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Hiromi     The pair of teenaged hunters had said something about having just reached the den of the goat. Leading the way back there, keeping a careful distance from the trees lining the river, it proves to not have been very far away, after all. It's not really a den, as such, but an area where thick tangles of plants provide cover from one direction, and a small hill, largely comprised of overgrown boulders, provide cover from another. The area between has had its undergrowth cropped short, very possibly thanks to the creature standing at one edge of the almost-a-clearing, its side against the rocky hill.

    Taro and Suke stop when they're only just barely, possibly in sight of it, keeping low to the ground. Suke motions to Hibiki and Hook to do the same, or else stay back, though this angle of approach does provide a good chance to peer through the jungle and, mostly stealthily catch sight of the target.

    As stated, it's a goat. It's somewhat closer to the size of a moose, and it has four impressively curving horns that come to fine points. It's looking away, eating at something leafy.

    "You see it? That's the thing that's been eating our herds."

    "It ate Tosa, too."

    "Yeah. Don't listen to anything it says. We just need to cut off its horns."

    "And its head, to be safe."

    "Right. Ready? Let's do this."

    The both of them are drawing their bows, and moving apart, obviously readying to fire from one direction, then surprise it from another. The shake in Taro's voice is mostly controlled.

    The trample-crushed bones in the clearing are more difficult to make out, without getting closer.
Hibiki Tachibana     They certainly did mention the 'mission' they were out here on. Their mission, but they can come - and far from Hibiki to let them go at it alone. After their locust encounter, something tells her it's not an ordinary goat at all...and maybe it's what she actually came here for in the first place. Now that she's being much more careful and following the more knowledgable pair's lead, there's no more incidents along the way.

    And dropping low when the gesture is given, she can see barely see if through the plantlife and mostly-cleared-out growth. No, that's sure not normal. "It can talk? ...And it /ate/ someone...?" She murmurs in response to Taro and Suke right before they both split off, before grimacing back to Captain Hook briefly.

    Staying close to the ground, and not wanting to do anything to upset the pair's plan before they're ready to spring it, Hibiki makes to only get slightly closer, short of entering the chopped up vegetation.

    She thought she caught a glimpse of bone...and she wants to be sure of what she saw. These two are obviously used to taking care of themselves, but...at least like this, she'll be ready to spring out herself almost instantly.
Captain Hook      Ah.

     Hook doesn't have too much trouble in the jungle. Actually, now that he's not having to follow Hibiki through an awkward path guided by a mysterious compass, Hook's a lot better-able to navigate, avoiding the various mundane hazards of the place with a great deal of...well, self-evident expertise. He ducks under trees, uses his hook to push aside undergrowth, and otherwise moves like he knows what he's doing.

     When the two of their comrades get low, Hook opts instead to step back against a tree. He'd rather not be too close to the giant man-eating goat. He offers nothing to the conversation as he reloads his flintlock and clicks the hammer back into place. He offers no thought on the nature of the man-eating goat, either; it's a goat, it eats people. OK. That's fine. He offers Hibiki a warm and reassuring smile and mouths 'it is what it is' at her as he readies himself.

     The two picked the fight, so Hook will simply bide his time and wait for the right moment to pounce.
Hiromi     Taro is the first to fire, a little while after both hunters are nearly impossible to see through the underbrush. The arrow strikes true, embedding just inside the foreleg's shoulder. The goat's head rises, revealing murky amber eyes with long, barbell-shaped pupils. It bleats, rising up on its hindlegs as a second arrow finds it from the opposite side. The penetration is shallow, not even reaching the full length of the arrowhead. Its mouth stays open, and those are, noticeably, not teeth of a carnivore. They're small and flat, as a goat's would be expected to be.

    "Come here, come here, and learn the wisdom of the forests," it says, in a voice like an old man's, matching its long beard. "No need for that. You're forgiven. Come and sit, and I'll tell you its secrets."

    "Taro? Stop!" Suke's voice comes from one side, as Taro steps out from the other, walking right into the clearing, his expression hesitant and confused, as if uncertain why he's there.

    There's something terribly compelling about its words. They're without malice, or even vengeance. Mystical, intriguing, and trustworthy.
Captain Hook      Ah.

     It's trying to control him.

     William Hook will never allow himself to be controlled again.

     It's pure spite that forces it out of his mind. Pure spite that shoves aside its words, pure spite that leads William to leave his tree cover and start his movement.

