Adventurers may achieve a higher ranking in multiple ways, though Dungeon Tests are by far the most common. A party will attempt to clear an Adventurer’s Guild approved dungeon up to one rank above their own while accompanied by a Guild Escort of appropriate strength to protect the party should they be unable to clear the dungeon. Upon completion of the dungeon, members of the party will receive their new rank. In most instances, this rank will be within one step of the cleared dungeon based on individual performance. For example, a member of the party deemed to be less influential to the party’s success while completing a C rank dungeon may receive a ranking of C-. The party leader, should they perform acts of particular note, may receive a ranking of C+. – History of a New Age, pg 41

After his run-in with the swarm of Ghoul Rats, Elijah had changed his daily schedule to some degree. He still spent a large portion of each day travelling through the forest and ensuring that, come sunset, he was in a secure spot. Now, however, he would awaken early and spend the first hour or two before sunrise keeping an eye out for more of the little beasts so he could hunt them for experience.

It had taken him a little while, but he had begun to pick out the telltale signs of the things’ presence. The small cries of their hunting packs. The slight shaking of the undergrowth as the tiny terrors felt their way through the underbrush. The scratch marks on the trees that showed what areas were their territory even during the day. Scratch marks that, much to his chagrin, he later realized had absolutely covered the base of the hollow tree he had camped in that fateful night.

After learning how to identify their overall presence, he had begun discovering how to lure out small, manageable groups. At first, he had tried using small amounts of raw meat, but the scent never failed to draw the entire pack to his location and force him to make a run for it until it got too close to sunrise and the creatures faded away into the forest. The things apparently had a highly developed sense of smell and touch that they used instead of their eyesight, which had appeared very poor while he had observed them.

With this in mind, he had instead created a visual lure for the creatures. He had noticed the things had a penchant for carrying around gnawed, sun bleached bones when they were unable to find fresh food. As such, he had saved a few of the bones from one of his meals and thoroughly cleaned them in a stream. From there he had found one of the trees with the territory markings of one of the rat packs and climbed into it for his night’s sleep. The following morning, he had used some of his rope to suspend the bones just above the base of the tree and waited.

A short time later, Elijah had been rewarded with angry squeaks of one of the disfigured animals as it called for help getting ahold of the bones. Taking his chance, he had leaped down from the tree and charged the thing. The creature had abandoned all sense of danger and recklessly charged him as he had expected, allowing him to quickly dispatch the creature. He had just been patting himself on the shoulder for a job well done when the experience message had popped up and given him a disappointing piece of news.

Apparently, the system considered the creatures far, far less dangerous, and therefore less rewarding to kill, when they were alone. He had received a mere two experience instead of the five he had previously received, even at Level Two. According to the voice, this was because each member of the rat pack was linked in a magical and spiritual sense and only by forming packs could the individual members reach their full potential. This would result in a “stronger spark of soul to plunder from the dead.”

That had started a rather interesting conversation about what, exactly, experience actually was. Apparently, anything with a soul, the spiritual system required to actively or passively utilize magic, would award a tiny measure of their soul to the beings that killed them before the rest disappeared from the mortal plain. This reward would then be used as a resource to nourish one’s own soul and strengthen it.

Alternatively, one could naturally grow their soul. This could be accomplished by pursuing one’s goals and improving upon one’s talents. By seeking to improve oneself, you could inherently strengthen your metamagical self as well. This was the approach most non adventurers took, slowly building their skills as a farmer, blacksmith, or alchemist to strengthen their souls and level up. This method was far safer, but also incredibly slow. Most would be lucky to get a single level up a year with this approach, even at relatively low levels.

Either way, eventually one’s soul would grow to the point where it could no longer be contained by an individual’s body and mana. In response, the soul will begin drawing in Wild Mana and using the energy to condense and purify itself. Along the way to the soul, the Wild Mana also enhances the body and mind of the individual, thus creating the phenomena of a “Level Up”. At least that was an extremely simplified version of what happened according to the voice.

