AN: Check out my other novel, "Of Arms and Arcane" https://www.scribblehub.com/series/872408/of-arms-and-arcane/

The moment the roars roused the camp, men and women were shouting, armor was being donned as fast as possible, spears were being raised, and the sentries were being asked of what they saw, their only reply was that trees were shaking in the distance.

 

But before everyone could even prepare themselves, in just under a minute, the roars died down, and an eerie silence fell upon the land. 

 

Chieftain Dhun quickly got together a few scouting parties and sent them in the general direction of the disturbance to investigate.

 

A couple of hours later, all but one scout party returned. The scout parties that returned found a clearing of broken and knocked-over trees, and splatters of blood, but no signs of any dead beasts.

 

There were two tracks leading to the site of the scuffle and two tracks leaving in different directions, fortunately not their direction.

 

As for the missing scout party, they decided to wait until noon before sending a search party to look for the missing scout party.

 

What the search party found were broken and dropped weapons, blood, and flecks of meat around the area. The worrying part was there were little signs of struggle, which suggested that the scouting party was killed swiftly without much time to react.

 

This worried the search party as they all raised their spears and looked in all directions as they slowly backed away from the site of their dead brothers after collecting what was left of them.

 

The moment they felt they were far enough away, they quickly made their way back to the outpost.

 

—

 

High in the thick branches of a ring of trees, were a group of beasts looking down on five furless soft skins with sharp sticks. Just like the ones they had eaten a few hours earlier.

 

These beasts were lizard-like creatures that were around three meters long from head to tail, were covered in dark greenish-brown striped scales that blended into the trees they were currently in, and had a thin membrane of skin that stretched from the wrists down to the ankles and includes a portion of the tail.

 

Upon seeing these five new furless soft skins, the beasts started silently crawling off their perch and down towards their new meal, only to be stopped by a low growl too soft to be heard by their prey below.

 

Out of the shadow of the branches, one of the lizard beasts that was slightly bigger than the rest and had a nasty scar that ran halfway down its back, came forward to gaze at their prey. This was the leader of this pack of carnivorous tree-dwelling lizards.

 

And this leader had seen this kind of prey before. The only reason it stopped its pack from attacking was that its prey was now alert after seeing the remains of their earlier kill and knew that if they attacked now, they may kill the prey but most likely lose pack members doing so, which would lessen the strength of the pack. No, the leader had other plans.

 

As the soft-skins ran away, the leader huffed and signaled its pack to follow. It had seen these soft-skins before when it was still a hatchling before it was chased away from its old territory by said soft skins, but unlike those soft-skins from so long ago, these new soft-skins were slightly shorter, thicker, and tougher, but also tastier.

 

And it knew, that where one could find one soft-skins, there were always more of them. It would follow these soft-skins back to their den, where there would be more food to grow its pack.

 

—

 

The search party made their way back to the outpost and reported the demise of their fellow hunters. After Grud and some other shamans performed the last rites for the dead, the expedition got back to work.

 

There was prey to process, and newly gathered fruits, roots, leaves, and grasses for the shamans and medicine men to test. And who better to test it on than rodents.

 

Before the expedition made its way to the new lands, the shamans gathered many rodents for just this occasion. They would put rodents who had not eaten in two days into jars, put in small pieces of unidentified food, and observe.

 

If the hungry rodent totally avoided the unidentified food, it was a safe bet that it was not safe to eat. Those rodents that ate something were to be observed overnight, if the food did not kill the rat or cause it to behave erratically or have diarrhea, the expedition members would then test the unidentified food on themselves.

 

Other than the reinforcing of the outpost walls and raising some huts, the day was quite uneventful, besides the deaths of the scouting party of course.

 

As the sun began to set more hunting and gathering parties returned. The reports of what they saw today were as expected. There were minimal to no sightings of prey or predators in the area, which all the hunters could only attribute to the fight between the two huge beasts this morning scaring away everything else from the area. This translated to the gatherers having an easy time gathering samples of new flora from this new land.

