Ragi breathed out in relief as Aya seemed to have bought her act. Wiping the proverbial sweat off her brows, she straightened her posture and followed Aya like an attentive attendant. That's one crisis averted. Next up would be.. Hmm, what would it be again? Oh yes, establish the pecking order. After all, the small group of two had somehow turned into a group of four. And I don't know about you, but ranking second in a group of two and ranking second in a group of four, is a hell of a difficulty jump for Ragi.
So while Aya was preoccupied with looking at the ground with overly serious attention, Ragi huddled with Twig and Bug, and started her small scheme to make them obey Aya - and in extension, herself. "Alright listen you guys. She, Aya, is our ticket to greatness. She's got the brains, man. Big brains. Doesn't matter if you are strong or courageous, or whatever. In the end the smart wins. They always do."
Ragi seriously thought she made a great speech, but reality is often.. Disappointing. Rather than realizing how important Aya and herself to their future success, both Bug and Twig were staring at her with a confused look. Wait, let me correct that. They were staring blankly, like Ragi was speaking some alien language or some sort.
"What I meant was, we follow her, we get to eat. Food, good?"
Now she's getting a reaction from the boys.
"So make sure you follow what she said, OK?" she continued as she patted Bug and Twig on their shoulder. Ragi don't know why, but patting people on their shoulder is her favourite gesture now.
Then suddenly Aya stopped her trek and stared intently at a patch of soft soil. Apparently the only intellectually-competent goblin of the lot had found something. Without wasting more time than necessary, she barked out some orders. First was Twig, who was told to fetch menial stuffs like rocks and.. Twigs? Aya quickly stopped herself from laughing as she realized the pun that Aya was making. Truly, she was a goddamn genius.
And then came Ragi's turn to get an assignment. And to her surprise, rather than calling her by name, Aya called her 'sister'.
Now if this were a romantic comedy manga, you would see a cupid's bow piercing Ragi's chest. She called Bug and Twig with their name, like, you know, how you address strangers, acquintances, and/or underlings. But to her? She called her sister! A nickname that denotes that Aya not olny saw her as a peer, but a close one at that.
Ragi could not control herself. Placing not one, but both of her hands on Aya's shoulders, Ragi trembled slightly before answering with a weirdly energetic and high-pitched voice. "Yes, of course! I will not fail you, sister!"
And with that said and done, she darted off into the forest.
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Now that she was alone in the forest, Ragi had more time to think about stuffs. Come to think about it, wasn't her job the most dangerous of them all? Was this Aya's plan all along? Butter her up by calling her sister, so that she would do the riskiest job of them all? Or was she the only one her sister could trust to do the job right? Or maybe, this is a test to see if she was worthy of being Aya's sister?
Whatever the case, this would mean that Ragi is in no position to fail. And to do that, she would need some tools. Rocks were the first thing that came to her mind. She had experience throwing them, and judging from the fact that they were hard and heavy, they should be quite effective as a weapon too. But the problem is, they were not that accurate. Even against the unmoving wall, Ragi only managed to hit the exact spot she aimed for three times out of ten. And that's because she didn't count the first fifteen or so attempts that she failed horribly.
Rocks simply won't do. She need to somehow course-correct the stupid uncooperative thingy mid-air to make them into effective weapon. Maybe, these vines would help? Thinking that they were long and flexible, Ragi thought she could tie them to the rock and control the stupid thing's trajectory by pulling the vine to one direction or the other. Thus, she began to work on her idea and.. Got stuck a few tens of minutes trying to figure out how to stop the rock from getting loose from the vines.
Failed attempts after failed attempts later, Ragi managed to tie a knot and secure the rock to the vines. Having made sure that the rock would not slip out this time, Ragi then began to test her makeshift
kurisagama (sans the scythe, of course) and tried to hit a tree trunk over and over again. Once she was happy with her accuracy, she began to look for animals to hunt. She would've trained some more, given the time, but she thought it would not be good to waste too much time not hunting. Since, you know, her role was to look for animals to lead into the trap Aya had prepared.
With her new weapon wrapped around her left shoulder, Ragi walked around as stealthily as she could from one tree trunk to the other. If she were to find a potential prey, she would want to get the element of surprise on her side.
TheMushroomLord
