I whipped four javelins through the air at the massive beast, one tipped with iron, one tipped with quartz, one tipped with hematite, and one tipped with diamond, watching each collide into the side of the dracosaur. Not a single one penetrated through the scales, but it had been worth a shot. I could still whittle away at the beast’s HP with the projectiles, but I switched back to hurling boulders instead to do additional blunt-force damage.
My cannonballs were smaller, and by making them perfectly round they would fly through the air with less difficulty. When I first learned to magically chuck rocks as a child, a small stone bullet nearly killed me from the MP drain. I was much, much stronger than that boy. I began blasting the beast with my cannonballs, one after the other, keeping an eye on my MP and the beast’s HP.
I saw arrows sail through the air towards the dracosaur, mostly harmlessly bouncing off the huge beast’s hard scales. “At least we know the scales will be great loot,” I muttered, hurling another stone.
The shugs under my command raced towards the beast’s tail and clamped their large, tusked mouths onto it. We were hoping they could keep it rooted in place somewhat, or at least slow the beast’s movement while Nurn danced around the beast’s feet, slicing at its ankles.
It was a bit hard to see from where I was, but it seemed like they managed to bite down successfully. I had started to worry that the tusks would bounce off the hard scales and stop them from chomping down, but perhaps the beast had a weaker underside, and the hardest scales were all on top.
With that being a possibility, I threw another series of stone javelins forward, guiding them down and under before slamming up into the beast’s belly.
The proud lubargs leapt at the dracosaur, scratching and biting at the enemy creature with sharp nails and teeth. It was a bit futile, but every bit of damage would help. Hella’s urstrig raced around, pecking when possible and doing some small amounts of damage as well. The dracosaur had not been at full health when the battle started, but it was close enough. I guided some final javelins close, slowly, until I was sure I would not hurt our allied beasts, then rammed them into the dracosaur’s underside, targeting the shoulder and hip joints.
The dracosaur roared, and twisted, swinging its tail with surprising force to the side. One of the shugs was ripped clean off the tail from the force and went flying through the forest, taking a huge amount of damage when it hit the ground. I had the other disengage and mentally commanded both to go for the ankles.
I could just barely make out Nurn as he ran between the beast’s huge legs, slashing and slicing, retreating each time a foot lifted off the ground and waiting to see where the beast would step before rushing back in. The rhinothell barrelled horn-first into a foot just as it was coming down, forcing the beast to stagger slightly and adjust its weight, while the octophant seemed to be trying to hold the beast’s gaze, screeching towards it, tentacle-like trunks waving.
Shuddering, I looked away from that horror and back to the larger one. I continued my cannonball barrage, each stone ball collision chipping away at the overall health of the creature. It was finally down to a little over half health, with 500 HP left to go, but I could not communicate that to my team.
The beast spun with surprising speed, and the tail thumped into the ground, shaking the world under my feet. I saw Nurn stagger from the force but he threw himself sideways into a roll to make some distance before a cloud of dust obstructed my view. I pushed forward with air magic, creating a gust to clear the dust faster, and I saw a smear of red.
Panicking, my eyes darted around, and I caught sight of Nurn attacking the legs. I let out a breath, and kept looking to see who was out of the fight. It looked like the octophant had upset the dracosaur enough to be the unfortunate target of the beast’s tail slam. Part of me celebrated not needing to see what the monstrosity would evolve into, then felt bad for Hella’s loss. She was not as personally attached to her beasts as some others, but it still represented a lot of time and effort she had spent to find and tame the beast.
The beast’s spin had thrown the ‘bargs and turned it away from the direction we wanted it facing—where the arrows were coming from, so they could target the eyes—and towards me.
“Bad move, dino,” I muttered, and started pelting the beast’s eyes with stone projectiles.
The second shug was back in action, so I had each one target the two front heels. They bit into the flesh that Nurn had been cutting away at, and the big dino roared again, this time in my direction. The stink of its breath hit me, but I was already firing javelins into its maw.
