The next day was a slow start. I had worked yet again far into the night to make the room, and I was tired. Add to that I spent more time than I should have had trying to get harvest things from the vextoad. The harvesting wasn’t such a bad thing as I learned a lot and picked up a new skill of Alchemical Harvesting.

Alchemical Harvesting Skill Grouping Magical Craft:

This is the skill of finding, harvesting, and preserving items needed for the craft of alchemy. Not all Alchemists have this skill and this is not the skill of alchemy.

The big problem was that I couldn’t take most of it. The stomach acid could be used to make an ink for metal; however, I didn’t have my ink jars with me as I figured I would either come back or get new ones. Yes, they were cored, but it was more weight than I had to carry and so I just didn’t bother.

The skin to the vextoad would make a great waterproof jacket if I waited several days to finish it. The dumb thing was that while I was making my room, I included a stretching rack for the skin and hung it up. Many of the other parts were just as odd. I knew how to use them and that they were necessary; I just didn’t have a way to keep them long-term if I didn’t do something with them now.

The core, on the other hand, was something that I would be taking with me and was kind of nice to have found.

Level 2 core

Core of Agility

+3 Agility

We kept going south, following the river till about midday. It was then that two things happened that I wasn’t fully ready for. First, it started to mist. It was nice and cool and slowly started to wet the ground as it turned from a mist to a drizzle. The other thing that happened was I heard barking.

It wasn’t something that I was happy hearing, even if it was far off. But, from my past experience with dogs, I knew that if they caught wind of me and wanted me, they would follow until it was time for a fight. So I kept on going at the same speed, but I did knock an arrow just in case I needed to fight.

It was about three hours later that the rain stopped with me thoroughly soaked. It was also about time for me to make camp for the night putting in a full seven to eight hours of walking. I was tired, but it was time to build the room. I would have just a couple of hours of light left.

The spot that I picked was between four great big fur trees. Each one was too big for me to reach even halfway around. Their first branches were around sixty feet in the air. They seemed like they ruled the area. I figured with how large they were, the damage I would do to their roots shouldn’t cause them too much harm.

When I finished my first round of mana usage, I went and gathered stones I would use to make power stones to power some of the things I wanted tonight. With it being wet, I was going to build a fire in the room and figured that I might as well power it magically.

I had just finished getting all of the stuff that I would need for the insides of the room gathered when the dogs started up again. They were close and sounded like they were closing in rather quickly.

I wasn’t near done with building the room, so I had no place to go and hide. However, Blink was around someplace, so it would be here when the fight started.

I was thinking about doing my second round of wand usage when the dogs showed up. I was looking at a pack of ten or so that I could see. They were about the same size as I had seen before, none more than about forty pounds, and each standing about two feet tall. With so many of them, I was starting to worry about getting surrounded.

They came out about thirty feet from me and laid down watching me. It was so strange to me to see them just resting there watching. I wasn’t sure why they were waiting. I was convinced that they had a plan; I just wasn’t sure what it was.

There was barking behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see a group just as large behind me. When I looked back, the pack of small dogs all were on their feet and started to bark and whine while circling around the clearing that I was in. The ones behind me began to as well, almost answering them as they moved.

I moved back a little so that my back was towards one of the trees. While this moved me from where the room was, it gave me a little protection from the dogs. But unfortunately, it also cut out some of my line-of-sight, which meant that they were likely to come in from those angles.

I dropped my pack to my right to create an obstacle, even if not much of one. I then quickly planted all five arrows into the ground on my right, drew my sword, and planted it into the ground on my left as well. Then, finally, I pulled my bow around and knocked the first arrow. The dogs, by this point, had closed into about twenty feet, and the howling had turned to yipping and growling.

I had my Magical short bow ready in my hands with an ice arrow ready when the first blow of the fight started. A dog at the back of the pack on the right side let out a yelp and was dead. My disappearing food mooch had struck again. She was great when it came to being there when I needed a friend. She was twice as big as one of them, but by the time the dogs realized that something had changed in the fight, Blink had already dropped three of them. The whole flank of the pack started to turn towards her, and so I fired off three shots into them as fast as I could. I only had five arrows total, and they were closing in still from my left flank.

