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Some fine print, in normal sized, italic letters.

The characters, locations, and events in this story are fictional creations of Reserved Rodent. Certainly, names of locations and entities from the real world are referenced in this chapter. This is not to lay claim to those things, but rather to grant realism to the background and should in no way be considered accurate representations of these places, events, things, or people in real life. Any other resemblances found within this work to other works are accidental as well as coincidental, and should not be considered monumental. In whole and part, original characters in this work belong to Reserved Rodent. This work was written with the intention of posting it and surrounding chapters on SoFurry.com. If you must take it and post it elsewhere, at least leave it fully intact, including these warnings to give credit (or blame) where it is due.

There's some very serious violence in this chapter, but nothing sexy. If either violence or lack of sexy offends you, there's other things to read here on SoFurry. Otherwise, enjoy.

Special thanks to my good friend Tengu the Lynx for giving this a quick look over for mistakes. Any that remain are where I was too stubborn to listen to his good advice.

For Every Door that Closes

by Reserved Rodent

Thirteen

I jolted awake, adrenaline surging through my veins. Sitting up, sucking in a deep breath of air, I quickly scanned my surroundings.

Rather than Hyipgr at my side, as I had seen in my dream, it was Gria on my right, saying: "Relax, you took a nasty bump to the head." This seemed out of character for Greg's cousin, considering how upset with me she was this morning. Rather than dwell on that, though, I focused on continuing to get my bearings while desperately holding on to my last thoughts and memories from the dream.

Shala knelt on my left side, a worried look in her eyes, but with a friendly smile: "Welcome back. We were very worried." Her tone of voice and a slight droop in the position of her alert ears made me think there was something she wasn't telling me, but I was still pulling myself back together, too busy holding on to my own fading thoughts to dwell on what she might add to my mess.

Several young villagers of both sexes were scattered around the conditioning pools, obviously interested in what was going on with me - well, me and another small group.

Hyipgr was having a heated discussion with another adult male. My interpretation of my friend's tail swishing back and forth and ears slightly back told me he was getting aggravated at the male before him - a yellowish tan-furred hyena who appeared to be very aggressive, lip curled back and fur puffed out, which did little to diminish the muscle tone of his powerful build.

I made a quick assumption. Since both Greg and Vargr were standing in the group, the pissed off hyena had to be Fangr. Which meant I had either been out for a while or the jerk had bailed on going hunting with Jagr's pack, as ordered.

"That intruder has been spreading slander about me not caring for my brothers!" got snarled loud enough by him to solidify the male as Fangr in my mind.

As I started to stand, wanting to be on my feet when we met in person, Greg saw me and let out a happy bark, "Randgr!"

My smile at seeing the youngster shattered before it was fully formed as Greg's dash towards me was cut short with a heavy backhanded smack from Fangr. The kid's yipe of pain cut every thought from my mind except stopping his oldest brother from ever touching him again.

Hyipgr, who had turned his head to look in my direction at my name being called out, turned back to catch a fist to his muzzle as Fangr snarled, "Stay out of this, jarlgra. I can tell you like the outsider, but this is a personal matter between me and the weak, lying shit."

The bully then lost even more respect in my eyes, as he pushed past my stunned, bleeding friend, knocking him down. Vargr gained some points by making sure Greg was okay, but I could tell he was terrified of his older brother and would not stand up to him. Seeing Hyipgr's bloody nose, I remembered the identical wound the younger hunter had when he showed up this morning - and grew even angrier at the asshole.

"You know, Fangr," I called out, taking a few steps forward to keep the two females from being in the line of fire between us, "You're doing a fine job of proving you're exactly the kind of bully I thought you were."

"I am the one who has taken care of Greg since our Father died! I am the one providing for them and helping them grow strong! You have no right to come in and make accusations about what you do not know!" the hyena snarled back.

"You've just hurt him -" I started to say when, in a blur of motion, Fangr pulled a spear off his back - I'm not sure how it was situated there, or how I missed seeing it before - and hurled it at me.

I could feel my magic - still heavy from all the power I built trading blowjobs with Hyipgr - flex as my muscles prepared to jump out of the way.

But there was a gasp from behind me.

I'm not sure if it was Shala, Gria, or someone else. It didn't matter who it was, though. I couldn't let his insane bastard's throw hurt someone else.

I moved my arms to try and catch or block the hit, bringing my left shoulder into the line of its trajectory, so if I missed hopefully it wouldn't hit anything vital.

I missed.

The sharp spearhead pierced into my flesh, audibly snapping a rib as it hit with such force.

I could see my enemy smile as he heard my squeak of pain. Yet, the pain didn't drop me. It just pissed me off more, and made my focus even sharper. I couldn't help but smile myself as Fangr's smile slipped a little, his brow slightly creasing as he noticed his surprise attack did not kill, or even drop me.

