her.
The lead Mosswine dropped its thick head low as the distance collapsed to nothing, its snout nearly scraping the ground — like a battering ram cocking itself back, ready in the next instant to send everything before it airborne.
But Hoshimi Miyabi met the straight-ahead charge with nothing more than a single sidestepping shift of her foot, slipping to the flank with fluid ease. Her blade swept upward from below, edge biting cleanly into the side of the Mosswine’s belly.
"Shssskt——"
This time the sound of steel meeting flesh was entirely different. Where before it had been the dull thud of a blade hammering packed earth, now it rang out crisp and clean — the sharp, clear note of steel parting muscle and fat.
The flanks of a Mosswine, it turned out, were only thinly armored by mud.
Without that thick crust of compacted earth to soak up the blow, even a practice tachi found purchase — the sensation of the edge breaking skin and sliding through fat traveled with perfect clarity up through the blade and into Hoshimi Miyabi’s palms.
In that moment, she felt absolutely, gloriously in form.
The Mosswine let out a shriek as the pain registered in its belly, but momentum doesn’t stop for pain. Blood welling from the wound or not, all Second Puu could do was what it had always done — keep charging forward, keep leading its brothers and sisters in the rush, and hope that the gap in the attack would let one of them plow into the target and send her flying.
Unfortunately for Second Puu, that hope came to nothing.
The gaps left between the charging Mosswine to avoid colliding with one another were razor thin — but for Hoshimi Miyabi, they might as well have been open road.
Her blade-work was rougher than usual, dragged down by the conflict she was still working through, but her footwork had lost not a single step. Sharp and light at once, she threaded herself through the gaps with a dancer’s ease, her tachi swinging in a flowing arc, and every Mosswine that thundered past her came away with a deep gash carved into its side.
By the time the charge was spent, every single Mosswine that had rushed past her was bleeding.
The dark blood oozed from their wounds and caught the moonlight with a dim, iron gleam.
Hoshimi Miyabi’s martial gift had not let her down. Feeling the harmony that had manifested in those last few strikes, the corner of her mouth curved up — the barest suggestion of a smile, almost nothing at all.
Up in the tree, Kairu took in the sight. She managed to hold herself still, but her tail absolutely did not, swishing back and forth entirely of its own accord.
...Isn’t she improving a little too fast?
Just a handful of exchanges, and the change was this obvious — was it really that easy to sharpen a Hunter’s technique?
Watching carefully, Kairu had felt it with every swing: the jarring, discordant wrongness that had marked those earlier strikes was dissolving at a speed that didn’t make sense.
This isn’t right.
The Mosswine charge had not let up, and yet between Hoshimi Miyabi’s footwork and her sword-arm there had begun to emerge a new kind of rhythm.
Distinct. But no longer forced — no longer the awkward seam of two things jammed together. It was flowing, now. Genuinely flowing.
...Am I looking at some kind of once-in-a-generation genius?
Kairu couldn’t help the little seed of doubt that had taken root in her chest.
Granny actually wasn’t lying to her this time?
But she held her tongue again, and instead of speaking she pulled her gaze from Hoshimi Miyabi and let it slide over to the figure beside her — Andrew.
The male Hunter was still crouched on the same branch, flipping a pebble idly from hand to hand. His posture was identical to a moment ago, as though everything happening below had absolutely nothing to do with him.
But his eyes never left Hoshimi Miyabi. And at the corner of his mouth, so faint you’d miss it if you weren’t looking — a smile.
Watching him like that, Kairu ultimately swallowed the urge to ask. The fight below was still going on, and watching for herself was a good deal more reliable than fishing for answers from someone this smug.
But when Kairu shifted her gaze back down to the field of battle, something snagged her attention at once.
"Wait — why are there only four Mosswine still charging?!"
Down below, the strikes of a practice tachi were blunter by nature than those of a sharpened blade — what Hoshimi Miyabi’s swings were dealing out was less true damage and more sharp, stinging pain.
