Chapter 120: Playing With Fire
"You have fur and fangs and stomachs that can handle raw meat. I have NONE of those things. If I don’t cook this meat, I cannot eat it. And if I cannot eat, I will starve."
Greymaw’s lip curled. "Then perhaps the shiftless one should have stayed with her own—"
Calis cut him a look so sharp the old wolf’s mouth clamped shut mid-sentence.
The silence that followed was heavy.
Tera took a deep breath to compose herself.
She faced Calis.
"Have you ever eaten roasted meat? Smoked meat? Anything that has been prepared over heat?"
Calis’ frown deepened. "We eat our meat fresh."
Tera sighed.
"I understand your worries, but I am not summoning a forest fire. Fire is safe as long as it is controlled. I just want to cook my meat." Tera gestured around them. "Look at this place. The ground is too wet, the air is humid, and even the trees are moist. Fire cannot even spread, even if I wanted it to. It’d be a struggle for me to even make one."
Calis stared like her words had gone right over his head.
"I did not understand a word you said. And the ground is not wet. What are you saying?"
’No shit!’
"Fire cannot spread in a place like this."
Greymaw’s eyes narrowed. "You lie."
"Science does not lie!"
"What is science?"
She turned to Calis. "I need fire to eat. If you want me to stay alive long enough for my mates to arrive, I need to be allowed to make a small, controlled fire."
Calis’ eyes held strong disapproval, but it seemed like he was giving her some thought. He was likely weighing her words against the old fears and warnings of his elders.
This female was in his care. He had taken her from her territory, and he had not even considered that she couldn’t eat what his pack ate.
He felt annoyed with himself.
"No fire," he said gruffly.
Tera turned to walk away. She was going to do it at a distance. No one was going to tell her what to—
"What do you eat?" Calis asked.
She paused and eyed him. "Cooked meat, fruits, and vegetables. Food that doesn’t still look like it’s waiting to run away."
"Fruits are scarce here," Calis said slowly. "And I do not know what ’cooked’ means."
Calis turned to two wolves nearby. "Go and find fruits she can eat."
The two wolves stood up, shifting to their human form.
"Alpha? There is no fruit near—"
"Look harder."
They lowered their heads and turned away.
Calis’s thoughts drifted for a moment. He remembered the area where he had found Tera. The large lake, the healthy trees, the abundance of fruit-bearing plants. That land was richer than this one.
When his scouts returned from that clan, he would send more wolves there to scout the area.
But that was for later.
Right now, a shiftless female was going to starve because he had been too preoccupied with information-gathering to think about what she actually needed to survive.
"Wait!" Tera called after the departing wolves, feeling sorry for them.
She was not about to inconvenience these wolves like this and make them further dislike her.
"They don’t need to get anything."
Calis looked confused.
Tera had, at that very moment, realised that even making a fire would be a problem. A quick scour of the floor did not reveal that the stones used to make fires were nowhere near, and with the earth being moist in this region, uprooting a dry one would be difficult.
She needed—
Tera’s mind darted to the system shop. She had unlocked tier two months ago, and there happened to be a lighter in there.
Tera immediately purchased it, and it appeared in her system space.
"I will create my fire, but I will do it away from the pack," Tera announced.
Everyone tensed up.
Greymaw stepped forward. "Alpha, you cannot allow this! She is going to—"
It appeared in Tera’s hand when she took it out of the system space, and before the old man could finish his words, she lit it up, putting the flame in front of them.
Calis stiffened, and Greymaw screeched, throwing himself to the floor.
"I will burn you with fire if you try to stop me. No one comes between me and my cooked meat, you hear? I control fire." She huffed proudly, waving the tiny flame.
The wolves stared transfixed. Some of them looked scared, especially the elders, while the rest looked excited.
A lot of them had never seen this before.
[Effective use of the lighter as a deterrent!]
[(≖⩊≖)]
[This system has already told Host it’d be useful months ago]
[No item in this shop is useless!]
Tera fought the urge to roll her eyes.
"What are you doing?"
Calis’ body was tense, and it took Tera a chilling second to realise he wasn’t scared but was practically calculating how he could disarm her.
"Look. I promise you, the fire will not spread, and it will not burn anything. I only need it long enough to cook my food."
She turned it off.
Calis’ jaw worked.
The elder wolves were vibrating with disapproval.
"Fine." The word came out like it had been extracted with pliers. "But if it spreads—"
"It will NOT spread. Look at this ground!"
Calis grunted, which Tera chose to interpret as agreement.
She immediately started gathering sticks from around the area. There were enough lying around and under the surrounding trees, though some were damp. She sorted through them, picking the driest ones she could find, while snapping off smaller branches for kindling.
The wolves watched her every movement as if she was handling a venomous snake.
The elder wolves had started grumbling amongst themselves, their displeasure radiating through the clearing like the very heat they were terrified of.
"She is going to kill us all," one muttered.
"The shiftless one has lost her mind."
Minutes later, Tera had already made her shoddy fire pit and had started roasting the meat over it.
To her surprise, even without any seasoning, it started to smell nice and was strangely roasting fast.
She then remembered that there were different types of meat with their textures and roasting times.
The aroma reached the wolves, and within seconds, heads were turning across the entire pack. Wolves who had been eating their raw portions paused mid-chew, sniffing at the air.
One by one, every nose in the Glimmer Pack pointed in the same direction.
Toward the small, struggling fire where one shiftless female sat alone, turning a stick of meat that smelled like nothing any of them had ever encountered in their lives.
A lot of them started salivating and drooling.
Tera turned back and was shocked at the sight. Every single one of them looked like hungry dogs.
If her eyes weren’t working properly, she would think they wanted to eat her instead.
Tera smirked as she saw Greymaw’s nostrils flaring.
Calis and his sister were the only ones in their human forms now. His eyes were fixed on Tera’s precious meat as his mouth shamelessly watered.
Faelynn’s lips were pressed together in a way that suggested she was exercising tremendous self-control.
Tera turned her attention to her meat, only to squeak as Calis appeared right beside her out of nowhere, and, like a little child encountering something for the first time, he was reaching for fire.