Magically, I could tell the spearhead - though in deep and having broken bone - had hit nothing vital. Still, I wasn't going to be able to fight well while bleeding with it lodged in my shoulder.

But I was determined to fight.

Grabbing the shaft, I tried to do a quick and dirty version of the magic that was described to me by Shala. Picturing my shoulder whole and healthy, I brought the power thundering through me into focus.

The spear wasn't a part of me, it didn't belong. I jerked physically to pull it out, while trying to pull it and the wound away from how my body was supposed to be like. Hopefully, I was subconsciously aware enough of what it was supposed to be like to at least stop the bleeding, and be able to use that arm.

While the magical jolt was noticeable, leaving me with much less magical energy than I had the moment before, the spear seemed to come free easily.

Unfortunately the wound felt like it was on fire, every nerve screaming in shock, but a quick, panicked look down showed not even a mark on my shoulder. I mentally locked away the pain and tossed the spear safely out of the way.

Damn, the shoulder still stings like hell.

"Idiot. You could have hit someone else," I growled. "But then, you really don't care about anyone else, do you?"

Fangr was obviously startled by how quickly I had appeared to recover from his spear throw. Hell, Hyipgr was wide-eyed and had his jaw hanging open from surprise as well. Vargr was still looking after Greg, so had missed it, and I wasn't going to take my attention far enough away from my enemy to see how everyone else was reacting, but maybe they were all shocked.

If not for the fact that I could still feel the pain of the wound, I might have been shocked as well. As it was, I just remained happy I was able to use the arm.

Fangr sneered, "I hit my target."

My awareness washed over him, learning every cell of his body, searching for a weakness.

"I always hit my target," my opponent snarled. "You were lucky to have kept it from finding your heart, outsider. My next try will - "

Even as his muscles tensed to reach for another spear, from the five remaining in a quiver-like container strapped on his back, I was sprinting towards him. My magic fueled my speed, letting me grab his tan-furred arm halfway through it's own blurred movement while slamming the palm of my my other hand into his shoulder joint, dislocating it.

He howled in pain, but brought the paw I hadn't disabled up, raking claws over my stomach and chest, to snap my head up as the swing hit my jaw. Fortunately my tongue wasn't hanging out, so I didn't bite it off.

Forcing myself to keep my jump away from his attack short and quick, I released his arm and ran my own claws across the leather strap that kept the spears on his back, slicing it so it started to slide off.

"Shiteating betrayer of pack!" Fangr screamed, as I leapt over his next swing, grabbing the falling bundle of spears and tossing them on the other side of the nearest pool.

But once again, the practiced hunter was quicker than I expected, and managed to swing around and rake his claws deep down the middle of my back before I could recover.

My tail responded without thought, wrapping around his nearest ankle so when I spun around to face him, I pulled his feet out from under him.

And got promptly kicked in the balls for my move.

It wasn't a solid hit, but it doesn't take too much to make that kind of strike debilitatingly painful.

I was fortunate that he took my tumbling into fetal position and rolling away as a chance to slam his shoulder back into it's socket on the ground, instead of killing me.

We both managed to recover and regain our feet at the same time.

He hurled himself at me, and I decided to try and catch the attack rather than strain my still sore groin with a fancy leap. Turning slightly I just missed catching his paw before it managed to strip a little bit more of my furry flesh off my ribs. But, by caching his arm and pulling him closer and off balance, the move let me slam the palm of my other hand into his muzzle, dislodging several of his teeth.

Which he promptly spat in my face.

The blood and saliva in my eyes was much more distracting than damaging. Still, I didn't see the attack he followed up with, using the claws of his other paw to cut my belly open.

Feeling my guts and blood slide down the front of my waist I pushed my killer away hard, into some rocks beside the nearest pool.

I could feel shock setting in as my entrails and blood poured out.

I knew I was as good as dead.

Then I remembered my magic. For the second time I called on the power I carried to heal myself. As the energy burned through me, lighting more nerves on fire with increased pain, I felt something else.

There was another force working to change my body.

I couldn't tell who or what was trying to mess me up, but it felt different than when Shala had used magic on me to heal my nose. Rather than energy being applied to me, it seemed like the energy was trying to disassemble and pull out a part of the magic already with me.

With no sense of how rapidly everything was occurring, and only halfway started on repairing my deadly disemboweling, I considered just letting the other magic do whatever it wanted, rather than waste time dealing with it.

At least, I felt that way until I realized the attack was trying to remove the part of magic that protected me from this world's viruses and bacteria.

I tried blocking the foreign threads of power with my own magic, but my attempt just seemed to make the attack more powerful, as it drained the energy I used. Cutting at the magic either failed to materialize or had no effect. However quickly or slowly time was passing as I focused like this with my magic, I was running out of both power and time.

