Chapter 34
Night has begun to fall in the portal, and both groups agree it’ll be safer to camp together by the entrance than to attempt to stay inside tonight. We pack up what we can, Karl making a pair of wagons for me and Jurgen to pull the remains of our most recent fight back to the portal.
"I’m a Lycan, not a pack mule" I mutter, making Jurgen laugh and point back at his own wagon.
"Sorry Kat, it’s the best we can do at the moment, and my physical strength is nothing compared to the two of you" Karl tries to console me.
We finally reach the portal, the night now well and dark, to find Mary waiting for us.
"The others have taken the wagons to bring back our bounty. They think with the 3 of them they should be able to manage it. We only made it a few hundred yards then spent the day picking off water buffalo from the herd."
Sounds like they need more help than we do, only having one site to clear plus a mangled gorilla corpse well into the woods that’s likely not worth recovering, so we head to help out the guys.
"Food always comes first" Jurgen pipes up cheerfully, pulling both empty carts behind him.
We find the boys struggling to load the second cart and chuckle a bit. They’ve thought ahead and rigged a pole and pulley system, but the 10 ton beasts are still a hassle to load. Karl lifts the bodies one at a time into wagons, finding that well stacked, we can get 2 water buffalo per wagon.
This is going to be one stressful trip.
Wagons now loaded and split 4 per group, me and Jurgen on one side, Jake and the Ramirez brothers on the other, all of us enhanced with Karl’s support magic. I notice now that he’s much more stingy with it than Mary is.
I wonder if it’s about mana usage for his attack spells, or if he just wants us to fight under our own power until we need it. All ’struggle makes you stronger’ style?