Its roar caught as it gagged on the stone forced into its throat, and I saw its eyes narrow as it looked for the source of the magic rock. Its eyes were more intelligent than I expected, so I ducked behind a tree. I only had a few prepared stone shots left, and my MP was low, so unless I wanted to drink another potion I was almost done there.
I quickly fired off the last stones then slipped through the forest towards the battle, drawing my own sword along the way.
The dracosaur reared back slightly onto its back legs as I approached, stomping its front feet trying to dislodge the shugs. The one that had been injured by the earlier toss lost hold of the ankle and fell, and the dracosaur stomped on it, ending another one of our beasts, but the force of the stomp caused its front legs to buckle slightly. It was down to 300 HP, a third of its total health.
Racing forward, I nodded at Nurn as I joined the fray of close combat. With its front legs weakened, we could get it to drop to the ground with a little more effort. I slashed my way through its legs, covering the opposite side from Nurn. The ‘bargs had fallen back, wisely, as they were not accomplishing much and risked injury, assuming they were not already injured.
I caught sight of a nearby rock, chugged my second potion, and shouted to Nurn “Get clear!”
The rock lifted from the ground and slammed into the back of the beast’s front left leg joint. The leg buckled, and the beast started to tilt. As I ran out from underneath the beast, I jumped and slashed at the back of the front right leg, then landed and sprinted forward.
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Pitching forward, the dracosaur tried to catch itself, but the leg was too badly injured. It failed to hold, and hit the ground.
Nurn had raced off to where he had stashed more of his spears, now in the wrong direction since the beast had turned in place during the fight. Fortunately, the archers had repositioned and come forward enough to shoot directly at the ground-level face of the large creature. The ‘bargs were on it again, ripping scales from the beast’s back and clawing away at the flesh beneath.
The rhinothell raced past me and slammed into the side of the dracosaur’s head. I saw the beast’s eyes lose focus momentarily at the intensity of the hit to the head. I called to my last shug and had him bite down on the enemy’s thick neck.
Spears tucked under his arm, Nurn arrived back in front of the downed dracosaur’s face, skidding to a stop. He dropped all but one, lifted it up, reared back, and spiked it at the dracosaur’s eye.
The first throw went wide, but Nurn was already grabbing a second, and that spear hit its target, slamming into the beast’s eye successfully that time. Nurn grabbed his last spear, turned slightly, and tossed it at the dracosaur’s remaining one.
Blinded and crippled, the dracosaur roared again, in rage and now fear. Its HP was under 100 and falling fast.
I called Nurn back and we retreated to the archers who continued to plink away at the beast, but at this point, we could leave it to the beasts under our command. We were all in pretty good shape, aside from some fatigue from racing around the battlefield, though we had taken some losses with the beasts.
The last shuggopotamus chomped at the dracosaur’s neck over and over, two ‘bargs were digging into the various wounds, and soon, the dracosaur was finished.
* * *
Descaling and parting out what was, basically, a big dead dinosaur was a lot of work. I badly wanted to swear everyone to secrecy so I could use my inventory skill to finish the job in an instant, but instead, our group set to the task and spent the next day and a half filling our saddlebags with scales, cutting strips of meat and burying them in salt, and letting our surviving beasts eat their fill from the remaining dracosaur corpse.
Our group also took select cuts to cook over a campfire, as well, since there was no need to hunt for food for the next few days with a bounty of meat available. Even without much more than just salt, the dracosaur meat was divine. Like the beasts, we humans ate our fill and then some. We lay there, digesting and dozing, all of us thinking about the battle and the beast’s might.
A part of me felt bad about killing the thing. Its size and power meant that it had the potential to cause massive amounts of damage and death if it made it to a settlement, assuming they were not able to rouse their best to the settlement’s defense. Our settlement had strength, as evident by the fact that our fellowship had been able to kill the beast, but that was, perhaps, artificially inflated by my magic, how I had introduced taming for combat, and the higher average level of our group from their associated experiences.
