Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 6: Passenger Princess
His vision went sideways, then dark, and when it came back everything looked like he was staring through a wet shower door.
A slender shape blocked the sunset rays.
His eyes tried to focus and got feathers first. π³ππ²ππ¨ππ―πππ§ππΉ.π°πΌπ
Layered plumage running down the shoulders and arms, pale greens and greys that bled into the canopy behind it.
Then he saw the helmet:
Curved into a beak that hooked past the nose, covering the upper half of its face. A bird of prey if birds of prey wore armor.
And under the beak, steady green eyes.
They met Ezraβs brown eyes and held.
It was a girl, that much Ezra could tell. Not like it was going to help him from dying.
She crouched over him without a word and tilted his head up with one hand. The other brought a small vial to his lips and poured into his dry throat.
It tasted like absolute shit.
He would throw up if he could but her hand held his jaw tight. It didnβt stop his biological reflexes though. His whole body tensed at the foreign substance and the liquid came back up, spilling from the corners of his mouth, running down his jaw.
Her thumb caught the runoff at the edge of his lip, swept it back, and pressed into his mouth.
His lips closed around it on instinct.
The medicine was still on her skin. It still tasted like shit, but warm now. And warm was no better. He sucked the rest of it off without thinking.
The pad of her thumb sat flat against his tongue for a second longer than it needed to and those green eyes didnβt blink once behind the beak.
His HP bar climbed. He watched it through half-closed eyes, ticking upward past 50, past 80. The meal buff expired somewhere in the middle and his ceiling shrank back to 210.
She pulled her thumb free and stood up. The feathers caught the evening light as she rose. She could have been part of the canopyβbackground if not for her eyes, which were already somewhere else.
Ezra watched her clip the vial back underneath her feather breastplate, which revealed a pale stomach with a red gem adorned into her belly-button.
"You encountered the Gynoscylla?" The voice came from beneath the helmet. Muffled by the beak, but he could hear the roughness in her words. "Answer me, brute."
He remained fixed on her stomach, which she had already covered again. That did not stop his gaze.
"If youβre going to eat me," he said, "spare me the foreplay."
The bird girl scoffed. "I saved your ass. Donβt mistake me for a..." She stopped. The beak tilted slightly, like the word was stuck somewhere behind it.
"Monster?"
"An imprudent woman," she corrected. "Now answer my question. Or Iβll kick the potion back out from your gut."
Ezra lifted himself to his ass, vision still working to keep up with the bird girl standing over him, arms crossed and hips swayed to one side.
"First of all, youβre fucking rude." He coughed and something in his chest shifted in a way it shouldnβt have. "Second of allβ" He gestured at the severed tail, the mouth that was once the naked woman now coated in mucus and more purple liquid. "You can see for yourself."
She shifted her weight, following his pointed finger. His right hand was still hissing faintly from the Ember Arts discharge, the skin across his knuckles still pink.
"I saw." Her green eyes lingered on the charred cord. "How did you burn it?"
"My hand?" Ezra stuck his right hand up, flexing the fingers.
"You think Iβm stupid?"
"Depends. Ask me again in the next hour."
She ignored his half-ass grin.
"Anyway, where did it go?" she said, stepping over him like he was a pile of garbage on the side of the road. "Direction, time, something you can sum up. And donβt give me a lie or half truth."
"You know what, I thought you were hot and all, but youβre just a massive bitch."
Ezra lifted himself the rest of the way up, feeling the medicine run through his muscles and veins.
His left arm came with him but it didnβt cooperateβthe fingers wouldnβt close and the wrist hung at an angle that looked more like a prosthetic minus the dangling flesh.
The HP bar said half. The arm said otherwise, and it was the clear winner.
Even then, he towered over her by a foot and two inches.
Her beak helmet tilted up.
Looked him up and down.
Then up again.
"So you give me a lie and a truth."
Ezra shrugged.
"One more chance," she said. "Fuck it up and I finish the Gynoscyllaβs job."
Ezra looked back at the broken spear. Both halves, the shaft snapped clean, the pincer tips still intact on one end. The bird girl followed his gaze in the same motion.
After all the chasing, heβd run a full circle back to where it broke.
Fuck.
"It went that way," he said, pointing at nothing in particular.
He lunged for the half with the pincers.
When he was back on his feet she was already drawn. A bow made of radiant light, pulled to her cheek, the string humming with a sound that made his balls itch.
Sheβd drawn it in the time it took him to pick up a stick.
