Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 18: Gleaming Beast of the Dunes

"The Aerobow has a third arrow." Neve hadn’t moved from the spring. "Sonic boom." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

She summoned her bow, and this time it was a misty gray that almost looked like ash.

"Yellow paralyzes, blue kills, and gray does what exactly?"

The bow dispersed into thin air and she paused for a moment.

"Shakes the ground hard enough to flush anything hiding underneath it."

She explained the rest in the time it took the ground to pulse twice more.

Arrow hits sand, detonation carries vibration through the ground, anything underneath that hunts by tremor-sense gets its own senses turned against it.

"I need line of sight above the rim. One clear shot."

"And I’m the elevator?"

"You’re the legs." Neve sat upright now, leaning her body on her good elbow. "Spine’s still fucked."

The Ossalaka looked between them, blinking in unison.

’Three arrow types and she’s been too broken to fire any of them. Yellow, blue, and now...

She wants to use the one I’ve never even seen.’

"I’ll give you a ride, but don’t choke me to death."

"Just hurry up," she said.

Getting her onto his back was exactly as bad as it sounded. One working arm locked across his collarbone, legs barely gripping because her core was half paralyzed.

She weighed nothing and it still hurt both of them in ways neither bitched about.

The Ossalakas paved a way for them. Ezra walked through, bowing his head in case they understood courtesy. They probably didn’t.

Though he stared on at the ugly Ossalaka. They met eyes and held. Grudges never died easy after all.

The bowl’s inner wall had enough handholds between the stacked boulders, but every reach threatened to pry her arms from his neck and meant fingernails digging into his chest.

"Drop me and I fire a gray into your spine," Neve said after they’d nearly made it to the top. She was quiet the whole time apparently.

Ezra heaved both their bodies up before taking another breath. "You shook your head no to wrapping your legs around my waist. Don’t even start."

Neve sighed, her legs hanging limp.

"You are so incredibly dull. I can’t."

"Oh, right."

Ezra set her against a flat stone at the rim and the desert opened up below them.

Sand painted the surface in every direction under the yellow and blue moons, both casting shadows in different colors so everything below had two outlines.

And across the middle of it, maybe two hundred yards out, a single fin.

It was curved and dark, cutting through sand like a dorsal fin through still water. The sand beside it parted ways in a logic Ezra did not want to rationalize just yet.

’Shark Week. Except the shark is underground and I’m standing on the beach.’

"Don’t freeze, and don’t die." Neve summoned the bow again, the gray one, into her palm and let the weight settle. "That’s a Sandsea Leviathan. Get in its path and it swallows you whole."

’Fuck me.’

She pulled the ethereal string back with her teeth and the fog solidified into a gray arrow eager to be set free.

"Even someone as big as you are," she muttered. She strained against the pull once, and the string went taut. "Watch this."

She released the arrow with an exhale. It went straight up into the evening sky, glowing as bright as the dozen other arrays of stars.

"It’s going to drop right on its path in twenty seconds. Five more seconds because I feel bad for you."

Neve closed her eyes, opening one of them to see Ezra squinting in the sky.

"Go, brute."

Ezra nodded once and skidded down the rim, his feet pummeling into the frozen sand.

He was never really much of a runner. Never much of an athletic person either. Being chased by a Gynoscylla didn’t exactly count.

The ground had been too muddy and he was zigzagging more than anything.

But on the frozen sand where his feet met solid surface?

He fucking flew.

> SP: 170/180

Each stride punched into the ground and pulled free and he picked up speed faster than he had any right to.

His legs covered distance in lengths that didn’t match anything he’d been capable of on Earth, and every step echoed his position to anything below that could feel vibration.

He didn’t care. Why would he? The arrow was somewhere above him, arcing through the sky, and he was racing it to the same spot.

Besides, the bird girl was watching. Somewhere behind him, she pretended to fall asleep. But she was watching everything.

> SP: 160/180

He pulled a charred berry from where he’d tucked it between his cheeks and shoved it into his mouth mid-stride. The Sated passive kicked in and the SP cap stretched.

> SP: 155/205

The fin was still out there, closing fast at one hundred yards, then seventy-five. Any second now they would collide. Ezra was betting on it.

> SP: 150/205

Fifty yards out, the ground changed identity.

It started as a hum in his feet and then it wasn’t a hum anymore.

The sand vibrated in patterns that didn’t belong to his footsteps, grinding stone against stone somewhere far beneath him. The sound came up through his ankles and into his knees up his ass into his spine and had no intention of letting go.

Then the creature started wailing. Deeper than the surface and lagging behind the grind of dirt and sand. It was fucking massive and in pain.

The body under the fin began surfacing, a mound that broke the surface as if it was declaring a path and the sand let it.

Above Ezra, a gray point of light appeared in the sky between the stars.

Brighter, bigger, and closer because it didn’t care for whatever it hit.

’Oh fuck.’

Ezra dropped to his knees right as the arrow punctured the ground.

BANG.

The detonation brought his face to kiss the ground and held it there for three more seconds while the rings of the sonic boom escalated in layers that seemed to go on forever.

The body with the fin breached the sand and all two-hundred tons of its yellow scaled plating met the cool desert air, each of them vibrating at a frequency that dissolved the debris trailing behind it.

Ezra saw it then:

A harpoon lodged in its belly between the crevices of two plates. Left of center, metal, serrated, barbs curved backward so the thing could go in but never come out.

The flesh around it was swollen black-red with infection and the beast wailed once more, its body still in the air taking its sweet time as Ezra was recoiling from the sonic boom.

’It’s not hunting them. It’s been scratching the harpoon out against the rocks. The Ossalaka live on the biggest rock formation in the desert and this thing has been body-slamming their walls for thirty nights trying to scratch an itch it can’t reach.

They’ve been hiding from something that doesn’t even know they’re there.

Stupid furballs.’

It finally crashed back down and the impact threw Ezra off his feet again and onto his back. Sand rained over him and the massive thing kept wailing, flapping its tail the span of three Ezras to and from the air.

Every movement it made deepened the already impaled harpoon, steaming blood spurting where the hole closed and opened.

Ezra pointed a finger, one eye closed, one eye fixated on the beast’s flailing tail should it come across his way.

"Appraisal."

[ Sandsea Leviathan — ★★★★★★★ ]

> Profile: Deep-sand apex predator. Nocturnal. Diet consists of Gigaworm and occasional mammal. Foreign object embedded in ventral tissue causing prolonged wound infection.

’Seven stars. Neve’s ceiling. So the Ossalaka’s "Gleaming Beast" is a seven-star whale with a splinter.’

Ezra got up to his legs and ran at the leviathan, sweat glistening off his body as he measured the distance between its tail and the harpoon.

’I will be the leviathan whisperer. Or die.’