Prog pressed his back against the berry bushes stem. Although calling something big enough to hide his entire body a stem rather than a trunk still felt decidedly odd. Not that it mattered today. A few simple checks confirmed that his scent blocker was active, (near-jasmine, Rocoto chilies and corpse lily, dried and powdered in a scent bag around his neck. Combined with a simple wind spell it was an excellent low-cost magic substitute... if you could ignore the smell) his foci were ready and he was fully behind cover.

All was in readiness. Only waiting remained.

Only. His nerves and muscles felt like cables with some dumb bastard constantly turning a capstan to tighten them. He wondered, absently, if nerves were like cables. If they were over-tightened much further, would they part with catastrophic energy?

He shook his head, he would not find out today. They paradoxically began to relax as the ground began to shake. The fight was on, no more time for nerves. The passel rolled forward like a mudslide, migrating with considerable speed, but little urgency. Even without it, their speed was their undoing.

In a maneuver that reminded him of playing Lemmings as a child, the ground collapsed beneath the front runners, and the next few ranks were moving too fast to stop. They two plowed into the pits, the spikes and their pack mates in a horrible din of snarling, squealing and booming percussion.

A few on the outsides dodged around that porcine pile, to no avail. The sound of breaking bones was louder than thunder as trotters plunged into land visited by a giant’s aerator. Gopher like-holes just the right size for the task.

Pure bedlam! For a moment, he was too shocked by the sheer noise and audible pain to react. Their racial magic made Hogs nearly immune to physical damage. Nearly, a fast blow would do nothing, but steady slow pressure? That worked quite well as the bed of spikes and ankle traps showed. They also weren't immune to the men and women waiting in ambush above.

He snapped out of it as the first spells rocketed past him. Simple elemental effects for the most part. Bolts of fire, earth spikes, quicksand, jets of frozen air, suffocating bubbles of water and even the occasional bolt of electricity. Following the faster spells in a concerted wave, a mass of woven vine nets, with large rock weights attached, flew through the air and onto the already trapped beasts.

Prog contributed a few of his own spells to the mix. Nothing fancy, a simple but robust jet of flame, but one he had to be careful not to destroy the nets with. Elemental battle magic might not be his specialty, but everyone needed at least a few basic combat spells.

Even so, it wasn’t his spells that did the killing. Nor, despite their numbers and considerable skill was it any of his compatriots. No, it was the large, reinforced spikes that lined the bottom and sides of the traps. They were the start of the show, though honorable mention went to the ankle breakers.

Not that the pigs in the pits seemed to care about the distinction. They lunged forward, sideways, upwards. Any which way they could, just to get at their tormentors. And in their flailing, the spikes were all the more effective.

A pitiful few that managed to launch themselves out. Only to fall back down. It wasn't just one line of spike pits. Having escaped the first they went back down in the second without ever getting a chance to fight.

The side traps were a minor matter and with ruthless speed and aggression, the majority of the hunting party collapsed on the main pit and its abnormally sized occupant. The largest beast in the pack, and thus the alpha, was half buried in additional hogs, all moving about in rage or panic, ripping into one another as much as anything else. Spells fell on the pile with abandon. Weight spells forced them down onto the spikes even as other elements stole their focus and overwhelmed their thoughts with pain.

The alpha struggled mightily, flinging great clouds of dirt, and even a few other hogs, into the air, not to mention more than a few shattered spikes. But he was at the bottom of the pile, and the pit was deep. His struggles bled out of him and with them any chance the passel might have had. This was over.

Prog flinched, clamping down on his emotions and cursing himself for jinxing it as a hog that didn't get the memo launched itself from behind the traps in a magic-assisted blur. In an instant Camille disappeared, leaving the barest hint of red mist behind.

No time to mourn. He reminded himself for what felt like the hundredth time, snapping off a fire dart in vengeance at the blood-spattered hog. Keep it together.

His mind lept through the available data. The hog was a runt. Smaller and weaker than its kin. Nine out of ten it couldn't keep the pace and fell behind. It probably fell behind the rest and was only just now catching up. It would never do so again, with its aura tuned to release its stored motion it could no longer absorb it.

It was vulnerable and several men and women took ruthless advantage to bombard it with stone spikes and even a few spears. It died squealing, but it wasn't enough. Camille was still gone, and the hog’s death would not bring her back.

Nothing would.

The jungle began to quiet as the pained or enraged squeals were silenced, one after another and Hunters began to pull back the nets and rock weights. A difficult task considering a rock large enough to inconvenience a hog wasn't something a single human could hope to budge. At least not using muscles. Spells on the other hand...

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They dug carefully at the center trap and its massive occupant. The dead top Tier 2 beast was the reason they’d risked this ambush. His divinations had predicted that it would ascend soon, absent any interference.

So here they were, to provide that interference. It was a powerful beast, but trapped and subjected to the steady bombardment of over 20 guardians it had gone down fairly easily. Even with the silly extra death, he could have succeeded with half the hunters he had. Not that he’d ever do so.