And for creatures as thick-hided and meat-packed as Mosswine, pain was honestly the last thing they feared.
Even so, the relentless, extended charge was pushing their stamina to its limits. The one that had been trailing dead last had already buckled under its own exhaustion and gone down. What Hoshimi Miyabi hadn’t expected was that the rest of them still hadn’t turned to run.
The formation of the charging herd was strange, too.
No matter what angle she looked from, only ever three of them appeared at once.
As though the whole thing had been choreographed.
As their fallen companion went down, the lead Mosswine — scarred and battered now, but still on its feet — suddenly let out a low, thunderous roar. The others responded instantly, reading the signal without a word.
The herd charged at Hoshimi Miyabi again.
But this time—
As Hoshimi Miyabi sidestepped to dodge the rush from the left, and brought her blade around in the same counter she’d used before — a Mosswine erupted from her blind spot.
And then it threw itself at her in a dead sprint.
The biggest Mosswine. The one that led them all.
Boss Puu had slipped away from the herd at some point during a previous charge — nobody had noticed — and had spent the whole time prowling unseen at the edges, letting its siblings grind down their opponent while it quietly preserved every last scrap of its own stamina, waiting for the perfect moment.
Hoshimi Miyabi had never once imagined that a pig was capable of running a feint. And Boss Puu had done everything in its power to keep itself at full strength.
All Hoshimi Miyabi could manage was to catch the dark shape in her peripheral vision as it came barreling in.
"Squeal squeal! (Didn’t see that coming, did you! This boar’s got tactics, baby!)"
Face to face at last with the one responsible for leaving its family battered and bloodied, Boss Puu dropped its head low and bared its tusks.
Too close.
In Hoshimi Miyabi’s eyes, the Mosswine had appeared in almost an instant. The moss carpeting its back was practically perfect camouflage inside the Ancient Forest — indistinguishable from the surrounding undergrowth in every way.
Add to that the near-flawless timing of its entrance, and Hoshimi Miyabi found her blade still raised in mid-swing, her center of gravity already shifted mid-air from the dodge she’d committed to — leaving her in that one fraction of a second where she couldn’t move.
The ongoing charge of the rest of the herd cut off any chance of sidestepping left or right.
By the time the stampede cleared her, Boss Puu’s attack would be in her face.
And the most damning part of all: Hoshimi Miyabi had simply never fathomed that a pig could run actual battlefield tactics — could exploit a formation, construct a distraction, and set up an ambush mid-fight.
No time to pull the blade back. No time to dodge.
Boss Puu’s lowered head was aimed straight for her midsection. Those two thick, heavy tusks gleamed a sickly pale white in the moonlight.
A direct hit wouldn’t be fatal — but injury was unavoidable.
Kairu’s paw had already moved on instinct, pressing down on the Barrel Bomb pouch at her hip. Her grandmother’s stern warning had been flung clean to the back of her mind.
She didn’t want Hoshimi Miyabi to get hurt.
But what she hadn’t accounted for was that someone else in that clearing was already moving faster than she was.
——Snap.
A sound barely audible above the wind — and then a dull, meaty impact cracked through the forest clearing.
As Boss Puu’s charge abruptly warped off-course, Kairu finally saw the source.
A small pebble had struck Boss Puu’s front leg joint with pinpoint precision. The crack of the stone shattering and the brittle pop of bone shifting out of alignment rang out almost simultaneously.
Charging with everything it had, Boss Puu felt its front leg buckle beneath it. Its entire body lurched hard to one side, and the charge wrenched itself sideways by a full angle — just enough to scrape past Hoshimi Miyabi and barrel on by.
Watching the tree trunk rushing toward it at speed, Boss Puu let out a furious screech:
"Squeal! (Oh COME ON! You humans have NO honor, ambushing a defenseless little piggy like this!)"
Unfortunately, the laws of physics have never once cared about a pig’s feelings.
Hoshimi Miyabi, who had just barely cleared the charge, felt a hot rush of air and the rank smell of a large animal sweep past her face — and then that enormous dark shape was already a dozen or so meters behind her, stumbling headlong into a tree trunk with a resounding crash.