"Drop dead," she muttered, and let loose.
The light hit him in the chest before he heard the string release.
His body locked, every joint seizing at once. He was standing one second and tipping backward the next, the broken spear half still in his right hand. Ezraβs body hit the ground and didnβt bounce.
[ Status Effects ]
> Sunburn (Minor) β HP regen slightly reduced
> Paralysis (Severe) β All motor functions rendered useless
βShe shot me. The bird bitch actually shot me. System, do something!β
[ Bzzt ]
[ Quest reminder: Save the poor woman ]
βFuck you too!β
He couldnβt move his jaw. Couldnβt move the fingers still wrapped around the spear shaft for that matter. The paralysis had frozen him mid-grip and that was that.
The bird girl walked into his fixed line of sight, looked down at him with those green eyes and crouched. The way an adult approached a lost little boy.
"You pointed east, right?" She whispered, close into his ear simply because she could.
Ezraβs lips pried open only to have saliva trail out the sides.
"The broken canopy trail goes east. The sap on the sheared branches is still wet, which means the Gynoscylla passed through less than twenty minutes ago. Heading east." She tapped the forehead of her helmet with a metallic tang. "You pointed in the right direction, brute. On accident or on purpose, I donβt care. But youβre a terrible liar either way."
She grabbed him by his good arm and started dragging.
The jungle floor scraped against his back. Rocks, roots, dirt, all of it grinding against skin that was already cut to shit.
His body wouldnβt flinch or tense no matter how bad it got.
He just felt it.
All he could see from this angle was the curve of her hip beneath the feathered dress-armor, inches from his face, swaying with each step.
βCanβt complain.β
"Iβll admit," she said, heaving his dead weight over a root with a grunt, "you are pretty damn fat."
The paralysis held his face in a half-grimace that he hoped looked intimidating but probably looked constipated. A fern dragged across his open eyes and he couldnβt blink.
They moved uphill. The jungle thinned as the ground rose, ferns giving way to exposed rock and shorter brush. The canopy opened in patches and the sky was going from amber to ink.
"Brute. How did you know to sever its tail?"
The paralysis was loosening. His tongue came back first, then his jaw, thick and dry like heβd been chewing sand.
"Huh?"
"Did I stutter?" She yanked him harder. His face met a stray rock and his nose took the full impact.
"Fuckβlady, give me a break."
She didnβt slow down.
The rock had opened something above his eyebrow and blood ran sideways into his hairline.
"The strands of a Gynoscylla lure need a sharp weapon," she said after a while. "Your spear would not have done the job. And as big as you are, you couldnβt have ripped it with your hands."
She glanced behind her shoulder. The blood was pooling around his eyeball, dripping onto the dirt.
"You gonna say sorry or what?"
The bird girl kept pulling his body past more twigs and rocks.
"No, Iβm not."
They went quiet after that.
The moon was coming up behind the ridge, pale and fat, and the terrain was clearing out. More boulders. Jagged geometry unlike the beach or the jungle. The trees were shorter and the spaces between them wider, the land of green beneath them stretching for miles.
"I just..." His voice came out rougher than he expected. "I just wanted to live."
She paused mid-stride.
His body slid to a stop on the dirt.
"Live?"
"Yup."
She started dragging again.
"Everyone wants to live," she said. "Even the Cartigon you killed. Yes, I saw its body. It must have really pissed you off."
"Like you wouldnβt do the same."
She pulled harder. His shoulder blade caught a groove in the rock and he felt something grind.
"The nape is the swiftest way to end it. You took your leisure and pummeled its spine in place. Brute."
"If Iβm a brute, youβre a blue baller."
"Donβt know what that means. Donβt even try to explain."
Her green eyes glanced back at him over her shoulder. He caught them for half a second before she turned forward again.
The terrain leveled off and then climbed steeper. The boulders were bigger here, stacked and angled against each other. Wind hit his face for the first time since the beach. Dry and cold, it shriveled his crotch area and was rude about it too.
βFuck, sheβs seen everything already. This isnβt fair at all.β
"Weβre near the nest. Gynoscyllas make their homes on summits. The altitude wind keeps their lure-tail taut." Her eyes found his over her shoulder. "Makes it fuckable."
"And when you get there?" Ezraβs legs were tingling now, most of his body already recovering from the paralysis. "You gonna kill it?"
"No."
She dropped his arm with zero care and rolled her shoulders with a crack.
"Iβm going to use you as bait."