Use more, lose less. It was a truth he'd had beaten into him in training.

It wasn’t always practical, not when the nature of threats wasn't clear or there were too many threats at once. But then, that was the province of divination. Some called it fortunetelling or soothsaying. They were wrong. You didn’t need to see the future to predict it. It was created from the present. Just like the weather. If you looked east and saw a heavy dark cloud with the wind blowing to the west, it was a good bet that there would be rain.

The familiar thought carried him over to the edge of the pit where the hunters were hard at work butchering it down to manageable bits. Everything on the beast was valuable, blood, bones and oh-so-tasty flesh.

A good thing too. They didn't have a choice but to kill it. At Tier 3 it would cost over ten times the effort, and possibly the lives to bring it down. Even with traps. But if they had no choice, at least there was a significant payoff. Enough of one to draw volunteers. A much better state of affairs than if he’d had to order them out.

He sighed softly. He’d give it all back for Camille. If only he could truly divine the future if only he could have predicted that last hog and saved her life.

It works, he reminded himself, just not always the way I might wish. He reminded himself of what a Tier 3 was like. The strength and durability had to be seen to believe. Stone and Wooden spikes would snap off rather than pierce its hide. The earth walls of the hole might as well be paper.

If they hadn’t come, Camille might have died anyway. Or several others. Trading lives… he sighed.

This was his purpose, though it hurt to face it. He read the signs and made the hard choices. The world provided him with signs, and this time at least, he'd had the wits to notice. The unstable consumption of the nearby magic field told him a beast was about to evolve. The fault lines between competing territories provided a map of where the beast would tread. The state of the overgrazed vegetation told him when.

He made the choice that led to this, the best result he could create. The best for the Hold.

Not for Camille.

He sighed and turned away from the nearly completed task. All his observation and intuition had managed to keep the Hold strong and growing. They'd managed to keep the surroundings relatively clear of strong beasts over the last few years. But it had cost a steady trickle of lives and every man or woman lost was one less to help keep this situation stable.

Not to mention the other signs he'd seen. This beast's very existence foretold change and not in a good way. He wasn’t ethically raised and locally sourced. No, he'd wandered into Prog’s detection range already high tier 2, just waiting for the opportunity to make the jump from dangerous to deadly.

An opportunity they’d just ensured would never happen. But what if he’d advanced before wandering in? What if he'd appeared out of the blue as a new tier 3? What if the next wandered did the same? All things had causes, and most had effects. The ruthless culling of the local beasts had created a vacuum of power and nature abhorred such vacuums.

The safety of yesterday might become the danger of tomorrow. The effect would be coming home to roost.

Trekking back toward the hold, well laden with loot the same as the rest of the hunting party, he mulled over his limited options. He knew his strengths. With a bit of effort, now that he knew what to look for, he could anticipate dangerous newcomers. Power vacuum plus Mana Field fluctuations and the availability of food supplies... He stopped his mind from proceeding through the lists of possible inputs. There would be time enough for that later.

The problem was he also knew his weaknesses. He could completely know what was coming, but be unable to do anything about it. Divination could predict what was coming. But it didn't provide much in the way of the magical punch required to kill such a beast. Foresight, well-laid traps and prepared ambushes were something he could pull off over and over again. Force multipliers and damn good ones. But for a multiplier to work he had to have some force to start with!

If he just had someone to team up with, he groused for perhaps the thousandth time. He would set up ambushes and let someone more offensively focused go to town. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Even worse, guardians followed in the footsteps of their Pathfinders. His lot were great at detecting incoming threats, intuiting targeting solutions and possible weaknesses based on the smallest of clues, but that wasn't the same as being able to hit hard. Even with an eye strike, you had to hit hard enough to punch through into the brain!

He might not be able to see the future in a random crystal ball, but this wasn't a hard prediction to make. Sooner or later something bigger than they could handle would migrate in from outside, and his underpowered troops wouldn’t be able to handle it.

He had to make a change.

Training and the assumptions of the elders can only take a man so far. That was a hard reality of life. His current mastery was acquired by studying the results and philosophy of his elder. Then finding his own understanding of how to do the same. Step by step, walking forward. Improving on that great man's work.

The problem was along with the good there was a great deal of bad. The weather was predicted not based on the future, but by understanding the present. That was an acceptable metaphor. But it fell through when he wanted to manipulate that coming future. His elder wore blinders, the weather can’t be changed!

He was stuck against what they didn’t know and bound by what they did.

But this ambush, and many more like it they’d pulled off, showed that the future was not the weather. With the weather, all you could do was close the windows and fix the roof. But why stop there?

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

And it was time to man up.

He couldn’t let the wall of their preconceptions control his fate. If magic was possibilities, the many potentials waiting to be reduced to one reality then divination was about reading the present possibilities for the most likely results. All possible events were contained in the amorphous flow of energy that backed reality. Was it such a stretch to go beyond simply peaking and begin to be the one who chose?