Twenty-five hundred meters from the vale, with their eyes no longer covered by nictitating membranes yet tearing profusely with the lingering dust and dry air, the large lumbering behemoths continued their trek to the vale with their heads swaying side to side as if trying to sense something. The head of the pack consisted of four beasts with six bringing up the rear roughly one hundred meters behind and loosely fanned out. Two hundred meters further back from the middle of the pack, five of the beasts were staggered in distance from each other and the pack, following but looking around, watching for threats. They all stopped for a brief moment when they felt a low tremor in the ground that seemed to grow, followed by a low-frequency hum, so low that it was more felt than heard. Like a ripple from the front to the back, each section of the group started for the vale again, the heads no longer swaying. The pack moved as one as if guided by a beacon. The group in the back had no sooner started when the furthermost rearguard of the creatures stopped still. Other than its breath that came out visible in the cold air, the creature made little sound, its head tilted as if hearing something. Hearing nothing and seeing the pack getting further out, the creature turned towards the vale to rejoin the pack, only to again stop suddenly. This time it did hear from behind a rapid movement, soft yet quick pads on the ground. The creature’s instincts screamed that it was being hunted. It was only a heartbeat within the time of sensing the danger that the creature turned suddenly in the direction of the sensed threat; five smaller beasts in the air, their sharp teeth and large claws bearing down onto its head. Before the creature could take a defensive position or even make a sound to the rest of the pack, the beasts collided into its head and its legs, viciously clawing and biting every centimeter they could.

Pain, while the creature could endure much as it had needed to survive in the desolate, unforgiving harshness of its home world, was still a warning, a flag when something was wrong. The pain in its head and flank as the small but vicious beasts tore into its body caused the behemoth to do the only sensible thing to stop the pain: flail around and dislodge the creatures. Stomping, shaking, and bucking, the ground trembled violently under the weight of the eighteen-hundred-kilogram behemoth until one of the attackers was dislodged from its head. As the front feet hit the ground hard, the attacker was sent spitting and hissing, with chunks of flesh still in its claws and bloodied maw, landing with a thud onto the hard-packed clay ground, kicking up reddish-brown dust. Flailing in the dust cloud on the hard, cracked brown and red clay ground, ribs partially poking from its chest, blood from its mouth mixed with that of the creature, the beast still managed to raise its head, bloody maw wide, hissing in defiance, only to see the foot of its prey filling its vision. Its defiance and life ended with a sickening crunch. One by one, the attackers were dislodged from the huge creature, two landing on their hind feet while the other two, like the first beast, hit the hard clay pack below. The two on the ground suffered the same crushing fate as the first beast dislodged, now no more than unrecognizable blood stains soaking into the clay ground. The two landing on their feet were charged by the creature as their companions were crushed underfoot. One beast was run through by the creature's horn while the remaining beast rolled and ran away. Swinging its head like a samurai cleaning the blood off their sword, the now limp body of the beast was flung from its horn, landing with a squelching thud onto the ground as the creature squared off with the last attacker.

Backing up on powerfully muscled hind legs with reverse joints, ending in five, thirty-five-centimeter claws, the beast snarled with ferocity, its mouth open, hissing, revealing twenty-centimeter razor-sharp teeth. With a blunt snout, thick muscled jaw, and wide yellowish phosphorescent sclera with no visible pupils, combined with its hissing and menacing posture, the beast had a mad, unhinged look. While small, it had clearly evolved to be a knife amongst many of its pack. Horns for piercing, teeth within a heavily muscled jaw and neck designed for biting and rending chunks of flesh, and black hardened claws for digging and piercing into its prey. Hissing and spitting as it backed away, the posturing of the beast was all bluff. This was proven when the creature postured to charge the beast; the beast quickly backed away while turning to run into the dust cloud. While the creature’s eyesight was not good at visual tracking through the cloud, it could sense heat. Staring into the dust cloud where the attacker had fled, a tremor went through its body like a warning. Then, as another pack of beasts ten strong emerged from the dust cloud, the creature let out a huge bellow to the pack ahead, then squared off against the approaching threat as the returning bellow from the pack was heard.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The creature charged the oncoming pack, its ability to move at short sprints anathema to its size. The pack of beasts moved out of the way of the charge, yet two did not move fast enough; one was impaled through the back of the head and out of its mouth by the creature's two-meter horn, and another was trampled and crushed. The rest of the pack seemed to keep out of the creature’s way by fanning out and distracting it. The creature would charge, and the pack would fan out and back away, not advancing—a trap that the pack was setting as it baited the creature further and further towards the dust cloud. Suddenly, the creature was aware of the pack of beasts from its right and left flank, some already jumping in the air, claws and fangs bared with the promise of a gruesome death.

The creature did not feel fear, despair, or anxiety over the prospect of its demise. Its instinct within the hierarchy of the pack was to serve the alpha, to defend at all costs for the pack’s preservation. As a juggernaut capable of withstanding hordes of beasts, an apex predator, its power and defense were immense, but not infinite. Instinctively, it knew this. Thus, with mounting numbers and more it could sense coming, a slight tremor ran through the creature. It hesitated for but a fraction of a second at the prospect that it could be taken down, that it could fail the pack. The creature reared up and spun, kicking up dust just as its attackers were about to land, trying to gain purchase into the joints between the thick plates covering its side. The attackers in the air, unable to turn or change their trajectory, hit and scraped along the plates without penetrating the thick armor, falling to the ground amidst the creature’s stomping legs. With a squelching wet crunch and little more than a short screech, they were crushed before they could recover. Hissing and posturing, the remaining beasts surrounded the creature after the initial attack failed. The creature spun and bellowed as it was boxed in by the growing horde. In brutal desperation, the creature rushed into attack, to break the line. While agile, there were too many of the beasts packed together to evade the juggernaut’s wrath. Charging, spinning, bellowing, beasts getting crushed, trampled underfoot with a sickening crunch, gored with the creature's horn and eventually sliding off when the creature would charge again, snapped in half for the unlucky beasts caught in the juggernaut’s maw, exploding in a rain of crimson blood. Yet they kept coming. Even with the instant and gruesome kills against the beasts, more and more came. The creature bellowed in defiance as more piled on, ripping, gnawing, and biting, leaving rents in its plated armor, gouges and slashes now seeping blood as well as its strength. Again, it shook and stomped to shake off its attackers, killing more and more, yet they were replaced by more numbers. The rents in parts of its armor that were breached, the beasts latched on, locking their jaws and bleeding the behemoth. Again and again, it shook them off, killing and killing. The floor beneath its feet littered with mangled and bloody corpses of the fallen, yet they still came, until finally, overwhelmed and overrun by the magnitude of the blood loss and the tiredness of battle, the creature finally stumbled. Sensing that their prey was about to fall, the frenzy of attacks increased, more and more pouring on until finally, unable to hold on, the creature fell like a huge tree crashing to the ground. The beasts piled on in a frenzy, then abruptly stopped when they heard the bellow, the charge, and the crash of their bodies as the arriving creatures from the rearguard finally arrived to rescue their fallen brethren.