Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 8: The Gynoscylla

Ezra had been watching the Gynoscylla so hard he almost missed the rest.

His eyes drifted past it, past the ridge and up to the shapes stacked above the summit’s peak against the stars.

He’d been staring at those shapes since the bird girl dropped him where he lay. Those irregular silhouettes—dark and still like gargoyles. And he had filed them as rock and moved on.

But two of them had light in them.

The same two violet points he’d mistaken for stars. They hadn’t moved since the last time he checked. They hadn’t needed to. They’d been exactly where they were this whole time—not above the summit.

On it, set into the dark mass of something that sat on the peak in perfect stillness. Two points, spaced wide apart, wider than his arm span.

They weren’t stars.

They were never stars.

He stared at them and they blinked again and his intestines twisted all at once.

The jagged silhouettes he’d dismissed as terrain were edges. Bladed ridges and angular plates folded tight against a body the color of obsidian. Black and deep purple.

It had been there before the Gynoscylla crawled over the ridge.

Before she dragged him to this outcrop.

Before the wind ever even picked up.

Without ever making a fucking sound.

Ezra saw it clearly now:

Two violet eyes the size of his chest watched them from above.

The Gynoscylla lunged forward and fifteen feet closed to nothing. The rear legs fired and the eyeless head whipped forward, spiral teeth chattering as the throat gaped wide enough to take his chest.

Then the neck—skinless pink tissue—pulled back like a sleeve rolled to the elbow, retracting without so much as a hurry.

An inner frame of wet bone. Segmented and ridged, tapering to rows of hooked teeth layered so tight they overlapped each other. There was no mouth separate from the neck—the whole thing was a throat turned inside out and coated in digestive film, flexing open as the segments spread apart.

Air whistled through slits along the exposed bone and the neck vibrated.

"Help me, slayer."

Every hair on his body stood up and the ducts pulsed again.

That’s where the voice had always come from. Not the bait, not the puppet swinging through the jungle on a cord. The body’s throat had produced the sound and the cord had carried it like a phone line.

The call had always started here, in these vibrating slits of bone.

The bared throat lunged for his chest. Ezra looked at the boulder where she was crouched and she hadn’t moved.

’Fuck this.’

He rolled and his legs worked. She didn’t know that and the Gynoscylla sure as shit didn’t either. He was off his back and onto his feet in a motion that would have stumped any Cartigon.

Ezra stood five feet from the Gynoscylla now, chest up and right hand banging against his chest.

"Come on, fucker! Finish your job!"

The ducts hissed, teeth spreading back open. It lunged again, right for his crotch.

"Drop dead!"

Ezra hit the stone before the words finished leaving her mouth, chest flat, chin on rock, arms over his head.

He’d learned that lesson the first time.

The hum of the blue bow filled the outcrop behind him, the string vibrating at a pitch that sent shockwaves through the summit. Tri-color moonlight scattered off the limbs.

She released and the bolt hit the Gynoscylla between the cartilage on its left side. Light punched through flesh and the creature screamed a guttering cry, legs spasming, purple fluid foaming from the wound and the throat.

It was choking on its own blood, stout arms clawing at air.

She drew blue light again and put the second bolt low through the belly where it met a mound between its legs. Its lower abdomen burst in a wet scrunch and all at once its pink body dropped to the stone beside Ezra.

Dead before it even hit the floor.

"I told you not to move," she said, lowering the glowing bow. The blue bled out of the string and the rest went with it until it was just her bare hands again.

Her palms were steaming, the same way his palm was when he used Ember Arts on the cord from before.

’She probably has some kind of Art skill too.’

She knelt down beside the stiff Gynoscylla, its pink hairless corpse twitching in post-mortem.

"Well, you took your sweet fucking time. I wasn’t trying to get my dick eaten off."

"I was waiting for the shot. A Gynoscylla’s weak points are the chest and lower stomach. Besides, if I missed..."

A short blade came out from under her feathered breastplate. She opened the stomach with a long cut from chest to pelvis. Steam hissed up in the cold air that had nothing to do with warmth.

"...I wouldn’t be able to retrieve the bones of the missing villagers."

She reached inside with both hands and started pulling out bones.

Small ones first—finger bones and fragments worn smooth by stomach acid, lined up on the rock beside her knee. Then bigger ones—a femur snapped in half, a pelvis cracked into thirds, more Ezra couldn’t name.

But they all held the same conclusion:

Human bones.

"Pitiful men," she muttered to herself. Her fingers sorted through the bile without slowing. "Seeking easy release in the trees." The bones kept coming and there were more than one body’s worth.

Ezra sat on the rock with his left arm cradled to his chest and watched her stack the dead. His stomach was still twisting and he was sure it had nothing to do with the Gynoscylla corpse.

’The lure. Naked women in the clearing. How many of them came running? How many were kids, grown men?’

[ Ping! ]

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He looked up, and his breath froze all at once.

The two violet points above the summit were gone, glowing lower than before. They slid down from the peak lingering over her like two lanterns lowered on strings.

She didn’t see them at all.

She was crouched over the stomach cavity with her blade in hand and her back turned.

The violet glow settled ten feet above her head without a sound.

Then the jaw opened, wider than the entire Gynoscylla.

[ Quest reminder: Save the poor woman ]