They had not been moving towards the shattered boulder long before the scavengers began venturing out of the woods.

The small mammals were the first that Robin was able to spot, the darting shapes appearing from under the logs and stones around the slaughter-stone, most just grabbing small hunks of meat that had been dislodged during the feeding of the dragon and darting back to their nests or hiding spots.

Some did not run, however, staying to feed on the choicest bits they could find.

Robin eyed them from a distance, then spoke to May without diverting his attention.

“We have to pass the stone if we continue following the woods along the slope. If we go down and follow the river, we will have to deal with whatever lives in and around the river, and the mist will block out sight. It will also block us from aerial threats, but I have my doubts that things hunting in this area would not have something to deal with that, or at least mitigate it. Echolocation, tremorsense, that sort of thing.”

May made a “mhm” noise, and Robin took it as a signal to continue.

“We could cross the stream and go up the slope on the other side, following the woods to the coast there.” He glanced at May. She was still nodding. He stopped talking and waited.

A moment later, May snapped out of her daze, and shook her head. “Sorry, I actually think we should go to the stone. There might be some other things from creatures the dragon has killed that we could loot.”

“Okay. I am sure we could get away from the scavengers if we needed to, provided there are not any larger, more Ysari System-affected predators.” Robin had a realization and cut himself off. “Oh! Do you want me to identify that ring?”

May started, immediately reaching into her pack to withdraw the ring. After a few moments of fumbling around, she found the platinum band, tossing it to Robin with a flick of her thumb.

He snatched it out of the air, nervous about losing it in the dense natural debris on the ground, and immediately focused on activating Identify. The box appeared immediately, and he began reading it out loud for May.

Ring of the Spearspark (E) The wearer of this ring may transform themselves into a bolt of elemental lightning, travelling with the same speed and power. Anything the user strikes in elemental form is affected as if struck by lightning of similar strength, and the transformation immediately ends. The ring may transform the wearer once per day when travelling through the air, and three times per day when the user is following a trail, such as a power cable, chain, or a crowd of densely-packed people touching shoulders.

“That is two hundred and sixty thousand kilometers per hour, depending on atmospheric conditions. I wonder how far it can carry you if you decide to move horizontally?”

May held out her hand eagerly, bouncing around like a teenager.

Robin held the ring out to her solemnly, and she reached out for it, slipping it onto her middle finger as soon as she had it.

May immediately began twitching wildly, gasping and falling to one knee.

Robin ignored her and walked back to the slope. She followed him, groaning.

“C’mon, that was a good one!”

They fell in together, walking towards the shattered-eggshell boulder, stained with the satiation of draconic hunger.

Opal followed, moving through the woods. She would stop and occasionally offer birds or small rodents to May, to the intense amusement of Robin and the absolute confusion of May.

I have no idea why Opal is doing that, but… they act like cats in their tiny form, so this is not too surprising. Cats give dead animals as gifts to the humans that take care of them, so…

After walking the circuitous route around the slope, they came to the edge of the treeline closest to the boulder. The noise of the small scavengers was beginning to become obvious, the noises carrying up the slope, small squeaks of effort as they ripped meat, tiny grunts of indignation as another scavenger encroached on their bloody find. Insects could also be heard, a low buzzing that carried through under everything else.

May slapped her neck, and then nudged Robin, looking at the tiny blood spot on her hand.

“Hey, can you activate your bug zapper thing?”

Robin nodded, focusing on activating Eternal Static Will of the Blue Entomage. He decided to put eighty MANA into the ability, not activating the “field” function for extra MANA.

He felt an intense hum crack into the air around him, like it was shaping something he could neither see nor understand and that something had broken just slightly under the pressure. It left him slightly unnerved. May was giggling again. He glared at her.

“It sounds just like one of those huge old-school bug zappers! Y’know, the gigantic ones?”

Robin had seen them, but he was not going to give her the satisfaction, and he kept walking, making an audible “Hmph!” sound as he went. May caught up and passed him again, still giggling slightly. She went forwards a ways and stopped, pointing out a small hole to Robin. It was roughly thirty centimeters wide, dug into the soil beneath the roots of a relatively normal tree.

“I think it probably belongs to one of the things that are out there. Weasels, maybe? Badgers?” May squatted and pointed at the claw marks on the roots near the hole; they were deep gouges, at least two, maybe even three centimeters deep in some areas.

That is ...troubling. Badgers were known for being ferocious before the Ysari System, and with its influence, they might be unholy little terrors.

Robin nodded and kept walking, briefly pausing to watch how May sealed the hole with a strand of web, weaving a quick “w” over the nearby roots. He looked at her, curious, still paused mid-step.

“There were definitely some in there”, she explained. “And the web won’t last forever. They won’t starve or anything.”

Robin nodded and continued his step down the slope, finally heading directly towards the boulder. He could see a lot more of the small scavengers now, and felt like he might be able to relax just a shade.

Most of the animals were Ysari System-enhanced rats, mice, moles, and shrews, and they fled as soon as his shadow fell across them from the slope. The insects buzzing through the air were plentiful, and for the most part, were the size of normal insects that one might see in a swamp that did not ever get cold enough to experience an insect die-off, which is to say, rather large, but not unnaturally large.

Several of them flew into Robin, clearly hoping for a meal, only to immediately have blue electricity arc from the armor plating directly through them, killing most of them instantly. The few that did not die immediately died moments later or flew away entirely, avoiding the grim fate of the deceased insects behind them.