While interesting, this information had not been particularly useful to him. Especially when the Voice had been unable to tell him what the minimum number he was required to face to get the same rewards as before was. Trying to maintain a positive outlook, he had simply taken that as an opportunity to experiment. He had begun slowly attracting larger and larger number of the rats at a time, hoping to discover the point at which the system considered them a “greater amalgam”. Even without the full five experience, it had been a worthwhile endeavor and had quickly gotten him a third of the way to Level Three.

Eventually, he had discovered that the missing piece of the puzzle was not actually sheer numbers. There had turned out to be a subspecies called a Ghoul Rat Alpha. These variants were about fifty percent larger than their common kin, but less muscled. Instead, the alphas had an aura of power similar in appearance to a thin purple and black cloud of interspersed with flickers of silver. More importantly, these creatures seemed smarter and were capable of directing their lesser kin while also possessing a small beam spell of some kind.

They could only project the beams a foot or so, and the attack only lasted two or three seconds, but anything caught in the baleful black and silver light would begin to rot apart. Using this ability, the first of the Alphas Elijah had attracted had easily stolen the bait before he felt confident of attacking. It had simply rotted the rope suspending the bone and run off, swiftly followed by the squeaks and shrieks of its fellows.

Knowing that the ability had to have some kind of limit, after all the Alpha of the pack that had attacked him previously had not simply bored through the tree with its rot beam, he had performed a few more experiments. Thanks to those, he had discovered that this special magic was generally much less effective against living things and almost entirely ineffective against inanimate objects. It had been unable to rot through a still living vine he had used to suspend the bones the following night and done nothing to rocks he had dropped through the beam. The second thing he had learned was that it left the creature vulnerable. Following the use of the beam, most Alphas would lose control of a small number of their pack. It appeared the Alpha’s control was not purely status based, but an actual magic effect. By wasting their mana on other magics, they had less to spend controlling the pack.

Lastly, he had learned that the creatures seemed to only use the beam as an absolute last resort or for problems they could not simply throw bodies at. The incident that had taught him this had also alerted him to why he never saw any other creatures within the rats’ territory. He had just lowered his bait during this particular session, when a new creature had slowly poked its way out of the underbrush. Later questioning of the Voice had confirmed his suspicions that the thing was a Ghoul Rabbit.

The creature had had the general build of a Rabbit, with large rear legs and far smaller front ones, but the similarities had largely departed from there. For one thing, the creature had had a large horn curved similarly to an antelope protruding above each of its milky eyes. The front had been sharpened similarly to a blade and easily capable of tearing through flesh, as the creature had later shown off. The creature’s mouth had been filled with razor sharp teeth, though smaller and less unwieldy than those present on the rats. Its front paws remained much the same as a normal rabbit’s while the rear appeared to sport large raptor claws for slashing and tearing. The thing had also been two and a half or three feet tall when standing on all four paws.

None of that had helped the creature in the end. After it had easily leapt up and claimed the bones, a pack of the Ghoul Rats had made their way to the clearing. Apparently, the creatures were incredibly territorial about their hunting grounds and would quickly respond to invasions by other predators. The scouts in the area had called for reinforcements, as soon their angry cries of hunger had been echoed from ever more mouths in the surrounding underbrush. The resulting swarm of perhaps three dozen rats had been piranha like in their swarming attacks meant to strip the flesh from the rabbit’s bones. The rabbit in turn had killed at least two thirds of their number and had nearly killed the Alpha before being physically intercepted by a pair of especially large lesser rats.

The entire fight, the Alpha had only used its beam attack when those two defenders had fallen and left it with no other nearby allies. The beam, focused on one of the rabbit’s eyes, had burst the organ and distracted the creature just long enough for more members of the swarm to reach them. The Alpha had quickly cut off the beam after that and scurried away to hide behind a wall of flesh until the rabbit’s eventual demise.

