One Last System

"You don't want me to wear the usual clothes?" Mia asked, looking at me with a weirded-out look on her face.

"We are all dirty, aren't we?" I replied, throwing a quick look at my own, naked body before moving my eyes over to Mia's overbearing beauty. "I mean, I do not consider our own fluids to be dirt, but we shouldn't rub it all over the only set of nice clothes we have, right?"

There was a massive difference between having a cum on oneself during intercourse and during the other parts of the day. And even though I wouldn't consider Mia to be dirty after coming all over her face or chest, the same couldn't be said if she were to keep this kind of organic makeup over the rest of the day!

"Should I bring my original robes along, then?" Mia asked right as she grabbed some random rags before tightly covering her body. Those makeshift clothes didn't look pretty. They weren't something a girl as beautiful as her should wear… But they did their job of covering the beauty of her naked body away from the prying eyes of the other inhabitants of the city.

"You can," I replied while grabbing the dirty sheets from the bed before using them to cover my hips and wrap them across my chest. "According to my calculations, we are only twenty kilometers away from the river. So, even if we don't push ourselves too hard, we should be able to reach it in a jiffy."

"So we are going just for a trek?" Mia asked as she finished dressing up in whatever before moving over to pack her elegant robes into a single ball that she then proceeded to wrap on a random stick she found amidst the rubble in the room.

"That would set a bad example," I countered, finishing up all the preparations I needed to set out. "So, once we clean ourselves up, I planned to go for a little bit of hunting!"

Right now, the scarcity of food was the greatest problem of the outerpost that we commandeered.

All the fields around the city were in a state of complete devastation. And even though it was the height of the harvest season right now, gathering the crops planted by the former residents of the local area was a massive pain in the ass.

With the fields destroyed, it wasn't as simple as just going along the parallel lines of the fields, cutting down, and then hauling fruits and cereal. Right now, harvest turned into a scavenging run, where cultivators desperately looked for every piece of edible plant that somehow survived the onslaught of the monsters, the migration of the population that followed, and then the former attempts at gathering as much food as possible by those who were in this city before.

All in all, the leftovers that have yet to start rotting on the fields could only be used as a stop-gap measure, not a stable supply of food. Or, in other words, the only way to keep the cultivators that I brought here happy and full was by hunting game!

"I never hunted before," Mia pointed out as a small blush appeared on her face. "So I don't know if I will be of much use," she added as she finalized everything she needed before leaving.

"It's a simple task, don't worry," I encouraged the girl before grabbing her hand and gently pulling her outside. "All you need to do is to stay hidden and move upwind so that the monsters and animals won't be able to smell you out."

All my experience of hunting came from a few novels I read in my past life… and then several months' worth of hands-on experience that I gained while out on my contractor's job.

And I passed as much of this knowledge as we walked through the mostly deserted streets of the once bustling city.

"So this is where we are going to hunt," Mia muttered a few moments later, once we moved out of the city and then across a small field before facing the entry to a small forest that separated the city from the river to the north.

Just as one could expect from a world where there still was more ground than people that could make use of it, save for the lands where the ground was too infertile to support trees, everything else was covered in thick vegetation.

'It might be smaller and less lively than the forest in the borderlands, but it's still a place where some game should be roaming around,' I thought as I grasped Mia's hand even tighter before pulling her towards the trees.

The first few minutes of our trek were pretty simple, no more than just a leisurely walk one would take to freshen their mind. Yet, as we pushed deeper and deeper into the forest and as the thick crowns of threes above us shielded us from more and more light…

I just couldn't help but get back into the hunting mindset I would have while out in the wild.

My back was hunched. I lowered myself on my knees. My eyes danced around, scanning the surroundings to look for places suitable to place my step…

All the while, Mia did her best to follow my example only to fail over and over again.

"Am I just a burden to you out here?" Mia asked in a frustrated tone, pulling her eyebrows together as she forced herself into a state of extreme focus.

"Yes, you are," I replied bluntly, only to shake my head and release a heavy sigh. "But do you really think I learned how to move around in the forest in a day?" I then pointed out. "No one becomes an expert over an hour's worth of training. So don't beat yourself over it and just try to do better with every attempt," I encouraged Mia with a tap on her shoulder before going back to looking for clues that would point at the presence of the game nearby.

In theory, my words were pretty damn far from what one would call encouragement. But I knew Mia more than enough to know that she wasn't looking for empty words of praise or reassurance.

When complaining about what she was doing wrong, she wanted me to point out her mistakes and the means to improve upon them. When she complained about being a burden, she didn't want me to shout just how insanely wrong she is, but to learn how she could become a useful asset.

And it was this progressive mindset of hers that allowed me, only about an hour ago, to stop her with a single flick of my hand.

Then, just by pointing my thumb down, Mia didn't assume I was rating her progress but slowly fell down on the ground while ensuring no twig or stick would crack under her weight, alerting whatever I noticed.

"A fifth stage best, two hundred paces ahead," I whispered while pressing my own chest against the ground and only keeping my eyes and hair above the level of the forest bed.

"Do you want to hunt it?" Mia whispered, in a voice barely loud enough to reach my ears.

"No," I replied with a faint smile while controlling the volume of my own voice. "I think you are ready to try to hunt it yourself."