Moving out of the lair we had occupied for about two weeks felt weird. It had been such a short time, yet, the lair felt like home, almost more so than the apartment I had lived in for years. The strange sensations didn’t stop me from packing my bags and walking out with my companions, but they made me feel odd.

Other than the night we had brought them home, we had never moved with the entire army of dog, it would have been just overkill. Instead, with Silva’s help, the dogs had split into individual parties, each with a somewhat balanced composition around their individual physiques and strengths, in order to get as much EXP as possible while they roamed, hunting Shattered and the rough-riding racoons. Mysteriously, the dogs had managed to add to their number, locating either individual dogs that had been hiding away, or even a few packs that had banded together for protection. Personally, I found it rather amusing that the dogs appeared to be much more practical about their ensuring their survival, namely, they simply submitted to the biggest, baddest bitch around, in this case, Silva. Or maybe me, but given the communication barrier, I couldn’t be sure whether they obeyed my instruction because Silva was obeying me, or if they accepted me as more powerful due to my own abilities.

Either way, we now had almost forty dogs moving with us, most of which had managed to achieve level ten and gain a class. I wasn’t sure if Silva had been proselytising amongst the dogs, which was an amusing thought of its own, but even without drawing power from Hecate, some of the dogs had stabilised their magical abilities. They were more like druids, at least from the feel of it, but their exact abilities were a mystery to me. Maybe I’d find out in time, but for now, I hadn’t worked enough with them to know.

If it had been a group of forty humans, moving through the night, the noise would have caused tons of Shattered to come after us, possibly even some of the more intelligent, non-Shattered threats out there trying to pick off one or two of our number, but the dogs were nearly silent as they moved. Maybe not as stealthy as cats, but the only noise they made was a soft clicking of claws on asphalt, barely audible even with my excellent ears.

But given that I suspected Mrs Wu would try to get the people at the gym moved as soon as possible, we did our best to cull as many of the Shattered as we could. Luckily, the dogs had long since committed the scent of Shattered to memory, allowing them to hunt them down with speed and confidence, even if it caused a few issues around Lia. From what I could tell, Lia didn’t completely smell like a Shattered any longer, but it was close enough that the dogs had growled at her more than once. Amusingly, her response was to instinctively seek shelter on the highest, least accessible platform she could conveniently reach, even after she had grown strong enough to take down a pack of dogs without issues.

It hadn’t taken her long, within days of her change, we had managed to come up with a significant upgrade for her, namely, a way to harvest Astral Power without having to directly drink blood. It turned out, her claws were somewhat malleable and with enough focus, she could carve a runic formation directly into them. With five claws, the solution had been obvious, namely a five-rune formation. It had taken her some trial and error, but afterwards, the skill she had gained to manifest her claws had changed, turning the rune-inscribed versions into the default to be called up. That way, she simply had to sink her claws into her prey to not only rip out chunks of flesh but also draw some power back into herself, allowing her to sustain herself while fighting. There were some performance issues when it came to Shattered, but when we managed to track down a racoon, or their porcine mounts, she reported excellent efficiency.

With the problem of her Astral Power regeneration in combat somewhat reduced, I had begun showing her some of the simpler spells I had come up with. Things like conjuring up a cloud of fog, or darkness, to hide her movement, simple healing spells to bolster her, admittedly, impressive physical resilience, nothing overly complicated. She didn’t need to be a magical powerhouse, though I was planning to give her some arcane training as time progressed, she needed to be able to keep herself alive in a fight. From what I could tell, she lacked to interest to delve deeply into the arcane mysteries that fascinated me so much but she enjoyed getting into the thick of things, to rend flesh with her claws and bathe in the blood of her enemies.

All in all, she had made great progress since I put her Shattered being back together and even gained her class a few days back. Since then, she had continued her strides, reaching a somewhat impressive level sixteen. Class-wise, she had embarked on the martial path and taken on the martial version of the Sorcerer, simply called a Fighter. There had been other possible options, but after some discussion, she had decided that she didn’t want to limit herself. She wanted to train with me, focusing on her innate gifts and merging those with the magic lessons I had promised and by the time she managed to reach level fifty and cross the first Divide, she’d earn a class just for her.

With instruction on arcane matters from me and a combination of practical experience, instinct and Mrs Wu’s teaching for the actual martial matters, she didn’t need the specialised skills some of the classes would provide. Instead, having the broad, basic abilities of her fighter-class would allow her to build from there.

There had been a few classes that might have been suitable, chief amongst them the Scout class that Rai once had held, but they all lacked a little something. She wasn’t just a sneaky predator, she was also a brutally effective front-line fighter and with her burgeoning healing magic, she was becoming damn hard to kill.

Silva’s progress had obviously been lesser than Lia’s, simply because she, too, had far outstripped the threats we faced. Still, she had managed to gain quite a few levels, reaching a comfortable twenty-two in the service of Hecate. So far, she hadn’t been required to draw on her divinely granted abilities once again, instead, she had gone back to the basics of canine combat, tooth and claw. If not for the many, many dogs that followed us around, I would have considered the one night a strange fever-dream, but with the way the army of dog had been growing, that just didn’t work.

Personally, I thought it was quite amusing that she used her class abilities the least among the dogs, but maybe that was just part and parcel of the divine path. That you tried to solve your problems on your own, without always bothering your divine patron for help. If I was a patron, I certainly would hope that my followers tried to solve their problems themself, before coming to me. But that might just be me, who didn’t know a lot about the mystical interaction between devout and divine.

We managed to reach the edge of town with only small delays, mostly Shattered that needed to be dealt with and from here on out, things would get interesting. I had been back a few times, simply to check on things, and from what I had seen, the cows didn’t continuously stay in one spot, they seemed to wander with no pattern I could discern. Their presence fluctuated from no cows in sight, to hundreds, possibly even a thousand of them, clustered on the fields and the road out of town.

On this fine night we had chosen to migrate, their presence was amusingly middling. There was enough starlight for me to see, even an almost full moon helping out, allowing me to see the roughly three dozen cows idling about.

Silva must have been able to discern their number, too, and she looked incredibly excited.

“You want to put some beef on the menu?” I quietly asked her,already considering how we might be able to fight the cows without getting trampled. Sure, some of the bigger dogs might be able to take one down with their innate abilities, but I wasn’t sure how powerful the cattle was. No, I wanted a better plan, something that was mostly foolproof and, if nothing else, wouldn’t see all the cows engaged. Sure, I would likely be able to kill them all by conjuring up the killing mist, carefully surrounding them before draining their life, but what then?

Three dozen cows, each somewhere between five-hundred and a thousand kilograms, that meant literal metric tons of meat. No matter how gluttonous the dogs were, the vast majority of our kills would spoil, even if we tried to get the meat to the farm. No, it was better to drive some of the cows away, while taking down two or three of them, leaving the others alive to be harvested some other day.

The only question remaining was, how. Luckily, I already had a plan.