The village was as small as it expected it to be, it was also composed entirely of humans—a rarity with the amount of other sentient species in this world.

The Human stopped right before exiting the tree line, and it could be its imagination, but it seemed to look at it before continuing its walk. But that would be impossible as he didn’t show any other signs of knowing of its existence, so it had to be a coincidence. With the estimated perception of his being so low, he wouldn’t see it with its Stealth on even if he tried.

The Bird flew into the sky, circling the community and picking prime targets. It wanted to pick the elderly but either they all were in the houses or there were just no old people in the settlement. The most aged individual looked to be about 40 and was presumably the leader with how little work he was doing. It didn’t see any children either.

The swordsman went to the Village head to talk to them inside the most extravagant house in the village. Although the foreign architecture might have thrown it off the loop it wasn’t that hard to deduct that the building was lavish when they had statues of magical beasts in their too big garden.

The shard of The Core wanted to listen in but found that the language they spoke was not known by it. An alarming thing to find out when you are in enemy territory with no way to access the System shop to buy a language mastery skill. It decided to blame the swordsman for not talking through the entire walk here so that it could think of a plan to compensate for this.

Having given up on eavesdropping the Bird decided to go back to picking an appropriate target, at first it needed to be no one important so that the village wouldn’t raise a fuss until it killed enough for them to get a clue to go deeper into the forest. How could anyone find the dungeon when they would be searching only on the outskirts of the woods after all?

Its gaze landed on a human that was hanging on the edge of the forest. The human seemed to be a young adult with dusty clothes. What was the most attention-grabbing about him were the lines on his skin. They normally wouldn’t be noticed by another person as they weren’t that observable, just a patch of skin that was a few shades off from their skin color and dimly glowing blue. But the shard of The Core had an unusually high perception for its level, so it immediately caught that feature.

That characteristic of the human had the Bird stumped. Not because it had never seen that before, in fact, it was the complete opposite. The human looked like he just got out of a Mana Overload trap. But that couldn’t be possible as there would be no need for such a trap near a village, and if there was a need then the residents would naturally know where the trap was located and not walk in!

That only leaves them getting into the trap somewhere else, but the settlement is far enough from anywhere else that the effects of it would naturally disappear before they got here. The mana inside the body naturally dispersing to the air.

It could be something else. The shard of The Core didn’t know everything after all, and it didn’t even have Mana sight to properly check and make a diagnosis.

One of the farmers who was working in the field caught sight of the human and waved at him while smiling. The human proceeded to mirror the gesture and run to the farmer while avoiding stepping on the crops.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The action just confirmed that it was not Mana Overload, after all, people who suffer from it are under such immense pain that moving becomes an impossible action. That’s why the trap was so effective, if you hadn’t got an experienced Mage in the party then the whole group had to retreat from the mana-dense dungeon into the less mana-dense surface so that the mana would have room to leave the victim’s body.

However, during the surveillance, something became abundantly clear.

The villagers were scared of the forest, not daring to get close to the edges even with no beasts in sight. A peculiar phenomenon as the forest presented another source of food and there were no particularly strong creatures close by.

Only 2 humans seemed to not be worried about the woods the swordsman and the human decorated by lines. The prior because he just left the forest and the latter because of his closeness to the area when the Bird saw him.

This circumstance put a hold on its plans as no Human would go and search the forest for the missing bodies and if it killed someone in the village, they would suspect the swordsman or each other instead of a beast in the woods.

A few days passed and The Bird was running out of ideas, but it couldn’t just return without good news about adventurers dropping by for a raid.

The swordsman, who the shard of The Core was beginning to suspect was returning to the village and not visiting it, was training the guards and the human with lines in a field next to the settlement. An activity that started the very next day he came to this place.

Night fell and every one of the humans returned to their homes to rest. The swordsman, as always, was housed in the Village's head home.

The shard of The Core was sitting on a random house, thinking of a way to get out of this difficult situation, when it noticed a Shadow Fox, the Onyx variant, sneaking into the settlement.

An easy feat considering that the fence was made of easily breakable for the fox mundane wood and tonight the guards seemed to be too tired for a nightshift after training and probably also assumed that nothing was going to happen because it never does, an oversight that the animal was capitalizing on.

The mammal went to the fields to dig out its food, they were omnivores and although this variant always seemed to prefer meat, they would almost always eat vegetables and fruits. A result of it being at the bottom of the food chain and thus being unable to hunt anything large enough to state its hunger.

...If there was a fresh enough corpse without any predators nearby, they would eat it.

Acting quickly the Bird broke the door to the house closest to the mammal, it did so quietly, not wanting to alert anyone. It flew off to the bedroom, found a peacefully sleeping human there, and slit its throat with its talons. It didn’t matter if the cut was unnaturally clean as the fox would eat the flesh anyway.

The human woke up from the pain, as the shard of The Core had accidentally not dealt a finishing blow, fortunately, they died quickly after, seemingly drowned in their blood.

With that done it flew loudly towards the animal to alarm it of its presence. As it looked like a normal bird and the fox didn’t have Appraisal or Danger sense it quickly got lulled into a false sense of security, following the seemingly unfortunate bird with no hesitation to the scene of murder.

It paused before the entrance to the house, sniffing the air and smelling the blood.

The mammal entered further with caution and found itself before the fresh corpse of the owner of this abode. It immediately changed its target, judging the human to be a better source of nutrients.

The Bird flew away, feeling happy that something was going well for it a second time.