Origin Witch - Drake Marrow Haul
A six-foot iron bolt driven into a lizard’s collarbone made a sound like a wet fence post being split with a sledgehammer. Green bile, thick as lard and smelling of burned hair, shot ten feet into the cold morning mist, splashing across the granite rocks of the northern ravine. Two of Garrett Thorne’s men dropped their steel winches with high-pitched curses, pulling their hands back into their leather sleeves as the acidic spray hit the wet dirt, sizzling like fat on a hot stove. The air down in the trench was so heavy with sulfur and copper stink that Corinne had to pull her tunic collar up over her nose just to keep from gagging while hovering thirty feet above the fight.
“Hold the cable, you idiots!” Garrett bellowed, his voice raspy as an iron rasp against oak. He didn’t drop his end. The big warrior had his boots planted deep into the black mud, his broad back bowed, his iron chest-plate creaking as the Canopy Drake thrashed its massive, armored neck. The steel cable wrapped around his forearms was vibrating so hard it sprayed tiny drops of water off the braided wire.
The Drake was dying, but it wasn’t quiet about it. It let out a wet, gurgling roar that rattled the broad cypress leaves above Corinne’s head, its intact right wing beating the mud into a bloody yellow froth. Its tail, a heavy, six-foot appendage studded with jagged bone thorns, swung in a wild, blind arc, smashing a two-foot boulder into gray gravel.
Corinne didn’t waste time admiring the beast’s death throes. She steered her floating torso through the branches, her dead legs swinging beneath her gray tunic like pendulum weights, and reached into her spatial bag. Her fingers bypassed the small health vials, closing around her last two round, yellow glass throw-tubes.
[Grade-E Offense Potion: Corrosive Slowness Decoction]
[Grade-E Offense Potion: High-Yield Explosive Charge]
“Thorne!” she called down, her voice raspy, cutting through the roar of the wind. “Get your men back from its head!”
The warrior didn’t argue. He spat a mouthful of dark blood into the dirt, kicked his left boot out of the mud, and lunged backward six feet, dragging two of his front-liners with him by their leather collars. Corinne leaned her upper body forward, adjusted her black frames, and dropped both vials straight into the open, bleeding jaws of the Drake. The glass broke against the beast’s blue tongue.
The marrow charge detonated with a wet, ripping blast.
The explosive charge detonated inside the monster’s throat with a heavy, muffled thud that sounded like a cannon going off inside a wooden barrel. A split second later, the yellow acid decoction exploded into a dense cloud of pressurized mist, coating the inside of its mouth, nostrils, and windpipe. The Drake’s jaw snapped shut with a sickening, wet crunch. Smoke, thick, mustard-yellow, and smelling of burned liver, poured out from between its scaly lips. The beast’s neck twitched once, twice, its massive body collapsing flat into the bloody mud with a heavy, earth-shaking thud that sent a shower of wet silt flying thirty feet into the air.
Its 850-point health bar, visible through Corinne’s spectacles, dropped to absolute zero.
[System World Notification] [Grade-D High Monster ‘Canopy Drake’ slain.] [Primary Kill Credit: Corinne Mercer / Garrett Thorne.] [Experience Allocated: +450 Points.]
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the distant dripping of water from the high cypress branches and the ragged, shallow breathing of twelve exhausted men standing in the mud. Corinne didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. She activated Zephyr Float, lowering her weightless body down through the yellow haze until her bare toes hovered three inches above the dead monster’s neck. The smell down here was atrocious. Raw lizard blood, scorched scales, and the sharp, vinegar-like stink of her own alchemical acid filled the narrow ravine.
Garrett Thorne limped over, using his broadsword like a cane. His right leather sleeve was burned away, revealing red, blistered skin where the acid had grazed his forearm, but his bearded face was split into a wide, wild grin.
“Hell of a toss, Mercer,” he wheezed, wiping a mixture of sweat and black blood off his chin with his thumb. “The second blast broke its lower jaw entirely.”
