The hoofprints became easier to follow the deeper they went.
Wherever the ground was wet, the boar’s weight had pressed it down several inches. Exposed roots had cracked under its hooves, and whole sections of brush had been shoved apart rather than walked around. The Mowbray heir and the two spearmen took the lead in reading the trail, since this was their territory, while Owen stayed close to Gareth.
The question on his mind had changed. They already knew monsters were leaving their usual ranges. What he wanted to know now was whether the creature that had made these tracks was the reason.
The farther they went, the more something bothered him. Earlier, they had barely been able to go any distance without running into wolves, spiders, hyenas or fresh signs of them. Here, there was almost nothing. The bird calls had thinned to the occasional distant note, and the undergrowth had stopped rustling. Even the spearmen had lowered their voices, though nobody had told them to.
The Mowbray heir stopped beside a tree and pointed to scratches low on its bark, old and weathered. A little farther on, he showed them a feeding site that had clearly been abandoned for some time.
"These markings are old," he said quietly. "Nothing has renewed them. Whatever lived around here hasn’t been coming back."
That didn’t sound like animals wandering off, Owen thought. It sounded like they were avoiding the place.
The smell reached him before anything else did. Rotting meat, damp soil, and beneath both, the sharper smell of fresh blood.
Gareth slowed them and signaled for the group to spread out. They moved forward between the trees instead of straight down the trail, until the forest opened slightly around a stretch of churned mud and broken vegetation.
The Giant Boar was there.
Its head was lowered over the torn body of another monster, and it was feeding, grunting and snorting as it worked, with a wet tearing sound every time its head jerked back. Its shoulders rose well above the carcass beneath it, its dark bristles were clotted with mud, and fresh blood coated its muzzle and the base of its tusks. Owen couldn’t tell what it had killed. Too much of the body had already been ripped apart.
Hrrnk... hrrnk...
Whatever it had been, it had lived this deep in the forest, and the boar had killed it anyway.
For several seconds, the boar went on eating as though the six of them weren’t worth noticing. The Mowbray heir slowly shifted his grip on his spear. Gareth raised one hand to stop anyone from attacking first, and Owen summoned his longsword and kept it low.
Then the boar stopped chewing, and the grunting stopped with it. Its head turned, and one blood-darkened eye settled on them.
Owen’s first reaction wasn’t excitement. The Prowlers earlier had looked dangerous right up until they moved, and then a month of training had made the difference between them and him obvious. This was different before the creature had taken a single step. The size of its shoulders, the depth of its tracks, the carcass beneath it, and the way Gareth had gone completely still beside him told Owen more than any system window could have.
The boar rose to its full height and let out a bellowing squeal.
SKREEEEEEEE!
The sound slammed through the clearing and rolled away into the forest. Somewhere far off, birds burst from the branches. Leaves trembled overhead, and Owen felt the noise vibrate through his chest.
"Back," Gareth said quietly. "Slowly. Don’t turn around."
Nothing about the operation required six of them to prove themselves against a monster this size. The Mowbray heir agreed without argument and directed the two spearmen toward a clearer gap between the trees.
The boar took that option away before they could use it. It lowered its head and started toward them, first at a heavy trot, its hooves thudding into the soft ground, then with an acceleration something that size shouldn’t have been capable of. Owen could hear it huffing through its nose as it came.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
There wasn’t enough time or open ground for all six of them to retreat together. If they tried, someone would be caught from behind.
"Spread out," Gareth said, louder now. "Stay away from the head and the tusks. Nobody gets isolated."
The first charge showed how badly they had misjudged it.
Gareth cleared its path cleanly and struck as it went past, his épée flashing blue-white. The Mowbray heir thrust toward the side of its head, and a burst of wind rushed out along his spear and slammed into its face. The older spearman planted his spear, and Owen saw grey stone spread along the shaft as the man’s whole stance seemed to harden behind it. For an instant, it looked as though their combined response had worked.
Then the boar crashed straight through it with a grunting roar.
CRASH!
The stone-reinforced spear held just long enough to bend the creature’s path slightly before the impact threw the spearman backward across the ground with a pained shout. Gareth’s épée had cut its shoulder, but not deeply. Owen threw himself clear of one tusk and felt the air move against his coat as it went past. Behind them, the boar smashed through the brush in a crack of breaking branches and turned far faster than its bulk should have allowed.
