The Savage exposed

Mac moved slowly towards the second camp of the House of Lhasa entourage. He had taken out the first party at the previous camp a few hours earlier.
The Eskimo back there had given him quite a hard time, but the House Warrior had been an easy prey, once the dogs had passed out due to one of Mac's gas-tubes. The gas only meant they would sleep for a few hours, but in temperatures like these sleeping almost definitely meant never waking up again. And anyway, sleeping or dead, they were out of play. Without the dogs, the House Warrior had no waking fellow souls to connect to with his mind, and therefore no-one to alert him of the intruder.
"That's the problem with his kind", Mac thought to himself. "Too bloody dependent on others. No self-sufficiency."
He had quickly taken the Warrior out with his knife.
Effective and to the point, and once again aided by the goggles he'd been provided, together with all the other goodies from the R.O.S.E. arsenal of tech: Another hard argument in the ongoing debate among these Ancients concerning their fear of technology.
The Eskimo had been more difficult. He reacted in a split second to Mac's attack on his cave-mate and had been on him in the next moment, trying to wrestle the knife out of his hand in the darkness.
The very darkness that Mac didn’t have to worry about.
Eventually he had managed to win over the knife and swiftly slit the Eskimo’s throat, blood pouring out all over and making crazy fireworks of blue and green flash inside his infrared goggle view.
It had been kind of pretty, Mac thought.
Now he was moving in on the dogs of the second party.
The direction of the wind came straight towards him, and the canine watchers had no clue of the intruder sneaking up on them.
Same strategy, he thought as he closed in, gas-tubes armed and ready. Why change it if you keep winning?
He felt the blood rush to his head.

Njoro woke with a feeling of total terror filling her entire soul.
There was no sound of the dogs. Everything was quiet. Not even the wind was there anymore. The whole cave was still dark.
Still, and filled with the most terrifying fear.
Then she realized it.
Someone was inside the cave.
But it was far too late for a warning now. As the thought hit her, something else did, too.
Hard.
For the glimpse of a second she felt the taste of blood spreading in her mouth.
Then everything went black.

Mac double-checked every inch of the cave through his night-vision. There was no living thing in there except the unconscious House Witch lying at his feet and another dead Eskimo.
He could sense that something was wrong.
These people never used to travel in twos. They avoided too many even numbers in their entourages, and as the other group consisted of two members he expected this one to be a threesome. The Lhasa people were much too entangled in superstition to go easy on these matters, so something must had happened that made them take extraordinary measures on this trip.
It just wasn’t right. They were far too dependent on both their superstitions and eachother to take risks like these.
He couldn’t help but wind himself up on the topic yet again.
All this was their own fault.
Their ways didn’t allow people any kind of privacy or individuality, and that’s probably why the climate in the Middle North had changed like it had for the last decade. People were ready for something new. They were tired of the talk of 'the old ways' and the constant reminders of how to live, how to breathe, how to fucking stand when pissing. It was all 'well-meant advice' of course. Nobody was obligated to do anything at all.
That was also part of the problem, maybe the biggest one of all.
This endless struggle for harmony.
And their eternal mantra of how fucked-up things were before the 'Age of Restoration'.
More like the Age of bloody regression, if you asked him.
Nobody did, though.
He was a simple man who had a simple job to do, and that's how he liked it. No questions asked. No headaches.
But he had to admit that now that new groups like Mr. Sykes' organization Research On Soul Evolution had started working on unraveling the past in a more thorough way, he felt that some kind of progress might once again be the steps for mankind.
It was merely the question of dealing first with the obstacles to progress that these people represented. They never seemed to give in their resistance towards the world spinning around, and what irritated him the most was that, in spite of their shortcomings, the Traditionalists always seemed to be one step ahead of the game when it came down to digging up information from the past, even quite useful information.
But when they did find something that could have been of value, it was always all about 'making it work for the common good of mankind' - if they dared to take a closer look at whatever they found. Most artifacts were just given silly names and put it on display in one of their sacred spaces in the Golden City, located far away from most of the globe’s population high up in mountains of the Far East.
What's the problem with wanting to exploit knowledge?
To advance? Get ahead?
They would probably never understand the claustrophobic boredom they evoked in any middle-northerner looking for some excitement or change.
Couldn’t they at least recognize the worth of just some technological advances R.O.S.E. and their competing organizations had come up with during the last few years?
Which reminded him:
Why the hell couldn't he pick up the missing third person on his WristSat?
He couldn't have gotten far if he had left just before Mac arrived, something that must have been the case. Could it be that they had some kind of warning anyway?
It was weird still.
They were so afraid of the weather that it was very unusual that they would dare to move anywhere in a storm like this.
He decided he would just have to wait here in the cave.
They wouldn't let a pretty young 'Sister' like this behind.
He’d best keep her breathing, but tied up. She would most certainly try to use her skills to call on her missing companions when she woke up.
The smell was killing him. Burning walrus blubber.
"What the hell is wrong with electricity?" he thought, tied up the unconscious House Witch and lay himself down to have some rest.

As he was sure the R.O.S.E hunter was sleeping, Pi came out of the dream-hole.
His body had been standing beside the Savage ever since he entered the cave. He had been warned of the attack from pictures Sha-Ton had sent from the far side of the Dreamtime. His blessed brother had also given him the message that he himself wouldn't be coming back. Not this time. Not with the broken body the Savage had left him with.
Not until it was time to struggle through another birth would they meet again.
Pi looked forward to see him, and wondered what lives they would hold on their next crossing of fates.
He had also been given the message that most probably the Savage's attack wouldn't harm Njoro more than that she would be thankful to have been so lightly hurt, but that she'd surely would become furious when she - in the close future - would wake up and eventually know that Pi had let it all happen.
Surely she would forgive him when she understood his plan.
Surely.
He would have to move fast. The third party who took the alternative route would have reached the destination by now.
The R.O.S.E. hunter would have to meet his fate, and Njoro would be scared, but would come out of this stronger than ever.
He quietly went outside. The dogs were all dead.
It was not a good situation at all, but the weather had lightened up, and he could use the moonlight once again.
He started walking.
“You’ll be fine, Sister Njoro,” he whispered to the freezing night. “Just fine.”