The language barrier meant Lin had no way of getting answers directly from the Felynes. But after handing back the Plasma Pistol and the Bazelgeuse scales, the little creatures grabbed the hem of his trousers and tugged insistently, seemingly inviting him to leave the cave and come outside.
Lin let them lead him. He followed the group out of the cave — and discovered that the open ground outside was hosting a full-blown bonfire celebration.
A crowd of Felynes sat in a great circle around the fire. In front of the flames, several Felynes wearing grass skirts and clutching stone-tipped spears were throwing their limbs about in some wild, unnamed dance.
For a disorienting moment, Lin felt like he was watching a tribe of Stone Age humans.
Primitive as they were, the Felynes' organised, purposeful behaviour was unmistakably the first flicker of civilisation. They were throwing a hunt celebration — and the subject of the hunt was equally unmistakable. The small severed Bazelgeuse head propped beside the bonfire confirmed what Lin had already suspected.
Behind the dancers, a slab of dorsal meat stripped from the Bazelgeuse was suspended over the fire on a spit. Several Felynes who had stacked stones beneath themselves to reach the right height stood beside the roasting meat, tirelessly turning the cuts so their hard-won feast would cook evenly.
Lin was struck by a deeply absurd sense of unreality — the feeling of a dragon prince telling his minion to go dispose of the Tang Monk and his disciples, only for that minion to show up the next morning cheerfully carrying a monkey's head. He genuinely could not fathom what price the Felynes must have paid, even armed with a plasma pistol, to finish off a heavily wounded Bazelgeuse.
Before he could think it through any further, the elder Felyne who had brought him to the celebration let out a sharp call. At the sound of her voice, every Felyne in the gathering fell silent at once.
They turned to look at her — and naturally, they saw Lin standing at her side.
The elder Felyne unhurriedly took Lin by the trouser leg and pulled him up onto a small mound of earth that had been specially raised for the occasion. Because Lin was still far too tall relative to the Felynes, her attendants promptly volunteered as a living step-stool, hoisting the elder Felyne up until she stood level with him.
Finally at eye level with Lin, the elder Felyne seized his hand with both forepaws and thrust it high into the air. She meowed out a proclamation — and when she finished, the previously hushed celebration erupted into something far louder than before. Every Felyne raised their paws and cheered.
The Felyne in charge of the roasting carved off a generous portion of the Bazelgeuse dorsal meat and placed it on a stone plate. One of the hunter Felynes who had been dancing by the bonfire carried it forward with both paws, presenting it to Lin with great reverence. Lin hesitated for just a moment — then caught sight of the expectant eyes watching him from every direction, and reached in to take the roasted loin with his bare hand and bring it to his mouth.
The long-forgotten taste made Lin's eyes go wide. Human taste buds, it turned out, were an extraordinary thing. The smoky fragrance of wood and herbs, combined with the perfect char on the outside and the tender flesh within, had been locked inside the meat by a scattering of spices — and the full force of that flavour only burst free the moment Lin bit down.
That taste hit him somewhere deep. Lin had long since reduced himself to survival on nutrient injections and energy supplements alone — but that single mouthful suddenly called back the memory of what it had felt like, as an ordinary human, to simply enjoy food. It was one of the greatest pleasures available to a person living any kind of normal life.
One bite was all it took. Having tasted the joy that human flesh was built to experience, Lin found himself almost understanding why a certain golden-throned old man cared so deeply about the purity and identity of the human body. The Felynes, watching Lin swallow that first piece, broke into another wave of cheers.
The Felyne cooks began slicing the roasted loin into portions, plating each cut and carrying them out one by one to every Felyne gathered at the celebration. Alongside the roasted meat, the Felynes also brought out berries they had foraged and a fruit brew spiked with silvervine.
Though Lin had long since ceased to depend on eating to survive, he found himself genuinely swept up in the Felynes' revelry. By the time the feast had wound down and many Felynes had simply collapsed where they sat and begun snoring, the elder Felyne sought Lin out once more.
She was clearly still enjoying herself — her eyes were half-lidded with contentment — but she had remained sharp and alert throughout the entire banquet. When it was over, she found Lin again and led him to a separate cave nearby. It appeared to serve as the Felynes' storehouse. Lin peered inside and found a cache of Bazelgeuse materials piled within.
The elder Felyne pointed to the heaped scales and hides and indicated, clearly, that all of it belonged to Lin as his spoils.
Lin hadn't expected the cat-cart service to come with full loot rights intact. A warm, harvest-season satisfaction washed over him. But there was something that mattered more to him right now than the spoils — if not for the materials, why had the Felynes been so determined to finish off the Bazelgeuse in the first place?
He tried to communicate with the elder Felyne: "I understand why you might see me as a hero — I'm the one who wounded the Bazelgeuse. But what I'm more curious about is why you all went ahead and finished the hunt yourselves afterwards."
"That Bazelgeuse was badly hurt, but it still wasn't something you could have taken down easily. What made you willing to pay such a heavy price just to bring it down?"
Years of working alongside Mechanicus adepts — whose internal communications swung between impenetrable binary invective and extremely expressive full-body brawling — had, unexpectedly, left Lin with a reasonably good command of physical expression.
The elder Felyne understood him. Her expression shifted — something sad and distant moved across her face. She turned and led Lin to the far side of the cave, where the walls were covered in rough, hand-carved murals.
Lin studied the murals carefully. They were, he realised, a rough chronicle of the Felynes' history:
From the distant past, when they had gradually built up a structured community and begun passing down accumulated knowledge — to the emergence of stone tools — to the point where their ability to hunt smaller bird-wyverns and other prey with those tools had made them rivals to the dominant creatures of every territory, earning them nothing but expulsion.
The Felynes' development mirrored human history in many ways. The one critical difference was that ancient humans on Earth, even stripped of all tools, were still among the apex predators of their world — whereas the Felynes of the Stone Age remained, without exception, at the mercy of every terrible draconic species that prowled this planet.
And so the Felynes were trapped in a vicious cycle: they couldn't fight the dragon-kind without reaching a certain level of development, but they had no space to reach that level while the dragon-kind kept them crushed underfoot.
Years passed. Decades. Their civilisation never advanced beyond stone and fire. In that long span of time they had encountered a Rathalos, witnessed a Brachydios, been caught in the path of a Tigrex, been hunted for sport by a Bazelgeuse... whatever the threat, the Felynes could only ever run. Their numbers dwindled steadily. Almost every one of them had come to despair of any future at all.
And then Lin had appeared.
Like a god descending from heaven, he had fought the flying Bazelgeuse in open sky — and with a weapon that blazed with the fury of the sun itself, he had laid that wicked beast low. It was something no Felyne had ever dared to imagine.
And yet, compared to those vast and terrible monsters, Lin's build and appearance were far closer to a Felyne's own upright, walking form than to any of the great beasts. If Lin could use his wit and skill to wound a Bazelgeuse that badly — then surely, surely, the Felynes could find a way to do the same.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