     And it is...ominous. The man moves like the shadow under a boat. His slow walk builds anticipation of his next action. His slow motions are calculated precisely, step after step, perhaps on purpose, perhaps by rote, to drive an enemy to wonder what he's going to do next. The flintlock spins in his hook hand. The cutlass does not move in his right, held firm and pointed downward. Slowly, slowly. Step by step. Is the shadow a mere trick of the light? A cloud in front of the sun? A great and gentle whale? Or some horror from the deepest ocean?

     Hook does not run.

     When Taro starts moving, Hook simply raises his flintlock and shoots directly for the goat's eye with a loud and echoing bang. The expression on his face is one that's unpleasant to look on to say the least.
Hibiki Tachibana     It is what it is. Fair enough. She's seen worse than man-eating goats. Have Taro and Suke, though? After a tentative moment, the arrows fly--and it becomes clear within the span of a moment that this is far from something that can be hunted with ordinary tactics. She immediately starts springing up to her feet.

    ...Only to pause halfway, on her knees, words striking at her mind. Her tense fight loosens up slightly, and her motions slow down. She recognizes that they're just honeyed words, but...


    Suke's scream hits her, and her eyes snap back to full alertness as she glances up. "Taro--!" Remember her purpose. Her body remembers it faster than her mind, and she completes the motion of leaping up, straight into a forward sprint alongside and then past Hook's slow and methodical ones. It's a fast, hasty sprint that'll carry her right between the goat and the bewitched boy.

    Where she'll interpose her body between it and him, putting back her hand to push lightly back against his chest. "Snap out of it! Remember what you're here for!" No sooner does she do that than she kicks off forward, to plant an upwards palm strike into the beast's jaw. Maybe that'll shut it up.
Hiromi     One eyes is focused on Hook. At least, it might be. Those horizontal slits, the mark of what should be a fairly harmless herbivore, take him in. Walking forward, he can see the bones now. It's harder not to find them, there beneath his feet.

    He fires, and the goat screams with the voice of a man, turned again to bleating as Hibiki's fist strikes it. Its right eye is shattered, only a bloody pit. Its raised up on its hind legs again, this time involuntarily, from the force of Hibiki's blow. Taro stumbles backward as Hibiki interposes herself. He drops his bow, grabbing his sword from where its tied at his sash. He draws it, but steps back, not forward, still shaken.

    Suke steps in from the opposite side of the clearing, firing a second shot, then a third, barely taking the time to aim. Both shots still hit, but one grazes the top and bounces off and away where it should have hit spine, and the other buries itself only about an inch into the goat's flank.

    Its head raised, the goat brings its horns down. They flow, lengthen, and split apart, extending into whips of bone that can reach the whole radius of the clearing. There were four, originally, but that number is made nearly irrelevant by the flailing mass that now appears.
Hibiki Tachibana     When one looks at sturdy horns like that, you don't expect them to be able to move like this. Or split. Or grow. When they mentioned just needing to cut off the horns, Hibiki now understands entirely what they meant by it, and they just might have pissed it off now that it's lost an eye. "Be careful, Suke!" It only takes a quick glance to understand Taro is still hesitating, getting himself back together.

    Hibiki remains just ahead of time as the storm of bone rips through the surroundings, dodging and spinning around what she can and using the armor protecting her limbs to block what she can't. Even her maimed arm still has her forearm gauntlet attached to it, enough to work as a defense when nothing else will. Before anything else, she's not going to let any of it reach Taro.

    "You came this far, don't get cold feet now...!" With a sharp breath in, Hibiki waits for one of the lashing bone-horns to come back in - and she throws her hand out not to block it, but to grasp onto it. She'll stop it in its tracks.

    And gripping down on it with enough force to threaten to crack it if it's not made out of some supernaturally sturdy stuff, she lets out a shout and forcefully wrenches back and down, the force of the motion carrying through back towards its head to drive the beast down into the ground face-first.
Captain Hook      Well, Hook can't deny that that's bloody unsettling, a goat screaming like a man. The shriek gets in his ear and makes him wince. A goat that screams like a man is certainly more...horror...than any of the things he'd ever faced, other than the existential dread that was his life. Briefly he wished he'd taken Hiromi up on her offer of immortality again.

