Cass examined the area well, but the reality is that she did not really have the training to deduce what had occured. She was able to discern that when the manticores attacked that the villagers had broken up into three groups.

First, the group that had tried to fight the beasts- it did not take an expert to know those people had perished. The second group, the people who had hid in their homes, were undoubtedly dead as well. There was little left aside from the occasional bloody stains and broken doors, the manticores having either taken the bodies or eaten them whole on site. According to what little Cass knew, it would be hard to tell which had occurred. Manticores were strong enough that they did not need to drag prey, so their would be no trail that would show they had taken a body and their habit of eating people whole was well documented.

They did not spend long in the hamlet, Cass instead directing their guide to try and follow the trail of the third group. The third group had fled, and Cass hoped that the other groups had bought enough time for those people to escape. According to the guide, maybe four or five people had ran to the south and there did not seem to be manticore tracks pursuing them.

Cass wanted to find the survivors, should there be any, before she attempted to track down the beasts. Any information they might be able to provide would be invaluable- and she was not in any rush to fight the manticores. She would much rather gather whatever knowledge she could first, even if that meant risking having to make camp and wait until dawn to continue the hunt.

Not far from the village, a few of the manticore’s spines and a new blood trail made it clear that the beasts had noticed the people fleeing and had managed to strike them from a distance. The tracks were obvious enough for even a city girl like Cass to read, they had clearly attempted to carry their wounded comrade to safety.

“They won’t have gotten far, Sir Rammuson.” Cass called out to the ever-vigilant leader of her forces. “And this blood is fresher than I thought it would be, we seem to have just missed the fight.”

Cass increased the pace even more than what she had made them do to get to the hamlet, running the poor guide ragged. However, the sudden screams of terror and odd sounding roar ahead of them seemed to prove Cass had made the right choice. Focusing mana into her legs, she charged ahead leaving Rammuson to catch up behind her.

She burst into a small clearing that would have been picturesque in any other circumstance. A small brook bubbling merrily by a boulder grown patchy with moss and the rays of golden sunlight shining down through the gaps in the leaves. Except now a man hardly held himself up as he leaned against the boulder, smearing it with blood as he struggled with the manticore spine that had punctured him in the side. The face, pale from blood loss, terror, and poison as he looked on in horror at the large beast stalking the other four villagers in the clearing.

Cass had wondered what a manticore looked like, supposing that it would look like a large cat with a human face and a longer tail. That was not wrong, but at the same time it failed to convey the sheer monstrous nature of the creature. It was large, maybe four and a half feet tall at the shoulder, covered in rough and spiky looking reddish-gold fur that seemed somehow tarnished.

The human heads features were subtly wrong above the mouth, and the mouth itself was a nightmare by itself. Stretching from ear to ear and unfolding and opening downward to reveal a gigantic maw filled with rows of teeth, human teeth in the front and two rows of sharp canines behind them. It leaked blood and drool in a mess down the chin as it roared, shaking its body as it did so to make the spines on its tail rattle against each other in a deafening storm of clicking and clacking. Two men and two women had their backs against a large tree, one of them fallen to the ground and all of them clearly too terrified to even try and run for a second time.

In a blur, Cass jumped over the wounded man and on to the boulder- using it as a platform to power her launch forward and into the side of the beast. Despite taking the manticore by surprise, and the power of her attack, the beast merely stumbled slightly and did not fall. It spread its paws to absorb the force and reacted quickly, spinning its long tail and the spikes that covered it in an arc towards where Cass had landed.

Rather than dodge away, Cass moved forward, gripping the rough fur of the creatures body as it turned and pulling herself on to its back. Her hand pulled back and covered with her magic claws, Cass attempted to launch an attack from her perch but had to abandon it as the creature threw itself into a roll.

Springing off and twisting in the air lightly Cass produced a candle she had stolen from the Rence Manor as she had left, tossing it towards the beast and pouring mana into a system. Even as Cass landed and the manticore was getting to its feet, a ball of fire came into existence and shot towards the monster. Realistically, it was not a very dangerous system. The fire had no mass or weight behind it, and Cass would not be able to increase the heat to a truly dangerous level without time that she didn’t have or a catalyst that she also did not have.

