“Here we see the lumbering stabosaurus in its natural habitat.”
“Quieter!” Gloe hissed to himself. “It’ll hear us.”
“Sorry” he whispered back. “I think all the isolation might be driving us nuts.”
“Quite possible. And of course I’m fine with this coping mechanism. Just keep it down.”
“You got it, me. Ahem. The stabosaurus is what might be considered a prime herbivore of the peripheral layer of the deep wood. Roughly half the size of an earth elephant…”
“African or Indian?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Roughly the size of two buffalo…wait, I mean two North American bison…” he coughed softly. “Right. The stabosaurus is covered in protruding pointed plates that are likely made of bone or some sort of exoskeletal extrusion. These plates are not particularly sharp, but they are sufficiently strong and closely spaced that they can repel an attack from a desperate hydra tiger.”
“Nor is defense the only strong point of the stabosaurus. The bone blades on its powerful but nimble tail are sharper than their defensive plates, and the stabosaurus can use the tail to deliver incredible lateral blows. Accuracy does not seem to be their strong suit, but they have the strength and endurance to hammer a foe with cutting strikes until there is little left.” He paused. “Would we cut to images of what was left of that hydra tiger we saw one fight?”
“Nah, too graphic. Leave it to their imagination.”
“Roger.” Another light cough. “Given their potent mixture of defensive and offensive capabilities the stabosaurus has no natural predators in the peripheral layer. There is speculation that this would no longer hold true farther into the deep wyld, but we cannot confirm this at the present time. Since, you know, we’d fucking die if we went in there.”
“Hey, keep it professional. Kids might watch this.”
“Right, sorry. Ahem. At the time being expeditions farther into the deep wood would be ill-advised. However, the stabosaurus is essentially unchallenged in the peripheral layer. Although creatures such as the mighty ripperphant could almost certainly slay a stabosaurus they prefer to not risk the injuries they would sustain in the process, and the same is true of many other mighty predators. In short, the stabosaurus combines the strengths of terrestrial animals such as the porcupine or armadillo with those of others such as a moose or elk. A truly formidable combination.”
“Quite true me. However, it should be noted that these strengths combined with its herbivore nature means that the stabosaurus has little need for guile or cleverness. It tends to graze mostly aimlessly, simply eating whatever greenery it runs across.”
“In fact the stabosaurus needs to eat almost constantly in order to motivate its heavy form and fuel its powerful movements. Since it doesn’t seem to be smart enough to search out sources of more efficient energy it eats a lot of leaves and shrubbery. However it does prefer fruits and berries, and will consume entire groves worth if able. A particular favorite is the disgusting glopberry, a berry believed to be poisonous to humans.”
“We’ve held down stuff that was downright rotten and those berries still made us queasy.”
“Fine, that is almost certainly poisonous to humans. As you can see this particular stabosaurus has spotted a large patch of glopberries and is approaching with relish.”
“Odd how they’re all just lying there on the ground, away from any glopberry bushes.”
“Hush. Aside from their low intelligence the stabosaurus also lacks particularly acute senses, likely because its physical capabilities makes detecting threats less important. As such this stabosaurus does not seem to have detected us yet, although it should be noted we are pretty far away from it.”
“It can probably see the rope, but it doesn’t seem to recognize it as unnatural.”
“It is possible that many of the creatures of the peripheral layer only vaguely recognize humans at all, given the infrequency of expeditions here. Most that do encounter hunter parties likely don’t survive.”
“Or so we surmise.”
“Correct. Okay, look good to you?”
“Yeah. Let’s do it.” Gloe pulled hard on the rope. There tremendous clattering, rumbling noise broken up by deep groans. He grinned and slid down the hillside.
“As you can see the stabosaurus is not at all aware of the danger of rockfall traps.” He slipped forward, drawing his knife as he approached from behind the creature’s pinned head. The monster caught sight of the knife for only a second before it was driven through its eye and into the brain. “This proves fatal as the wily Gloe comes in for the kill.” He took a deep breath and grinned.
“And here come the scavengers.”
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“Damn they’re fast. Time to go.” He nipped up the nearest tree.
...
The nest was full of bones. Stabosaurus bones. The scavengers had cracked the smaller ones to suck the marrow out, but the larger ones had defied their best efforts. The various spiny plates were solid all the way through, so those also had been left.
Gloe breathed out and smiled. It had taken him days to work out the best way to do it, but he’d finally managed to get it together. A mid-sized only slightly curved bone from the tail made a decent handle. He’d carefully wrapped it with various plant weaves in order to pad it slightly and give him a better grip. Then he’d used his strongest binders to attach one of the tail blades to the head. Finally had come the magic.
He’d pushed a lot of the stabosaurus’ durability in. The thing was useless if it fell apart in short order. Hopefully he’d need less in the future, if he succeeded in securing better materials. He had high hopes for sinew for instance. For the moment though it was better to be safe than sorry. After all, it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been any capacity left over.
Gleefully he’d used that to duplicate the striking force of the stabosaurus tail. It was hard to tell without testing, but he was very hopeful. He stood and exited the nest, his new possession in hand.