The Ferrers swordsman caught its exposed flank as it came around. Fire wrapped his blade, smaller and duller than Owen’s, and he cut. At the same moment, Gareth drove his épée toward the wound in its shoulder.
That was when the boar’s core power showed itself.
The hide around its shoulder and flank darkened. A metallic sheen ran beneath the bristles, and then sections of its flesh hardened into overlapping grey plates. Gareth’s point went in only shallowly before it stopped. The Ferrers swordsman’s burning blade scraped across the hardened surface with a violent metallic shriek instead of cutting, and he cursed and leapt back as a tusk swept through the space where he had been.
Owen recognized the principle. He had seen something like it when Edith reinforced her sword, except that this was spreading through a monster’s body rather than a blade. Whatever its core held, it was some kind of metal power, and it was turning the boar’s own hide into armor.
What followed frustrated every straightforward answer they tried.
The Mowbray heir used his wind to shove the next charge several degrees off its line, and the boar still tore through a young tree with a splintering crack before correcting. When they attacked its sides and rear, the plating spread toward whichever part of its body was under the most pressure. Gareth’s lightning went in better through the wounds he had already opened, and each time it cracked into the boar, the creature jerked and squealed, but even he couldn’t thrust through the plating on its skull or shoulders. The older spearman braced again and held, but the shock drove him down to one knee with a grunt and left him gasping, his arms shaking.
The younger spearman fought differently. He used wind as well, but his showed itself in his feet. He moved in sudden accelerated bursts, darting in to thrust and out again before the tusks could find him.
Owen tried the greatsword when enough space opened up. The boar changed direction before he could safely commit, and he abandoned the swing rather than leave himself stranded with a heavy blade.
After that, he stopped treating the greatsword as the automatic answer just because the target was large. He kept the longsword as his base because it gave him room to respond. When a narrow gap opened behind one of the plates, he changed to the rapier and drove the point at it, then gave up the attempt when the boar rotated and the gap closed. When it came too close for the longer blade, he changed to the arming sword rather than lose time recovering his reach. His fire did real damage wherever it found softer flesh, and the boar squealed each time. Against the plating, it only hissed and spat and left scorch marks behind.
The fight never stayed in one place. Trees and roots restricted where any of them could go, and the boar kept creating new lanes by smashing through the vegetation, so the six of them were constantly shifting around the clearing to stay out of its way.
Slowly, they began to do real damage. Blood darkened one of its flanks, one ear hung torn, and Gareth’s lightning had opened a wound near its shoulder. But every injury only made it louder and more violent. It was grunting and snorting almost constantly now, and it stopped charging straight ahead and started using the forest, crashing through brush to come at them from angles they had thought were blocked, and snapping its head sideways with its tusks whenever anyone got close.
The next charge came at Owen.
He got clear of it, but when he landed, his boot caught between two exposed roots. He wrenched it free almost at once, but it was still too long. The boar skidded around with startling speed and came straight back at him, and there was no longer enough open ground for him to get out of its way cleanly.
The younger spearman saw it first. He didn’t waste time shouting. He moved.
Wind carried him across the clearing in a single accelerated burst, straight into the boar’s path. He drove his spear at its face and released a blast of force behind the thrust, enough to push the boar’s head several inches to the side.
It was enough. The tusks missed Owen.
They didn’t miss the spearman. The boar powered straight through his spear, and one tusk caught him through the side of his lower body. He let out a short, raw cry as it lifted him off the ground, and then the boar flung him away. He struck the base of a tree with a heavy thud and collapsed there, and the cry didn’t come again.
Owen had barely understood that the man had just saved him before Gareth was shouting at him to move, because the boar was still attacking.
He moved. The thought that came with him was simple and brutal. The spearman had stepped in because Owen hadn’t recovered his footing fast enough, and there was nothing Owen could do to undo that while the monster was still alive.
At the next opening, the Mowbray heir got close enough to look at his fallen soldier. One glance seemed to tell him everything. The wound was far too large, and by the time the heir straightened, the spearman was no longer moving.
The older spearman’s face went white, then hard, and he charged with a wordless shout. Stone climbed through his spear as he drove straight at the boar, no longer waiting for the others or for any kind of opening.
"Back!" the Mowbray heir snapped. "Get back in position. Now!"