     The bone whips flail, and Hook's forced into a situation that can only be called desperate. He can't support anyone right now - he's just a normal human, and he can't afford to take many hits from this. Blade meets horn. Shot pushes aside blow. As he's reloading he uses his hook to push aside the third, looking for a chance to hit - and the fourth catches him in the side and slashes across his chest, cutting into his fancy shirt and bloodying him. The Captain stumbles, grabbing for it with his cutlass hand.

     "Blast," he mutters.

     But Hibiki goes charging in, and now he's forced to move once more. He rolls sideways through the water, flintlock reloaded as he goes, and brings up a shot. Another spin of the hook-hand to catch the black powder and ball, and another shot to open the way.
Hiromi     That hesitancy is what saves Taro, being just far enough behind Hibiki that he isn't targeted by the horns. Rising up in the air like that, they wouldn't necessarily have to go through her to reach him, but with only her clearly in sight, Hibiki's the one who has to deal with the attack. Each one is a potentially fatal wound, the kind of quick and deadly means of attack that could pierce a dozen men through the heart, the moment they were close enough.

    On the opposite side, Suke falls falt to the ground once the horns split, which keeps her safe for a few seconds. It's long enough for her to turn over on her side and fire another arrow, but she can't keep pulling from her hip quiver with it under her, and though the first strike passes wide and above her, this is followed up by angled strikes that hit the ground hard, tearing up gouges of earth. Only its partial blindness saves her from being immediately killed. She drops her bow, rolls to her feet, takes a whipping strike onto her tonfas, pushing her back to the ground with a cry of pain.

    "Endlessly the world flows from the sea to the mountain to the sky." It's almost a whisper, but still perfectly audible, and still strangely compelling. It has the air of something incredibly important, though no clear reason why it should be.

    "Shut up!" Taro steps in after Hibiki drags the goat to the ground. He leaps, sword arm driving forward midair. Hook's shot hits a bloody hole in the goat's neck, though it stays standing. Taro's sword strikes horn, and rebounds away.

    "Truth and lies flow with the water, and only what the light touches reveals what is and is not --" The words cut off into a very human cry of pain and abuse suffered, as Taro's sword swings around again, this time off part of the goat's nose. Its head shakes, descends back into bleating, and the horns all converge, their splits retracting. It raises, strongly enough to take Hibiki with it if she keeps her grip on what is now its head, and merely brushes Taro strongly enough to send him flying into the thicket.

    That's good for him, because it means he doesn't get the full-force headbutt, its entire body and weight behind the charging motion, that Hibiki does, all concentrated onto the razor edges of those horns. And then, at least, turns its good eye toward Hook, charging him with its horns again extending to reach from ten yards away, though it turns at the last moment, rather than retract them again for a headbutt, to swing around and deliver a double-kick to the vicinity of his stomach.

    Avoiding that may be aided, or perhaps complicated, by Suke attempting to tackle Hook out of its way.
Captain Hook      Suke gets a most interesting experience.

     Hook's hook, still holding the flintlock, grabs Suke by the collar. It brings her down underneath Hook as she tries to shove him out of the way. She then gets the unique experience of having Hook hop off her, ensuring that the two of them are only clipped by the double-kick. He slides backwards off the horns, another line of bleeding from his side, and Suke gets completely saved from the blow.

     And he plummets directly for the goat's head, damn the consequences.
Hibiki Tachibana     Taro goes in, and Hibiki keeps her grip to make sure the thing doesn't get the chance to respond in kind while he does--but he's sent flying, and that grip is soon turned on its head when its horns retract and she's forced to let go if she doesn't want to meet a far more unfortunate fate than just being battered out of the way. "Taro...!"

    He is, fortunately, not the one to worry about. That's her. She's charged at, and the short distance between her and the beast is closed immediately with the fierce headbutt. Both her arms cross up, the heavy metal of her armor used to directly defend against the blow, even as it's gashed open and blunted inward slightly as the forces carries through to send her tumbling backwards.

    Head-over-heels, several times over, until she comes to a skidding stop, feet digging deep into the dirt of the clearing, and she flings herself back in the direction she came as the goat turns its sights on Hook and Suke. "No you don't...!"

    Her momentum is put into a flying, descending elbow strike to the head, just as it turns around to kick at the others, to come down right between the horns and drive it down into the dirt.
Hiromi     Somehow (through the efforts of both Captain Hook and Hibiki), neither Suke nor Taro are all that badly hurt. She's getting back up off the ground at around the same moment the goat is driven down by Hook's plunging attack. He has time to vacate the spot before Hibiki catches up with an obliterating elbow drop, and Taro returns to the sight of the goat's skull being caved in. It is terribly messy, and smells foul. She should probably wash that off.