However, even most people who were aware of this would flinch as fire came at their face, and a manticore was not an intelligent creature but a beast of instinct. It recoiled away from the flames and Cass lunged forward through the dispersing flame, her hand outstretched. Her magical claws sliced through the flesh on top of the bald head, Cass’s hand was too small to grip entirely around the skull, but she had all she needed. Her eyes met the beasts- those two human like orbs seated above the gaping, hideos, maw beneath- and saw them devoid of intelligence, but brimming with malice and hunger.

Mana flowed into her hand and she crushed the manticore’s skull in her hand, watching as the light in the beast’s eyes faded and the giant body collapsed on the forest floor. Aside from the brook, which had cheerily continued to bubble and splash throughout the fight, there was no sound aside from the quiet panting of the stunned audience. An audience that included a slack-jawed Rammuson who had come upon the scene to see his petite and pretty charge dive through fire and crush a monsters head with a single hand.

The whole fight had taken only a minute, maybe two at the most, and had left Cass with her hand dripping blood above her ruined enemy. As she looked at that hand in silence for a moment, she seemed to exude an aura of intimidation and violence, but in reality she was simply thinking that it was a good thing she had changed from her dress and into the leather armour they had taken off the mercenaries. It did not fit well, and they obviously had no time for alterations, so they had compromised with quick and crude cuts and using belts to strap down the armour in place.

Cass thought that it looked ridiculous, but the tightened belts caused the armor to hug her form a little too well. With her hair tied back and her confident and powerful movements, even her tiny size seemed to tower above others. As she looked away from her blood stained and still dripping hand towards the four cowering villagers they showed just as much terror from the attention of their rescuer as they had from the monster that had cornered them. The tension was broken somewhat by the gasping of the injured man by the boulder, who caught Cass’s attention and she walked over towards. Rammusson seemed to shake off his daze and motioned his soldiers to secure the clearing as he came to join her.

“Can you save-?” The woman who started to call out must have gathered all of her courage and will to speak, but Cass mercilessly interrupted her.

“No, I cannot. At least, not after so long.” Cass said as she examined the dying man. “The only question at this point is whether he dies naturally or not. It does seem rather painful.”

The woman choked up at Cass’s dispassionate analysis, but Cass was not paying any attention to her any more. Instead, she asked the man the only question that would still matter to him.

“I can make it fast,” she said. “Or would you rather the manticore’s venom do it?”

The man struggled for a moment, opening his mouth to gasp out, “End it, please.”

If someone imagines putting a suffering person out of their misery, perhaps they imagine a knife to the heart or throat, but that would not be merciful. You still have to bleed out and die in the former, and wait for the brain to lose consciousness in the later. Actual mercy was not so pretty, especially when Cass was dispensing it. Two fingers sheathed in magic claws through the man’s eye and into the brain behind it and he was instantly dead.

Behind her, the woman screamed and one of the others threw up in disgust and horror. Cass ignored their reactions and rinsed her hands off in the water, watching as it ran red.

“We tracked you from the village,” she said, standing up to dry her hands on the dead man’s shirt and turning towards the cowering villagers. “I am Cass, the Hand of Lord Hall, and this is Sir Rammusson, a knight of the same. Baron Rence asked for our help in exterminating the manticore threat, and as you may imagine, we have some questions for you regarding this attack.”

They stared at her for a while in shock, and then one of the men stepped forward in anger.

“You are here to exterminate those damn freaks? Where have you been for the past two weeks! Those things have been stalking hunting parties and travelers for at least that long, maybe longer!” He shouted at her, his eyes red and wild, his face haggard and strained. “And now everyone is dead. Dead! Hell, you just killed Jeb as easy as you would have stepped on an ant! Where was your help when we needed it? And how is killing a man like that help at all?”

The attacks had been going on for that long? That was nothing like the Baron had told her, and manticore’s were not known to be stalkers anyway. If a manticore had been here that long it would have attacked the village then even if it had to do so alone.

“The request was given to us from the Baron today,” Cass replied sharply. “Take it up with him, and I’d suggest you start to watch your tongue. With four people who can talk I can rip yours out without losing the information I want, speaking of which… You say these things have been around for as long as two weeks?”

