“How far is it to Frahmtehn?” I asked the man politely for the third time. His breaths came short and ragged, blood dripping from his mouth and eye socket. I had forgotten to test eye regrowth on the rats, so I opted to test it on a human subject. As I had learned it only took around a minute for an eye to be regrown, though that time was increased to two minutes if the eye socket was kept open during the process.

“Doymztoyljh zaareyzh npoyt!” he yelled back at me defiantly, stretching at his bindings. I had tied him up using knots that were designed to hold warbreed who had collapsible thumbs, so even lacking a hand he was unable to wriggle out of them. Both hands now, I thought, I should have kept one so I could remove the nails.

“Pick a foot,” I demanded.

“Eat shit,” the man snapped.

“Both then,” I shrugged. I took out my knife and walked behind him, grabbing at his right foot. I placed the tip of the blade under his right toenail, centering it before giving it a forceful shove to detach the toenail. The main screamed out in an uncharacteristically high pitch which echoes through the woods behind us. I pulled the bloody nail and cuticle away from his toe, then watched as the flesh regrew and produced a nail rapidly.

“You shehpzeyl npoyt,” the man cried, “just walk down the road! Why do you want me to-” his words cut off into another scream as I tore out the nail on his second toe.

“How far?” I asked softly once the man's yell turned into a croak.

“Five days,” he gasped, “if you walk it's five days. If you have a beast, it's about two.”

“Interesting,” I grunted, “now what about that mercenary company of yours, what were their names again?”

“The St-” the man began, words being drowned out by another scream escaping his throat as I tore out the third toe's nail. “WHY!?” he cried. “I told you what you wanted!”

“I had to ask you twice,” I smiled, craning my neck so that he could see my face, “seven more to go.” Screams echoed through the forest for hours as I tried, and mostly failed, to squeeze more information out of the man before he finally lost consciousness and I ended his life.

I sat by the waterside in the dead of night, looking at the three stripped bodies and the pile of possessions sitting in front of me, flickering in the firelight. It had taken some time for me to find a suitable spot for the corpses after subduing and interrogating the one living mercenary. Eventually, I just pulled them downstream until the creek turned enough that they wouldn't be visible from the main road. The ground near the road was still splashed with blood, both my own and blood belonging to the mercenaries, but with any luck nobody would think enough of it to go searching. I'm just lucky nobody walked by in the dead of night while I was interrogating the live one, I thought, he yelled loud enough that there wouldn't have been a chance of avoiding detection.

Of the possessions, the clothing was the most relevant to me immediately. Having been run through by a sword during the fight, as well as shot multiple times with a crossbow, my shirt was torn severely yet again. Neither the lead merc nor the interrogee had body sizes that were comparable to mine, but to my surprise the clothing that the female merc was wearing was actually a much larger version of the males' clothing, hemmed down to fit her form. Probably to accommodate the breasts, I thought as I tore out the stitchings to let out the shirt to its full size. A quick test showed that the torso was sized correctly, and once I let out the seams on the arms they fit snugly.

My armor was another matter entirely. It had barely been holding together before the fight, and the straps that kept the two large plates in place were worn down to the point that they were almost falling apart. The holes in the plates were also not great, though I managed to hammer the distorted metal back into a relatively flat surface near the impact points of the bolts. Ultimately, I settled for replacing the straps with strips of fabric from the leftover clothing. I would have replaced the plates, but the plate armor that the mercs had been wearing was not double piece like the caravan guards, but made of a single large piece of metal that was tempered in position. If it fit me I would gladly take it, I grumbled.

Tragically, the crossbow was not in a great state. The wood was cracked or cracking in multiple places and none of the bolts were left in good enough condition to be fired accurately. I might have over-cranked it when I did it by hand, I figured. I was half tempted to try firing it just to see if it would hold together, but I knew quite well the kind of damage high-tension releases could do to a body. Having an unlucky shard of wood pierce my upper spine was not how I wanted my mission to end. I might be able to sell it or get it repaired, I thought, I should bring it and just be prepared to drop it in an emergency.

Among the other possessions were three knives with leg sheaths which I took, three pouches filled with currency, and a single small book with a crude fountain pen and pouch of coal for making ink which was in the female mercenary's possession. There was very little visible writing in Suwlahtk so I hadn't taken much of a look at it, not that it mattered because Uwrish script was not something I understood. It's not based on the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, I thought as I observed the crude scrawl on the pages, it almost looks like Chinese but there are far too few characters. Most of the writing was made up of collections of straight lines and dots, with only a few curves to be found on what I assumed were special characters.

Inside the wallets were coins, unsurprisingly. Five types, I noted as I looked at the currency. Not a single one of the coins was round. The coin type with the least sides was a hexagon shape, with an octagon coin and a dodecagon coin also being easily identifiable as well. The other two coin types had twenty-four sides, and one had a square hole in the middle. Metallically, the coins with fewer sides all looked to be copper, while the twenty-four sided coins were a less colorful metal, probably nickel. There was writing embossed onto them but I found it just as unintelligible as the writing in the diary. I have no idea how much money this is, I thought, surely between three people it must be a substantial amount.