 

That night, with reinforced walls and sentries posted, the expedition went to sleep with peace of mind.

 

—

 

At around midnight, with the cloudy sky shrouding the moon’s pale light, the sentries posted on the wall could barely see the trees near the wall, even with their lit torches.

 

While they were waiting for the next shift to come and replace them, the sentries were staring out into the darkness while trying to entertain themselves. Some were whittling pieces of wood for fun, others were tapping a beat or throwing loose stones into the treeline for fun.

 

But out of all the sentries currently on duty, there was one who was hugging and leaning his head on his spear with his eyes closed, this sentry who was currently sleeping on the job is named Oog, and like everyone else, Oog had a long day.

 

He had spent the morning helping out with reinforcing the outpost wall, when that was done, he was recruited to stack mud for the huts, but worst of all, he drew the short straw as a sentry for tonight and halfway into his shift, he just could not keep his eyes open as he rested his head on his spear while leaning on the wooden railing of his scaffolding.

 

And while Oog was sleeping on the job, a certain pack of tree-dwelling carnivorous lizards noticed his lack of vigilance and glided from tree to tree to assemble at the trees nearest to Oog.

 

With a soft clicking noise from the pack leader, one of those carnivorous lizards jumped off the tree and glided toward Oog, bit down on his neck, and both tumbled off the scaffolding, leaving a lit torch with no one to man it.

 

Hearing the sound of something heavy hitting the ground, the sentry nearest to Oog looked to the source of the noise to see a creature with its mouth around Oog’s neck, but before he could raise his voice to alert the others, something flew out the trees near the wall and bit down on his neck too.

 

Then after waiting for a few seconds and confirming there was no one else watching, the pack leader made a clicking sound then glided over the wall along with ten others while the two who took down the sentries hauled their kills over the wall and jumped back to the trees.

 

The lizards made their way to the closest tents on the outskirts and started sniffing around.

 

The pack leader let out soft clicks as it passed two tents and surrounded the two tents, when they were ready, the pack leader released one last click and they pounced on the tents, using their sharp claws to tear apart the tents to get at the soft-skins inside.

 

Naturally, this caused those in the tent to shout in alarm as their tent collapsed on them and sharp claws and teeth started assaulting them. But unfortunately for those in the tent, they were ill-prepared to defend themselves.

 

As the lizards dragged the screaming men out of their collapsed tents, the surrounding tents were quickly roused to see what was the ruckus.

 

By the time the first of the neighboring tents produced a single man to investigate, four men were being dragged off dead or alive towards the walls while the rest inside the collapsed tent were fighting off their invaders.

 

It was then that a loud chirping noise from outside the wall sounded, and the lizards that were still trying to get at their resisting prey perked their heads up and then bolted to the walls themselves.

 

Unfortunately, one of the lizards was not fast enough and failed to dodge a thrown spear that nailed the loose membrane that it uses to glide to the ground. This staggered and stopped the lizard in its tracks which opened it up for more flying spears to pincushion it to death while other spears flew through the air trying to kill the other escaping lizards.

 

In the end, they only managed to kill one lizard and injured a couple of others that got away.

 

By the time Grud and Dhun who were camped at the center of the outpost got to the scene, the lizard beasts were already gone and the wounded were being treated.

 

After questioning the nearby sentries who were still alive and saw the lizard beasts retreat, and all those who were involved, the final report was that they were attacked by three-meter pack hunting lizards who were adept at climbing trees and were capable of gilding.

 

On top of that, six of their men were dead and four were injured with claw and bite injuries.

 

After all that needed to be done was taken care of, the guard was doubled and when the break of day came, all the men flooded out of the outpost, axes in hand.

 

It took them two days of hard work from dawn to dusk, but they managed to deforest all trees in a fifty-meter radius from the wall.