Her trust had never once been misplaced.
Hoshimi Miyabi turned her head, following the trajectory of the pebble back to its source.
Andrew was still crouched on that branch. On his right wrist, the wrist-mounted launcher — a piece of equipment Hoshimi Miyabi had only just learned to recognize — sat open and ready, the next stone already braced against it, eager to fly.
That was the tool he’d used to fire the shot.
And it was that utterly ordinary-looking pebble that had turned Boss Puu’s painstakingly crafted plan into a complete and utter waste of effort.
Hoshimi Miyabi looked at the Mosswine now knocked cold from the impact with the tree. The corner of her mouth curved upward, almost imperceptibly.
But just as Hoshimi Miyabi’s gaze drifted from the fallen Mosswine and she instinctively looked up toward where Andrew sat — her movement stilled for the briefest, barely-there instant.
There was a black cat crouching beside Andrew.
More specifically: the black cat was pressed right up close to Andrew’s side.
Earlier, when Kairu had been asking her questions, she’d drifted close without realizing it — drawn in by the effort of keeping her voice low — and neither of them had noticed a thing.
Watching Andrew, completely oblivious to this fact, Hoshimi Miyabi’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around her tachi’s grip.
Her fox ears pressed back against her head. The small curve that had just lifted the corner of her mouth had vanished without a trace, she couldn’t say exactly when.
She wasn’t sure why, but something about that image bothered her.
It wasn’t that she disliked the Felyne called Kairu — it was just... she didn’t want to see her that close to Andrew.
Why she felt that way, Hoshimi Miyabi herself couldn’t say.
But before she could even begin to turn the question over in her mind, she no longer had the luxury of time to pursue it — because the remaining Mosswine had already regrouped into formation and, having watched their leader fall, were now rallying on sheer grit and closing in around her again from every side.
Under ordinary circumstances, Hoshimi Miyabi would surely have gone easy on them for a display of spirit like that.
Unfortunately, a small interruption had gotten in the way.
Hoshimi Miyabi drew in a slow breath, pulled her gaze away from Andrew, and let it settle back onto the monsters before her.
The deep breath in — and the grip on her tachi tightened, just a fraction more than before.
Looking at the last few Mosswine stubbornly making their stand, Hoshimi Miyabi brought the tachi back into motion — and this time, the strikes that came out were sharper than anything she had thrown before.
She cut straight through their desperate defiance, and the remaining Mosswine were left crying out in wretched complaint, thoroughly chastised.
In short order, every last one of them — already running on fumes — crumpled under the force of a punishment they hadn’t remotely earned.
She hadn’t even needed to use the Tranq Bombs.
As the enormous bodies of the Mosswine hit the ground, a cloud of dust surged up across the clearing and shook a few dry leaves loose from the ancient trees above.
Hoshimi Miyabi waited a beat, confirming that all five Mosswine had lost any capacity to stand again — and then, at last, she slowly sheathed the tachi.
Click.
The soft, clean sound of the tsuba meeting the mouth of the scabbard rang out with quiet clarity across the forest clearing.
Then she raised her head and looked at Andrew.
Andrew was still crouched on that branch, tossing the pebble in his hand.
But when he caught Hoshimi Miyabi’s eyes on him, he immediately and without a moment’s hesitation raised his hand and gave her a big thumbs up.
Watching him do that, the restless feeling that had been stirring at the bottom of Hoshimi Miyabi’s heart quietly dissolved. And without quite realizing when it had happened, the corner of her mouth had curved upward again, just slightly.
The smallest of arcs. You’d miss it entirely if you weren’t paying close attention.
But just as Andrew rose from the branch and was about to jump down to help Hoshimi Miyabi tidy up the field — a low, heavy vibration seized both of their attention at once.
The ground was shaking.
Like something enormous was moving toward them, every step wringing a deep, groaning tremor from the earth beneath their feet.
____
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