I dropped my bow and pulled my sword out of the ground, and turned to the left as the dogs started to come in. We now had two circles of dogs nipping at us. While they had directly lost three and now had several more wounded, they still were in the place of power. They were going to wear us down and eat us, or so they thought.

While I thought that I was the smart one, it turned out Blink might have been a bit smarter as she started to retreat. This, in turn, broke the group back into two smaller groups. They had balanced out where she had about ten dogs, and I had seven. It was where she was retreating that did the trick. She pulled the dogs through the small game traps. The stakes that I put in when I first got there started to work on them, causing the dogs to feel peaceful. The ones outside the radius of the stakes were still yipping around me, but the ones chasing her were now all out of the fight for a while.

She even had time in the middle of the fight to send the feelings of smugness as she preened from the image of half the dogs being trapped. I laughed as I lunged toward one of the dogs taking its right ear.

She then looped back while I was fending off the dogs as much as I could. They would dive in from one side, and I would swing at them with my sword, and then they jump back while the ones from the other side would bite in at me. I might score a hit here and there, but it was spread out, and they were getting one in ten to land a bite on me. It was just like how jackals would take down a lion. I might be bigger and meaner, but there were more of them, and they were faster. What I did have going for me was that my armor could take a bit of the damage, so I wasn’t hurting too badly, and it could heal me some.

I had just dropped my first one with a solid strike using the rotting fear when I was knocked over from behind. They were on me so fast that I wasn’t sure what was happening. I felt my teeth on my legs and weight on my body. I was yelling and flailing around trying to knock them off when Blink struck again.

She had moved around so that she could get close, and when they took me down, she went headlong into them. The ones on me got knocked off, and she killed one outright. My health was showing just over two-thirds as I stood back up.

My sword had fallen to the ground, so I snagged up my sword with a roll and struck the closest dog. That dog broke and ran, then the next one I hit released Blink and ran as well. The one that had run turned back and charged back in to get hit again, and then back out they went. Blink and I started to wear them down since we were next to each other. I had my armor heal me, bringing me back up to mostly full health.

While Blink was larger, she was just as fast, if not faster, on short strikes than the dogs were; she also was all weapon. While her tail wasn’t that strong, it was big enough to impale dogs with the barbs that had shown up in the fight. Her eyes might have made her look like prey, but they gave her independently focusable eyes and so the dogs couldn’t get where she couldn’t see.

I was doing a great job holding the left; she covered the middle and right. My little blanket thief was dropping every dog that got within her range while I was doing good not to get wounded again.

After another 10 minutes of the fight, the last two dogs broke and ran. The funny thing is they ran right for the rest of the pack that was lying down having a nice nap. I was down to just over half Hp with two bleeding wounds that Blink closed up for me. She looked like she only had one wound on her leg, which had already stopped bleeding.

Of the twenty-three dogs that made an attack on us, there were now twelve in the small game trap just resting and looking around like nothing happened. Blink and I were wounded and tired, and so we were keeping a watchful eye to see if any of the dogs felt like getting up. They were peaceful, so unless they got hungry enough, the dogs should stay put, but they also shouldn’t function as a pack anymore since each one was peaceful. Those resting stayed as the fight happened, so it was a pretty powerful effect.

I drank a healing potion which filled me right back up. For Blink, I gave her a bowl with healing tea and some of the jerky as well. Then we waited. Blink had climbed up the tree behind us a few feet so that if she needed to, she could pounce on a dog. I had reclaimed my bow and had an arrow ready but not drawn.

Once it was clear that the dogs weren’t going to move, I headed back and finished building our room. I got all my equipment moved in out of the rain and even dropped in the items that I was going to need for a clothes drying rack.

I looked around the clearing for Blink but couldn’t find her. So I yelled, “hey Blink, lets head in.”

I felt roll across the bond, a feeling of frustration, and then she sent, “Finishs hunts!”

I sighed; she was right; we needed to finish these guys off since they were right here. However, I wanted to see if they would stay overnight. In the past, we had gotten stuck on what I thought of as game. These were predators, and so I wasn’t sure if they would stay.

So I called out, “Not tonight! Let’s head in!”

Then I sent across the bond the feeling of peace and that I wanted to test the trap. It took a while, but in the end, Blink came back, and we went into the room.