When I mentioned it to Nurn, he waved away my concern. “There is a reason the Kingdom has a history of walling high-value cities. Beasts like this will ultimately find their way to a location full of people. It is as though the strong act like beacons for other strength. Conflict was inevitable. Though I have not seen such a powerful beast in my lifetime, I have heard stories about past assaults on cities. I would guess that the only reason Hella found this beast was that it was slowly being drawn to Freehold, given the growth of the settlement. Though we could have made more use of the carcass had it fallen closer to the settlement, its body will also, in turn, attract many beasts as scavengers seeking their own power. It could lead to a beast tide, which we would not want anywhere near the settlement. Ending it here was the better option by far.”
I intended on making the body disappear, of course, but that was, admittedly, a unique power of mine. The only way to destroy the entire body otherwise was by burning, and even then it would require a huge amount of fuel to do so, and the smell of cooking meat would likely only speed up the approach of local hungry beasts.
For similar reasons, we opted to move fast, taking what we could before hastening our return. The only hold up was waiting and hoping we could trigger evolution in our beasts, who were still eating their fill.
“Sorry about your octophant,” I said to Hella as we watched the beasts eat.
“Thanks. I really would have loved to see what it transformed into. Glad we still have the shug and the rhino, at least. And my urstrig, of course,” she said with a grin.
Her owl-bear had maxed out from the dracosaur meat and we fed it a beast crystal, impressed by the rank C evolution. As a nocturne urstrig, it was sleeker, darker, faster, and much more dangerous, particularly as a night hunter. It was one of a few evolutions where the beast did not grow substantially bigger, growing more powerful in other ways than raw size. I wondered if that would be a trend with the higher rank beasts, given that there were normally practical size constraints for lifeforms due to gravity, energy needs, and movement. Not that those mattered to that guy, I thought, looking back at the dracosaur corpse.
Evolution healed the urstrig back to peak health, which was nice, but unfortunately not an option for the already-evolved proud lubargs. While they had mostly engaged in hit-and-run tactics, doing minimal damage, Bortag’s lubarg had broken a leg during a bad fall. We had set the break and fed it a healing draught, which sped up the natural healing, but the beast would likely have a bit of a limp from now on and might not be as helpful with Bortag’s hunts.
I felt terrible that I could not just use my healing magic and restore the ‘barg to full strength, but I could not risk the Church’s ire. I looked over to where Bortag was sitting with his companion, stroking the fur of the beast I convinced him to take on as a puppy.
“It’s a’right, Lubi,” he said quietly as he pet the wolf-like beast. “I’ll take care of ya.”
Perhaps after a season, I could stealthily heal the beast with magic and correct some of the damage, and people would just think that the beast improved over time through natural rehabilitation.
Healing draughts helped manage the other smaller injuries that could be healed, and the shug’s broken tusk would heal if it managed to evolve. Mostly, though, the battle was the type where any beast or person that got injured by the dracosaur had been fully pasted. If we had needed to throw people, exclusively, at the beast in defense of the village, the splats of red on the ground would have been human lives lost.
After a day and a half, the corpse was starting to smell, and we were noticing beasts in larger numbers coming around to try and scavenge from us. It was time to head back, so we packed up and set back out.
Under cover of the first night, I stealthed myself and Horsey with magic, and we raced back to the wealth of leftover meat and scale. I hope the meat is still safe to eat after two days of sitting out, I thought as I fought my way through the increased number of beasts to get at the corpse.
Fortunately, all I had to do was get a hand on it and it disappeared into my inventory. This angered quite a few of the beasts who were eating, so I rolled my shoulder and grinned.
“Come on, then,” I sneered at the angry horde of beasts. “I don’t need to hold back this time.”