I watched as my keelish swarmed over the last of the living wolfstags, the whimpers of the canines dying out as the last of their number were exterminated. There were many keelish corpses joining them, much more than I’d hoped, but not so many as I had feared. I didn’t care to take specific note of which had died, since I was confident it hadn’t been any of mine, and instead I waited for a report to come my way. Before I let myself begin to relax, though, I looked for Silf. He had stayed near me in the initial assault, and I worried that he had been killed, thus weakening Foire’s utility.

Fortunately both for him and for me, he had stuck close to me the entire fight. As a matter of fact, the wounds he had sustained (electrical burns across his face and arms) had all been from the wolfstag that had latched onto my tail. Silf, not one of Took’s pack as I had assumed, had ripped into the wolfstag that was stunning me and, disregarding the agony the electricity must have worked on him, had refused to give up or slow down.

“Your face… looks like it hurts.” There were patterns of scorched scales that decorated his face, and Silf’s jaw didn’t seem to work the way that it had before.

“‘Eah. Urts. ‘m ok.” He didn’t want to expand on the injury he’d sustained, and I could appreciate that.

“Silf. Thank you. You saved me.”

He flicked his tail, denying it. “‘As ‘Ook.”

I tried to understand what he was saying for a moment, before it clicked. “It was Took that saved me, not you?”

Silf flared his frills in agreement, then recoiled in pain as the muscles in his head moved to do so.

“It was just as much you as Took. Thank you, again. Do you want me to go find Vefir for you?”

He flicked his tail, much more emphatically than before. I didn’t force him to speak to deny his need for healing, but I appreciated his willingness to suffer nonlethal pains for the good of the pack anyway. Regardless of what he said, though, I’d make sure Vefir saw to him eventually.

“Has Foire seen any more wolfstags coming?”

A flick of his tail.

“If you want to say yes, just wave your hand. Any other news from Foire?”

Flick of the tail.

“Keep an eye on Foire, let me know if he has any news.”

Waving his hand.

“Great. Now rest, just keep your eyes open.”

Silf sank to his haunches with gratitude obvious in his posture. Sybil was conferring with a couple of the members of the pack, surely about something she would tell me soon. While I wanted to lay down and rest, the only rest I afforded myself before going to speak with others in the pack was looking at the [System] notification that appeared in the middle of the fight.

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[New Skill: Debilitating Diatribe acquired.]

A small smile cracked my face as I noted the [Profound Sonilphon]’s evolution counter had ticked over to 3/5. And what does this do?

[Skill: Debilitating Diatribe is the inverse of Skill: Innervating Address. As Innervating Address allows the Skill holder to use their words and lace them with magic to grant greater energy and confidence in the listener, so does Debilitating Diatribe allow the Skill holder to use their words and lace them with magic to sap energy, excitement, and morale, as well as to occasionally incite obedience in the listener. This Skill cannot evolve. Once a Skill holder holds both the Skill Debilitating Diatribe and Innervating Address, the holder can discern which individual listening to give either effect.]

So I could now choose that keelish get the effects of [Innervating Address] while our enemies would be affected by [Debilitating Diatribe] at the same time?

[Incorrect. The Skill user can simply choose if a listening individual will be affected by the currently used Skill or not.]

Not as amazing, but still great news though. I’d worried if I was helping our prey when I’d used it before, but now I could use both [Skills] with the knowledge that I wasn’t accidentally assisting our foes. Having done that small search into my [Status], though, I now needed to take stock of what the casualties suffered were. I stood tall and walked through the grove to find Sybil.

While I knew that it always happened, this was the first time I’d participated in such a large and bloody battle. Everywhere I stepped, the muddy ground was red with blood and thick with shed scales and ripped fur. The smell of blood choked me, and though I no longer cared about how bloody my body or how viscera-filled the air was, the odor was so thick that it almost involuntarily activated my [Bloodlust]. Everywhere I stepped, there was a corpse cooling in the light rains, and my body ached with every movement, given the full dosage of electrocution I’d been given. Again, I simply wanted to relax, to lay down and be done for the day, but I didn’t allow myself that weakness. I needed to be the prime example of our strength, our power, our superiority.

Looking for Sybil, I saw her near the front of the battlefield, where the keelish casualties were the highest–as I’d planned. Again, I’d never wanted for this to happen, but Shalla (and Khaa by extension) and Criit were currently unwilling to bow down to me, and thus were the most expendable in my eyes. I forced myself to look at the crumpled and torn bodies of the keelish who’d died under my command. They were pitiful, sad, and I would mourn their deaths alongside their companions, but I could not regret them. If I did, I would never be able to do anything, to take a single risk.

While looking at the bodies and attempting to imprint the sight of them on my mind, I noticed that Criit laid among the fallen, his fangs filled with the fur of the wolfstags. He had refused to die quietly, and most wounds he had sustained were on his face, throat, chest, and shoulders. Criit had refused to turn and run when the odds had been against him, and I bowed my head in respect as I walked past and began to hear the words that were rising in volume in contrast to Sybil’s ever-calm tone.

“I must say that you should do nothing until the Alpha comes.”

“MY Alpha is dead! It’s his fault! I’m leaving, and we’re taking whatever we want when we go!”

“Like I said before, you are allowed to make that choice if you have decided it is your best option to do so, but do you think that Ashlani will happily allow you to leave and take the spoils? Do you think that he will allow you to happily rob him?”

“More than half of us are dead on his hunt’s grounds! Our blood is price enough!”

While I didn’t know the name of the female screaming into Sybil’s face, I did know that she was both Criit’s Beta, and his mate. And, as much as I wanted to just let Sybil deal with it, I needed to step in and take care of the fallout from this hunt.