That had been the last of his attempts to collect data regarding the Ghoul Rats. Confident that the Alphas could not simply rot a hole through his stomach and instantly kill him, he had dropped from his tree and killed the exhausted Alpha and the eight remaining members of its pack after he finished recording his observations. He had been disappointed to find that the Alpha only rewarded five experience points. At first, he had thought it was a product of attacking an exhausted enemy, but killing other Alphas later had proven that that was not the case. Apparently, the system was of the opinion that such minor magical powers did not represent an inherently higher danger then other members of the pack when they were properly guided.

#

Over the following nights he had hunted several small packs of the Ghoul Rats, quickly building up his store of Evolution Points and increasing his level. To avoid attracting too many of the things to handle, he did his best to set up on the edge of each pack’s territory. He was generally successful in this endeavor. His chosen hideaways had the added benefit of allowing him to witness a number of other attempts by various types of ghouls to invade the rat’s territory, before they were ripped to shreds by the voracious hordes. The tiny terrors were unimpressive on their own, but created a devouring tide. It reminded him of army ants in various stories from his old world.

The invading creatures were impressive in their own ways as well. Eight-foot-long snakes with the ability to sling their jaws similar to goblin sharks and bladed scales along their bodies. Three-foot-tall frogs whose tongues had spikes on the ends and quills like porcupines. A rotund raccoon whose fur hid jagged pieces of bone and tail was heavily armored enough to crush the rats it hit into paste. The last had been particularly dangerous for him as it had retreated up one of the nearby trees, sending the rats flooding into the tree branches to hunt it down.

While they were distracted, egged on by a pair of Alphas that were entirely focused on the masked creature after it had killed over a third of their number, he had been forced to cut a path out of the swarm and make a run for it. For the most part, the rat pack had ignored him unless he directly placed himself between them and the raccoon, but it had been a dangerous situation. He had eventually made his way to what he believed to be the far side of this nest’s territory and had spent the rest of the night there.

Thanks to this though, he had begun to figure out the ecosystem of these night predators. As far as he could tell, despite their fearsome displays, the rats were more of a scavenger group. He had seen them fight off and kill these other forest creatures, but always at the cost of large numbers of their own packs. Additionally, a number of the creatures appeared to employ a very similar strategy to himself. They would pick off individual rats or one of the small roving groups before retreating out of the territory with their prey.

The Ghoul Snakes and Ghoul Frogs were especially prone to this as their attacks were lightning quick and prevented the rodents from sounding out an alarm and bringing the full might of the pack down upon the larger predators. They would simply snatch two or three of the rats and wander off. Elijah quickly decided that this tactic provided him with an opportunity.

#

After hitting Level Four, the rats had started to provide little in the way of Evolution Points and the experience rewarded had drastically decreased. They were still worth killing as the main driver of his grind for Experience, but he needed something stronger to continue to grow his store of evolution points. Especially with some of the purchases he had in mind. So far, the best opportunity he had seen to go after something stronger than the rats was a counter ambush.

While there was no doubt that the Snakes and Frogs were powerful, the vast majority of their abilities had seemed to be focused on attacking from ambush. Once the initial burst of speed was expended, from either lunging forward in a strike or the launching their tongue, they seemed highly vulnerable until they were back in position for their next strike. Or rather, Elijah had been of the opinion that they were far more vulnerable at that point than any other. They still had plenty of defenses, but nothing as obviously aggressive in nature after the loss of momentum.

It took witnessing five or six fights between the rats and the frogs and almost a dozen with the snakes for him to feel confident enough to put his plan into motion. In retrospect, he likely had needed maybe half that many examples to fight the things, but he had had absolutely no interest in being taken by surprise by some new ability or unexpected defense mechanism.

