Two weeks of hunting had changed them.
Marcus could see it in the way Mei moved through the forest now—quieter, more aware, her eyes constantly scanning for signs. Could see it in his own body, the way his muscles had adapted to the constant physical demands. The weakness from his illness had faded, replaced by lean strength built from climbing trails and carrying kills.
Four successful hunts out of fourteen attempts. A 28.5% success rate—more than double their first week's performance. Three pigs and one deer, all processed cleanly, the meat smoked and stored for winter. Their mother had even started working the hides, scraping and curing them in preparation for sewing. New clothes for Bao, maybe. Or repairs for their father's worn-out boots.
They'd fallen into a rhythm. Night hunts for pigs at the ravine—Marcus's throw, Mei's processing, quiet teamwork in the darkness. Day hunts for deer and rabbits in the upper clearings, where sunlight filtering through the canopy made tracking easier. They'd learned which locations produced results, which times of day offered the best opportunities.
Their success had not gone unnoticed. Zhang Kun had asked Marcus for advice after another failed village hunt. Liu Ming had offered to trade information about distant trails for a cut of future kills. Even Old Zhao's grandson had stopped sneering and started paying attention when Marcus spoke about game patterns.
But success bred a dangerous thing: confidence.
Marcus recognized this intellectually, warned himself against complacency. Yet here he was, mid-morning on the fourteenth day, approaching a hunt with something that felt uncomfortably close to certainty.
They'd found fresh tracks that morning—a male pig, evident from the size and the distinctive territorial marking on nearby trees. Not the massive, dangerous boars that could kill a man, but a juvenile male, maybe 50-55 kilograms. Larger than anything they'd taken before, but within their capabilities.
Or so Marcus had calculated.
The tracks led toward a section of forest they knew well, terrain that favored their approach. The wind was perfect, blowing from the target area toward their position. The morning light was bright enough to see clearly, not so harsh as to create confusing shadows.
Everything was optimal.
"There," Mei whispered, pointing.
Through the trees, perhaps 20 meters ahead, the pig rooted in the underbrush. Its dark bulk was clearly visible, broadside to their position. The animal was focused on whatever it was digging up, oblivious to their presence.
Marcus felt his heart rate elevate—the familiar pre-throw adrenaline, but controlled now, channeled into focus rather than anxiety. Two weeks of practice had built his accuracy to roughly 85% on stationary targets. His form had become consistent, reliable.
He signaled Mei to stay back, then rose from his crouch and advanced three careful steps to optimal range. Fifteen meters—close enough for accuracy, far enough for safety if the throw went badly.
The pig continued rooting, its tusks visible now as it lifted its head briefly. Small tusks, maybe 8-10 centimeters. Dangerous if given the chance to use them, but manageable. The animal's chest was exposed, the target area clear.
Marcus set his stance. Weight on his back foot. Spear gripped properly, one-third back from the balance point. He took a breath, let half of it out, and threw.
The spear flew true. His form had been perfect—full hip rotation, clean follow-through, the shaft spinning smoothly through the air.
It struck the pig behind the front leg, exactly where Marcus had aimed.
But it didn't penetrate deeply enough.
Marcus saw it immediately—the spear hit at a slight upward angle, deflected partially by the pig's shoulder blade. Instead of punching through into the chest cavity to reach heart or lungs, the metal tip lodged in muscle and bone, painful but not immediately lethal.
The pig screamed. Not the brief squeal of a dying animal, but a prolonged, enraged shriek.
And it charged.
Time seemed to slow as Marcus's enhanced perception kicked into overdrive. The pig was covering ground at approximately 8 meters per second, closing the fifteen-meter gap in under two seconds. Its head was lowered, tusks forward, the spear shaft jutting awkwardly from its shoulder and doing nothing to slow its momentum.
Marcus had no time to draw his knife. No time to dodge. His body was still recovering from the throw, weight forward and unbalanced.
He did the only thing he could—threw himself sideways.
The pig's charge missed him by centimeters, its bulk crashing past where he'd been standing. But the animal was already pivoting, surprisingly agile for its size, coming around for another attack.
"Liang!" Mei's voice, sharp with fear.
Marcus scrambled backward, finally getting his knife free from its sheath. The pig charged again, and this time he couldn't fully avoid it. The animal's head caught his leg, one tusk scoring a line of fire across his calf, and Marcus went down hard.
The pig wheeled for another pass, blood frothing at its mouth, eyes wild with pain and rage. The spear in its shoulder swung as it moved, and Marcus had a moment of dark humor—he was about to be killed by his own weapon, still lodged in his target.
Then Mei was there.
She came from the side, moving faster than Marcus had ever seen her move, her knife already drawn. As the pig turned toward Marcus for what would likely be a killing strike, Mei closed the distance and drove her blade into its neck.
The pig shrieked again and turned on her, but Mei had already danced back, her movement surprisingly graceful. The animal tried to follow, took two stumbling steps, and its front legs buckled.
Mei struck again, this time from behind, her blade finding the spine at the base of the skull—a killing stroke their mother had taught her for chickens, scaled up to a much larger target.
The pig collapsed.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The forest was suddenly, startlingly quiet except for their harsh breathing and the dying pig's final twitches.
Then Mei was kneeling beside Marcus, her hands on his leg, examining the wound. "How bad?"
Marcus looked down. His calf was bleeding freely, the tusk having carved a furrow maybe ten centimeters long and deep enough to show muscle. Painful, but not life-threatening. No major vessels severed, no bone damage his mind could detect.
"Not bad," he managed. "Muscle wound. I can walk."
"You're sure?"
He tested his leg, wincing at the spike of pain but finding the limb functional. "Yes. Help me up."
