In hindsight, it should have been obvious.

Everyone knew wolves traveled in packs. Two wolves in a clearing didn’t mean two wolves, it meant two wolves you could see, and a variable number you couldn’t. Yuto almost felt embarrassed that this had needed to be explained to him.

Almost. There was a more pressing emotion queuing up behind the embarrassment, and that was worry.

Not about the pack itself. With Shiny beside him, they could carve through a wolf pack without too much difficulty. What worried him was the leader. Pack leaderss wouldn’t be of the same rank as the other other wolves, it had to be something that had earned the position by being worse than everything else in the area. A paragon threat, maybe. Or, if the universe was feeling creative, a paragon menace. Like Shiny.

If it was the last one, Shiny would have his hands full with the leader, which meant Yuto and the girl would be managing the rest of the pack between them. The girl and her eagle on one side. Yuto on the other, with a sword that had already proven it couldn’t reliably get through tough hide on the first try.

For a brief moment he considered it, just leaving. Turning around, walking back the way they came, pretending they had never found this clearing. They had come to the Astral Realm to hunt beasts, yes, but they had also come to not die, and a wolf pack with an unknown leader qualified as a meaningful risk.

Then he reconsidered.

They were Ethereals. Danger was the job. You didn’t come to the Astral Realm and then quietly exit every time things got complicated. Besides, progress required fighting, and fighting required not walking away from perfectly good fights.

That was the reason he was staying. A principled, strategic reason.

...It had nothing to do with not wanting to leave a very beautiful girl alone with a wolf pack. That would be a very different kind of motivation and Yuto was not that person.

He turned to Shiny. "Don’t engage the wolves. Wait for the leader and take it out."

Shiny nodded, expression unchanged, and moved to a position at the edge of the clearing with the calm patience of someone who had all the time in the world.

Yuto sighed and went for one of the two wolves.

The wolf moved first. It covered the distance between them in under three seconds, low and fast, and launched itself at him before he had fully closed the gap. He swung his sword.

The blade hit the wolf’s flank and bounced off.

He didn’t have time to process this because the wolf was already on him, its full weight slamming into his chest and driving him back. The jaw snapped at his face. Yuto shoved it back with both hands, bought himself half a meter of breathing room, swung again and missed. The wolf lunged for his face and he got the blade up in time, the teeth came down on the flat of the sword with enough force to drive his arms down. He wrenched it sideways and yanked it free. The wolf was off-balance for a single moment.

Yuto stabbed it in the back.

His smile lasted approximately one second. The wolf raked his side with its claws.

The pain was immediate and specific, because the claws had found the same wound the hog had opened earlier, the graze along his ribs that had never quite stopped stinging. He dropped, his back hit the ground, the air left his lungs entirely. The wolf was above him before he’d finished falling, jaw open, going for his throat.

He got his boot up and kicked it hard in the chest. It stumbled. He scrambled to his feet before it recovered.

It came at him again. He swung. It ducked under the blade and barreled into him, and this time his grip didn’t hold, the sword spun out of his hand and landed on the ground a meter to his left. The wolf bore him down and went for his face. Yuto grabbed it by the throat with both hands and they struggled like that, neither of them making particular progress, until he twisted enough to spot the sword.

He got his fingers around the hilt.

He brought the blade up between them and drove it into the wolf’s throat with everything he had left.

Die, he thought at it. You absolute bastard. Die.

The wolf thrashed harder, which was alarming, then slower, which was not, and then stopped altogether and went heavy on top of him.

Wolfhound slain.]

[+1 Soul Core]

The notification appeared in his vision and it felt, genuinely, like music.

He pushed the wolf off, sat up, and looked across the clearing.

The girl fought like someone who had been doing it for a long time and had stopped finding it interesting.

Her eagle went in first, it climbed sharply, then folded and dove, hitting the wolf across the back before the animal had registered it was coming. The wolf howled, snapped upward trying to catch the bird, and closed its jaws on empty air while the eagle was already banking away.

The girl was already moving. She came from behind and stabbed twice, fast and deliberate, no wasted motion. The wolf spun on her. She stepped back. The wolf pushed forward, chasing the retreat, and walked into the eagle, which had swung back around and went for its spine.

The wolf was faster than expected. It turned and caught the bird mid-air, dragging it down to the dirt.

The girl closed the distance without hesitating. She drove the dagger into the wolf’s flank. It released the eagle and lurched sideways. The eagle shook itself, then lifted back into the air.

She stabbed it a second time. Then wound up for the third.

The wolf slammed into her first.

She went down with a sound that was quiet and involuntary, barely an oof, like she was mildly inconvenienced and rolled clear as the wolf’s jaw snapped shut on the space her head had just been. She slashed from the ground, opening a line across the wolf’s muzzle. It recoiled with a pained sound and she was already standing.

The eagle came down and pinned it, holding it just long enough.

The girl didn’t waste the seconds. She stepped in, drove the dagger deep, and held it there while the eagle pressed from above. The wolf twisted and shrieked and fought to get free, and she simply rotated the blade, methodical and expressionless, until it stopped.

Then she withdrew the dagger, stood up straight, and looked at the wolf with the same blank face she had worn the entire time.

Her eagle ruffled its feathers and looked back at her. A brief, private exchange, by all appearances. Then it settled.

Yuto realized he had been staring with his mouth slightly open and closed it.

There was blood on her nightgown, a dark line across the white, and dirt in her hair, and she looked completely unbothered by both. Not performing calm. Just actually calm, in a way that Yuto suspected was not something she had learned but something she simply was.

He had no idea what to make of her.