Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 9: Two Wet Possums

Ezra had said he wouldn’t risk his ass for her. He meant it too when the words came out.

She’d said the same thing back.

’Likewise,’ she’d said, and that was it.

But Ezra had always been a bad liar, that much the bird girl clocked already.

The words came out of his mouth before his limbs could act.

"DROP DEAD!"

She hit the stone flat on her belly and the jaw came down where her head had been a second ago. Ezra expected the crunch to bounce through the air, off the rocks even.

Something that size closing its mouth that fast should have cracked the air. Things produce noise and that’s what Ezra believed since he was a butt-naked drooling kid.

Instead the teeth came together in silence, the way a door shuts in a dream. The only sound, if at all, was the click of bone meeting bone so clean it barely registered.

Ezra’s brain tried to make sense of what he was looking at—a skull wider than the Gynoscylla’s entire body, jaw hinged open at an angle that put physics to shame. The teeth were flat and layered in rows, built for crushing, not cutting. Behind them, the throat of a hole that dropped into purple fumes.

’Human teeth.’

It pulled the jaw back up and the bird girl was pressed against stone. It hadn’t noticed her, that or it didn’t give a damn.

Ezra concluded on the latter. It hadn’t been aiming at her at all. She’d been between its mouth and the Gynoscylla corpse the same way plastic sat between trash and a maggot’s feast.

The bird girl hadn’t moved an inch, frozen maybe. Or playing dead like there’d be a prize at the end. Ezra crouched low, unsure if noise attracted the giant thing or not.

It was reeling in for another bite, a deeper one. It would fit the both of them, girl and Gynoscylla.

’Don’t think Ez, just reach her in time. Go, go, don’t stop to look at it. It doesn’t even notice you.

Just get there in time.’

The skull lowered again, slower this time, and the jaw opened over the dead Gynoscylla and the bird girl still face down beside it. The flat teeth closed around the pink body in one motion and the crunch that followed was the first real sound it made.

The second sound was the scraping of armor.

Ezra pulled her leg with all his back into it. She collapsed into his chest, her green eyes wide and glassy. The beak helmet was open now, strands of hair the color of ivory over her forehead.

Ezra’s gaze was still on the behemoth.

The corpse that was the Gynoscylla disappeared—all of it. The whole corpse in a single bite. Along with it, the bones that she had carved out from the pink flesh’s belly.

Wing-arms unfolded from the body above and the membranes spread wide enough to block what was left of the night sky.

Out of instinct, or habit, Ezra pointed with his disfigured left arm, muttered, "Appraisal."

[ ??? — ★★★★★★★★★ ]

> Profile: Invasive wyvern species, tread with absolute caution.

The golden text was flickering in and out of his vision. That had never happened before.

The wings paused, slowly retracting back into its limbs. The head lowered back toward the outcrop, jaws opening again, rows of teeth catching no light.

’We’re the fucking dessert now.’

The purple fumes weren’t fumes. They were gas, thick and heavy, crawling out from between the flat teeth and curling from nostrils set high on a skull shaped like something between a crossbreed of alligator and deer.

The gas pooled in the air and didn’t rise. It sank, rolling down toward the outcrop in slow ribbons that caught the moonlight and turned it violet.

Ezra was on his feet now, holding the girl by the collar of her chestplate. Her limbs dangled uselessly above the ground, her body still frozen.

"Your breath fucking stinks," Ezra said, his chin tilting up more and more as the thing came closer into view.

It didn’t react at all, as if the frozen girl and naked boy were rocks against the summit. Its violet eyes were fixed on the outcrop the way someone stares at an ant’s hill before they stomp it to the ground.

Ezra swung the bird girl behind him and paused in the same breath. He didn’t know why he did it. The arm wouldn’t do shit. Neither would his body, no matter how tall he’d grown or how strong.

Everything about the gesture was stupid and symbolic in a way that made him want to throw up. But he did it.

He was the plastic between the maggot and its meal now.

’Fuck.’

A sound like a lighter hitting the trigger rumbled out its mouth.

Then a spark blinked deep in the throat, followed by a flash of orange behind the purple smoke. And then a line of light so bright it burned the silhouette of its towering body into his vision before it even fired.

A beam birthed into existence, pulling in the air around the jaws and refusing to let go. It swept across the outcrop and down toward the valley.

The bird girl shook out of his grip and grabbed his waist, yanking both of them down past its trajectory.

She was too late.

The beam passed over them and through her, the metal parting way for it more than it did the opposite. The light burst through her left shoulder and kept going, lancing past the outcrop’s edge and into the valley below.

The explosion hit a second later.

Red and orange blooming against the dark vegetation far below, a fireball that lit the cliff face and the river and held it for five more seconds just to ensure whatever it hit was dead for good.

She made a whimper and tumbled to her back and back on her legs. Actually, she fell onto one knee, her left arm now in the same condition as Ezra’s arm. Her shoulder was a hole ringed in perfectly cauterized flesh. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about bleeding out.

Even then, she brought her good palm out, and the blue bow manifested to life.

"You can’t draw it, your arm’s useless now," Ezra said, finding his own footing. "And why the hell did you do that?"

"Quiet," she muttered.

She bit the ethereal string with her bloodied teeth, pulled it back taut, neck veins straining. Mumbled something Ezra couldn’t hear.

The spark in the behemoth’s throat triggered again. It was sweeping the summit clean, and they just so happened to still be on it.

Ezra looked at her.

Looked at the cliff edge three feet to his right.

At the river far below.

The trees there were tall, skyscraper-tall. And the leaves and branches would probably dampen their fall before they hit the water. That was excluding the shallowness or the random branches that would impale them both like forks against Jell-O.

Then again, most of Ezra’s working theories so far had turned out to be true. It was better than being ash against stone.

That was the theory building in his head, the only one he could work with.

He pulled the girl back and the arrow went into the air, followed by the beam that cut through where they’d been standing. Their feet went off the cliff and they fell together.

It was longer than expected, the free-fall. He had all the time in the world to think. But how could he?

How could he, when the girl’s face was pressed into his bare chest, their good arms holding like separation would pry the breath from their lungs?

Above them the summit flashed orange. Then again. And again.

Beam after beam sweeping the rock clean, each one lighting the cliff face for a second before dying. None of them ever made a sound.

The beams traced across the valley and left chains of explosions in their wake, orange flaring after orange until the whole mountain remained lit like the sun was out at this terrible time of night.

But none of that mattered.

All he did was let the fall take them both.

[ Ping! ]

[ Quest completed: Save the poor woman ]