The frogs were simple. They had their tongue, which could be fired at fast enough speeds to send the needled tip straight through inch think branches. Additionally, they displayed a rather powerful leap that would allow them to quickly reposition, though had proven to be ponderous and out of the norm for the otherwise sluggish creatures. The weight of the spikes armoring their back meant they generally had difficulty landing and it took them a few moments to get back into position if they displayed the full might of their rear legs. Those spikes had been the last of the dangers. In addition to being very useful for warding off attacks, they could be fired a short distance from the frogs back when they were surprised. This made attacks from the front far safer, assuming the tongue was otherwise occupied.

The snakes were a different matter entirely. The initial lunge allowed the creatures to quickly close short distances, while the rather unique way their jaws could be fired forward added a good six inches to their bite range. Something that could be truly deadly if the target was unaware of it. If the initial bite from the creature’s hand sized head failed to kill, they could then coil around whatever creature had been bitten and slowly shred it to pieces by rhythmically stroking their scales across the creature. This would leave the creature looking like it had been toweled down with sandpaper and razor blades as the scales’ textures ranged from abrasive to downright lacerating.

That same instinct to curl and shred could just as easily be used defensively, not to mention the fact that the scales themselves offered a far stronger armor than the frog’s skin. That natural defense made a counter-ambush of his own less likely to succeed. Instead, the snakes had a different weakness in his opinion. Most notably they were vulnerable to counter-attacks. When confronting one of the creatures he would know how the creature was attacking and where it was aiming immediately. This, combine with the things face first charge, meant that if he could get his sword in position, he could not only prevent injury to himself but likely strike a grievous injury to the monster.

Each of the creatures had presented unique dangers in his mind. The snake’s length was more intimidating, but Elijah had estimated, and later confirmed, the things to only weighed about the same amount as the frogs due to the other monster’s squat build. Both had required that he put himself in danger for the initial attack, but his response had required careful positioning for one and swift response for the other. Both of them had required that he bait an attack out of the monster to manage the kill. He hadn’t been able to find a realistic way around that.

Before beginning his hunt of either creature, Elijah had resolved his greatest weakness when it came to fighting the thing. Quite simply, his spells had not been ideal for fast fights like the frog and snake monsters had necessitated. They were meant to slowly bleeding enemies to death overtime, which wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem, but he also had had no confidence of surviving either monster’s initial attack. Having determined that his spells were unlikely to provide him a solution for quickly killing his opinions, he had decided that that lack of defensive power had been the real problem. The issue he had needed to resolve before taking on new threats.

Thankfully, the voice had been more than willing to help Elijah review his options for both new abilities and strengthening his existing powers. The process for empowering his spells had made sense after his discovery of Blood Roil Burst, and he had been pursuing the goal of increasing his list of spells ever since. That said, he had elected for a far more mundane solution to his issues at the time. He had purchased a better set of armor to replace the rather ragged set of leather he had used up until that point and a buckler.

The armor he had selected was very similar to his first set, being mostly composed of pieces of brown leather. The two major improvements had been the addition of steel plates sewn onto various vital areas and a simple enchantment he had found. The enchantment was called “Blood Soaked” and had appeared when he was looking for a way to improve his armor’s performance when used in conjunction with his Blood Drinker Armor.

The enchantment had two effects. The first allowed the armor to store any blood it came in contact with, slowly staining the leathers a dark red-black as the enchantment reached its limit. It would also store any unused blood when his armor spell was released, ensuring he had at least a small pool to enforce the spell during his next use. The second ability would consume this stored blood to first repair the armor and then enhance his own healing.

The buckler was a six-inch disk of steel with a bump in the center that housed a comfortable wooden handle he could hold his new shield by. The thing would sit across his knuckles and was ideal for both protecting himself and punching out with. More importantly, the enchantment on this particular piece of gear had made it his secret weapon against the Ghoul Snakes. The magic, simply called “Spike”, would cause the center of the buckler to sprout a six-inch metal spike when activated. There had been limitations to keep the cost low of course. The metal was flimsier than the rest of the shield and the spike would fade away after a minute or so. He could only summon the spike a few times a day too, as it would take the magic time to recharge between uses. Not to mention that the enchantment recharged by consuming his own mana, though only at about a tenth the rate of his natural regeneration of the resource.