My stomach growled and I looked at the spit I had constructed over the fire. Not wanting to go hunting in the dead of night I instead decided to make do with what I had and cook some of the human meat, starting with the first leg I had removed from the interrogee during our discussion. I got up and walked over to the fire, pulling the leg meat off of the spit and taking a smell at it. It didn't smell bad so much as unappetizing, but my stomach overpowered my better sense of what would happen and I took a bite. Immediately my body gagged, and I spat out the meat before the reaction could become strong enough that I would vomit. The taste of the meat wasn't bad, gamey and strong but definitely not inedible on its own. Great, I grumbled, it even has that strange taboo programmed into it. With a deep sigh I looked at the dead bodies again, then set about floating them down the creek to get rid of them. It's not like prion conditions even affect me... I continued to gripe while carrying the leader into the water.

I couldn't sleep at all. I was tired but apparently not tired enough to initiate a rest cycle even when I was trying to. Instead, my mind kept racing back to the moment when the interrogee had stabbed me earlier in the day. The memory of the pain involved both in the stabbing and removal of the sword was powerful enough that I was involuntarily flinching during recall, something I had never experienced before. I could have been permanently disabled, I thought, I could have failed the mission right there. I silently wished I had an operator who would review the footage and analyze it, since I knew I had erred again.

I'll have to do it myself, I thought sometime later, snapping my eyes open and sitting up under the stars. I threw some more wood on the fire and gave it a couple of pulses of heat to get it going again, then sat cross-legged across from it. I've given an after-action report enough times that I should be able to do it from the other side, I thought, I just need to be objective about this. The flames flickered and danced in front of my eyes and I once again brought up the memory of the fight, forcing out the similar fight in Suwlahtk to limit the scope of my analysis.

Initial combat conditions: Allied side, one infiltrator unit in unknown configuration body. Enemy side: three (creator?) human combatants, two male, one female, I began as I went through the motions of collecting and presenting the information to myself. On the surface the battle appeared to be quite stilted in my favor due to my own superior physical ability and armaments, but as I knew the outcomes did not follow that appearance. I went over the information slowly, analyzing and judging each of my actions and criticizing them with hindsight, trying to find the source of my errors. In the process, my mind still ended up drifting towards Suwlahtk, but I found that it aided me.

Essentially, my combat skills have been placed into an environment where they are not as effective, I concluded. I was used to using guns in combat for any distance longer than five meters, only using thrown weapons as a backup when ammunition was scarce. In melee, my main weapon was nearly always a utility or combat knife because such a weapon was common, easy to conceal, and available ubiquitously. If I could not find a knife, I preferred to fight hand to hand. I was trained to use batons such as tonfa but rarely had the opportunity to exercise those skills, and my spear skills were oriented around hunting rather than combat with humans. The issue with melee is that knives aren't lethal, I concluded.

It was a strange thing to say certainly, but it was a true one. With the ability to heal from stab wounds in seconds, anything short of the rather excessive decapitations which I had used against the merchants or sticking a knife into a critical area and holding it inside that area was a non-lethal move. The underarm and neck strikes I had done to the two male mercenaries would have incapacitated a warbreed without regeneration, possibly even killed them, but they were nothing but a temporary annoyance to the mercenaries. In this environment, a knife is a single-use weapon, I thought, in order to kill or incapacitate it needs to be stabbed in and left in.

Another problem was that I was severely overestimating what kinds of injuries would be debilitating and for how long. I had already adapted to the idea that breaking bones was not severe enough to incapacitate a person, but when I had removed the hand from the interrogee I had subconsciously considered him to be out of the fight. I made that same mistake with Mpahray, I thought, except for him it was the whole arm, and he was not nearly as skilled as any of these mercenaries. Removing a single grasping limb reduced fighting ability, but it did not neutralize people as a matter of course when their stump could seal itself quickly.

Finally, pain, I thought, I don't understand how they experience pain. Warbreed felt pain, of course, but their hormonal systems were designed to flush them with powerful combat drugs whenever they fought which would nullify pain for large durations of time, sometimes hours, making it a rather irrelevant consideration in combat. These creator humans, on the other hand, felt and expressed pain very openly. When I had stabbed the mercenaries in the throat and armpit it was not the wound that stopped them, but the pain. When I think about why the leader didn't try to remove the bolt from his knee, it must have been because it hurt so badly, I concluded. If my own damage responses and simulated pain were accurate to theirs, wounds such as that one would have caused a constant surge of searing, burning agony, and been even worse to treat after partial healing. That must be why they were so shocked when I pulled out the bolt, I realized, I suppose if I couldn't ignore the sensation, it would have been unpleasant.

I see why they all use swords now, I continued, a spear probably wouldn't be that effective at killing either unless one could hit the heart or the brain. Swords and axes though, they can chop off parts, and a sword can stab to cause immediate distraction with pain. I looked at the pile of swords and resolved to pick out the best maintained one in the morning to take with me. In short, I need to focus less on trying to kill quickly because unless it's a decapitation or a wound which destroys the circulatory system it's not effective. Instead, I need to think of attacks as a way to cause pain or debilitate the opponent, eventually crippling them enough that I can kill them fully. Finally, I need to assume that all opponents are still in the fight unless fully unconscious.

When I examined how that fighting style would have worked and the decision I could have made, it seemed correct. If I had used the knife to target a joint at the beginning, for example, and then my axe to begin removing body parts I could have crippled the lead mercenary much quicker, I thought as I laid down and closed my eyes, If I had thought to go back and kill the interrogee after forcing the female to drop the crossbow, even while being attacked, I would have sustained much less severe wounds. I got lucky in that the leader was a coward, because if he weren't it wouldn't have been one sword through my chest for my folly, it would have been two.

My mind settled and I felt oddly at peace. The sounds of the forest grew blurry in my ears, and before I knew it I was inside a nondescript dream about something which I would forget when I awoke.