He started with sticks. It was effective, but messy. Too much force, resulted in a lot of splintering and material loss. He switched to branches, and his grin grew. Even those as thick around as his arm took only one blow to sever, and larger ones succumbed within a few strikes. So he moved on to tree trunks.
Five minutes and one fallen tree later he was a very happy man. He held his new pride and joy overhead and screamed his sentiments to the deep wood. “Tools are back in play! What more could I axe for?”
...
Within a week he had a whole collection of tools. The ability to chop wood opened up numerous possibilities. Naturally he upgraded the nest to provide himself with greater security and storage capacity, but more important was his newfound ability to construct more elaborate traps. He didn’t try to hunt anything too hazardous, but spike and sapling traps netted him a slow but regular supply of shadow moles.
That got him the sinew he’d wanted, which in turn expanded the configurations of tools and traps he could make. With more versatile bindings and hours of careful chipping stabosaurus plates formed the core of various hammers, knives and even a basic adze. It felt like the sky was the limit at that point.
Zip squirrels fell to camouflaged spines. Fink martens were nailed by pendulum clubs. Melt rats died to rough spears. It was almost an embarrassment of riches.
...
Within three weeks hubris had begun to rear its ugly head. Gloe raced through the canopy, running along branches and leaping from tree to tree with all the speed he could muster. He was not alone.
Close at his heels was a hydra tiger. As it turned out, it was not that they couldn’t climb, they just preferred not to for some unknown reason. Whatever their aversion, it was clearly not unsurpassable. Gloe had attempted to slay this particular hydra tiger utilizing his presumed arboreal and ranged superiority. The problem was that only the latter actually existed.
Additionally the hydra tiger apparently had tremendous reflexes, and was able to strike at and deflect missile attacks. Such as spears. And not only was the arguably justifiably enraged hydra tiger competent at navigating the forest’s canopy, it was damn fast.
Gloe’s only real advantage was that his magic boots allowed him to run on thin or unstable branches at speeds that shouldn’t have been possible for a human. He was able to take shortcuts while the hydra tiger had to detour around utilizing the larger and lower branches. The damn thing was quite a bit faster than him though, so it was staying in the chase quite handily.
The magic boots did some of the work for him, so Gloe didn’t tire as quickly as he should have. Given his other advantages he also had more endurance than a normal human, but without people around he couldn’t muster the endless energy he’d used against the warden. He was slowing. The hydra tiger was a formidable predator, and given the caliber of prey it regularly killed it likely was fairly high level. It probably would have the stamina to catch him.
And it did. Gloe stopped for just a moment on a branch, leaning against the trunk to rest. The hydra tiger leapt up neatly and gathered itself for the finishing pounce. It instinctively knew that Gloe wasn’t strong enough to knock it aside, nor fast enough to cleanly leap clear, and it was correct.
Instinct couldn’t tell it what the axe was for though, much less reveal its magical nature. The branch happened to be about the thickness of Gloe’s arm. After one axe strike it ended up being pretty stubby.
True to its nature the hydra tiger landed on its feet, alive, but not unharmed. It had been quite a drop. It growled upwards in warning, but then it turned away. The deep wyld was ruthless, and the weakened quickly became the dead. No matter how insolent, this puny prey wasn’t worth getting heavily injured over, especially now that it had proven to have peculiar abilities. Still grumbling the beast limped into the underbrush. Gloe collapsed back against the trunk in relief.
...
Chastened, Gloe confined himself to safer prey (although he did finally manage to snag a few mauler ocelots.) He’d been over-enthralled by his new capabilities and forgotten the fact that he was still incredibly weak compared to the average deep wood denizen. There were very few he could have bested in a direct and unanticipated confrontation, and most of those had abilities allowing them to evade him.
Now was the time to slowly build up, not take reckless chances. He continued to make small improvements to his tool-crafting ability. He improved the nest further. He began working on new clothes. Most importantly of all, he tried to sample and understand the auras of as many creatures as possible.
He had the most success with shadow moles and zip squirrels, since their strengths were evasive in nature. His traps countered their strengths by preying on their low intelligence and almost total inexperience with snares. It was fairly easy to trap them alive and kill them personally. This allowed him to breath in their aura regularly, and also slowly raised his level.
Occasionally a fink marten would only be stunned and he could finish it off personally, but that was dangerous, so he only even attempted it rarely. After the first time one woke up early and whistled in every predator and scavenger in the area, well, it no longer seemed like a worthwhile risk. So he put that off for a while.
Melt frogs were too dangerous to kill at close range, and the same was true of mauler ocelots. It was frustrating. He lacked any strong offensive capability, but because of that he couldn’t afford to confront anything that had even a middling such ability. So how was he ever going to work his way up to something significant, much less accrue some real levels?
Since he couldn’t think of a way around the problem he focused on what he could do. Acquisition of more materials, supplies and tools. Incremental improvements to his existing abilities, tactics and techniques. Higher security housing and escape routes. Even if it wasn’t his preferred avenue of advance at least it was regular progress.