#

The next night, his preparations had proven up to the task. He had ended up fighting one of the snakes first, which had been his preference. The difficulty of closing with one of the frogs and then potentially having to close again after it had leaped away had made him a little nervous. Much better to deal with one of the snakes that would come to him. This particular snake had been on the slightly smaller side, closer to seven feet then eight, but had quickly taken interest in the carcass of a Ghoul Rat he had killed and hung up.

Seeing he had gotten the serpent’s attention; Elijah had jumped down from the tree and interposed himself between the bait and the snake. He had worried how the creature would respond to something like this, not having seen them deal with a similar situation before, but had counted on the things hunger to make it stick around. The snake had not disappointed either, immediately taking far more interest in him than the rat that had initially drawn it to the area.

Nothing could quite prepare you for the sight of seventy pounds of muscles and scales flying through the air at your face, fanged mouth moving at astonishing speed. Elijah had done admirably though, intercepting the flight path and getting his buckler between the two of them. He hadn’t been able to activate the Spike Enchantment, having been taken by surprise even with all his practice and studying of his target, so the fight had not ended as cleanly as he had hoped it would. Instead, after wrapping its wicked fangs around the edges of the shield, the snake had initiated an attempt at embracing Elijah in its deadly coils.

In response, Elijah had activated his Blood Drinker Armor and begun carving away with his short sword, allowing the slow flow of vaporizing gelatinous blood to reinforce his defenses. Between this, his Blood Roil Aura, and a few uses of his Bleed spell, Elijah eventually put an end to the thing when he broke free of the serpent’s restrictions and decapitated it. Armor shredded and bleeding from dozens of minor wounds, he had been forced to flee from the attention of local rat pack after a scout group stumbled upon the very end of their confrontation. The rewards had been well worth his effort though, almost twenty evolution points and enough experience to push him through a quarter of his current level.

The next snake had gone more smoothly. Fully initiated to the feel of the things attack, he had been able to calmly raise his buckler and activate the enchantment, which resulted in the spike impaling the monster through the mouth and up into its skull. Either due to the construction of the creature’s jaw causing him to miss the brain or its ghoul nature, this had not been enough to outright kill the snake. It had, however, left the monster disoriented and slow. An easy target for his amateur sword skills.

His third confrontation had finally resulted in a fight with one of the frogs. As he had anticipated, their prodigious leaping power and ranged attacks made the confrontation far more difficult than the serpents. Dodging the tongue was difficult, but he managed and his new armor meant even a direct hit was not immediately debilitating. That, combined with a new version of his Blood Roil spell that extended the range of the ability but only allowed him to use it on one target, had allowed him to slowly wear the thing down. The fight had been loud and he had been forced to fight a small pack of maybe a dozen of the rats immediately afterward in his punctured armor and exhausted state though. After his eventual escape from the pursuing rats, these factors had made him more determined than before to prioritize the snakes over the frogs with their similar reward.

#

Over the following weeks Elijah continued to hunt, kill, and grow his skills. Not just the skills granted by the system either. Soon the constant confrontation had him far more comfortable with the equipment of his new existence as well. He learned how to properly tighten the armor so it wouldn’t rattle around or come loose while he fought. How to aim his swings with his short sword and avoid overextending. How to best use his buckler to send attacks glancing away rather than simply meeting them head on.

He grew his number of spells several times over and soon was thinking about how best to combine them to break into the Intermediate Rank. His Blood Roil Aura became capable of very specific effects. One of them, the specific effect that made the rat hordes essentially zero threat, was a spell called Blood Roil Drop. This version of the spell would drag all his targets blood straight down. This allowed him to force small, weak creatures like the rats to the ground and leave them defenseless.