Mei pulled him to his feet, and they both stared at the dead pig, at the spear still jutting from its shoulder, at the knife wounds that had actually killed it.
"That was—" Mei started, then stopped, seeming unable to find words.
"Stupid," Marcus finished. "That was stupid. I got overconfident."
"You hit exactly where you aimed."
"I aimed wrong." Marcus limped over to the carcass, examining the spear placement with clinical detachment despite the lingering adrenaline. "I calculated for a clear shot into the chest cavity, but I didn't account for bone angle at this specific position. The shoulder blade deflected the spear upward. A few centimeters lower and forward would have avoided that."
"You couldn't have known—"
"I should have known." Marcus pulled the spear free, noting how the tip had bent slightly from striking bone. "I had data on pig anatomy from previous kills. I could have calculated the optimal angle to avoid bone deflection. I didn't because I was confident, and confidence made me lazy."
Mei watched him with an expression that was equal parts concern and frustration. "You're bleeding. The pig nearly killed you. And you're analyzing angles?"
"Yes." Because that was what kept you alive. Learning from mistakes, especially near-fatal ones. "If we don't learn from this, it'll happen again. Probably with worse results."
He limped over to sit on a fallen log, his leg throbbing. Mei reluctantly began field dressing the pig, her movements efficient despite the chaos of the last few minutes. Marcus watched her work while his mind replayed the encounter frame by frame.
The throw had been technically perfect—that wasn't the problem. The problem had been his targeting. He'd aimed for center mass of the visible chest, a large target with high hit probability. But high hit probability didn't equal high kill probability. Better to aim for a smaller target with lower hit chance but guaranteed lethality if successful.
Heart. He should have aimed for the heart specifically, not the general chest area. Should have calculated the bone structure at this angle and adjusted accordingly.
His overconfidence had assumed any solid chest hit would be fatal. Reality had demonstrated otherwise.
"It's moving," Mei said suddenly.
Marcus's head snapped up. The pig—definitely dead, he'd verified that—was indeed moving slightly. No, not moving. Twitching. Post-mortem nerve firings, nothing unusual.
But Mei had frozen, knife in hand, staring at the carcass.
"It's dead," Marcus assured her. "Just muscle spasms. The nervous system takes time to fully shut down."
"I know that." Her voice was tight. "But when it charged you, when I saw it about to—" She stopped, took a breath. "I thought I was going to watch you die."
The words hung in the air between them. Marcus realized with a start that Mei was shaking—not from cold or exertion, but from delayed shock. The adrenaline that had fueled her precise strikes was wearing off, leaving the emotional aftermath.
"But I didn't die," Marcus said quietly. "Because you were fast and brave and knew exactly where to strike."
"I just reacted. I didn't think."
"Sometimes not thinking is exactly right." He tried to smile despite his throbbing leg. "You saved my life, Mei. Thank you."
She nodded, not quite meeting his eyes, and returned to the field dressing with perhaps more vigor than necessary. Marcus let her work in silence, understanding that some people processed fear through action rather than words.
His own mind was already cataloguing the encounter for future reference. The pig's charge speed, its turning radius, the effective range of its tusks. Mei's reaction time, her knife work under pressure, the efficiency of her strikes. His own failures in positioning, targeting, and threat assessment.
Data. All of it was data, valuable for preventing similar mistakes.
But underneath the analysis, quieter and harder to quantify, was the understanding that he'd nearly died. Again. The fear he'd felt watching that enraged animal charge toward him, tusks forward—it was different from the abstract fear of starvation or winter. More immediate. More visceral.
And Mei had saved him. His sister—or Chen Liang's sister, the distinction was becoming increasingly blurred—had put herself in danger to protect him.
That meant something. Something his analytical mind struggled to properly process.
"Done," Mei announced, standing and wiping her bloody hands on the grass. "Fifty-two kilograms, I'd estimate. Biggest yet."
"Good work." Marcus tested his leg again, finding it stable enough to walk with care. "Can you manage the pack? I don't think I should carry heavy weight on this leg."
"Obviously." Mei helped him rig the carcass in the pack, distributing the weight for easier carrying. Then she looked at his wounded calf, her expression shifting to something stern. "Mother is going to be furious about this."
"Probably."
"Father might forbid us from hunting again."
"Maybe."
"You're not worried?"
Marcus considered this. "I'm worried about the wound getting infected. Worried about whether I calculated the charge speed correctly or if my perception was skewed by adrenaline. Worried about optimizing our tactics to prevent similar situations."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know." He met her eyes. "But punishment from Father is less concerning than dying because we didn't learn from mistakes. Priorities."
Mei shook her head, but there was something almost like affection in her exasperation. "You're very strange, Liang. You know that, right?"
"I've been told."
They made their way back to the village slowly, Marcus limping and Mei carrying the heavy pack without complaint. The sun was high now, the morning hunt having stretched longer than planned. People would be working the fields, preparing midday meals, living their ordinary lives.
Marcus and Mei were returning bloodied and wounded, carrying their largest kill yet, with a story that would probably get them lectured extensively about the dangers they'd been warned about repeatedly.
But they were alive. They'd survived a situation that could easily have killed one or both of them. And they had data—valuable, hard-won data about what worked and what didn't.
That would have to be enough.
"Mei?" Marcus said as they approached the village edge.
"Yes?"
"Next time we see a male pig, we're walking away. They're not worth the risk."
She laughed, a slightly shaky sound. "Agreed. Absolutely agreed."
They limped into the village together, prepared to face consequences, carrying proof of both their success and their failure.
And Marcus's mind was already planning improvements for the next hunt, because there would always be a next hunt.
At least until they got killed doing it.
Hopefully that would be a long time from now.