Chapter 20: Payout

Chapter 20: Chapter 20: Payout

Wen was still working when Reeve waved the other two off with his free hand.

"You and Jason get started on the cores," he said, wincing slightly as Wen’s water essence pressed against the cracked rib. "Alpha first, that one’s worth the most. Skip anything torn up too badly to sell, damaged cores aren’t worth the weight."

He tossed Skyler a set of collapsible sacs from his pack before she’d even finished standing, sturdy canvas cinched at the top, clearly built for exactly this.

"Be thorough," he added. "We’re not leaving good product behind because nobody felt like walking the extra ten feet."

"We’re on it boss" Skyler said, already moving toward the alpha’s body.

---

The alpha’s chest cavity didn’t want to open easily, thick muscle and heavier bone than the smaller wolves, but between Jason’s grip and a bit of effort, it gave way without needing a blade at all.

"You could just cut it open," Jason pointed out, watching Skyler work at a smaller carcass a few feet away.

"You could. If you’ve got the precision for it, a blade’s actually faster, a clean line straight around the core without cracking half the ribcage." She wrenched hers open by hand anyway, grunting with the effort. "I don’t have that kind of precision yet. So I do it the slow way."

"Bare hands works fine for me."

"Bare hands works because you’re strong enough to brute force it open. Most people your rank still need the blade." She glanced over at him, something considering in the look.

"Speaking of rank. You fight like you’re punching well above yours and moving like you’ve never held that spear in your life. What’s that about?"

Jason huffed a short laugh, not entirely offended. "Is it really that obvious?"

"Reeve noticed. I noticed. I’d bet the wolves noticed, if wolves noticed things like that."

"Fair. It’s bad, I know it’s bad. Picked the spear up a few minutes ago, never really had proper instruction on it."

"You should get that fixed. Not everything you fight is going to leave room for raw strength to cover the gap." She nodded toward his forearm, the skin already closed over where the claw mark had been. "Speaking of which, that healed fast."

"Good genetics," Jason said, easy and unbothered, already turning back to the alpha’s chest cavity like the subject wasn’t worth lingering on. "Runs in the family."

Skyler gave him a look that said she didn’t entirely buy it, but let it go, apparently deciding a man’s freakishly fast healing wasn’t worth pushing on their first job together.

"Anyway," she said. "Were you already planning to find a tutor before you said anything?"

"I was. Now I’m planning it harder."

She drew the alpha’s core free, dark red and fist sized, still faintly warm, and held it up to check for cracks before dropping it into the sack.

"This one alone’s probably worth more than the rest of the pack combined."

---

They split up after that, working opposite ends of the clearing, each of them dragging carcasses into rough piles and cracking open the ones still intact enough to be worth the effort. A few of the wolves had taken damage too severe to bother with, crushed ribcages, cores shattered outright by whatever had killed them, and those got left where they lay.

Reeve and Wen joined them not long after, Reeve moving stiffly but upright, rib fully knit even if his color still looked a shade paler than it should’ve.

"How do you feel?" Jason asked.

"Like I got hit by something the size of a small car," Reeve said. "But I’m standing. That’s the important part."

By the time they’d finished, the sacs held twenty cores between them, out of thirty wolves. The other ten had been too badly damaged in the fight to salvage.

Reeve hefted one of the sacs, testing the weight, and nodded, satisfied.

He glanced at Jason, the same measuring look from earlier settling back onto his face. "Did Skyler say anything your form to you?"

"She did."

"That’s good then, it saves me the trouble." Reeve cinched the last sack shut. "I’ve got a friend, a D-Rank Hunter at the Third Level, he retired from active raiding a while back, but he takes on private students through the Association these days. I could put in a word if you want it. You’ve clearly got the raw output, you’re just wasting half of it on bad mechanics."

Jason considered it for exactly as long as it took to remember how many times his own spear had nearly gotten him killed in the last hour.

"I’d appreciate that."

"Consider it done." Reeve slung the heaviest sack over his own shoulder without being asked, apparently unwilling to let a cracked rib slow him down for longer than it had to. "I’ll call him tonight."

"Thanks."

Reeve just nodded in response.

They gathered the corpses of the strongest wolves too, four of them, the ones with pelts and bones worth enough to justify the extra weight, and left the rest behind. There wasn’t room in the sacs, or the strength to spare, for more than that.

The walk back to the Gate’s exit felt considerably longer than the walk in. Jason attributed that to how exhausted he was from the battle.

---

The Association branch handled the sale the same day, a back room lined with appraisal tables and a bored looking clerk who perked up considerably once the sacs came open.

Reeve did the negotiating, the same flat, practiced tone he’d used on Jason back in the gravel lot, running through core quality, pelt condition, bone density, and by the time the clerk finished tallying everything, the final number came to just over forty thousand pounds.

Ten thousand each.

Jason heard the number and let out a low whistle before he could stop himself.

’Ten thousand pounds. For one job in one afternoon.’

He thought, briefly and involuntarily, of every warehouse shift and delivery route and minimum wage stretch he’d worked through in the years the clans had written him off entirely, years spent scraping together in a month what he’d just made in an afternoon of getting mauled by wolves.

He didn’t say anything about it out loud. But if anyone had looked closely enough in that moment, they might have caught the faint shimmer of a tear he blinked away before it had the chance to actually fall.

’Get it together Jason. It’s just money.’

It wasn’t just money to him. Not yet.

He exchanged numbers with all three of them before they parted at the branch entrance.

Then he walked home, spear in one hand, shirt torn and dark with blood that wasn’t entirely his own, ten thousand pounds heavier and feeling, for the first time in longer than he could easily remember, like his life might actually turn out fine.