He also created a version of the aura spell that would allow him to exclude individuals from the effects of his aura, much to his satisfaction. He may be on his own now, but he still had high hope of finding other humans in the area. When that happened, it would be important to be able to fight without endangering his allies.

His Blood Drinker Armor had, perhaps, the most impressive evolution. Besides learning to concentrate the magic in specific areas to make a more solid defense, such as forming a complete helmet and shoulder guards when fighting the snakes, he had also learned how to manipulate the armor into a more offensive and more defensive form. The offensive form, called Blood Thirsting Armor, would provide almost no protection, but would drag small rivers of blood from his targets. The Blood Bathed Armor, its more defensive form, would not naturally draw upon the blood around him to strengthen itself, requiring him to instead manually take it. He could then guide the stolen blood, taking the form of scale mail, to reinforce specific areas. In addition to the greater focus it took to use this more defensive form, a second downside to the more stabilized armor was that it would also resist repurposing the blood for Sacrifice.

He had also discovered that the armor could interface with his Blood Blade spell. After discovering the ability to forge Blood Blades from anywhere on his person, he had found a way to manipulate his armor spell to accept these formed blades as a part of his armor, resulting in a powerful counter against creatures that attacked with their own bodies. This spell, called Blood Piercer Armor, gave up no defensive properties when compared to his more standard armor spell, but would consume a large amount of blood and mana while active.

While the forest was still extremely dangerous, these advances meant he was no longer at the bottom of the food chain. It also meant that he needed to find something new to push him even further. The Frogs and Serpents were no longer giving as good of rewards and he was ready to find what preyed upon them in turn.

#

As it had turned out, the next highest rung on the food chain was occupied by three different types of monsters. The first was some kind of large bird creature, easily four feet from the tip of their wickedly pointed beak to their sharp and heavy tail feathers, that were incapable of flight. Their wings were ragged and missing large amounts of feathers, as if they had been plucked while going through a particularly bad molt. Seemingly to make up for this deficiency, large structures of finger like bone supported the ragged flesh in a manner similar to bats. The ends of these “fingers” protruded as black blood encrusted natural weapons and the beasts would use them for support when moving along the forest floor in their strange, hopping pursuit of prey.

The creatures were fast and could quickly rip apart prey with their curved talons, spear like beaks, and blade like wing bones. They also possessed excellent vision even in the dark of the forest, great weight that belied their avian nature, and a ten-foot wingspan that gave their strikes great range. The result was a blurring offensive of sharp edges aiming to disembowel or impale their prey with little regard for their own safety.

The second monster at this level of power was a creature that almost looked like a fox with four sets of fluffy tails. The creatures had an additional segment in their legs, causing them to be incredible tall for their size. Almost as though they were on stilts. Like the Alpha Rats, these creatures seemed to rely more on magic then brawn for killing their prey. Between bolts of withering energy, a gaze that would leave their target feeling weak and sickly, and spectral claws they could fire with waves of their elongated limbs, the fox monsters had offered a unique danger when compared with his opponents up until that point.

Thankfully, as befitted their more mage-like status, the Ghoul Fox was a rather fragile creature. His particular brand of magic also seemed to have a natural advantage against the creature’s own magic, as the deathly energy would expend itself turning the blood of his armor into a noxious black sludge rather than hurt him. This had had no effect on the beasts’ ocular powers, but he had come up with a counter measure for that before confronting them as well. By flinging sand or other dirt into the creature’s eyes or hiding behind terrain to break line of sight with the creature, he had been able to quickly wear the things down with his Blood Roil Aura and close the distance for a killing blow.

