A man dragged his feet on the dirt path to his home.
He wore tattered old clothes, with a crudely made bow in hand and several hand made arrows in the other.
The man, Philip, wasn't limping, but simply had no motivation to reach his home. To see his loving wife and family.
(Are they going to have to go to sleep hungry again?)
That thought was all that occupied his mind.
But as he approached his home, the scent of food reached his nostrils. The smell of meat made him think that maybe a neighbour had some luck today and they were celebrating. He felt happy for them, but it wouldn't do anything for his family unless if they got a large kill. If it was only a rush rabbit, then there probably wasn't enough to share.
Philip's feet grew even more heavy. If the scent reached his home, his family would be the ones trying to hold back their hunger as they imagined what the neighbours were eating.
But no matter how much he walked, how many neighbours' homes he passed, how much closer he got to his home, the smells didn't weaken. Instead they grew stronger.
It wasn't possible.
No, maybe it was, but it was hard to get his hopes up after years of famine had struck the poor village and most of the wild game in the nearby forest had been hunted out.
People had been going in deeper and deeper into the forest in search of food and animals to hunt, but stories of people going missing or people just barely escaping strong monsters had been increasing. The local adventurer's guild had been doing all it could to bring in as much meat as it could and sell it to the village cheaply, as had Mint and his general store been buying everything it could from the villagers to sell at the nearby Linsington City, then bring back food that they gathered from more successful farming villages.
But no matter what they did, it wasn't enough.
The crops had been failing at an alarming rate year after year. Wheat simply didn't grow well in the area for some reason. Despite that, other plants grew in the soil as if the low fertility was a lie.
In particular, milkweed was easy to cultivate, and they were able to sell the threads and woven cloth made from milkweed, but they didn't sell for much in the city. It was just barely enough pay for the food to supplement their meagre wheat harvests and forest hunting. But as the wheat crops failed more and more, they were forced to rely on hunting that much more to avoid starving. That in turn meant that there was less and less animals to hunt the next year, and the year after.
For the last few years, it was rare to find anything to hunt without going deep into the forest, but not many returned.
Philip thought back to the winter more than a year before. After counting everything up, it was clear that they didn't have enough food to last the winter. If he tried to feed his whole family, then they might have had to go an entire month before the snow thawed and they could scrounge for any seeds and edible plants they could find in the forest.
Nobody in his family would survive a month without food, so together with his wife, Hilde, he made the hard choice to sacrifice one of their children in the hopes that the rest would survive.
In truth, he wanted to sacrifice himself for the sake of all his children, but doing so would doom them in the long run. With only one strong adult left, there wouldn't be anyone who could take the risks in the hopes of bringing in a kill from the forest, or to gather seeds and mushrooms where the weaker monsters might appear.
Then again, he thought, he hadn't managed to do either this day. Even scrounging the forest floor for any of it's bounty was getting harder and harder.
It wasn't just him either. It was getting rarer and rarer for anyone in the village to get much of anything from the forest.
So because of that, he and his wife decided that for the sake of everyone, they needed one less mouth to feed. Philip's first child was born with clouded eyes. The village chief had said that she would never know light her entire life. The day he discovered that, Philip and Hilde wept the entire day, mourning for the gift their daughter would never have.
Due to her cloudy eyes, she was unable to do anything on her own, and her body ended up weak as a result. Even when she was old enough to work, she needed extra time and teaching to learn anything, as she couldn't see to learn by example. Even when she did learn to do work, she couldn't do it for long, as her body was weak.
Even worse, she couldn't do any of the hard work needed to raise her level. Without eyes, she couldn't kill small animals and pests, nor could she safely do any real labour. She couldn't even play with the other kids to slowly gain XP.
His daughter was the only one he had heard of that was still at level one after six winters. Most children reached their second level by the time they were three, and by four, it was extremely rare for any children to have not have reached level two. Any normal child should have already achieved level three by the time they saw their sixth winter.
All her younger siblings did just that, and she was his only child who was still at level one, with his youngest reaching level two at the beginning of that year.
As for who to sacrifice, the choice was obvious. Both he and Hilde knew which one without asking. Most families would chose their youngest as they were the ones most vulnerable to illness. But for them, their youngest could already do more work than the oldest.
Together with his wife, Philip told their children that they were going to gather food deeper in the forest than usual, and everyone had to help so that they could bring back as much as possible.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, Philip saw his eldest's eyes glitter with excitement. The thought that she could be truly be useful for the first time in her life made her happy, and thought of the fate that he was about to condemn her made his determination waver. If Hilde hadn't put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head right then, his will might have broken right then and there.
Philip carried his daughter on his back so they could hurry and spend as much time as possible gathering everything they could.
As the trees grew bigger and bigger, the knot in the pit of his stomach grew colder and denser, but the thought of his family starving to death even with whatever they managed to bring back spurred him on.
As if for extra encouragement, he spotted the broken skull of a child lying beside one tree.
The sight reminded him that some of the people who went missing in recent years had been children. The fate of the adults who disappeared was easy for Philip to understand, but how little children, usually less than four years old, went missing had always confused him. To have thought that he wasn't the only one burdened with the sin he was in the middle of committing.
With the proof that his family wasn't the only one that had been suffering so badly, that very thought hardened his resolve.
And so, he left his elder of two daughters deep in the forest, telling her that he's be back with a basket full of the forest's bounty for her to carry home.