“I need the spine,” Corinne said, her voice flat, her eyes fixed on the base of the Drake’s skull. She didn’t care about the kill credit. She didn’t care about the experience points ticking in her status panel. She drew the Moonstone Carver from her waistband. The nine-inch crystal blade shimmered under the pale morning light, its Strength +30 enchantment making her right arm feel heavy, dense, and unnaturally solid as she hovered over the beast’s neck. She pointed her spectacles at the thick, scaly ridge behind the Drake’s head.
[Canopy Drake Carcass (Grade-D)] [Target Area: Third Lumbar Vertebrae / Spinal Channel] [Condition: Intact / Marrow Temperature: 39°C (Cooling rapidly)] [Note: Marrow fluid will denature into useless cartilage if not harvested within twelve minutes.]
Twelve minutes. “Thorne, hold the neck,” she ordered, dropping her floating body another two inches until her knees were almost touching the wet scales. “Don’t let the head roll into the mud.”
Garrett didn’t complain about taking orders from a girl in a white tunic. He jammed his broadsword into the dirt, stepped into the bloody puddle beside the neck, and clamped both of his large, scarred hands around the Drake’s upper jaw, holding the heavy skull steady.
Corinne drove the Moonstone Carver into the joint between the third and fourth neck scales. Squilch. The crystal blade cut through the tough, rubbery hide like a warm knife through suet. Green blood, thick, warm, and smelling of copper, poured out along the blade, but Corinne didn’t pull back. She used her 32-Strength-boosted arm to lever the blade sideways, slicing through the heavy tendon fibers until she hit the cold, gray bone of the spinal column. Her hand was covered in warm lizard blood up to her wrist.
“Careful,” she muttered to herself, her thumb steady against the crystal hilt. “Don’t crack the bone wall.”
If her blade slipped and punctured the inner spinal channel, the precious marrow fluid would mix with the outer blood and contaminate the entire catalyst. She cut a neat, six-inch square hatch through the outer bone plate, using the flat tip of her knife to pry the bone cover free.
The bone plate snapped off, revealing a twelve-inch section of the inner spinal cord.
Corinne pulled a specialized, sterile glass containment tube from her spatial bag, a nine-inch cylinder she’d cleaned three times with Anseic water. She slid the crystal knife beneath the silver spinal cord, sliced both ends with two swift, razor-thin cuts, and lifted the twelve-inch marrow section free from the bone channel. The marrow was warm, vibrating slightly in her gloved fingers like a living pulse. She slid the glowing silver marrow straight into the glass tube, sealed the rubber stopper, and plunged the container into her Pouch of Preservation. The spatial bag’s internal stasis field locked around the glass instantly, freezing the marrow’s temperature at thirty-nine degrees.
Harvest Complete: Grade-D Drake’s Spinal Marrow (Purity: 98%).
Corinne let out a long, ragged breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her shoulders sagged, her lightened body drifting three inches upward as her posture relaxed. She had it. The primary catalyst for the Nerve-Restoration Fluid. “You got what you came for?” Garrett asked, wiping his bloody hands on his trousers as he let go of the Drake’s jaw.
“I got it,” she rasped, wiping her Moonstone Carver against the dead beast’s scales before sheathing it in her belt.
“Good. Because my boys want the rest of this lizard before the swamp hounds smell the blood.”
Garrett turned to his men, who were already pulling out iron skinning knives and copper saws. “Strip the hide! Cut the wing tendons into cable strands, and pull every tooth out of its upper jaw! Leave the meat for the haulers!”
Corinne hovered over to the Drake’s smashed skull, used her knife to pop the Grade-D green monster core out of its right eye socket, and dropped the fist-sized crystal into her bag. She didn’t stay for the butchery. “Thorne,” she called out, turning her floating torso toward the high branches. “The three Grade-D Obsidian Array Bases will be delivered to Finch’s broker desk by tomorrow morning.”
Garrett looked up from the carcass, his iron broadsword resting against his shoulder, his bearded face covered in green blood. “A pleasure doing business with you, Witch.”
Corinne didn’t answer. She activated Zephyr Float, pushed off the blood-soaked cypress trunk with her bare toes, and shot forty yards straight up into the gray morning fog, the marrow heavy and warm against her side as The Spire pulled her home.
— Origin Witch —