The man did not push his luck, which was probably for the best because Cass had not been joking. This entire trip was starting to look like some sort of conspiracy or trap, and Cass was not happy to be in the middle of it. Perhaps she should have known given her luck that her first mission as her Lord’s Hand would not end simply.

Speaking to the villagers painted an unpleasant picture. People who wandered into the woods alone had started disappearing two and a half weeks ago, and the first sighting of a manticore had been only a few days after that began. The creatures would skirt the hamlet, but never enter and runners had been able to make it to the Baron and back even if a few never returned.

So the Baron had been lying when he said he had just gotten the report, Cass noted. But why lie and why not organize a subjugation party to put them down before now? No, Cass realised that she was thinking about this wrong. She ordered camp to be made in the clearing and sat down on the boulder to try and organize her thoughts.

Manticores had been present, and killing, for two weeks and the Baron had known, but not reacted. Normally, if the lord of an area thought the reports were lies or hyperbole, they would at least dispatch some kind of force to check. For that matter, they would have some force to dispatch and check. The Baron lacked any real force and had definitely not sent anyone- much less trained soldiers or guards- to examine the situation.

But that had not been a problem until now, because the manticores were not acting like they normally would. The information on the beasts highlighted their intensely aggressive natures and insatiable gluttony, to say nothing of the indications that they prefered human meat over animal meat when they had the choice.

So she had manticores not acting like manticores and a baron who was not acting like a baron. Cass would be a fool to think they were unrelated, but what could be the connection? Her first instinct was a crazy one, but once the thought had gotten into her head she could not dismiss it easily.

What if they had found a way to tame magical beasts? That could be a possible explanation for the Baron’s seeming lack of guards or soldiers and the odd behavior of the manticores. If he could direct magical beasts, he would hardly need humans to defend himself- at least before the glyphs Cass had come with. The dead beast that her guards had tossed out of camp would probably have been a tough fight for her men if she had not been present, but they would undoubtedly have prevailed.

There were many holes in her theory though, not the least of which was that taming magical beasts was borderline impossible. Some specific types could be domesticated, but manticores were not part of that very small, select, group. If it was possible, why would the people holding the creatures leashes spend so much effort terrorizing one small community? If the Baron was working with them, why notify Cass at all?

To kill them all and blame it on the beasts? But then they could have just had the beasts ambush them on the road. The attack on the village today would be strange as well if there were controllers behind the scenes, mostly because there seemed no reason to do so.

She questioned the villagers thoroughly, but nothing strange had happened recently. Well, nothing besides the manticores, but Cass was more interested if strangers had come around or if some hunter had started talking about some odd discovery in the forest. It would, Cass reflected, have been too easy for one of those things to be true.

So what were her other options? The manticores may have been afraid of something in the village, and avoided the place until whatever they feared had left or changed. However, manticores were almost incapable of caution or fear and were known to willingly charge into groups of hundreds of soldiers in blind rage.

It could just be coincidence, albeit an incredible one. Cass did not believe it for a second, and only tried to consider it for the sake of examining all the possibilities she could think of. It was unheard of for the beasts not to go after human flesh when it was available, and there was no set of circumstances that would have kept the beasts from a waiting feast.

The forrest was growing dark, and Cass had ordered the fires to be kept low. She wanted the area lit, but only softly. There were two reasons for this, the first being to allow them to see better in the night while not interfering with their night vision too much. And the second was to try and keep as low a profile as she could while still having fires burning.

Fortunately, manticores had about the same quality of vision as people, and as long as they kept the fires low and careful the trees should block the light from traveling too far in the forest. They did, on the other hand, possess supernaturally acute hearing. A blind manticore could accurately shoot spikes just based on sound alone, so Cass had no desire to face the creatures at night.

She got into her bedroll after ensuring a double watch would be set, her thoughts abuzz with theories and worries and frustration. Tomorrow, they would backtrack to the ruined hamlet and attempt to track the beasts themselves. If Cass had any luck at all, the four people she rescued might be able to provide some help in that regard, but she would not hold her breath.

Tomorrow was going to be a busy, and very probably bloody, day.