Even though I’d never seen a keelish mate, it didn’t take any time for me to realize what I had stumbled into. Immediately, I turned and began walking out of the den. It didn’t take long before Rulac walked out, looking a little miffed, but mostly pleased with himself. I’d wondered what exactly to say while waiting, and all I had come up with was, “Um. Sorry for interrupting.”

“At least you know enough to apologize. But she was nearly done anyway.” His amused smirk grew with his words.

“Don’t you mean ‘we were nearly–’” I cut myself and my knee-jerk curiosity off, but it was too late.

“Nope.” His smirk transitioned into a full grin, and I knew some comment was about to follow.

“Regardless,” I raised my voice to cut him off, and I realized I subconsciously laced it with sonic magic, giving my words a certain gravity. Rulac looked at me, more attentive and present than I could ever remember him being. I realized, for the first time, that I was taller than Rulac. When last I’d seen him, just after my long training with Wisterl, I’d been about a foot shorter than him, but now, I was a couple of inches taller. He still outweighed me by a fair margin and was longer than me snout to tail, but since I stood upright now, I was taller. The prideful “khatif” part of me took notice of that and gloried in it.

“I had a reason to come here, and it wasn’t watching you. Our hunting grounds are running dry, and I wondered if there is anything that the swarm usually does in cases like this.”

He flared his frills in acknowledgement before he answered, “You aren’t the biggest brood to reach adulthood, we’ve had a couple with some more, but we’ve never had one quite so big and so successful, least, so far as I know. Most of the time, when a brood your size reaches adulthood, they’re half starving, cause they’ve eaten through all the easy prey in the area. They get cycled to new grounds, and usually start to find out how to get good prey there. You… you’re different. You figured out pretty young how to hunt the real prey.” Rulac’s voice glowed with a certain amount of appreciation as he spoke.

“Your pack ain’t huntin what they usually would be at this stage, and that has kept you full, but there just ain’t enough prey in the area to fill so many ravenous, growing keelish. Your problem will start to get better once you all finish growing quite so much, cause you won’t be so hungry all the time. There is another problem, though.” He paused and looked at me, weighing my reaction.

“What kind of problem could we have?” I felt myself bristling at the insinuation that my pack could be anything less than impressive.

Rulac, unimpressed by my little display of anger, looked at me levelly. “You have another predator in your space. They also reduce the quality and quantity of prey available. ”

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After just a second, I realized he was talking about the wolfstags. Rulac saw my understanding and nodded. “Those thunderfangs are dangerous. We don’t know exactly how many of them there are. And they’re in your territory. What are you going to do about it?”

My anger at Rulac’s insinuation began to transition to a hot-blooded rage towards the wolfstags. They dared to impede my growth? That of my pack? I nearly strode away that same moment to begin an assault against whatever canine I found, but I tamped down that anger with reason, and I thought about what Rulac had just said. Then, with that moment’s thought, I turned to him to ask, “You say you don’t know exactly how many. Do you know about how many?”

He flared his frills in acknowledgement, and for perhaps the first time, I realized that while Rulac was brusque, rude, and straightforward, it wasn’t from a lack of wisdom or intelligence. “With all those you killed in your fight, we think there are about one hundred battle-ready thunderfangs. We can’t really be sure, since nobody has found their den yet.”

With Rulac’s second mention of the wolfstags as “thunderfangs”, I realized that I was the only one who would have had the name wolfstags for them. No other keelish had the [System], so they wouldn’t see it there, and I had preexisting knowledge. So did the name of the wolfstags in the [System] change due to my own perception, or was that their name? I shook the thought from my head, realizing I was again allowing my mind to wander, something that I already noted happened much more frequently as a khatif than it did as a keelish.

“If there are that many of them, we couldn’t survive direct combat with them. At least, not yet.” I thought out loud, and Rulac, though he obviously heard me, didn’t say or do anything to let me know what he thought. I began to think through any option that occurred to me. Most obvious, pick off as many as we found in groups. A good option, but we didn’t know where they were. Mass hunt again, trying to find the den? But, still, we were outnumbered. Maybe…

“Am I allowed to recruit other packs to follow me for this? More numbers give me more options.” And, could allow me to complete a [Quest]...

“You wouldn’t know this, but once you’re an adult, the packs change more. There are the keelish that are better in the den, and they stick together. Other packs just stick to themselves and are pretty… dunno, is aloof the word? Anyways, some do their own thing. Redael doesn’t really care, as long as they all listen to him and don’t forget it.” I could easily pick up on the tone of warning in that. Rulac continued, “I would say it’s fine if you can find others who’ll follow ya, but those who will might not be able to do what you want to. Plus, if ya start doing somethin stupid, like trying to make yourself their Alpha before Redael… well, you already know what he’ll do to ya.” He flicked his tail, shrugging off my potential demise like it was an annoying fly.

“Thanks. I’ll see what I can do then, but we’ll have to start ranging out anyway, because once we kill all the w–thunderfangs,” I barely caught myself, not sure if I should even say wolfstags instead of thunderfang, “we’ll still be out of prey before long.”

Again, Rulac flicked his tail, completely uncaring about my pack’s need to eat. “Good luck.”

And, with that, I was only barely better off about how to feed my pack than I had been before I’d witnessed all of Rulac’s… “prowess”.