Gareth and the Mowbray heir exchanged short observations about the trail as they went, and the two spearmen pointed out things Owen would have walked straight past: a print half filled with water, a broken branch whose wood was still pale, old blood dried brown on a root, scratches in the bark at shoulder height, droppings that the older spearman judged to be a day old and therefore not worth following. Owen began to understand how much of hunting depended on information he had never needed in a training yard, and on knowing which signs were fresh enough to matter.
They hadn’t gone far before the younger spearman raised his hand.
Ahead, webbing was stretched between several trees, strung far lower than it should have been, at knee and chest height across the gaps.
"Spiders," he said. "Watch the lines."
Two shapes came at them before he had finished, one dropping from the branches above with a dry rustle and the other rushing out from behind a trunk, its legs clicking against the bark. Both of them hissed as they came. Giant Spiders, both Prowlers like the wolves.
Hssssss!
The longsword was already too long for this space, with trunks on either side and web lines strung between them, and a greatsword would have been worse. As the first spider closed on him, Owen changed the blade into an arming sword. He ducked under a line of web, stepped inside the spider’s reach and cut down through its body. With the strength behind the shorter blade, the strike went all the way through with a wet crunch, and the spider’s hissing stopped.
Crunch!
He turned to help with the second spider, but the older spearman had already found a clear lane between two trees and driven his spear straight through it with a grunt. The spider let out a thin, rasping hiss, its legs scraping against the shaft for a moment before it went still.
"Good thrust," the Mowbray heir said to him, and the spearman nodded once.
The cores came out the same way as before, while the rest of them kept watch, and then they moved on.
The next trail they found made the Mowbray heir slow down.
He crouched beside it and studied the prints for a while before he said anything. "Giant Hyenas," he said eventually. "They normally keep to another part of the forest. They shouldn’t be ranging this close to the village, and not in a group."
"Is that impossible?" Gareth asked.
"No." The heir stood and brushed off his knee. "Monsters roam. Prey moves, territories shift. One pack in the wrong place doesn’t mean much on its own."
They followed the trail far enough to intercept them, and they heard the hyenas before they saw them: a high, broken cackling somewhere ahead, rising and falling, answered by whooping calls off to one side.
Hee-hee-hee-hee!
Whoop! Whoop!
There were four of them, all Prowlers, and the encounter was a little larger than the first two. They came in yipping to one another. Gareth and the Mowbray heir took the front pair. A third tried to circle through the trees toward the side of the formation, its cackling moving with it, and Owen went to cut it off. The fourth broke away and tried to come at them from behind, where the younger spearman was waiting for it.
Owen’s kill came even faster than the wolf. The hyena came at him with a shrieking whoop, and he didn’t hesitate once it committed. He stepped into its line and cut, and the sound broke off into a gurgle. Then he was already looking past it, checking that nothing else was coming through the trees, before he moved back to support the formation. Behind him, the younger spearman’s hyena let out a last yelping cackle and fell silent.
When it was done, the older spearman didn’t kneel beside a carcass straight away. He walked back along the tracks the hyenas had left coming in and studied them for a while.
"They weren’t hunting here," he said. "The trail’s too direct. They were travelling, and they were coming from deeper in." He pointed back the way the prints led. "Away from the deep forest. They only crossed our path on the way out."
The Ferrers swordsman and the younger spearman dealt with the cores, while Gareth and the Mowbray heir went over what they had seen so far.
"The wolves on their own meant nothing," the heir said. "The spiders were unusual, but you could still explain them. A full hyena group this far out is different."
Owen listened and found himself arriving at the same conclusion they were circling. The attacks near the village might not be happening because more monsters had suddenly decided to hunt people. Something could be causing monsters that normally stayed deep inside the forest to move outward, and the village just happened to be in the way.
It was only a possibility. Nobody said it was anything more than that, and they didn’t turn back.
The search went on. Over the next stretch of forest, the Mowbray spearmen kept finding tracks from creatures well outside the ranges they expected, and most of those tracks led outward, away from the deep forest. They ran into one more Prowler along the way, a lone wolf that came snarling at the front of the group and died on Gareth’s blade before anyone else needed to move.
During a short pause while the spearmen studied another set of prints, Owen opened his system privately.
His physical numbers hadn’t changed. Killing monsters didn’t make him stronger or faster, and it didn’t advance his cultivation. But one line had moved.
[BLADES CLASS MASTERY: 75% → 77%]
Owen understood why. It wasn’t the number of monsters he had killed. For the first time, he had been choosing blades against living enemies that didn’t follow any pattern Edith had set for him, while the terrain, his position and the people around him all limited what he could do.
He closed the window without saying anything and went back to the search.
Later in the afternoon, the older spearman raised a hand, and everyone stopped.
He had found tracks that looked nothing like the lighter prints they had been following all day. In a patch of soft earth between two exposed roots, there were enormous cloven hoofprints, pressed so deep that Owen first assumed several animals had walked over the same spot. Then he saw the spacing between them and realized they had all been left by a single creature.
The Mowbray heir crouched down beside them.
"Giant Boar," he said. He didn’t sound bothered by the species. He sounded bothered by the size.
They followed the sign a short distance. Bushes had been forced apart rather than walked around, and several young trees had been snapped low on their trunks. The earth around an old tree had been churned up, and higher on its bark, well above Owen’s head, there were fresh gouges and scraped patches where something massive had rubbed against it.
"Should an ordinary Giant Boar in this forest leave signs like these?" Gareth asked.
The heir didn’t pretend to know more than he did. "These are bigger than any individual I’d expect to find in this sector," he said. "But that isn’t what bothers me." He looked along the trail. "It’s heading deeper into the forest. Nearly everything else we’ve found today has been going the other way."
Owen looked back along the route they had come. The wolves, the spiders, the hyenas, and all the smaller signs in between had been moving outward, toward the village.
The pieces lined up into one uncomfortable possibility. Something deeper in the forest might be pushing them out.
Gareth was quiet for a moment. Then he gave his orders. They would follow the trail, carefully, and they would keep enough distance that they didn’t walk blindly into whatever had made those tracks.
Owen tightened his grip on his sword as the six of them turned deeper into the trees.