He wondered though, that the sad expression she made as he turned his back on his own child, if it was one made knowing what exactly he was doing. If she had known from the start what her fate was, and willing came along with that knowledge?
Philip shook his head. Such questions didn't matter. He would never see his first daughter's smile ever again.
With such memories shoved firmly in the back of his mind, the man focused on returning to his home. Tormented by the smells of dinner as his empty belly rumbled, another day gone with the food meant for him being given to one of his children instead. For Philip, it was his punishment for abandoning one of his children. It was his duty to make sure the ones that lived would continue to survive, even if he had to go most days with nothing entering his mouth but cold water and rough tree bark as he distracted his belly to the best of his ability.
But to his bewilderment, the scent of food grew stronger as he approached his home. Not just any food, but the rich scent of cooked meat.
Finally, after being starved for so long, he was convinced that he had started to hallucinate. His failure as a father meant that god had decided to finally punish him with this hallucination more real than the harsh reality he had been living up until now.
With a heavy heart, he opened the door to his home.
"Papa! It's Papa!"
"Papa! Welcome home!"
"Look Papa! It's food!"
"Welcome home dear"
Before he could take a second step into his home, Philip was assaulted by his three living children as they excitedly pulled him inside to show him the dining room table.
There, against all common sense, were plates filled with fruit. Off to the side in the kitchen was a pot on the fire brimming to capacity with with meat and vegetables.
"Wha, this...am I hallucinating?"
"I thought so too at first, but it's all real dear"
Philip's shocked question was answered by Hilde.
"How..."
"I'm not entirely sure, but do you remember this?"
Hilde pulled out some rags from a bag. It looked like a worn sack with some holes cut into it. But Philip recognized what it really was.
"That dress? Huh? Doesn't it look just like..."
He hesitated to say so, but his heart already decided that it was a fact.
"This, it looks exactly like the dress that Alicia wore, the only one she had"
But Hilde finished his thought, confirming she thought so as well.
"Then..."
A strange hope started to well up inside Philip, but he wasn't so optimistic as to let it run rampant.
"I also found this"
But as if trying to crush his common sense, Hilde showed a stone tablet with etchings on one side.
"Thank you for taking care of her until we could meet...then that means"
"She didn't die that day. Not only that, someone found her and took her in!"
"Where is she then? Did you see her"
Philip's voice rose in excitement, but Hilde's lack of an immediate response drowned his elatement quickly.
"I don't know. These, along with a large amount of food was left in front of the house. I didn't even see who left it"
"Then...but then..."
An alternate possibility started to surface, but no matter how much Philip tried to swallow it down, it refused to sink.
"Maybe she didn't want to see us. No, that's probably the case. Why would she want to look on the faces of the parents who abandoned her?"
"Maybe, but then, why would she leave such gifts?"
If that was true, then the very sight of these gifts went in contrary to how their daughter probably felt about her parents.
"I don't know, but maybe she wasn't the one who decided that"
"What do you mean?"
"As I came back from sharing the food with the neighbours, Russel came by to offer some food. Apparently someone came to the guild and sold enough meat to feed the entire village, so he came to trade some of it so we could eat. He was pretty surprised when he found out that someone had left so much food at our doorsteps."
"Someone did something like that as well?"
Philip was amazed. With how difficult it was to hunt lately, whoever it was must've been strong enough to hunt in the deeper parts of the forest. There was no reason for such a person to sell food at a place like this that couldn't afford to give good prices.
"Not only that, but apparently she spent most of the money she earned from selling the meat to buy things at Mint's. Everything she bought was something made in the village on top of that"
"That...how could such a good person even exist?"
"I don't know, but Russel said her name was Scarlet"
"Like in the stories?"
"She said that she was named after her"
"She sounds more like the person herself if you ask me"
"I think so too. Maybe unlike the stories, she survived that damn hero?"
"Or maybe god gave her a second chance after her life was cut short?"
"If anyone deserved such a thing, it would probably be her, wouldn't it?"
"I think so too. We're really in a blessed age if Scarlet had returned"
"Papa! Mama! We're hungry!"
"That's right! I wanna eat!"
"Food! Food!"
"Alright everyone, settle down. We'll start eating immediately"
"""Yay!"""
"Ahh, she's gone"
Whack!
"Hey what the hell?!"
The young cat tribe beastkin man, Aaron, pulled his triangular ears back as he held the bump forming on his head.
"It's your fault she ran away!"
"Haaa? How's it my fault?!"
"How about how you keep on hitting on anything with tits?"
"Ahh, she really had big tits though"
"Aargh! That's why she ran away!"
The young human woman, Mary, held her head in both hands in frustration.
"Hey, maybe she really had some business she needed to attend to?"
"In the middle of the night?!"
"That's right! If anything, we should've offered her a place to rest!"
"You just wanted to sleep with her!"
"What's wrong with that?"
"Everything!"
"Hey stop it you two!"
Mary and Aaron glared at each other once again, ignoring Jason, who was technically the leader of this adventurer party.
"Now now, she might've had her own circumstances. The sun had sunk quite a while ago, yet she appeared out of nowhere. She might really have had urgent business to attend to"
"See? Even Mint thinks I'm right"
"Grrrr..."
"But that doesn't excuse the fact that we were rude to our saviour, nor the fact that we hadn't been able to thank her properly"
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