PFC Chapter 285: Bowral Notices
Chapter 285: Bowral Notices
Down in the main road of Bowral, Voss navigated the crowded stalls with cold efficiency, intent on trading the chocolate and eggs for Felicity’s specific cravings. But he wasn’t as solo as he thought. Trailing a block behind him were Marx and Tommy, supposedly on "reconnaissance."
It took exactly five minutes for Tommy to cause an absolute scene. Distracted by a stall selling hand-carved wooden rabbit figurines, Tommy tried to aggressively barter using a pair of his spare socks. When the vendor, a massive, hot-tempered badger beast man, took offence, Tommy accidentally knocked over an entire display of rare, hand-cared spices, creating a loud, sneezing, chaotic display that drew the eyes of half the market.
Marx dragged Tommy away by his collar, but the damage was already done. In a brutal, post-apocalyptic settlement like Bowral.
Women were treated like absolute gold, and a high-tier, beautifully pure fox-woman settling into a local manor was already the biggest gossip in town.
Tommy’s apology came out at full volume, each word more disastrous than the last, his massive arms windmilling as Marx tried to wrestle him into silence.
"Hey, watch the hair, buddy! We’re elite guards! Snow team!" Tommy yanked free, puffing his chest like a preening rooster. "We need to get back to the manor to protect our beautiful, pregnant fox!"
The words hit the market square like a boulder dropped into still water.
Marx’s palm connected with the back of Tommy’s skull so hard the crack echoed off the stone walls of the nearest stall. "You absolute catastrophe of a mammal," Marx hissed through his teeth, his tail bristling to twice its normal size. His silver tongue, for once, had nothing clever to offer, just raw, undiluted horror.
Voss didn’t look up from the merchant’s counter. He simply pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, exhaled through his teeth, and continued sorting chilli’s as though sheer willpower could erase the last ten seconds from existence.
It could not.
The silence that swallowed the market was the kind that preceded avalanches. Ten thousand beast-men, warriors, traders, and drifters packed into the square between crumbling stone buildings and patched canvas stalls. Every single one of them had stopped moving. Conversations died mid-syllable. A blacksmith’s hammer hung frozen mid-swing. A fruit vendor’s hand hovered over a basket of bruised apples, forgotten entirely.
Then the murmuring started.
Low at first. A ripple spreading outward from Tommy’s catastrophic announcement like wildfire through dry brush.
"A woman?"
"Pregnant? He said pregnant."
"At the manor. The one on the hill."
"Fertile."
That last word moved through the crowd with the force of a physical blow. In a world where compatible mates were rarer than clean water, where most beast-women had either been claimed, hidden, or lost to the chaos of the apocalypse, the concept of a fertile, unclaimed... no, even a claimed fox-woman living within walking distance hit every unmated male in that square like a thunderbolt to the chest.
Voss finished his transaction with mechanical precision. goods exchanged. His expression remained perfectly neutral, but the tension radiating from his shoulders could have bent steel. He turned, caught Marx’s gaze across the crowd, and the look they shared communicated volumes.
Marx grabbed Tommy by the collar with both hands. "When we get home," he said, his usual playful cadence replaced by something flat and dangerous, "I am going to feed you to Victor personally. I will hold the door open. I will provide seasoning."
"What? What did I—"
"Shut. Up."
Voss was already moving, weaving through the crowd with that deceptively casual stride that meant he was calculating seventeen different threat scenarios simultaneously. His jaw flexed. And he growled at nearby beastmen. He looked like they were about to head towards the manor.
Felicity was going to kill them.
No. Worse. Felicity was going to give them that look, the one where her golden ears flattened, and her lips pressed together, and she didn’t yell, didn’t shout, just stared with that quiet, immovable disappointment that made grown apex predators want to crawl into a hole and die.
Behind them, the square erupted into barely contained chaos.
A wolf beastman at the weapons stall started sharpening his blade with renewed intensity, his gaze fixed on the road leading uphill. Two leopard men abandoned their card game entirely, straightening their armour with the sudden urgency of men who’d just remembered how to groom themselves. A bear beastman—easily seven feet tall was running his claws through his mane and sniffing his own armpit with a critical frown.
"Is she beautiful?" someone called from the crowd.
"Does it matter?"
"I’m pretty sure her whole team is lvl 90+... aren’t we all like lvl 60, I feel we have no chance."
The moon around the street was a bit sour after that.
Tommy, because the universe had apparently decided today was the day everything went sideways, opened his mouth again.
Marx shoved an entire dried fish into it.
"He chokes, that’s on you," Voss muttered without turning around.
"Worth it," Marx said, dragging Tommy’s gagging form forward by the scruff. His tail lashed behind him, agitated and furious, but beneath the irritation, something else flickered across his features.
A tightening around his mouth. A flash of something possessive and sharp that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the image of a hundred unknown males marching toward their front door.
Toward her.
Voss’s pace quickened. Not running. Running would signal panic. But his legs ate up the cobblestone path faster now, his mind already reshuffling every defensive position around the manor, every sightline, every approach vector.
"Victor is going to level this town," he said, almost conversationally.
Marx made a strangled sound. "Victor is going to level Tommy first. Then the town. In that order."
"Dimitri is going to turn us into nothingness."
Behind them, the market square buzzed with energy that hadn’t existed five minutes ago. Weapons were being polished. Fur was being combed. Someone had already started composing what sounded horrifyingly like a courtship ballad.
And somewhere up the hill, blissfully unaware, Felicity was probably curled up on the settee with her tail tucked around her ankles, wondering why it was taking them so long to buy her berries and chilis.