    The horns are all still in their split and extended state, having swung about durings its kick, but they're now fallen to the ground. As if not quite believing what happened, Taro rushes in with his sword ready to hack them off, but stops as he gets close.

    "It's done. We did it?"

    "Yeah. It's dead. But... I don't think we could have hunted it alone. We might not even have escaped. Um." Suke lowers her head. "Sorry, for having you do our work."

    "Ugh, is that really how it is? After we came all this way, we can't even say we won? Wasn't it our hunt? Our victory?" Putting his sword away and sitting down, Taro's visibly reluctant to accept this interpretation, but is having trouble coming up with a convincing counterargument for Suke.
Captain Hook      Hook wavers a bit as he rolls ovff the thing and lands before Hibiki can kill it. When he stands, he's a bit shaky, and it takes him two tries to stow his cutlass, presumably out of sheer exhaustion, and another to holster his flintlock. A deep breath. "Goodness."

     It's dead.

     The boy hesitates to hack the horns off.

     Hook waits for a moment as the boy sits down. Then, he slowly squats down and, with his hook, hacks them off in one good chop.

     "Well, if you don't want them, then I'll take them," he says, rising with the horns under his elbow. "Feel free to feel miserable. I'm not a man who'll pass up a treasure out of some obligation to strangers. Hardly be a good pirate if I was, would I?"
Hibiki Tachibana     That's gross. Extremely gross. As Hibiki hits the ground nearby after her and Hook's attacks, she takes a moment to wipe any viscera off into the underbrush before slowly getting back to her feet. "Hugh..." It's only after the fact that the pain from all those lashes she took comes washing back in all at once, and she winces on the way up.

    But at the sight of not only Captain Hook, but both Taro and Suke still alive and mostly well. There's a sigh, and she runs a hand back through her hair.

    "Don't worry about it. I know how it feels. But having help...it isn't such a bad thing." She speaks towards Suke first, with a small smile, though she has a slightly more conflicted one towards Taro.

    And she goes to slowly sit down beside him. "...Well...no, you didn't get to kill it yourself. But you're the ones who tracked it, and the reason it could be hunted in the first place." She looks back at it, dead on the ground. "And because of that, it's not going to be eating your herd or hurting anyone else ever again. Maybe it's not the victory you thought you'd have, but..."
Hiromi     "No, that's fair," Suke says to Hook, stepping aside as he takes the trophy, though she sounds uncomfortable about it. Taro just looks sour. Hook finds that the horns, even broken and stretched thin in their last attempt to pierece him, take some real work to break off. This thing was, indeed, a monster. It's not clear, now that it's dead, how the horns could have possibly moved like they did.

    Suke looks less discomfited after Hibiki speaks to her, and goes to help with breaking off the horns. Rather than using the metal caps on her tonfas, she grabs a big enough rock to serve as a hammer. "It's too bad we can't get any meat. They're almost always all poison."

    "Yeah," Taro says to Hibiki, "yeah, that's right. It almost got me. That must be what happened to Tosa. But thanks to you, it didn't. Now our land's safe, again. That's the important thing." He takes a deep breath, needing that moment to convince himself that's right. "Why were you out here, anyway? Are you from the west side of the mountains, too?"

    "If you need a place to stay, we can lead you back to camp." Though the warpgate must be closer than wherever these two began hiking from.
Captain Hook      Hook drops a treasure chest out of thin air. He kicks it lightly. It pops open. He undoes his bloodied and torn shirt, drops it in the chest, and tosses in the horns, then closes it, slides it back into his coat, and pulls his coat around his chest, buttoning it properly. There are, after all, ladies present. Wouldn't do for a gentleman to show his bare chest so casually.

     He doesn't answer anything else. He just looks sideways at Hibiki. This is her show. She can accept if she likes.
Hibiki Tachibana     "That's a long story...but you could say we came out here as a favor to someone." With Taro lightening up some, Hibiki manages to grin a bit, and starts getting back to her feet. She considers the offer, briefly, meeting Hook's glance. After he's buttoned back up, of course. A gentleman, indeed.

    And she smiles back towards Suke, and then Taro. It would be faster to just go right back, but... "...We shouldn't stay for long, but I think I wouldn't mind resting there a bit before we go home. Lead the way."