Unsure of how to stop the magic from removing one of the changes that had been made to me, and - honestly - panicking about getting the whole guts torn open wound taken care of before I went into shock or lost consciousness, I tried redirecting the attack on to a different, less vital change. Whatever the reason, the first change that came to mind wasn't being a rat, or having hyena spots, but my nice 20/20 vision adjustment. I had spit and blood blurring my vision currently anyway, so good sight wasn't important right now. Right?

Admittedly, as the foreign magic destroyed that part of the changes done to me, it seemed fine.

And maybe, as I pulled my magic together to peel away all the wounds that had been done to me, quickly, like pulling out a sticker, the healing would repair my sight too?

OH FUCK! Healing myself like this hurts like a motherfucking salty Tabasco sauce covered cheese grater to the soul!

But my guts were back in, and even though I still felt like every single cell of my body was being ground into a meaty paste, I was able to stand up again.

I looked over to see a very blurry, light-yellowish brown shape that might be Fangr.

Crap, maybe losing perfect vision was a bad idea.

By scent, it was hard to tell if that was my sparing partner or not. Especially since I had his blood coating my face, filling every breath with its metallic tang. I had to make sure which blur was which before the fighting started up again.

Remembering that I had closely examined his body with my magic, I started pouring my rapidly diminishing power into scanning hyena-sized blurs. Fortunately, that first one I had seen was him.

Fangr was on his hands and knees. It seemed he had several broken bones I couldn't account for from fighting with him. Perhaps I had pushed him away too hard when I lashed out.

Nah, I still felt his gutting me trumped a few broken bones. At the rate my magic was being spent anyway, I'd be lucky to have another healing in me.

"Fucking freak," my opponent growled. "I can't beat you if you keep healing yourself like that." He struggled to his feet, despite his own injuries.

"So you'll leave Greg and Vargr alone," I said, not sure what was going to happen now. If he gave up, didn't that mean he had to do what I wanted? Wasn't that how these duels worked?

Crap, did that mean I had to fuck him?

With a very creepy hyena laugh, Fanger shook his head. "You're not a tribe member. This fight was me wanting to punish an outsider spreading lies. You can fight me all you want, but since I've beaten you badly enough you've had to heal twice, you would have already forfeited victory both those times in a real duel. Since I'm a real male - and have not been healed after every exchange of blows - you might be able to take me down right now with my injuries. But even then, you gain nothing except proving you're to dangerous to allow in the village."

I stared - okay, squinted - hard at the shit-for-brains fuckhead who had just hurt Greg and Hyipgr to come at me. He also put Shala and Gria at risk when he threw the his spear at me while I was near them. Even if I wasn't the focus of his attacks, I thought him the real risk to this tribe because of his callous disregard for others.

Didn't anyone else see that?

Was beating him when we were both at full strength the only way to stop him?

Could I beat him?

"Outsider," Fangr snarled.

It didn't matter if I could beat him or not. Doing nothing would be like saying he was right, and he was so far from right I couldn't live with myself standing down.

"If it's just your injuries holding you back," I said - and used the last bit of magical energy I had to rip away his wounds, leaving healthy flesh and solid bones behind.

We both howled in pain.

I had assumed he would not be ready for the pain I had felt both times I healed myself. I am only a little bit ashamed to say I was looking forward to seeing him feel it. But I felt his pain as if it were mine.

"Stop it!" Greg's voice screamed out, his shrill voice cutting through both our cries. "Both of you stop fighting!"

I realized I had fallen to my knees from the additional, unexpected pain piled on all the other pain that just wasn't going away. I looked up and saw a blurry, Greg-sized shape standing between a still standing Fangr and me.

"Stop hurting each other! I don't want you to hurt each other any more!"

I felt so damned ashamed of myself, yet so proud of him at that moment. He could stand up to us for the things he believed in. Despite everything his brother had done, the kid wasn't broken.

"Okay, Greg," I whispered.

Then gasped as Fangr backhanded his little brother again. "Stay out of the way, Gregie," he snarled.

I scrambled to my feet, ready to head over and beat the goddamned bully to a pulp, when Greg responded, having neither shied away from the hit, nor fallen back because of it.

"It's not Gregie any more. And you can hit me all you want, just don't hurt Randgr any more."

The "NO!" roaring up in my throat at the thought of Fangr striking Greg again died before it got out, when I heard the amount of shock in the oldest brother's response.

"What did you say?" he whispered softly. While I couldn't make out any details with my horrible nearsightedness, his general posture seemed to loose some of it's height. Or maybe I was squinting wrong.