The last type of monster, and perhaps the most dangerous at this tier, were Ghoul Boars. The things were three hundred pounds of angry pig flesh, bone armored skin, and four sharpened tusks on each side of its snout. Each tusk had been easily a foot and a half long and covered in sawblade like ridges. Fast, angry, and tough enough to survive being hit by a truck, the things were a tricky opponent. His only saving graces when fighting them had been the fact that Blood Roil Aura had ignored their physical defenses and they had very poor reflexes and flexibility. As long as he was able to make a dive to the left or right, the bone plates and their overall mass prevented them from being able to redirect their charging attacks.

Not that that was a particularly big deal when said charge would allow them to smash through tree trunks even a foot or two in diameter. The beasts seemed to never tire, and nothing short of military grade explosives would injure them. It had been a good lesson on knowing the value of dodging and recognizing that just because you could take most hits didn’t mean you should mindlessly accept every hit. It had also served as validation that every one of these monsters he ran into was worth studying rather than mindlessly charging in to fight.

Thanks to learning the weakness of the boars, in his first fight he had managed to bait the monster into smashing itself against multiple large trees. This had left the creature dazed and slowed it down enough for his Aura to do its job. Once the creature was disabled and unable to hurt him, he had gotten close enough to put his short sword through the things eye. That hadn’t killed the monster of course. Instead, it had quickly responded by goring Elijah through the leg with one of its tusks before he could slip the blade through a crack in the armor along its side and stab it through its unbeating heart. A lesson in caution for sure, but one that healed surprisingly fast thanks to the enchantment on his leathers, the effect of his armor spell, and his Scarification ability.

#

It had been about a week since he had started hunting the Boars, Raptors, and Foxes. He hadn’t made much progress in moving deeper into the Forest of the Final Sleep, but he had grown a lot in the intervening time. It had also shown that his initial hypothesis about the nature of the Forest’s changing weather was wrong. Despite the relatively long time he had spent in this part of the forest, the weather had not changed. Rather than winter, it had continued to have the appearance of mid-fall. Orange and yellow leaves had begun to fill the trees and apple like fruit could be found all around him.

While it had gotten later into the seasons, it had happened at a much slower rate. A rate corresponding with the decrease in distance travelled. Seeking to prove his hypothesis, he had backtracked for several day and watched as the leaves slowly decreased in color and returned to being mostly green. It seemed that rather than the seasons passing more quickly in this place, the further one travelled into the forest, the closer the weather came to winter.

If that was true, he was worried that it was a result of the dungeon attempting to increase the danger. The obvious part was that more and more of his life would be spent in the darkness of night, but what if that wasn’t all there was to it. What if the nights themselves became more dangerous too? More numerous or more powerful monsters. Traps meant to alert the predators to his presence. A point when there was no longer daytime for him to rest safely. It was something to think about and make plans around.

#

He wasn’t ready for the next tier of monsters. Not yet. He had, however, been able to spend some time scouting out his future enemies between frantic fights against his current opponents to prepare himself for the winter stage of the forest. As far as he could tell there were still two more general levels of danger for the creatures, placing him hunting middling beasts at best.

The next set were the ones he had actually laid eyes on, finding them hunting, killing, and eating the creatures he considered roughly his equals. The most common members of this next link of the food chain were Ghoul Deer and Ghoul Badgers. From what little he had so far gathered, the Deer were pack predators that liked to charge through the forest together. They would charge around impaling prey upon their impressive antlers before feeding their catch to the rest of the herd. The Badgers were powerfully built solo predators that could take almost as much punishment as the boar, seemed to have some amount of resistance to at least the fox’s magic, and were the physically strongest creature he had come across so far.

Then there were the predators beyond even these terrors. The same ones he had seen signs of the first night. That he would turn around and run from the moment he had the slightest inkling of their presence anywhere in the vicinity even now. The creatures he assumed to be the apex predators of the forest. The things that he guessed to be bears, wolves, and large cats. Those monsters were his goal. Before he went to winter, he wanted to kill one of the beasts that had terrified him on his first night. I’m a long way from protecting myself, let alone anyone else, but this is a step in the right direction.