novelraw Chapter 175: Something is Wrong!
Chapter 175: Something is Wrong!
Eren had a roasted Yaksha leg in his hands and was peeling the skin off it on the stone bench outside Selena’s restaurant when Rury’s voice crashed into his head like a door slamming open.
[Goblin... Something smells wrong.]
He looked up from the meat. Both wolves were running toward him from the north side of the village and the way they moved told him everything before they even got close.
"You still call me goblin? I thought we were over that.." He smiled but things were serious and Rury didn’t even argued or answered.
Rury was in front because Rury was always in front. She’d made that rule clear about four months ago when Fury accidentally overtook her chasing a rabbit and she didn’t speak to him for two full days. Fury was two steps behind her with his nose low to the ground and his ears flat against his skull.
They’d gotten big. Eren still wasn’t used to it even after months of watching them eat and grow and eat some more. When he first met them they were the size of large dogs with oversized paws and that goofy look that puppies had when their bodies haven’t caught up with their feet yet. Now each one could look a young elephant in the eye without stretching their necks and their paws left prints the size of dinner plates in the dirt wherever they walked.
Rury’s shoulders came up past Eren’s chest. Her fur had kept that silver-grey color from when she was smaller but it had thickened into something that looked more like armor than hair with a shimmer under sunlight that reminded Eren of those wolf documentaries his mother used to watch on Sunday afternoons.
The ones where she’d point at the screen and say "look how beautiful" while his father pretended to be asleep on the couch.
Fury was slightly leaner but taller at the back legs and his fur had darkened into something between charcoal and deep brown that made him almost invisible against trees and stone walls at night. He was the quieter one by far and always had been but the size made his silence feel different now. When a dog-sized wolf is quiet it’s cute. When a horse-sized wolf is quiet....thats an entire new kind of horror..
And they were only about six months old!
He’d thought for the longest time that these two were just regular wolves from this forest.
Bigger than normal sure but the same breed as the wolf packs he and Emily had fought in the southern woods during his early weeks. He’d been completely wrong about that and he only figured it out recently because of how fast they were leveling compared to everything else in this forest.
About a month and a half ago Rury hit Level 30 in a single afternoon after she solo-killed three Rotwood Trolls that wandered too close to the southern barricade. She didn’t even wait for Eren to arrive. Just ripped the first one’s leg off at the knee and used it as bait to lure the other two into the irrigation ditch Thadric had dug last season. Then she killed them both in the ditch where they couldn’t swing their arms properly because the walls were too narrow.
She was tactical about it. Not instinctive like a regular wolf would be but actually tactical, like she’d thought about the terrain before the fight started and picked the spot where she had the advantage. Eren had found her afterwards laying in the sun next to the three dead trolls licking green blood off her paws with the casual energy of a cat that had just knocked a glass off a table and felt zero guilt about it.
Fury had hit Level 30 the next day because he refused to let his sister stay ahead of him. Not that he would ever say that out loud. He just disappeared into the forest at dawn and came back at sunset covered in green troll blood with his tail wagging like a puppy who’d found a tennis ball.
"You went hunting alone?" Eren had asked him that evening.
[Rury said I was slow yesterday. I wanted to check.]
"And?"
[She was right. But I am not slow anymore.]
They were both past Level 40 now. Emily had spent years hunting this forest daily and she was Level 50. These two were closing that gap in months and they weren’t even close to fully grown. The wolves in the southern packs that Eren and Emily used to fight topped out around Level 25 to 30 after years of hunting and Fury and Rury had blown past that before hitting six months old.
So basically their mother is something completely different from the other wolves in this forest. Not even the same species probably. And these two are her actual kids with whatever alpha genes got passed down to them.
He really wanted to meet that mother someday. And also really didn’t want to meet her at all. Because if cubs the size of baby elephants were "still growing" according to them then the alpha mother they kept talking about was probably the size of a bus. Maybe bigger. Fury once mentioned she could cover the distance between the mountain and the southern river in "a few jumps" and that distance was easily fifteen kilometers.
"How big is she exactly.." he muttered while watching the two of them close the last fifty meters to the restaurant at a dead sprint. Nobody answered because nobody was around to hear it except Griks who was on the restaurant steps gnawing on a bread roll that Lyra had given her earlier.
Griks looked up at the approaching wolves and her ears went flat against her skull. She’d been living near them for months now but two horse-sized predators sprinting at full speed toward you was apparently something you didn’t get used to. She scooted backward until her spine hit the stone wall and her little clawed hand gripped the bread roll tight enough to squish it.
Rury reached him first. She pressed her massive head against his shoulder hard enough to push him sideways on the bench and the Yaksha leg almost fell off his lap. Her breath was hot against his neck and she was panting faster than normal.
[Something from the north.] Her voice was louder and faster than usual. [A smell we don’t know. Coming from the forest above the mountain path. Fury smelled it first but I tracked it better because my nose is superior.]
Fury walked up behind her and lowered himself to the ground next to the bench. He didn’t press against Eren the way Rury did but his eyes were locked on the northern edge of the village and his whole body was rigid with something Eren had learned to take seriously over the months.
[It isn’t an animal smell.] Fury’s voice was measured and careful, the way it always got when he was trying to describe something he didn’t fully understand. [Or a creature. I don’t know what it is. The wind carries it but I cannot separate it into parts the way I can with living things.]
That bothered Eren more than the actual news. Fury could identify almost everything in this forest by scent alone. He’d catalogued hundreds of creatures over the months from trolls to drakes to the weird six-legged acid things near the river that sprayed spit at your arm if you jogged past them too fast. If Fury couldn’t place a smell then whatever was producing it was something none of them had encountered before.
Eren put the Yaksha leg down on the bench and wiped his hands on his pants. "How far?"
[Maybe two or three kilometers north. It is spreading toward us.] Fury paused. [The wind is pushing it from the northwest and it is getting stronger.]
Griks stood up from the steps and the squished bread roll fell from her hand. "Griks smells too. Very faint but.. wrong. Like burning but not cooking fire. Not wood fire either. Griks doesn’t know."
He looked at the kobold girl, then at both wolves, then toward the north where the mountain range sat against the afternoon sky. The dragon had been nesting up there for months. Building something. Griks had been monitoring it with the drone and reporting the same thing every morning: it flies down, it picks up trees, it flies back up. Same routine every day like a bird building the world’s most terrifying nest.
Things were going well.
Everything was finally going well for once for him.
The Earth side was stabilizing even if they lost the elven fruit business. And Kalina was handling the logistics of the farm area better than Eren could have imagined. The village defenses were better than ever with the new barricades and watchtowers.
Emily was safe on Earth with his family and they were all in the new farm for helping the clean up.
He stood up from the bench and the warm pleasant feeling of the afternoon died with the movement.
"Show me."