"I said hit me all you want. I don't like it, but I can take it. You do it all the time when you're angry at... well, anything. So hit me, not Rangr. He saved me and has been nice to me, so I don't want you to hurt him. And I don't want him to hurt you, because even though you treat me like you do, I still love you. So please. Please don't try and kill him any more. Don't fight him. Hit me."

"You're not old enough to understand, pup!" Fangr growled, pushing past Greg to charge at me.

I had just started preparing to leap out of the way, hoping I had enough raw muscle power since my magic was exhausted, when I heard my attacker's steps falter and the yellowish tan blur that was him appeared to hit the ground.

"I said stop it!" Greg's voice sounded loud and, as I squinted really hard, I could see the youngest brother struggling to hold both of Fangr's legs.

Unfortunately, the practiced dueler was able to free one leg and delivered a cracking kick to Greg, who let out a soul chilling yipe of pain.

I tried to dash over and help Greg, but the pain coursing through my every muscle and bone caused my body to collapse rather than dash forward.

My vision blackened as I tried to regain control over my screaming muscles, but that only made Greg's pained whimpers and yips tear all the more at my heart. It sounded like he was dying.

"No," Fangr's voice cried. "I... no... I don't mean to... I've never wanted to hurt you. I take care of you. I... No... I... Damn you outsider, this is all your fault!"

"Accept blame when it is yours," I heard Greg say through his gasping sobs.

"He will, Greggie, the outsider -" Fangr started growling.

"No, you need to accept responsibility for every time you've hit me. But you never do. Dad would be so ashamed of you Fangie," Greg's growl, though soft and seemingly wet with pain, cut through the cleansing pools like a knife. Completely silence followed for several seconds.

Then multiple hyenas started talking at once, making my burning headache seem to grow worse.

The older brother knelt down and wrapped his arms around Greg in a loving hug, "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

I heard Gria say she would see to healing Greg.

While I had no idea where he come from or how much he had seen, Jagr was suddenly in Fangr's face, demanding to know why he wasn't out hunting as ordered.

Greg's brother wasn't given a chance to respond before he started getting his ass chewed out for letting personal issues interfere with duties to the tribe.

There were other voices I didn't recognize, chattering about in the background.

Also, I was hurting like I was being run over by a herd of icepicks.

A gray-furred paw grabbed my muzzle and brought my eyes up to stare at a slightly blurry, obviously concerned, and maybe a little pissed off hyena.

"What in the world were you doing with your magic?" Shala growled.

"Um... heal-mph..." I started, but she shook her head and grabbed my muzzle so I couldn't talk clearly.

"Hush. It was rhetorical. You burned through a shit load of magic without control and it looks like you've damaged- "

Wincing a little - still aching inside from all the magic or whatever - I shook my head, gently sliding her paw off my maw, then turned to direct her attention to Greg, where he was being looked after by Gria. "I'm not the important one here. He is."

"But you-" the young grey hyena tried to start up again.

"Am I going to die from it in the next few hours?" I asked.

"No, but..." She paused, and we both watched Gria's magic heal Greg. The young hyena relaxed and stopped holding the side of his muzzle in pain. Multiple blurs of other tribe members seemed to be drifting over to where they were.

Then, Shala leaned over and licked me on the cheek. "Look. Okay. They are important. I get that. I do. But so are you. It looks like Gria and everyone else here is focused on them. They're tribe, so it's everyone's first response to worry about them. They're going to get the attention they need, but someone has to take care of you too."

Unable to stop myself, I chuckled. "So as the youngest responsible party, you got the short straw."

"What..." she asked, laughing a little herself, "is a 'straw,' and why does it matter if it is short?"

"For duties no one wants, there is a tradition of... ah, forget it. Basically, you got the duty noone else wanted to deal with because you're young - still able to deal with the problem, but not able to push it off on someone else. Thus, you have to take care of me."

"I had thought you would rather have my help than Gria's," Shala said, and I immediately felt like an asshole for making light of her helping me.

From behind us both, facing the others as we were, a familiar voice said, "I am sure he would rather have my assistance than either a young novice or a cantankerous troublemaker."

I didn't risk turning to face her, for several reasons: I wasn't sure how the continuing pain I was feeling was going to affect my balance if I swung around, growling like I wanted. I wouldn't be able to see her clearly even if I did. But mostly, petty as it was, I did not want to acknowledge her any more than necessary.

"You gave up any right to pretend you care about me when you walked away this morning, Mira," I said, flatly.

Reaching out to put my hand on Shala's shoulder, I said in a calmer tone, "Shala, do you know where the things I had with me when I fought the Porsect are?"

"Yes, Randy," she replied. Thankfully, Mira stayed quiet and unseen. "But we need to talk about what happened here."

"Then talk as we go. I need to get ready to leave the village."