The flying insects and bugs that braved touching Robin and were killed for their daring continued sparking with crackling blue energy as they fell, the energy consuming their forms entirely before they hit the ground. As their physical bodies burned away, disintegrating into ash and blowing away in the wind, a glowing blue echo of the form of the creature was left behind where the body had been, looking to Robin almost like a wire-frame blue ghost.

They buzzed around Robin, and as he walked down the slope and more insects tried their luck, he began to feel like a Disney princess right before singing a song at night, the blue lights rapidly winking on around him.

Robin looked back at May, trying to see if she thought the lights would be a problem, but she was nowhere to be found. He shrugged and kept walking down the slope.

She read too many Batman comics as a kid.

The mist that clung to the river had long since crept back, and it slowly grew more noticeable. The blue lights swirling around Robin stood out eerily in the light mist, giving them an even more ethereal feel than they had before. Robin frowned.

Are they always so bright? He focused on making them dim, and was pleased when the bug-lights dropped dramatically, becoming almost unnoticeable in the dim light of the canyon.

Robin started and half-reached for his revolver when he saw a large form moving amidst the discarded bones tangled in the spikes of the shattered boulder, but relaxed when he realized it was May. He hurried forward, feeling slightly ashamed at his alarm.

The bones were from large creatures. Of that, there there could be no doubt, as the majority of the bones were longer than Robin was tall, covered in scratched and chew-marks from various creatures feeding on it after is was dislodged from its origin in some long-dead unfortunate beast. Robin tried using Identify on all of them that he passed, but only a few gave him any sort of notifications, and none of them were actual equipment, merely component-type items. Robin slid these into the Aliquam Pack as he found them, slowly formulating ideas as to how he might use a Beak of the Ink Horror, several Ribs of the Greymaw Fin Whale, or his favorite find among the lesser bone pile, a Saberhorn of the Solar Narwhal, a two meter long, two centimeter wide spiral horn that glowed a faint yellow.

After securing the Saberhorn in his Aliquam Pack, Robin glanced over at the larger pile of bones where May was exploring and softly called out to her. “Find anything good?” He glanced downwards at the river, standing from the stone he had sat upon to load his pack, and froze.

That is not a log.

*****

“Yeah! I found some really cool-looking bones, and a bunch of crap like that, but I also found a few bodies. Er, well, I found several partial human bodies,” she clarified, “and several items on them that I think might be worth inspecting. No point in leaving them here when they could help us stay alive, right?”

She glanced up when she did not receive a response, and saw Robin waving one hand frantically, held outwards to her. He was almost flapping it, like he wanted her to go away, or like… he was scared to move… She followed his gaze and saw the cause of his concern.

“Aw, shit.”

At first, it appeared to be a massive log, but a moment of casual inspection longer showed the gigantic yellow eyes that flitted open for a moment before blinking shut again, the rough eyelid resembling bark.

She thought it had to be a crocodile of some kind, at first, but the roundness of the ...thing sitting in the water didn’t really fit. It was at least three meters long, most of the mass of the form only partially visible through the fog and the moving stream.

She had her answer sooner than she would have preferred.

The thing in the water opened a gaping maw that extended far wider to the sides underneath the water than she would have liked, and she realized with dawning horror exactly what it was.

“Dodge, kid! It’s a frog!”

The kid seemed to get the idea, luckily, and jumped sideways just in time, dodging the massive pink-brown tongue that shot outwards, sticking to several bones and yanking them back into the waiting mouth, snapping shut on them the instant they were yanked in.

She could hear the bones snapping even from her distance to the thing, and she drew out the Machete of the Dark, still glowing white. She waved it in the air, drawing the round, bulbous eyes of the frog, now fully open, to stare balefully at her. She readied the machete to slash, prepared her legs to leap, and willed her luck to hold.

Come on, fugly froggo. Shoot that tongue at me.

It granted her wish, shooting the rope-like tongue at her with a bass croak that shook her to the core. She had been prepared for this, and was prepared to cut the tongue with her readied machete.

She was not prepared for the tongue to be followed by a blast of red and green fire, following the tongue like a wire-guided missile, slamming into her and enveloping her in a burning, caustic cloud. The machete of the dark slammed into the tongue, but the surprise of the elemental energy had caught her off guard, and the machete did not fully cut through the tongue. It impacted her on the center of her upper chest, right below her collarbone, and yanked her bodily towards the mouth of the frog.

*****

Crapcrapcrap get the Δ-Revenant out now!

Robin fumbled for the revolver, finally getting it out and aiming it. May had already reached the mouth of the frog, and was struggling not to be drawn into the amphibian’s maw. He could see that she was losing the fight quickly. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, remembering only a moment too late that he had emptied his handgun mercy-killing the whale, and had not taken the time or MANA to reload it.

This made the fact that the Δ-Revenant fired a shot anyway all the more surprising, a black bolt of light streaking towards the frog, seeming to stain the air behind it. It moved at the same speed as the MANA bullets that Robin had fired, but it seemed to carry a heavier weight to it, almost a gravitas.

The bullet passed completely through the back of the frog’s mouth, punching a hole through its back into the open air. The tattered flesh around the hole began to turn black, almost looking like it was rotting in place, but Robin did not have the opportunity to inspect it closely, as in the next moment, the frog moved bodily, yanking May into its mouth, and dipping beneath the water, seeming to move straight down.