“Some wild creatures could be used in some way. Perhaps their skin, feathers, or scales were useful material, or maybe their flesh is good to eat. Others might be domesticable and thus turned into useful mounts, guards, or beasts of burden with time and patience.
Yet others however seem to only exist to make life worse for the people they run into. For such pests, there exist only one approach to take: Extermination.” - From a lecture by Garth Wainwrought, Professor of Socioeconomy at the Levain Institute for Higher Learning, circa 542 FP.
In the end, it was someone from the convoy’s guard who lost their nerve first and loosed their arrow at the pack of Snow Raptors that surrounded them. It was hard to fault the individual, as Snow Raptors were infamous for not backing down from any prey they sighted without a fight, and a prolonged stand-off would have just worn down the guards more than the beasts.
Their arrow flew true and swiftly punched through the head of a smaller Snow Raptor, the upper torso of a second, before it embedded itself deeply into the gut of a larger creature, taking down all three creatures with one shot. There was no time to commend the archer for their accuracy and efficiency, however, as the creatures rushed towards the convoy all at once around the time the arrow landed on its first target.
Most of the caravan’s guards were armed with spears and heavy bows, which were ideal tools for dealing with larger beasts, but proved to be at a disadvantage against a swarm of smaller creatures like these Snow Raptors. Granted, the guards had somewhat accounted for that as well, as their spears had broader spearheads that could be used for hewing cuts, but it still remained less effective than something designed to deal with lots of smaller creatures.
The problem was that Snow Raptors were pretty much fearless.
Most wild beasts would back away from danger. Often, as long as one threatened them, it would be enough to de-escalate a situation and get them to back off. When you have a horde of slavering predators charging at you without regard for the casualties they took, however, it becomes far, far more problematic of an issue.
It was not difficult to kill a Snow Raptor. The guards could kill two, sometimes three with a single swing of their spear. An arrow would likely take down two of the beasts with one shot due to how densely packed they were, but there was not enough time to whittle them down that way, and once the horde reached the guards, they were forced to go on the defensive to save their own necks.
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Out of Aideen’s charges, Rhys was the one who had to take the most direct method of dealing with the creatures. He was a Life affinity mage, though he received quite a few lessons in how to use his affinity to reinforce his physical capabilities. Combined with the affinity’s well-known healing prowess, it basically rendered him pretty much immune to whatever the Snow Raptors could do.
So he just rushed straight into the pack and swung his pollaxe around as fast as he could, often cutting down three or more of the beasts with each swing, without a care for his own safety. Many of the beasts did turn to him, their claws tearing his flesh and fangs ripping wounds open, but the injuries they left behind vanished almost as soon as their fangs and claws left his body. Even so, he could only do so much, and many of the raptors simply circumvented the “tough” prey instead of tangling with him.
Áine was a Soulweaver like her mother, and while these Snow Raptors had strong enough souls that she couldn’t just crush them by the dozen like she could with simple insects, Áine still had enough power in her magic to stun them in groups, if temporarily. She would strike with her magic, stun five or six of the Raptors briefly, and harvest their lives with her long spear before she pulled back and repeated the trick on another group.
Kino did something far simpler. She set up a nearly invisible line of void magic a couple meters ahead of where the guards stood – after appropriately warning them, of course – and simply let the Snow Raptors run against them. She set the line a bit over knee height, so the smaller raptors still manage to pass through unhindered, but the guards could deal with those easily enough, while the larger ones suddenly found themselves missing their heads and dropping dead after they passed the line.
Eilonwy was the one with the most impact when it came to assisting the guards, however, as she simply brought out all eleven of her bone constructs and powered them up with the full strength of her magic. Ten constructs at the power level of a Bone Champion and one at the level of a Death Knight was not something a pack of Snow Raptors were equipped to handle at all.
Snow Raptors hunted down prey far larger than themselves through attrition most of the time, as they slowly tired them out and waited for them to bleed out. They were helpless against tireless undead that their fangs and claws cannot even put a scratch on, so Eilonwy dispersed her eleven constructs to help out in all directions.
She sent three of the Bone Champions each to Áine and Rhys, and another two to Kino, since that side needed less help with how efficient Kino’s void magic was at slaughtering the Raptors. She kept the last two Bone Champions to keep the guards near her safe while the Death Knight rampaged in the middle of the Raptor pack, tearing them to pieces with every vicious strike it made.
By the time they thinned the pack down to less than a hundred, the first few Snow Raptors finally got the message and started to turn and run with their tails behind their legs. Soon more escapees followed those first few, and not a minute later, the survivors of the pack fled, leaving behind hundreds of corpses all around the convoy.